Behold my minions! By Kriss.

Click here to learn how to make your own

We shall henceforth be referring to the little guys as Wavys, or possibly minions. Depends what sort of mood I'm in.

You will find some examples on this page or you can create your own using the Avatar Generator available in WetTest It is possible to save the files out in .png files of 50x50 , 64x64 . 80x80 , 100x100 and 200x200 . This can be done in a number of different poses and with perfect transparency so they will work on any web background.

Soon we will have animated output and all of these example images will start doing the idle dance. Honest, real soon now :)

Here are some example random avatars in 100x100, they change every time this page is viewed. You will also find one in the top right of this site on most pages.

WetTest can be used to generate your own... Behold some screen shots of the avatar generator in action

Pick your colours.

Choose your body parts.

These are the glue that will both advertise this site and bind the whole thing together. The idea is to let people produce them for free and use them wherever an avatar is needed. Obviously they make fine game characters, I'm not overly keen on the short fat large headed style but real proportions are just too tall and thin.

They are, fully 3d models, weighing in at around 2000 triangles (the hands account for almost half this) which means I'm talking real time rendering. Currently they are all non textured, it just isn't necessary to have textures at the intended size and it makes re-colouring them easier. But I plan on adding a decal map to the torso for T-Shirt symbols.

They are broken down into reusable parts, so you can pick the nose, ears, mouth, hair, head shape and so on from a library of pieces and then have generic animation applied to all of them. The bits may contain a few morph targets the feet have a bent state for use whilst walking and obviously the hands have many which are pre-built from bones. The hands however are a special case since it’s possible to reuse the boned animations to build the morphs.

There are a number of places that let you build some kind of avatar, the most obvious place is any RPG game character editor but these seldom give you much more than a handful of basic models with different texture maps applied. Below is a list of all the other web base avatar stuff I know of, the most popular of which seems to be the dollz type that stems from palace chat software, personally I liked the stor ones but they seem to be defunct nowadays.

http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Chat/The_Palace/

http://www.avatar-me.com/ this one is 3d with animation but rather ropey looking 3d and has no online creation you have to get your body scanned...

http://www.netgoth.org.uk/gallery/index-troopers.php?display=all a collection of stor avatars used by online goths, like I said the creator of this http://www.stor.co.uk seems to have gone bye byes. But is now reborn as http://www.stortroopers.com/ rising like a phoenix from the ashes. This is probably the main one I would recommend.

http://www.danasoft.com/ promises avatars and has a small sig creator thingy but doesn't have any as of the now.

http://www.msn.co.uk/specials/weemee and http://www.saw-you.com/ also http://www.wee-mee.com/ this is probably the best of the stuff that actually works right now even though the graphical style is not very good and they want 1.50ukp to download an MSN icon.

http://southparkstudios.com/games/create.html South park avatar creator, lacks saving ability and requires adult knowledge and screen captures to save your masterpiece but still kind of cool :)

http://weatherpixie.com/ This is more a positional avatar than a character one, uses the dollz style characters.

http://www.mypeter.com/pixel/pixel.html **warning contains pixel porn** :) This is a flash toy that seems to be half made, but, does have an avatar creator built in so it would be as easy to steal them from here as it is to use the south park one so I figure it should be mentioned.

http://www.haptek.com/ People Putty, not really an avatar creator more just a generic animated mesh with a lot of skinning options.

http://www.dookyweb.com/avatars.swf a facial punk avatar icon creator thingy. Needs cut'n'paste print screen trick to get the result.

These all tend to crop up as avatar icons for people all over the old webby webby woo.