Ready Player Me alternatives in 2026: free avatar and character creators
October 1, 2026 · 6 min read · Written by the Grab3D team (About us)
Ready Player Me ended its public services on January 31, 2026. Netflix had announced the acquisition of the company on December 19, 2025, and the online avatar creator and PlayerZero closed at the end of January (TechCrunch, PocketGamer.biz). The official Unity SDK on GitHub has been archived and read only since February 2026.
If your game or app used Ready Player Me, you need something else. There is no single tool that does everything it did, so this overview sorts the options by what you actually need. We make one of the tools in this list, the Character Mixer. We describe it with the same honesty as the others, including its limits.
What Ready Player Me offered
It helps to be clear about what is gone, because every alternative covers a different part:
- A web avatar creator for players, also from a selfie, which you could embed in your own app with an iframe (Ready Player Me on dev.to, React wrapper on GitHub).
- SDKs for Unity, Unreal and the web that loaded the avatars as GLB files (Unity SDK).
- One avatar across many games, the core idea of the platform (TechCrunch).
- A full body rig based on the Mixamo skeleton and 52 ARKit compatible facial blend shapes (Ready Player Me on dev.to, UE4 example on GitHub).
None of the tools below brings back the shared avatar across games. Most of them replace one or two of the other points.
The alternatives at a glance
| Tool | Price | Photo to avatar | Files |
|---|---|---|---|
| Avatar SDK MetaPerson | First avatar free, then paid | Yes | GLB, glTF, FBX |
| VRoid Studio | Free | No | VRM |
| Character Creator 5 | Paid, Windows | Paid add-on | FBX, OBJ, USD |
| MakeHuman and MPFB | Free, open source | No | FBX, OBJ, Blender |
| Epic MetaHuman | Free below 1M USD revenue | No | Unreal, FBX |
| Adobe Mixamo | Free with Adobe ID | No | FBX, DAE |
| Grab3D Character Mixer | Free, CC0 | No | GLB, VRM |
Prices and features as of October 2026. Please check the linked pages before you decide, they change.
Avatar SDK MetaPerson: the closest to Ready Player Me
MetaPerson Creator by itSeez3D turns a single selfie into a rigged full body avatar, realistic or cartoon, in the browser. Like Ready Player Me it can be embedded in your app with an iframe and a JavaScript API, and there are integrations for Unity, Unreal, Android and iOS (documentation). Exports are GLB, glTF and FBX with a Mixamo compatible humanoid rig.
Good for: apps where players create a personal avatar from a photo. Keep in mind: the first avatar is free, after that you pay per avatar. The Pro plan costs 800 USD per month, the REST API is part of the Enterprise plan (pricing). The license has conditions, for example you have to notify the company before you sell or license avatars to third parties.
VRoid Studio: free anime avatars as VRM
VRoid Studio by pixiv is a free editor for anime style humanoid characters on Windows and macOS, and there is an iPad version. It exports VRM, in both VRM 0.x and VRM 1.0, so the result works in most VTuber apps.
Good for: VTuber avatars and anime characters with a lot of control over face, hair and clothing. Keep in mind: there is no photo input and no SDK to embed the editor in your own game. The SDK and API of pixiv connect to models published on VRoid Hub. The creator of a model sets its terms of use.
Reallusion Character Creator 5: the professional pipeline
Character Creator is a paid desktop application for Windows, released as version 5 in August 2025 (CG Channel). It makes realistic and stylized characters with detailed facial rigs, including ARKit profiles, exports FBX, OBJ and USD and has setup tools for Unreal and Unity. Photo based heads need the paid Headshot add-on.
Good for: studios that want high quality characters and control over every detail. Keep in mind: 299 USD for the base version, plus add-ons. The content license allows commercial games but forbids reselling on 3D marketplaces, and an in-game character generator needs an extended license.
MakeHuman and MPFB: open source humans
MakeHuman and its Blender add-on MPFB are free and open source. They create realistic human bodies with several rig options, among them a game engine rig and a Mixamo rig (rig documentation), and optional face shape keys for ARKit and visemes. The assets are CC0 and the team makes no claim on what you export (MPFB license).
Good for: realistic humans in Blender without license worries. Keep in mind: the look is realistic, not stylized. Some third party asset packs use CC BY. There is no runtime SDK.
Epic MetaHuman: photorealistic, inside Unreal
MetaHuman left early access with Unreal Engine 5.6 in June 2025, and MetaHuman Creator now runs inside the Unreal Editor. Since then the Unreal Engine EULA applies, and MetaHumans may also be used in other engines (CG Channel).
Good for: photorealistic people, especially in Unreal projects. Keep in mind: the workflow lives in Unreal and the characters are made for high end real time rendering. Companies with more than 1 million USD revenue need a paid seat when they use MetaHumans outside Unreal.
Adobe Mixamo: animations for an existing character
Mixamo is not a character creator. It offers ready made characters, an auto rigger for humanoid models and a large animation library, free with an Adobe ID. Downloads are FBX or DAE, and you may use characters and animations in your projects but not redistribute the raw files.
Good for: quickly rigging and animating a humanoid model you already have.
Grab3D Character Mixer: free stylized characters, GLB and VRM
The Character Mixer is our own tool. You build a character in the browser from modular parts in three stylized looks (Cozy, Blocky and Low Poly), pick a body shape and colors and download:
- a GLB with one skeleton of 19 bones and the animation clips you choose (idle, walk, run, wave, jump) for Blender, Godot, Unity and Unreal, or
- a VRM 1.0 or VRM 0.x avatar file in T pose with a humanoid bone mapping, for three-vrm, UniVRM for Unity, the VRM Add-on for Blender and VTuber apps with VRM support.
Everything is free, runs in your browser without an account, and every export is CC0: commercial use, changes and redistribution are allowed without attribution.
Good for: prototypes, game jams and indie games that need stylized, rigged characters, and simple VRM avatars. Keep in mind: there is no SDK, no API and no photo to avatar. You cannot import other models or your old Ready Player Me avatar. The characters have no facial blend shapes, so there is no lip sync or face tracking in VTuber apps. Hands are a single bone without fingers, and the rig is not Mixamo compatible. We wrote a comparison with Ready Player Me that goes into more detail.
Which one fits your project
- Players make a personal avatar from a photo inside your app: Avatar SDK MetaPerson.
- An anime avatar for VTubing: VRoid Studio.
- Photorealistic people in Unreal: MetaHuman.
- Realistic humans in Blender with CC0 assets: MakeHuman and MPFB.
- High end characters with full facial rigs: Character Creator.
- You already have a humanoid model and need animations: Mixamo.
- Free stylized characters as GLB or VRM under CC0: the Character Mixer.
If you built on the shared avatar idea of Ready Player Me, plan for your own avatar system: let players create a character in your game, store it with your own accounts and load it from your own files. A tool that outputs standard files like GLB and VRM keeps you independent of the next shutdown.