Cloud Party's New, More Customizable Avatars Come With Many More Fashionista-Friendly Features

Cloud Party now has new avatars that are much more customizable -- above, some posted to a Cloud Party user forum. "You can now customize the shape of the body with sliders," CEO Sam Thompson tells me, "there are color and material choices on all of the clothes, custom skin colors, hair colors, makeup colors, etc. The cool thing is that both the shape and color customizers are definable by content creators, so they can now make customizers for different colors on their clothes (for example) that are accessible to the purchaser directly in the outfit creator! Those who create whole new avatars types can define shape animations that will create shape sliders for users of that custom avatar type."

This new update, Sam adds, also comes with features that should especially please fashionistas like Iris -- look:

• "Saving and loading custom outfits
• A fashion camera for taking self portraits
• A new "Orbit Camera" that lets you focus on objects in the world and check them out from different angles (hold down 'alt' and click to initiate it)
• Control improvements meant to improve camera controls on laptops and trackpads without multiple mouse buttons
• Built-in sit animations for chairs and sofas
• Improvements to the script system including loops"

More notes from Sam:

"We're going to release an 'Avatar Development Kit' in the next couple days, once we get some feedback and testing on the new avatars. This will include rigs for animators, the body geometry to use for clothes makers, and sample clothes including normal maps and textures so that fashion designers have starting templates to work with. There are more avatar features in the works as well: face customization sliders, animatable fingers, and many more emotes, clothes, and hair options. Those should be coming out over the next month or so."

So there you go. To me the avatars still look too doll-like and expressionless, but seems to me avatar evolution is heading in the right direction.

From left to right, avatars by lilli, ryanschultz, and Mykael.

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Comments

[Ezra]

I think in short order they've outdid themselves addressing a few issues expressed on this blog. Especially Iris' ones on a better avatar camera, inclusion of an orbit camera, and the new avatar sliders.

The level of thoughtfulness and ease put into the customization of the default avatars and clothes is insane. The fact that its all swappable avatars and things fitted for them is even more insane.

Fans of Second Life's deformer, materials and non-existent Avatar 2.0 project would really love such features.

[Cyberserenity]

It is really nice to see that someone is developing virtual worlds again for content creators. Now when Linden lab more or less have dropped the ball.

Maybe it is time to get in the game again.

[Smilodon]

None of the cool features matter if a community doesn't form. I have logged into Cloud Party a LOT lately; there's no one there.

Considering FB has now passed 1 million members, and that is the prerequisite for joining Cloud Party, to have concurrency about 25 or 30 on a Friday afternoon (as yesterday) is fail.

[Ezra]

"Considering FB has now passed 1 million members, and that is the prerequisite for joining Cloud Party, to have concurrency about 25 or 30 on a Friday afternoon (as yesterday) is fail."

Can't really be a fail when an attempt isn't made. You nor I learned about Cloud Party from advertisement from Cloud Party, we learned about it from this blog. They didn't invite us, but when we arrived they did an impressive amount to accommodate us.

I'd wait until Cloud Party is out of beta, has alternate login methods, and actually has community-related features to worry about community.

Right now they've prioritized creation tools so that's the only thing they've genuinely attempted that they can fail at, and in that area they've made Cloud Party far ahead of Second Life in all but a few areas.

[cloud-partyfr]

And now the new ADK has been released, but be careful, this version does not include for now, rigged animation, but only male and female bodies, textures and uv-map (for some clothes too)

Can see that for french people in www.cloud-party.fr

[Dartagan Shepherd]

Fantastic work by a 4 developer team, and great to see virtual worlds innovation again, it's a breath of fresh air.

As for community and users, I think it's more important to focus on the product than the numbers.

Virtual worlds don't need to be a "millions and billions" kind of thing. In fact, too much hype and reaching too far led to Second Life becoming unsustainable.

Not everything needs to be examined in terms of startups or success/fail prophesy.

Steady improvement and growth, however large or small is success. Building a great product doesn't need to be about world domination.

I'm appreciating a fantastic amount of product improvement by a small team, that isn't claiming to be a "country", the next 3D web or consist of claims of changing the world and I'm willing to wait to see how it turns out.

[Iggy]

@Dartagan,

I'm reading Cory Ondrejka's article, "Escaping the Gilded Cage," from SL's early days. Hamlet referenced it here an another post, and I got curious. I plan to teach my students from the piece next semester, as they study the culture of online communities and the utopian early vision for virtual worlds.

Does that vision persist? If so, does it apply to Cloud Party?

At some point, I would *love* to hear Cory reflect on the capacity of VWs to change the world, to make our physical lives different, to make a new country.

He is all about building a large metaverse in that article, of realizing something akin to Stephenson's vision. He writes "[an emerging metaverse] must expand through viral growth and produce an increasing supply of active creators who create wealth within a generalized virtual world."

I realize that as a FB employee he can now only speak "off duty" and not for his company's goals, but I'm sure he still has some strong opinions.

Any chance of a long interview, Hamlet?