Thursday, February 12, 2009

Blogger Avatar Gadget

One of the ideas behind allowing the graphical assets of an avatar character to function outside of the editor was to make it easy to place the avatar in the context of your website or blog without the extra interface or controls. I quickly made a little Blogger Gadget (a.k.a. Widget) which places your avatar in a sidebar item for your Blogger blog. You should be able to see an example of it on this blog over to the right - yes, that's me, and yes, the beard is new ;)

I did this through the simple blogger post API, not through Google's widget format which meant I just set up a simple html page with a form and hit a button to make it happen. I haven't decided if I wanted to make something link this visible on the site/editor or not, since under the current setup, it would pull the avatar file from myavatareditor.com sucking away precious bandwidth... but maybe it wouldn't be so demanding that my server couldn't handle it, and if it is, I could always stop hosting it!

Note: Feel free to play with the page posted above. To work with your own avatar, you would need to edit the content in the blogger page that appears after hitting the Add Avatar button and replace the avatar code string with your own.

9 comments:

Tommy Fenyx said...

Hi senocular, good idea I will put it in my blog as I help you with it.
The image that I want to show you:

http://i42.tinypic.com/14ild0j.jpg

Note the spot and nose I have in my avatar is lower than the original, the face is a little bit thinner(it seems so) and the eyeshadows a little bit higher.

Email-me to report you more help.

Tommy Fenyx.
http://tommyfenyx.blogspot.com/

senocular said...

Wow Tommy, those are very fine details you're pointing out there. I don't know how much more effort I'm going to put into matching those images. The fact that its as close as it is, is impressive enough, especially since I hand drew all of the character elements in 2D to match graphics originally rendered in 3D.

Face shapes are especially difficult to change now given how many other elements depend on their current shape (hair styles, facial features, etc.). And even on the Wii, I think there's some discrepancies depending on whether or not you're using the wide screen mode - and I can't remember which specifically I tried to match.

Looking at the graphics now, it doesn't look like the eyeshadow is variant between face shapes, so technically I should be able to tweak that a little if you think its really that far off. I can play around with the nose and mole positioning a little too. It would help if I had your character file, though. Can you provide a link?

Anonymous said...

WOAH! look at ur blogger avatar thing! something happend and so did mine its all like silver pants and the nose is 3-d! lol. hope u guys can fix it soon!

senocular said...

Goldguy55,

You probably don't have Flash Player 10. There are no version checks for Flash Player 10 in the character SWF used in the avatar gadget so it will look gray and probably freak out if used with a lower version of the player.

http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer

Anonymous said...

OHHHHHHH! that explains ALOT.

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