Meta Avatars SDK Update: Now Supporting Animated Full-bodied Avatars, Parametric Body Shapes, Custom Animations, and More

Today, v29.6 of the Meta Avatars SDK is publicly available, including an assortment of new capabilities and features for developers and their users. These updates, in addition to several bug fixes, are part of Meta’s ongoing commitment to deliver high-quality avatars to support immersive app experiences. Here’s what developers can expect from this release:

Meta has updated its avatars style and provides more extensive customization options and controls. Understanding that this increased level of customization can be overwhelming for some users, we’ve also introduced several additional avatar presets for users to choose from.

This release will include avatars with animated legs. Legs animations, which are built using Unity’s Mecanim animation system, include walking, running and crouching. Height variability, however, is not supported with this release. We understand the importance that height variability plays in MR experiences and are working on how best to build this capability.

Developers can bring their custom Unity humanoid animations and apply them onto avatars by specifying animations. They will also be able to reuse existing animations without needing to create new ones for versions 29.6 and beyond.

Now that Avatars can come in all different shapes and sizes, the joint attachment system has gotten an upgrade with the addition of OvrAvatarSockets to allow developers to author attachment points to the avatar that scale with body sizes. This is highly flexible and enables many developer use cases such as hip attachment points, and body attachables that scale to fit all avatars.

The following sample scenes have been added:

Additionally, a sample UI has been built to allow for easy switching between sample scenes for more convenient development and testing.

In order to sufficiently support this new tech stack and future releases, Meta will be discontinuing support for legacy versions of the Avatars SDK on March 30, 2025. Developers who are currently using Meta Avatars and want to continue their usage are encouraged to update to v29.6 before deprecation. Choosing to not migrate by the deprecation deadline will result in discolored avatars that users will not be able to edit.

We appreciate the developer community for its partnership as we continue to improve our products. To download v29.6 of the Meta Avatars SDK, please visit here.