Tafi’s Powerful Astra Avatar Creation Engine becomes Unity Verified Solution Partner
The state-of-the-art, fully-built avatar design tool now available in Unity Asset Store gives developers a robust character creation solution allowing users to create the perfect avatars.
Tafi, the creator of Astra, the world-class 3D avatar creation engine, announced the availability of Astra in the Unity Asset Store as a Unity Verified Solutions Partner. Developers can easily plug Astra into their games and digital environments, saving them time and allowing their users to create the perfect digital identity using Tafi’s massive 3D asset library. Developers can also integrate their own 3D assets designed in a variety of 3D modeling software for nearly infinite possibilities for their users’ avatars.
Following the public launch of Astra this month, the addition of the SDK to the Unity Asset store is a major step in making this powerful tool even more widely available to developers.
Tafi was founded in 2019 to level up personalized avatars, allowing everyone to have a digital representation as unique as they are. Tafi has quickly made a name for itself as a leading 3D digital content studio, having worked with brands such as Coca-Cola to release bespoke digital collectibles such as the International Friendship Day NFT collection.
Creators are at the heart of everything Tafi does, and Astra was built specifically with creators in mind. They can simply integrate Astra into their game or environment from the Unity Asset Store, replacing the task of developing a time-intensive and expensive character editor from scratch, making Astra easy to implement on a much more affordable budget. Then, with Astra’s extensive 3D asset library and the ability to add creator-designed assets, Tafi’s Astra creators – and users – are put in the driver's seat of virtual identity in a way unlike they’ve seen before.
Key features of Astra:
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A pre-built content library - users will have access to 1,000s of assets to build their perfect avatar
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Assets include clothes, hair, decals, morphables, and more
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The ability for creators to add their own 3D assets
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3D assets fit any shape or size of avatar automatically with no poke-through
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A streamable asset system. No need to ship assets with developers’ builds
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Solutions are performed quickly, client-side, allowing content to be distributed without precomputation
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A rich API for customizing avatars and querying assets
“No one does 3D avatar creation quite like Tafi, and no company powers and inspires digital content development like Unity,” said Matt Wilburn, president of Tafi. “Putting our Astra avatar engine into the hands of Unity’s talented creators is a game changer for representation in digital environments.
“We want to see diverse characters wherever avatars are created, and we feel it has never been more important to have a seamless ability to create inclusive virtual representation as the metaverse grows. With Astra, users will be able to represent themselves however they wish. I couldn’t be more thrilled about Tafi joining Unity as a Verified Solutions Partner and can’t wait to see how developers, creators, and users level up their avatar design experience using Astra.”
As a Unity Verified Solutions Partner, Astra is certified by Unity as meeting the highest quality and compatibility standards. Developers can trust Astra is a professional caliber third-party tool with Unity’s certification. The Verified Solutions badge lets developers know they can rely on Astra for compatibility, quality, and scale. Unity’s own engineers reviewed Astra to guarantee it met Unity’s highest technical standards.
“Astra has been designed from the ground up for developers, by developers,” said Jesse Janzer, Director of Technology at Tafi. “We have a large team with years of experience building avatars and the systems that create them, and we have created a solution unlike anything else on the market. There is so much potential with Astra, and the developers already using the SDK have shown the range of what’s possible.”
Learn more about Tafi and Astra here.