Alright, so I was messing around with the Nintendo Switch avatars the other day, and I thought, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool to make these totally customizable?” Like, beyond the few options Nintendo gives you. So, I dove in.
First thing I did was fire up Unity. Yeah, I know, probably not the most obvious choice, but it’s what I’m comfortable with. I started by looking at some references – basically, just Googling a ton of Nintendo avatars to get a feel for the style. Blocky, simple, and super colorful – got it.
Next up, I needed some 3D models. I didn’t want to start from scratch, so I grabbed some basic human models from the Unity Asset Store. Free ones, of course, because I’m cheap like that. Then, the real fun began: hacking them apart and reshaping them to look more like those Mii characters. Think lots of rounded edges and big heads.
Then I started thinking about customization. I decided to break it down into categories: hair, eyes, nose, mouth, clothes, and accessories. For each category, I modeled a bunch of different options in Blender. Nothing too fancy, just simple shapes and textures. Think different hairstyles, eye shapes, noses – the kind of stuff you see in the real Mii Maker.
Bringing everything into Unity was a bit of a pain. Lots of importing, tweaking materials, and wrestling with the scaling. But eventually, I got all my models in there. I spent a bunch of time setting up the UI. I used Unity’s UI system to create buttons and menus for each customization category. The idea was you click a button, and it swaps out the current model with a new one.
Now, here comes the coding. I wrote a script that handles the swapping of the models. Basically, it looks for the selected option and then hides the current model and shows the new one. It took a bit of trial and error, but I eventually got it working smoothly. I also added some color pickers so you could change the colors of the hair, clothes, and accessories. Because who doesn’t love neon green hair?
After that, I added a background selector and some basic animation like waving and jumping. And I had to iron out all the bugs and stuff. It was a lot of late nights, but finally, it was working! A totally customizable Nintendo avatar maker.
It’s not perfect, and it definitely needs some polish, but it’s a fun little project. Maybe I’ll add more features later, like the ability to export the avatar as a 3D model. Who knows? For now, I’m just happy it works.
