Free Avatar Maker falls into the latter category and can be used for making head and shoulder cartoon avatars.
While it doesn't have an extensive library of character features (you may struggle to get a good likeness), uniquely it will make your avatar in four different art styles concurrently, allowing you to save the one you like most, or even all four.
I wasn't overly impressed how my TET avatar looked in the first two styles, but style three is quite possibly the coolest looking version of my avatar I've ever seen in a third party avatar creator. It's a very contemporary style. Style four, line art, is also not too bad.
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| Avatar Maker's User Interface. Switch between the four different art styles shown across the top at any time. I particularly like the third style. |
Of course you don't have to stick with the same feature choices for each style. If you think other elements look better in that style, save each avatar separately once you have the features correct in that style.
Each avatar can be saved out as PNG files in two sizes but the real bonus is that you can also save your avatars as SVG (vector) files. Effectively allowing you to scale them to any size you need.
Free Avatar Maker and Cartoon Animator
What's really great about Avatar Maker's SVG export is that all of the character features are layered so that you can easily plug them into Cartoon Animator's SVG character template and use it as the initial starting point for an SVG-G3-360 character head, or you can do what I did, and directly import the entire avatar to into a template so you can turn it into an animated avatar.
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| Avatar Maker's SVG file already has all the features conveniently sorted into folders that you can simply copy over into their equivalent folders in Cartoon Animator's G3-SVG Character Template. |
You can actually get pretty far without needing to create any new sprites, however if you want your avatar to blink, have expressive eyes, or be able to speak with correct mouth forms, you will need to make additional sprites, using what you have as a starting point.
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| This short animation uses only components copied directly across from Avatar Maker's SVG file to Cartoon Animator's G3-SVG front facing character template. The only custom component I made was the eye white mask so the iris' would stay within the eye white region. This character uses a standard G3 head and would likely require extra, additional sprites to convert it to a G3-360 head. |
Making additional eye sprites is easy enough because the structure of the original eyes in the SVG file means you can duplicate them and adjust the eyelids for the six different eye expressions.
There's only one open mouth in Avatar Maker's library so making all the mouth sprites will be a little more challenging but do-able. Alternatively, you could just use a mouth from another Cartoon Animator character that has a similar art style to save you time.
If you plan to convert your avatar into a G3-360 head you may also have to improvise a side facing nose angle, and a back hair sprite (for the hair on the back of the head). Avatar Maker does create a back hair sprite for characters with long hair but shorter hair, like my TET avatar does not include back hair.
As you can see from the example images Avatar Maker is a good starting point for creating animated SVG character heads (or even raster based PNG heads). There's certainly enough variety to create an entire range of characters in the same art style.
You could also draw your own bodies extended down from the neck and shoulders these avatars include. However the easier way would be to simply save out the fully rigged G3 heads and apply them to any G3 characters you have in a matching art style.
Note that there is no stipulation on the Avatar Maker site about whether you can use their avatars in commercial projects but given the creators encourage you to share them everywhere, across the entire web, beyond social media, you should be more than fine to include them in your own personal projects that you intend to share on YouTube and similar places. Just don't forget to credit Free Avatar Maker because it's the right thing to do!