Starting January 1st however, Avatars will be going through a little transition. Games like Gears of War have sold gun-based accessories like their famous Lancer. but on January 1st, Microsoft will no longer be offering such items. Microsoft has no problem with violent games, but the fact that Avatars are available outside of such games is enough to make them nix these items. With the Kinect, Microsoft has started putting out family-friendly games that use Avatars and gamers on these games may not want to meet Avatars toting a giant gun.

That said, gamers who purchased these items already will still be able to use them. At least they aren’t taking away the items that people have already purchased with their hard-earned money. If you want one of these items, make sure to hit the Marketplace and buy them before the New Year, because after that they will be just like 2011….gone!

Source: TechSpot

You need them on Facebook, in your instant messaging application, and you can even use Gravatar to personalize your comments on MakeUseOf, and a ton of other sites.

A lot of people are too shy, or paranoid, to use a ‘real’ profile pictures. It’s understandable. You just don’t want to have your face next to everything you say and do on the internet. That’s why you build your own avatar: a digital caricature to represent the online you.

Below are four highly diverse online services that allow you to build your own highly personalized avatars, ranging from black-and white sketches to animated 3D.

Build Your Wild Self

Build Your Wild Self is that one-in-a-million avatar tool. It draws your kiddy self in rich colors and imaginative features. Inner adults do not exist. You should still find a remnant of the kid in you. The resulting avatars have that grainy pencil-drawn look about them. Talk about character.

Sure, you can use the tool to draw some normal arms and buttocks, but how boring would that be? Rather put in a little octopus, lying, or arachnid. Consider it a conversation starter.

When you’re done, click on ‘Get a Wild Desktop‘ for a big wild-you picture. Crop the image, or just take a screenshot of the part you want to keep. Easy as that!

Avatara (3D Animated)

With Avatar in our wake and Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland on the horizon, you’ve got two very good reasons to get excited about 3D. And don’t forget Heavy Rain. While you’re at it, why not build your own 3D avatar? With a bit of tweaking, it’s like looking in a 3D mirror. The only downside of Avatara is the need to sign up to render your avatar.

Once you’re satisfied with your avatar’s appearance, you can choose an animation. Use breathing for a simple mugshot, or have yourself dance around on the screen.

The easiest way of ‘extracting’ the avatar is to mail it to yourself after signing up. This will give you an animated gif of your 3D character. Not a lot of sites still allow for animated avatars, but even in the worst case scenario, you can still use the 3D you as a still.

Digibody’s Caricature Maker

Back to pencilwork, Digibody’s Caricature Maker is for those of you who aren’t looking for the most realistic depiction. Draw yourself in caricature with a few heavily exaggerated facial features. There’s things little more personal than enlarging and making fun with your own characteristics. After all, it’s the quirks and imperfections that make you… well, you.

The tool is sometimes a little slow to respond, and seems to reload the page with every customization, but the result is often hilarious. I give you my word, you’ll have a hard time finding a lot of normal facial features on that page.

Once you’re done, save the image to your desktop in png, gif or jpg, or extract the HTML to embed it on a web page or in a forum.

FaceYourManga

One of the best avatar (I should say, mangatar) creators. Whip up a funny manga-style profile picture in a whip. It’s one of the avatar creation services that’s used a lot with Gravatar.

Where the above caricature makers really focuses on facial features, FaceYourManga takes on your character by exaggerating facial expressions. It’s easy to make a smart-, angry-, energetic-, or happy looking avatar. Throw in some crazy accessories, and you’re all set.

What avatar creator do you prefer? Tell us your personal picks in the comments section below!

Or maybe you have your own ideas of what you would do with an Avatar…

Well look no further than Avatara which I discovered from the MakeUseOf directory. You can create 3d avatars out of pre-set up templates or create your own from scratch.

To start, visit Avatara’s homepage. You will see this screen:

Click Get Started to umm, get started! That will take you to this screen:

You see that you can build your own Avatar using an uploaded head shot like the Obama one above (just an example, guys). Or roll with one of their awesome avatars. I chose to start with a blank avatar by clicking Start with a blank avatar at the bottom of the screen. That takes you to here:

I clicked on the filter at the top and told it to filter out everything but male characters and then I saw this:

I rolled with Buck and continued. You need to click Select in the window of the icon you are going with to actually load it into your selection. You can also modify the images directly by using the advanced mode. To continue, you click on the next tab at the top of the window. The next step is to choose skin color like so:

Make your selection and move on. I choose Zoe from the white selection to represent my complexion.  Then the next step is to select the eyes. The eyes make your face so choose carefully.

I chose the third one down in the second row. My avatar is coming along nicely now! And I continued on to the hair selection which you can see below:

Almost at the end is body type. What kind of body do you want? A fat and flabby body or a sculptured and chiseled hard body?  I chose the latter.

Click Select on the body type you want and move on to the clothing. I choose some formal wear and went with a shirt and tie.

I continued on to choose pants (tuxedo pants) and sneakers! Yes, sneakers! We do want our avatars to have some personality, don’t we? So be creative!

And this is how my avatar looks like after I was done designing:

From here, what can we do? We can save the avatar but you will need to sign up for an account first. As you attempt to save the avatar, it will prompt you to create or log into an account.

Then you will name your avatar and it will be saved to your online account. Easy peasy right? Now, what can we do?

Click on Transport and you will get this screen:

Select a message and an animation to go with your avatar and then you can continue and share the avatar with the whole world! I set my dude (that is his name by the way) to dance and say, “What up?”

Then from the next screen you can email, preview or share your new avatar on most of the social networks. It will take a minute or two for him (or her) to render.

That’s it! We want to see your avatars in the comments! Share your creations with us!

Well, that’s what Gizmoz is. A Web 2.0 3d character maker that lets us create, customize and animate lifelike 3D talking characters and share it on sites like YouTube and Facebook. Yes, your very own talking, blabbering avatar.

The animated online clones are a new “˜breed’ of character-based visual icons. Digital characters that will take over from humdrum photos and dumb avatars. What Gizmoz does is provide a free web service that makes it dead easy to create dead ringers for our online selves. These are embeddable Flash objects with the look of a 3D caricature. It’s a huge lot of fun when you make these characters lip-synch with your own lines on social networking sites or just send it across like a 3D postcard.

There are three ways you can use the Gizmoz 3d character maker to make your own virtual showcase. But first, go through the simple registration and log-in.

Publish 3D Clips

Large repertory of templates to put your face on and publish them or embed them as Flash objects. The templates give you a gallery of choices to make slideshows, 3D greeting cards, animated mini-clips, vacation postcards, commentary clips for any video where you are the speaking critic, 3D avatars, and a new beta product where you get to swap faces with a celebrity.

Print Customized Products

You might not be asked to star in the next Indiana Jones film but you can put your face under his hat with a face swap. That’s the general idea in this section (which is basically the beta face swap option from the earlier section) leading up to the stage where you get to print it on mugs and tees. But the printing isn’t free though it may sound cool. If you don’t want to part with your pennies, share the finished file on your social networks or simply download it to your computer.

Create Cool Profile Pics

We are back to free with this part of the Gizmoz service. Create your own character using provided faces or your own snapped with a webcam or uploaded. You can customize your character by changing the hair, giving it some makeup, accessorizing it or just morphing it into something bizarre. The finished character is yours to download, print or share on social networks like Facebook.

Enter the Gizmoz Studio

The process behind all three options takes you into the Gizmoz Studio interface where you mashup your face on the templates provided, add bells “˜n whistles like graphics, media clips and voice bits to make the animations talk. Gizmoz gives you many tools to do the job. What’s needed is only the face.

Making the character talk is also easy using your own recorded voice or taking the help of the site’s text to speech engine. The steps to follow for each process are clearly outlined.

The Gizmoz site is designed around one concept ““ that it should be easy to make your own animated 3D avatars and share it across the web. Making animated reincarnations of your own self is fun, what’s better is finding out the ways to entertain your friends through it.

I will leave you here now and go make one Clint styled avatar for myself. Always wanted to spout the lines – “Go ahead, make my day!”

Will Gizmoz make yours? Discover it and let us know.

Have you ever asked yourself, “How do I make a background on MySpace?” Well, today I’ll show you how to find, create, and use a custom background on your MySpace profile.

Your source image could be from your personal photo collection or some wallpaper made available for free download from a site like Customize.org, one of my favorite sites, Digital Blasphemy, or Google’s Image Search (we suggest using the Advanced Search to narrow it down to non-commercial-licensed content).

When selecting your image, keep your audience in mind. Does the image provide a pleasing pattern or illustrate a great moment? Will it distract from your profile’s content? Is it age-appropriate, considering your friends? These are all things to consider, as well as image size. If your image is larger than, say 1024 pixels in length, we suggest using a tool like Resizr or any image resizer to shrink the image down.

Rather than linking to the image as hosted elsewhere, it’s good etiquette to save a copy of the image and upload it to a free host such as PiccDrop, and also to give credit somewhere on your profile to the artist or photographer. For demonstration, I’ve chosen this photo by Tim Snell. Once you’ve uploaded your image to your host, make note of the image’s URL (copy it into Notepad) for future use.

Your next step varies based on what type of MySpace profile you’re using. There are two versions of your MySpace profile. If you’re a long-time user and haven’t switched, then you’re using Profile 1.0. Here’s how to determine what type of profile you’re using. When you login, click the “Edit Profile” link next to your MySpace URL. Then, select “Customize Profile.” On the next screen, your profile type will be displayed at the very top of the page.

If you’re using “Profile 1.0“, follow these directions: Hit your “back” button to go back to the original profile editor. Use this background generator with your image’s URL to create the HTML code, then copy that code into the profile editor’s “About Me” box. Save your changes and check your profile.

If you’ve upgraded your profile to “2.0“, the process is easier. First, select your basic theme. If you have a dark image like mine, for example, it’s important to pick a dark theme to start with. In your customize menu, click Advanced Edit, then Background, and then paste your image’s URL into the URL field. Publish your changes and check your profile.

If everything worked, you’ll have a custom background for your MySpace page to show off to your friends (my profile is here). Feel free to share in the comments about any profile-customization tips you may have. There’s more MySpacey goodness on MUO here.

Convert video to animated gif

To convert a video to an animated gif, you first need to make sure that you make the video as short as possible. You can do this with one of many online video editing tools or with Windows Movie Maker (if you are on Windows of course).  According to gifninja, the video file has to be about 4 seconds long, so you should try to shorten it to about that length.

Once you’ve edited your movie and cut it down to size, visit the page to convert your video to gif. Click the Browse button, navigate to where your video file is, and select it. If you wish, you can make your picture available to the public and available to be rated. Then just click on make my gif!

Make animated gifs from images

If you have a series of images you wish to animate, you can make an animated gif from images. You can upload the files individually (up to five) or you can zip them up and upload them in a single file. If you choose to upload them as a zip, you will have to append numbers to the filenames in the sequence of the animation (car1.jpg, car2.jpg, car3.jpg, etc”¦).

Selecting the file(s) to upload is very much the same as uploading a video. However, there is an additional option to set the speed of the animation. There is a preview of an animated dog that demonstrates the selected speed. But don’t worry, if you’re not happy with the speed of the animation after you’ve uploaded it, you can adjust it later.

After you click the make my gif! button, you are taken to a preview page.  The preview page allows you to keep the image as it is, adjust the speed, or start all over again.  Once you have the animation set to the desired speed, click Yes ““ it’s fantastic! to proceed to the next step.

After you’ve selected the desired speed for your animation, you select the filename for your animated gif.  Again, you can make the image publicly available if you wish.  You can also enter the filename for the image as well as tags to help other people find your image.  Once you have everything set the way you want, click the Save gif button.

gifninja also has a cool feature to split animated images into separate images.  Just upload the file and click the split my gif! button.  The individual images will appear right on the page.  You can also download all the images at once with a zip file generated by gifninja.

gifninja could hardly make it easier to create animated gifs online. What other free online and offline tools do you use to create animated gifs?