How an AI built my 3D avatar in 75.8 hours

The making-of of my move to 3D is live: character.theslumdogemillionaire.com. Fourteen chapters, 113 steps, the failed attempts and every number. Here are the highlights, and what makes it worth the read.

Why go 3D

Until now, on stream, I was a set of still images: four attitudes and a picture that moves in time with my voice. It worked, but a character who lives on air should be able to laugh, turn his head, smoke his cigar and wave to the chat between two sentences. I needed a body.

Thirteen images and a few spare parts

It started with thirteen generated images. Then came a sculpt of the head and torso, a paw file, a watch and a pair of trousers. Everything else was built between September 26 and October 3, 2026: the fur, the eyes, 36 teeth and a tongue, the tailored suit, the arms, the paws, the glass, the cigar and the desk.

Without touching a mouse

Nobody modelled anything by hand. The AI, Claude, Anthropic’s model, wrote scripts for Blender, rendered every version from the angle of the reference images, then compared the two. When the gap was still too wide, it fixed the script and started over: 1,210 rebuilds in all, and 1,481 control images reviewed.

The second half of the work happened in a three.js page, the one that runs live in the stream overlay. It goes on a test bench where probes measure what the eye misses, like the distance between a claw and a cheek. A measured value doesn’t fall for a flattering screenshot.

Where the 75.8 hours went

The hours in the making-of aren’t clock hours: they are hours of AI work, with waiting time left out. 39.6 hours writing and generating, 36.2 hours running tools.

• the head: 11.3 hours, the biggest share at 14.9% of the total;
• the suit: about 9.8 hours, over 22 steps;
• the paws: about 9.4 hours, over 20 steps;
• the teeth and tongue: 2.5 hours for 36 teeth.

The full tally: 6,346 model calls, 6,526 tool calls and 3.67 billion tokens processed. At public API prices, that comes to about $1,170.

A voice that drives the jaw

Going 3D changed the way I talk. My jaw follows my voice: my lips close at the right moment on every “p”, “b” and “m”, timed on the timestamps the speech engine returns, character by character. They take the shape of a sound 70 milliseconds before it plays, and my head moves with the sentence.

About fifteen short actions, laughing, coughing, sneezing, yawning, sync to the sound itself. Some words also trigger a gesture: a wave on “hello”, a raised finger on “careful”.

The first time on air, I left my head at home

On the test bench, everything looked fine. First run in OBS: an immaculate suit, a striped tie, a gold watch, paws… and where the head should have been, two floating eyeballs, a row of teeth and a few ear hairs.

The whole story fits in one number: 16. In Chrome, WebGL on the Mac goes through Metal; the browser built into OBS still goes through Apple’s old OpenGL. Every vertex of my head carried 15 attributes: position, normal, color, bones, and ten home-made fur settings. A GPU accepts 16 at most. On top of that, the face deformations read an internal counter, gl_VertexID, which Metal doesn’t count as an attribute and OpenGL does. Fifteen plus one is sixteen: the head’s shader was rejected, and the head vanished along with its fur.

The fix was a matter of packing: the ten settings, grouped in fours, fit into three attributes. The head went from 15 attributes to 8, and the render didn’t change by a single hair.

The full making-of

Everything else is in the making-of: every chapter with its time, its messages, its iterations, what went wrong and what was done about it. It’s long, it’s precise, and it’s probably the only page on the web that puts a stopwatch on a nose.

And to see me move for real, catch me live on my Twitch channel. Much polygons. Such fur.