Avatar Invent

Fabricate a complete, reel-ready fictional avatar from a single text description. Where avatar-reel-composer's create_avatar.py clones a real person from their Instagram reels, this skill invents one: it casts a face, a room, a delivery style and a voice, and writes them into the exact same per-avatar folder structure the rest of the pipeline already understands.

The result is a first-class avatar — drop it straight into avatar-reel-composer / reel-restyle to produce reels.

Output location. A bare avatar name is created under ./avatares/<name>/ (so generated avatars never clutter the project root); pass an explicit path (e.g. path/to/nora) to override, or set AVATARES_ROOT. <avatar>/ below refers to that folder.

What it produces

<avatar>/
  brief.json             # the inputs (description, setting, style, ...)
  scene.json             # subject / wardrobe / scene / light  (drives the still + angles)
  talking_profile.json   # p-video delivery prompt (calm presenter, eyes to lens)
  voice_brief.json       # ElevenLabs voice description + sample text
  refs/<slug>_hero.png   # the hero presenter still (+ _hero_master.png)
  angles/<slug>_<move>_916.png   # camera-angle cuts (push_in, pull_out, ...)
  frames/frame_0001.png + manifest.json   # hero exposed as a clean reference frame
  voices/<name>.json + index.json + <name>_design_sample.mp3   # MiniMax voice_id
  avatar.json            # the record (invented: true, stages, artifacts)

Defaults (UGC talking-head reel best practices)

All baked into prompts/presets.json and overridable:

• Photorealistic render (use --style soft3d for Pixar-like, --style anime, or any custom style string).
• Vertical 9:16, eye-level, looking straight into the lens, leaning in slightly.
• Seated, half-body (waist/chest-up) medium shot, with clean negative space on one side for captions.
• Soft, flattering light: soft key from the left ~45°, a gentle rim/back light, open fill — no harsh shadows.
• Phone-camera look: ~35–50mm, shallow depth of field, natural color.
• Room fits the topic via --setting (office, home, studio, street, outdoors, kitchen, cafe, gym, clinic, …).
• Neutral mid-sentence expression (lips slightly parted) so the still animates well for lip-sync.

Setup

Keys are auto-discovered from the sibling skills (usually nothing to set):

• ElevenLabs (voice design) ← audio-theater/config.json
• Replicate (hero still via gpt-image-2 + MiniMax clone) ← gpt-image-2 / voice-clone
• Gemini (only for --generator gemini) ← asset-generator/config.json

pip3 install -r .cursor/skills/avatar-invent/scripts/requirements.txt
# sibling deps (usually already installed):
pip3 install -r .cursor/skills/voice-clone/requirements.txt
pip3 install -r ~/.cursor/skills/gpt-image-2/scripts/requirements.txt

python3 .cursor/skills/avatar-invent/scripts/setup_key.py --show   # verify keys

Cloning the designed voice with MiniMax needs cloudflared (preferred) or ngrok on PATH, same as the voice-clone skill (brew install cloudflared).

Workflow

The orchestrator runs an idempotent stage machine and stops once for an agent review (the creative casting step) before any paid generation.

# 1) Invent: auto-drafts scene/profile/voice, then pauses for review.
python3 .cursor/skills/avatar-invent/scripts/invent_avatar.py nora \
    --description "Chilean woman, mid 30s, warm and reassuring, clinical psychologist" \
    --setting clinic --language es

#    -> review & refine nora/scene.json, talking_profile.json, voice_brief.json
#       (make the SUBJECT a vivid concrete face; tune wardrobe/room/voice).

# 2) Re-run to generate the hero still + angles + designed-and-cloned voice:
python3 .cursor/skills/avatar-invent/scripts/invent_avatar.py nora

# Inspect readiness any time (no API spend):
python3 .cursor/skills/avatar-invent/scripts/invent_avatar.py nora --status

Skip the pause with --no-review for a one-shot run. Re-run any stage with --force-stage hero / --force-stage voice etc.

The author checkpoint (why it matters)

The script seeds scene.json / talking_profile.json / voice_brief.json from the brief + the topic's defaults, but the SUBJECT field is just your raw description. Refine it into a concrete, vivid person (age, face, hair, skin, expression) — gpt-image-2's identity fidelity is only as good as that text, and the same scene.json is reused for every camera angle, so a precise subject is what keeps the avatar from drifting between cuts.

Common variations

# Pixar-style soft 3D character instead of photoreal
python3 .../invent_avatar.py leo --description "..." --setting home --style soft3d

# Horizontal 16:9 (angles auto-off; the hero still is the deliverable)
python3 .../invent_avatar.py max --description "..." --setting office -ar 16:9

# Use Gemini for the hero (native 9:16/16:9, up to 4K) instead of gpt-image-2
python3 .../invent_avatar.py mia --description "..." --generator gemini

# Custom camera moves
python3 .../invent_avatar.py mia --description "..." --moves push_in,low_angle,negative_space_left

Single-stage scripts (also usable standalone)

# Just the hero still from a scene.json (preview the prompt with --print-prompt):
python3 .cursor/skills/avatar-invent/scripts/generate_hero.py \
    --scene-file nora/scene.json --style photoreal -ar 9:16 -o nora/refs/ --slug nora

# Just the voice (ElevenLabs design -> MiniMax clone):
python3 .cursor/skills/avatar-invent/scripts/design_voice.py \
    --avatar-dir nora --name nora --voice-brief nora/voice_brief.json

After it's READY

Write a storyboard and compose, exactly like any other avatar:

python3 .cursor/skills/avatar-reel-composer/scripts/compose_reel.py \
    nora/reels/001_slug/storyboard.json --finish

How the voice works (ElevenLabs → MiniMax bridge)

A fictional avatar has no recording to clone, so the voice is designed from text: ElevenLabs Voice Design (/v1/text-to-voice/design) invents a voice from voice_brief.json's description and returns a long spoken sample. That clean sample is then handed to the voice-clone skill (MiniMax), producing the same voices/<name>.json + index.json (voice_id) every avatar uses — so avatar-reel-composer's narrate.py speaks the new voice with no changes. The ElevenLabs provenance (description, preview ids) is kept in voices/<name>_design.json.

See REFERENCE.md for the stage machine, the prompt internals, the presets schema and design notes.

Related skills

• avatar-camera-angles — the angle generator this calls.
• voice-clone — the MiniMax clone step (+ TTS).
• avatar-talking-video — animate a still into a talking clip.
• avatar-reel-composer — compose the finished reel.
• reel-restyle — apply another avatar's reel style to this one.