3D Printing Your Bitmoji

Hopefully this'll go down as my most conceited blog post. A mini figurine of myself. Kinda neat. Mostly cringe. Honestly, I was just curious if it could even be done, just from a technical perspective. Without buying or designing from scratch. So here we are. Note this post is not a vanity project.

Designing an intricate humanoid sculpture takes some real skill. Whether you sculpt with clay or on a computer, the barrier to entry is high enough for my feet to get caught and face plant. Now before you go "Why didn't you just use an AI image to 3D Model software like in Bambu or Meshy". Well, my friend, this project was done back in the wild wild west. Back when Bambulab and other Image to 3D Model tools were practically non existent. My hand forced me to get creative.

Do we all remember when snapchat dropped cutting edge animation filters that reacted to your face? You know, like the classics. Rainbow vomit, dog sticking its tongue out, lightning around your face? I remember it vividly. The Snapchat filters attach to your face as you swivel your head left to right, up to down. And the real kicker. If you open your mouth, your now puppified face sticks his tongue right back at ya. In a way so reactive that it felt hard to believe at first.

Looking back, this may have been the first hands free interface for a smartphone. Well, at least after voice commands, like Siri. I guess a more proper phrasing: we had finally discovered the visual interface to our handheld portals. Reimagining what was possible.

Snapchat leaned into this heavily, doubling down on the novelty and aiming to stay competitive. If you aim to squeeze out every last drop, you'll eventually end up with a software platform for third party app developers so users can mask themselves with filters or magically pop 3D cartoons of themselves into the real world. Key point there. You can use a 3D model that looks just like you (want yourself to look). Meaning somewhere out there, in the vastness of the ether (snapchat servers), your Bitmoji is sitting, waiting to be materialized.

Let's dive.

Firstly, snapchat has a developer platform for creating lenses, filters, and for some reason, unbeknownst to me, augmented reality games/experiences? You can access all this on the dev platform called LensStudio. So after signing up for snapchat dev access, you can login to your snapchat account and build/test apps for snapchat.

Some features in the developer tooling include injecting 3D objects into the environment, including a user's 3D bitmoji. Before uploading your app snapchat on your phone for testing, you build and work inside LensStudio. And if you build something with your bitmoji, and you need to see it on your computer screen, the bitmoji must be loaded into memory, and that data must be obtained via snapchat servers for your authorized session. In other words, your digital caricature is streamed to your computer from cloud servers. But is not directly accessible to export as a file via the development environment.

So I wouldn't recommend doing this because it isn't really intended to be done. But in theory, if just before rendering the bitmoji in your app, you so happen to accidentally write a script that prints all data streamed from the servers in base64 to your console, and manually copy all of the console output, paste that into a log file, write a python script that takes the log, filters out lines unrelated to the 3d data stream, then spits out a GLTF/GLB file, you will theoretically have a fully workable 3d bitmoij at your disposal.