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Avatar picker

The avatar picker—opened from the Avatar button in the toolbar—lets you search and filter to find the avatar you want. After you add an avatar to your scene, you can adjust its appearance and settings from its contextual menu in the canvas, or from the inspector panel on the right.

Search

Use the search bar to find an avatar by name or description.

Filters

All, From Synthesia, My Avatars, and Shared with me are grouped together as views of your avatar library. Recent and Brand kit sit alongside them as their own filters.

Identifying avatar types in the picker

The avatar picker groups avatars under named sections that reflect the underlying avatar model, and the settings you'll have available for an avatar depend on its type: Express-1, Express-2, or Legacy.

Within those sections, a badge on an avatar's thumbnail can tell you more about what it supports:

Express-3 avatars

Express-3 avatars include customizable avatars (stock) and Avatar Builder avatars.

Express-3 avatars offer a deep set of tools for outfits, spaces, poses, and generating B-roll, alongside standard framing controls:

Express-2 avatars

Express-2 avatars include customizable avatars (stock and custom), and Synthesia's stock personal avatars.

Customizable avatars (Synthesia's customizable avatars and Personal avatars from photo) offer a deep set of tools for outfits, spaces, poses, and generating B-roll, alongside standard framing controls:

Stock personal avatars offer standard framing controls, and most offer multiple camera angles; their backgrounds cannot be changed or made transparent:

Express-1 avatars

Express-1 Studio avatars (stock and custom) offer standard framing and simple background controls, and some offer multiple camera angles:

Legacy avatars

Legacy avatars include our oldest stock Studio avatars, and any Personal avatars from video:

• Personal avatars from video offer standard framing controls.
• Legacy stock Studio avatars offer standard framing and simple background controls. Some stock legacy avatars include a limited set of predefined gestures.

Adding an avatar to a scene

To add an avatar to a scene:

1. Select the Avatar button in the toolbar at the top of the editor.
2. Browse through or search for avatars that are included in your plan.
3. Select the avatar to add it to the scene.

What happens next depends on the avatar's type:

Adding a customizable avatar

Selecting a customizable avatar opens a picker with three steps:

1. Choose the avatar.
2. Choose an outfit for it.
3. Choose a space: No space (transparent background), a space you've already used with this avatar and outfit (under Recent), or any space from the library (under All).

You can navigate between the steps using the breadcrumb at the top: Avatars > Outfits > Spaces.

Selecting a space adds the avatar to the scene. If you've used that exact avatar, outfit, and space combination before, it appears immediately. If it's a new combination, Synthesia renders it first—you'll see an "Adding Avatar to space" progress indicator before it appears in the canvas.

The contextual menu

When you select an avatar in the canvas, a contextual menu appears above or below it with quick actions. Which icons you see depend on the avatar's type.

Avatar settings

Select an avatar you've added to the canvas to access its settings in the Design tab of the inspector panel.

To replace an avatar (Studio, stock, or Personal avatar from video):

1. Select the avatar in the canvas.
2. In the Avatar section of the inspector panel, select the current avatar.
3. Browse through or search for avatars that are included in your plan.
4. Select an avatar to replace it. For a customizable avatar, selecting the avatar in the inspector panel reopens the full Avatars > Outfits > Spaces picker instead, since swapping the avatar there can also mean picking a new outfit and space.
5. Optional: Apply the replacement to every scene it appears in by selecting Change all in the toast notification that appears at the bottom of the editor.

Appearance

The appearance settings control the framing of the avatar. They're the same across all avatar types:

• Full: Set the avatar's bounding box to the dimensions of the canvas and center it vertically and horizontally with the canvas.
• Circle: Contain the avatar in a circle.
• Box: Reset the avatar's bounding box to its default boundaries.

The Full and Box options both let you crop the avatar as needed. All avatar types can be cropped.

Radius: adjusts the roundness of the container that holds the avatar. This setting is not available for the Circle framing.

Studio avatars

For stock or custom Studio avatars:

• Swap the avatar by selecting its thumbnail in the Avatar section of the inspector panel, or from the contextual menu.
• Set a colored background, or remove it, from the contextual menu's background control. This opens a Colored background panel with colors already used elsewhere in your video, plus a base color palette. Studio avatars don't have a Space section in the inspector panel—a colored background is the only background option.
• Switch camera angle, if the avatar is multi-cam: use the Camera field in the inspector panel, or the camera icon in the contextual menu. Angle options (for example Front / Angled / Angled deep, or Front / Angled left / Angled right) and Zoom levels vary by avatar.

Personal avatars from video, and stock Personal avatars

For Personal avatars created from video, and stock Personal avatars that come with their background already baked in:

• Swap the avatar from the contextual menu or the inspector panel. This is the only background-related action available for these avatars.
• Background: fixed at creation time. You can only remove it if you chose to remove the background during avatar creation—see Personal Avatars. There's no way to add, change, or remove a background afterward.
• Switch camera angle, if the avatar is multi-cam (only available for stock Personal avatars): same Camera field and contextual menu icon as Studio avatars, with angle and zoom options that vary by avatar.

Customizable avatars

For Synthesia's customizable avatars and Personal avatars from photo:

• The Avatar section of the inspector panel shows your current avatar and outfit (for example, "Matteo / Casual Tee Jeans"). Selecting it reopens the Avatars > Outfits > Spaces picker, pre-loaded with your current selections, so you can switch to a different space, go back and choose a different outfit, or replace the avatar entirely.
• Pose: choose from Standing or Seated, each in Middle, Left, or Right variants. Available from the inspector panel only—there's no contextual-menu equivalent for Pose, unlike Camera.
• Zoom: choose from the available zoom levels for the avatar (for example, Wide / Mid / Close).
• For deeper customization—designing outfits and spaces from scratch, uploading reference images, or generating B-roll—see Customize an avatar below.

Customize an avatar

Customizable avatars—Synthesia's customizable avatars and Personal avatars from photo—support deep customization: unlimited outfits, your brand kit, reference images for outfit and space, text prompts, and B-roll. There are two ways to reach this customization, depending on how much you want to change.

To customize just the outfit or the space (with optional branding), select the Customize Avatar icon from the contextual menu:

For full customization, where you can customize any combination of avatar, space, pose, and branding, all in one go, use the avatar picker from the inspector panel on the right:

From the contextual menu

Selecting the pencil icon (Customize Avatar) in an avatar's contextual menu opens a narrower editor scoped to the avatar you already have in your scene:

• Toggle between Outfit and Space editing modes using the shirt and background icons at the bottom-left of the prompt box.
  • Each mode shows its own prompt ("Describe a new outfit..." or "Describe a new space...") along with Branding and an Outfit or Space reference-image slot.
  • Reference images for outfits and spaces must be PNG, JPG, or WebP, at least 480px wide, and under 20MB.
• A prompt box ("Describe your outfit and space for your Avatar...") accepts a text description. Select the box and press Tab to auto-fill a prompt based on your script, or select the AI-assist button to do the same. If you have a brand kit applied, the colors from your brand kit will be included as part of the prompt.
• Click Generate to generate the customization—you can minimize the customization modal while the avatar generates.
• A toggle at the top-left of the modal switches between Show prompt (reveals the editing controls) and See full preview (hides them for an unobstructed view of the avatar).
• Select Use in video to apply your changes—the outfit and space will be available for future use in any of your videos.

From the avatar picker

Selecting Customize Avatars from the Spaces step of the avatar picker (or from the Avatar button in the toolbar) opens a modal where you can design any combination of avatar, pose, outfit, and space:

• Avatar, Pose, and Branding pills at the top let you choose the avatar, its pose (Standing/Seated × Middle/Left/Right), and a brand kit to apply.
• Outfit and Space each have their own reference-image slot, so you can upload a photo to guide the generation for either one independently.

• A prompt box ("Describe your outfit and space for your Avatar...") accepts a text description. Select the box and press Tab to auto-fill a prompt based on your script, or select the AI-assist button to do the same. If you have a brand kit applied, the colors from your brand kit will be included as part of the prompt.
• Generate creates the outfit and space based on your prompt and any reference images.
• Begin with a preset: a scrollable set of ready-made outfit-and-space personas (for example, Librarian, Product Manager, Corporate Trainer). Selecting one fills the prompt box with a starting description for you to edit—it doesn't generate automatically.

Adding a variable

From the Avatar section of the inspector panel, you can also add a variable to the avatar. This applies to any avatar type.

Adding a variable to the avatar lets you specify a different avatar to use in its place when you create a video via Synthesia's API.

Hiding an avatar

To hide your avatar but keep using its voice to deliver lines in the script, select the speaker pill in the script box, then select the eye icon to toggle its visibility. You can toggle the visibility back on to restore the avatar to the canvas from the speaker pill.

Alternatively, you can select the avatar and delete it from the canvas. The avatar remains as the speaker for its lines in the script. If there are two or more avatars in the scene, their lines aren't automatically reassigned to the remaining visible avatars when you delete one from the canvas.

Exporting avatars

Avatars are designed for use within Synthesia projects and can't be exported with a transparent background.