Ready Player Me Shut Down — Here's How I Rebuilt Our Avatar System

From Ready Player Me Shutdown to Building Our Own Avatar Renderer 🚀 How I replaced Ready Player Me with a fully modular GLB renderer — with zero Three.js experience. On January 31, 2026 , Ready Player Me shut down. We were warned at the end of December 2025. That gave us roughly 3–4 weeks to replace a system that powered avatars across our entire application. Two things had to be rebuilt immediately: Avatar creation Avatar appearance across the app But creation came first — because without avatars, appearance didn’t matter. And the responsibility landed completely on me — a core frontend developer with zero experience in Three.js, React Three Fiber, or Drei. It felt like a do-or-die penalty in the last minute of a match. But as developers, learning under pressure is part of the job. As Master Shifu said: "If you only do what you can do, then you will never be better than what you are." So I started. The Old System (Before Ready Player Me) Before using Ready Player Me, our avatar system