Abstract: A method and apparatus are disclosed for generating an avatar from an image of a face using an avatar generation engine executed by a processing unit of a computing device. The avatar generation engine receives the image, identifies a face in the image, crops a face in the image to generate a cropped face image, detects facial landmarks in the cropped face image, determines an ethnicity and a gender based on the cropped face image, selects a base facial rig from a set of stored facial rigs based on one or more of ethnicity, gender, hairstyle, skin color, hair color, body hair, presence of eyeglasses, presence of a hat, and presence of lipstick, alters the base facial rig based on the facial landmarks to generate a customized facial rig, and adds facial attributes to the customized facial rig based on the facial characteristics to generate the avatar.