Creating and Using Memoji On a Mac With Big Sur

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's look at using Memoji on a Mac in Big Sur. 

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So up until now you've only been able to use Memoji and Animoji on iOS or iPad OS. But on macOS Big Sur you can now create them and use them at least in one way on your Mac. So you'll find them in the Messages app. When you're composing a new message you've got a button here to the left now. You can click that and get to things like Photos, Animated GIFs, and the Message Special Effects. They are all now gathered here. You also have Memoji Stickers. When you choose Memoji Stickers you'll see the Memoji that you've created. Also Animoji which are these special characters that Apple has created. iPhone has synced the ones you've created on your iPhone here so you'll have those. But you could also create new ones here. 

So let's start with just looking at how to create them. Click the button here and you get the option to Edit the one you have currently selected, Duplicate it so you can edit a copy, Delete it, or create a New one from scratch. Let's create a new one from scratch. You could see here the entire interface for creating Memoji has been brought over to the Mac. To create one what you basically do is you go through all the categories here on the left and then select various attributes here on the right. So let's start with Skin. I can select a skin color. I could choose something natural or I could go with whatever color I want. It's really up to you whether or not you create something that looks like you or a version of you or maybe just a character that you're going to use. Now with every color here you could drag back and forth to change the tone. So you really have a lot of colors to choose from. Then you can scroll down on anyone of these and choose different things. Under Skin you can choose freckles. You can alter the cheeks a bit and set a color for kind of a little highlight on the cheeks. You can add a beauty spot.   

Now we'll go to Hairstyle. Now a lot of these have to load in when you get to them. So we'll wait here for these to load and you have hairstyles that you can scroll through. I'll go and I'll choose something that kind of looks like me. I'll choose that hairstyle there. At the top of this you've got color. When you see this here you can click and reveal more colors. So I can choose something like this and then maybe make it darker. Maybe something like this would actually be a little bit better. Then I can continue onto brows. Play with the color if I want and you can always scroll down to find more things. For instance I could find a forehead mark here, brow piercings. Under eyes go with something a little deeper set. I've got eye color here. Then you can play with the eyelashes. Add eyeliner, eye shadow. Under Head you've got Age so I'll age myself a little bit here. Then I can also play with the Shape. Now let's go to Nose and you can pick one of these. You can also add things like nose piercings. Pick a style and pick a color. Go to Mouth and choose one that you like. Also Teeth. Here we see something that doesn't quite make sense on Mac because if we were doing this on the iPhone the camera would be used to actually mimic our expression here. So as I'm building this I can move my eyes around, move my head around, open my mouth and the character would react to what I'm doing. So if I wanted to see what my teeth looked like I could select one of these and actually open my mouth to see them. But here you really can't. So you kind of have to guess. You could also go with mouth piercing, tongue piercings.

You could go through here with different types of ears. Add some earrings as well. Then also even add AirPods and you could just do it mixing and matching. So audio left and audio right. So I could put AirPods in only one ear if I like. So you can add sideburns and you could add mustache and beard here. So let's go and add something close to what I've actually got, like that. There's a lot of different ones to choose from. Then you could add Eyewear. There are glasses and also an eyepatch that you can add. Then finally Headwear. Now this is where I should point out it's pretty easy to Edit these. We saw the Edit button before. So you may want to have a character like this and maybe at a particular time put a different hat on. Then change your hat for another occasion because it's easy just to turn it off. A lot of options to show style, occupation, etc. You also can choose a face covering to choose from one of two kinds of masks. I like that you can choose really all these different colors. So, for instance, if I wanted to you know pick the color of my favorite sports team I could do that. Just like hats it's as easy to change. 

So once you've finished you can click Done. Now this will appear in the list here. So you can see I've got two. So you can have several different characters. So if you want you can duplicate it and have one with a baseball cap and one without. Then switch between them really easily. Now how do you use these once you've created them. Well, there are a lot of different ways. For instance use them on the iPhone. You could use them while Face Timing on the iPhone. But the only way that you could use them here on the Mac is as a Sticker. So these are the Stickers here and basically they're like Memoji but they are using your character instead of just a default round face or something. So you can use it to express emotion. A lot of different emotions here. Thumbs up, thumbs down. Lots of hand gestures and things like that. Just a whole collection of various different things that you could use. 

Now on the iPhone you can use these same stickers. But there's also functionality there to have the camera track your face and you can make your own expression and send that. Of course you can also record yourself talking using this character and it will animate along with what you say and how you move your head during the animation. But here on the Mac, at least for now, you just have these stickers. So let me go ahead and add one here like this. You could see it appears here. Now it actually appears as a graphic. So even if somebody on the other end has an older version of macOS or a non-Apple device they'll still get this as an image. Keep in mind you can still use any of the Animoji characters here as well. So, for instance, if you wanted to use the monkey here and have the monkey give a wink or something like that, you know, you can go ahead and use one of those. You get that in addition to you own Memoji characters. 

So while this is only just a tiny bit of the functionality that you actually get on iOS at least we now have the ability to send the most basic kind of Memoji, these Memoji stickers, on our Mac in the Messages app.