http://www.n-sided.com/ N-Sided, makers of Quidam, demonstrates the asset pipeline to Unity. Pretty cool! They even tout Unity on the home page.
I've been playing around with the free download of Animeeple. It has potential but it keeps crashing. I've yet to export a FBX of a model with mocap attached into unity before the program quits unexpectantly. It is a beta trial so it needs some more work.
I suggested to N-Sided that they support Unity as much as possible. I'm glad to see that they feature getting their characters into Unity on the website - at least it's a start and they put Unity on the radar right from the main web page. I noticed that the video has a >cut< right after the Animeeple stage and import into Unity so I can imagine the transfer is not as smooth as suggested. I personally prefer using DAZ Studio w/Animate+ - I'm sort of leery of apps that are "community enabled" - requring you to download assets (in this case motions library) from a community site. I'm not even sure if you can save your own motions in a fashion that's not sharing with the community. All in all however, I'm glad to see they have an animation solution in the works and that they recognize the importance of Unity with 3D gaming and virtual world development. -Will
When I checked with the Quidam people some time ago their license agreement as far as realtime applications was pretty S***. They wanted to make individual agreements for each released title, which is fine if you have a rock solid business plan, but if you're involved in multiple projects, its a bit restrictive. /2c AC
Well they now have indie friendly licensing for the use of their meshes within game engines - sub $1K or so. It's a step in the right direction if you really want to use their meshes within your game. My thing is now, it's not all that hard to ZBrush up (or 3D-Coat) similar characters from base fe/male character meshes that can be picked up pretty much anywhere - most 3D apps now include base fe/male "character primitives" in addition to the usual sphere, cube, pyramid etc. -Will
I personally do not understand their 1 game only license system. It is by far too restrictive for what it has to offer. $11k for 1 title just to use animated characters in a pro game? Why not 1 Billion $, does these guys need a bailout? When you are a challenger in a category, you don't sell you ap x20 time what the winner does. I know I'm a bit rude, but for this price you can pay a graphic artist to do an excellent job, or you can buy these mesh here http://x-trusion.com with a huge pack for 400 EUR. Also the Poser community offers a huge variety of humans and creatures for $30 bucks each and DAZ3D if free... If you compare the HUGE number of clothes, hairs, poses and animations for animal and human alike on Renderosity and Daz, you think: hum... wait a minute, did these guys are targeting Disney and Lucas or are they targeting me. Do they have animals, puppies, Dragons, Feeries, lingerie, biker style, skin with tatoos, punks, horses, medieval princess, cartoonish japanese little girls, bodybuilders etc?... Personally I buy a lot of meshes, and tools, my monthly budget is around $1000, but this license per games it a complete turn off specially with a software that has a good potential but does not answer to a lot of needs.
Actually the DAZ and Poser characters have similar restrictions - you can't use the meshes (not that'd you'd really want to since they're so heavy) in a game engine without proper licensing. -Will
The exception to this are the four unrestricted meshes shipped with Poser Pro. Here's the description from the Smith Micro website:
Yes, I stand corrected - I never upgraded to Poser Pro - I had went the Quidam Studio v2 route instead. -Will
here's an example of a talking Quidam guy: http://safety1.servicemedia.net/classroom1.html Their indie pricing sounds more reasonable, but my problem is poly count - Carlos here is ~6500 polygons, and that's the low poly setting. OK for just one character, but not more if you're targeting lowend machines/webplayers/iphone. Put two or more of these guys in a room and things slow down. I haven't up'd to v3 yet, but my friend who did says the output hasn't changed from v2. It is a very handy tool, though.
Hum hum... Well, no bad but I'm not impressed. I don't like his head. Doesn't look as good as 3drt or xtrusion models and weight x5. The facial is far away from what can do Poser, using basic pre-made facial poses. Skin textures are ... hum I think there is no texture at all for the skin
Hi Polytropoi, How did you implement the lip syncing for the character? It starts with sentence and ends with it just fine