Upcoming: Unity blend shapes / morphing tool

The tool is released, get it here!

My name is Rémy Maetz, I’m an artist at Creative Patterns, a French video game company. I'm currently working on a blend shapes / morphing tool that we plan to release on the asset store soon.
This tool aims to be universal, fully integrated in Unity and work regardless of the 3D software you’re using.
It will support blending / morphing of almost all vertices info: position, UVs, color, normal, tangent and even allow you to blend a mesh collider.

Here's a link to a small example of what you can do with it:

http://www.creative-patterns.com/MorphingTool

I’m looking forward to read any reviews or critics and I’m eager to discuss with fellow artists or coders interested in the tool.

 

This looks fantastic! How much do you think it'll cost?

 

I like it.

 

Wow love the morphing from man to werewolf, also Elvis hair ftw!

 

The elvis warewolf is cool.

But I wonder how you are doing it. Is it just transforming additional bones?

 

If you can set this up for heads, like a lot of RPGs would want, it'll sell like hotcakes. Awesome work

 

le morphing en loup garou m'a bluffé !
c'est vraiment un super truc d'autant que j'ai un projet sur lequel sa pourrait me servir.

 

Thanks everybody !

@earl: We're not fixed on the pricing for now, we want the tool to be affordable for the maximum number of Unity users.

@hippocoder: Only the bones needed for moving the character are here, all other modification are done by our tool, actually it's moving vertex and preserving their bone weights.

Again, thanks for your enthusiasm, and stay tuned !

 

when ? i want buy it )

 

We target to release it this month.

 

Realli a great project, I am interested too!

 

Hello !
I just added a new example, a simple physic simulation with changing MeshColliders.

Also, I updated the character customisation scene.

The link hasn't changed, just go here : http://www.creative-patterns.com/MorphingTool

 

affaire a suivre de pret ,

look very interesting indeed

 

Beau travail!

Is this somehow related to MetaMorph (using RGB texture data as a displacement map) or is it standard vertex morph data?

 

It is standard vertex morph data, stored in a custom class.

 

haha, a massive, smiling werewolf with elf ears is amazing! Wow, this is absolutely brilliant!

 

Very nice!

 

Hello again !
Thanks everybody for your enthusiasm !
The tool is now functional and working. I almost finished writing the documentation !
Just a few thing to clean and all will be good.

We plan to send the tool to submission in the middle of the next week.

Stay tuned !

 

Any word on price? This looks like it'll be extremely useful.

 

Awesome. Very interested in this.
Approximate price range would be nice to have. Thanks in advance.

 

I noticed it also changes textures. Or is it just color? Very nice either way!

 

After some discussion, we aim a price between $70 and $99 .

 

@Werewraith : For the Werewolf, I made a custom shader that blend from the normal to the werewolf texture, using something like a "ramp" texture and a slider that is bind to the "Werewolf" slider of the interface.
For the changing balls, I also use a custom shader to combine two textures, but this time it uses the vertex color intensity for blending. And the vertex color is animated with the morphing tool.

An idea of use for this would be : animate a face with blend shapes, were each shape store vertex color corresponding to the contraction of the mesh, and use this to blend between a base face texture and a wrinkles face texture. If I have enough time, I'd like to add this as an example to the package.

 

Sounds like a reasonable price, my main concern will be in how much setup work is required to get a given model working with the product - I see myself using this for character customization such as your first example, things like facial features (nose, mouth, height, weight, etc). What's involved in getting that setup is what will sell me on the product - looks very cool and i'm quite interested so far.

 

ReMix, do animated blendshapes on a character from something like Maya transfer in with the .anim clip data? The main use I would have for this is so my animator can use blendshapes for phonemes instead of joints?

Or would she have to animate the blendshapes in Unity after import?

 

Hi, I just checked out your demo. Since you've mentioned character customization, I'm assuming that there will be more option, such as to control the height, specific options for girls, and detailed controls for the face (nose, eyes, chin line, etc)?

I would also like to know how easy will this be to integrate with our models. Will we have to use the models you provide, or will it work with any humanoid model?

Looks great so far though!

 

Senkusha, as far as I understood it, this is for your own models that have blend-shapes applied - As in you create multiple versions and it is able to morph between them. So what morphs you create are up to the modeller .

 

Ah, okay! So, I would create three base images for each morph (a standard, in the middle setting, a lean, on the left setting, and a heavy, on the right setting) for example to change body weight, correct?

 

@Senkusha : sagron is right, you import your own models in unity, use to the tool to generate the morphing object, and voilà, it's available for scripting and ready to use ! But, you have talked of "base images", its 3d models, not images. So, for your example, it's 3 models : base, lean and heavy. All you have to do after is script the GUI that will control it.

@TheLlama : No, sorry, you can't export an blend shape animation from Maya and have it working directly in unity. But I've implemented what's needed to animate them in unity.
I'm also thinking of having a way to export this animation from your favorite 3D tool, but for now it's not possible, maybe in an update of the tool .

 

I have just updated the demo page with a new scene !
It's an other character customisation scene, with a character exported from Maya.
It's a work from Wolfi for the Eleven Seconds Club. You can see the blog here.

 

Hullo, Just chiming in about morphs and character modification:

While morphs work wonders for character modification, you will alos have to take into account the character's skeleton. For example, if you make the character taller, that is not mesh morph work (though it might use some morphs) it will also need you to stretch the skeleton as well along the height axis for each bone involved.

For example, you want the character to have the shoulders widen and become more muscular. You will need to also spread the shoulder bones, and expand the arm attachment points while also morphing the mesh to add muscle density along the upper torso.

I hope that makes sense. it just comes down to the idea when using morphs, you have to keep track of the skeleton modifying it as well.

 

Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately complex facial animation can't be done easily in unity due to limitations on audio scrubbing and a number of other things. Even if it has easy in editor tools the editor wasn't build for it. We'll stick to Joint based animation.

 

Hey everybody! I just submitted our tool, can't wait Unity's review!
I also uploaded the tool's documentation, so you can have a preview of how it works!

 

Yes. it looks wonderfull!.. Great job!!

Every variable is a mixture between two models?

 

I don't really understand the question. Provide the tool with a base mesh and different shapes, and you can get all the combinations of shapes (or partial shapes) you want.

 

Ow, I forgot, we have fixed the price at 70$.

 

haha this is great

 

What is performance penalty for this? Is "morphed mesh" slower then normal mesh?

 

Just wondering if you have tried this tool out in Unity iOS. It looks great and I will probably buy it, but I would like to know if it plays nicely with mobile. does it need to keep all the separate morph targets in memory as a mesh?

 

That's exactly what I meant..

 

interesting tools, very good.

 

is it possible to change/blend normal maps ?

i want to buy it but i'm not scripter, have you a beginner tutorial ?

PB: (anyone how is needing morphs targets can contact me)

 

@Demostenes: It depends how you use it. If it's for animating morphing every frame, it is the biggest performance cost. For the characters scene, with one character updated every frame you move a slider, I loose at maximum 10% of the fps.
But if you morph your mesh just once (loading of a level to get the good character look in a rpg game for example), it is applied only once and the object behaves exactly like a standard mesh / skinned mesh.

@rand1815: I haven't tried on iOS, but I have tried an early version on my android phone. It was working quite well. I check all this and keep you updated.

@Blackant: Normal maps blending is made by the shader you apply on your mesh, so as long as the shader handles it (by reading vertex colors for example), it is possible.
We're thinking of making a video tutorial, have you already looked at the documentation? It contains a small step by step tutorial to set everything needed to make a morphing Kurt (the man / werewolf in the example).

 

I have just tested the demo on my android phone (HTC Desire) and on our iPod Touch, the morphing operations are working! But the scenes and GUIs weren't designed for these devices, it was slow and hard to use. I will certainly spend some time to optimise this for mobile platforms and make a video.

 

Thanks ReMix! This opens up a ton of new possibilities, really exciting stuff.

 

Hey, it's done!
I rearranged the GUI for mobile platform, and it is working quite good (for this amount of polygons and even on our 1G Ipod touch).
Se on the video!

 

I have updated the tool, you can now view morphing in the editor view and the memory usage have been reduced.
I have also created a new thread here.