Mega-Fiers. A mesh deformation system - RELEASE

[SpookyCat]

Hello All
Mega-Fiers is out in the Asset store. Easily adjust and make new versions of your meshes with them bent, squashed, stretched etc or any combination of such effects. Why have just one variety of a mesh in your game, with Mega-Fiers you can endless varieties all made inside Unity, plus animate them easily to add real time deformation effects.

The system is inspired by the Modifier system in 3ds max, so if you are familiar with how that works then you should feel at home. The system allows for stackable modifiers so you can do multiple bends for examples. The framework is written in C# and will work on all platforms iPhone/Android/Web etc and the user can add their own modifiers as easily as overriding a Map method in the Modifier class. You can deform meshes in the editor or at run time seamlessly. Just added UV modification support and adding more modifiers all the time. The system also updates any mesh colliders attached to the object and will recreate tangent space if required by shaders.

Some of the modifiers included:

• Bend
• Bubble
• Bulge
• Cylindrify
• Displace
• FFD (2x2x2, 3x3x3, 4x4x4) (Lattice in Maya)
• Hump
• Melt
• Morph
• Noise
• Path Deform
• Page Flip
• Point Cache Animation
• Pivot Adjust
• Push
• Radial Skew
• Relax
• Ripple
• Rubber
• Skew
• Spherify
• Stretch
• Taper
• Twist
• UV Adjust
• UV Tile Animate
• Wave

And the following World Space Warps:

• Bend
• Noise
• Ripple
• Skew
• Stretch
• Taper
• Twist
• Wave

I will be adding more modifiers to the system near future. Hopefully the system will be expanded by community generated Modifiers as well. Some videos showing some of what the system can do is below. The price is $150. You can find some more info at MegaFier Help Page or visit the FaceBook page for MegaFiers I hope someone finds a good use for this and you do get any nice results please post or send them to me.
Chris

[yannalaplage]

What about Morph ?
When will it be released ?

[SpookyCat]

Adding the morph system is next on the list, just added 13 new modifiers including space warps which I am just testing at the moment and hope to have a new release today sometime. Should take a day or so before I get the Morph code in as well so possibly over the weekend if not next early next week
Chris

[yannalaplage]

Great news!
You were also talking about a possible bridge and as I'm doing my stuff in Max, I was wondering about that.
How could it work ? Will you release it ?
yann.

[SpookyCat]

Hi
The max support is taken out at the moment if people really want it I will look at adding it it back either as an extension to Mega-Fiers or as a separate system as it handles exporting everything from max to unity via a custom fbx exporter, so it can do materials, maps, controllers, modifiers, physics, helpers, splines and all with custom scripts to import and make those work in Max. The code needs a bit of cleaning up at the moment as it has support for the 100 odd custom modifiers and systems we use for our stuff at the moment. Ill get the new modifiers and morphing done first and then get onto that
Chris

[defjr]

That thread in showcase by p6r probably just sold me on this asset. Cheers!

[SpookyCat]

Just put up a video showing some of the system being used in the Unity Editor and showing a very small sample of some of the effects you can achieve, also shows some of the new Space Warps that will be in the next release.
Chris

And a couple of grabs from the new test scene

[3Duaun]

the new youtube vids are helpful, thanks

[SpookyCat]

Quick video of Spherify modifier in action.

[Zeronine]

Nice system for sure...

Will users who purchase Mega-Fiers now receive the max update for FREE? --- & how long before max support including exporter will be available?

I'm very close to making a purchase but I'd really like to know what performance metrics or timing estimations you can provide for realtime usage? Is there a performance savings for deforming once, as in the case of that deformed bridge, as opposed to a constantly animating deform?

Is your system currentlytly[/U] extensible? Can our side write our own modifiers?

Must a model be built to specific requirements to work optimally in Mega-Fiers?

Thank you!

[SpookyCat]

Hi There
I am still wondering which way to go with the Max exporter, currently the modifier exporter is linked in with the Everything exporter I have for Max to Unity, I think I may well do it via a separate system to export mod data to xml in which case yes it would be be included in the system. As for when I can get that done it will be a few weeks before I can get around to that. I have the warp release to get out hopefully today (final testing at the moment) and then I need to add the Morph system to it as that will be a key feature for many users, ie using the mods in the editor to produce morph targets and then collapse it all to a single optimized morph modifier instead of having a stack of deformations on a mesh.

The way the mesh is built really depends on how you plan on modifying it. For example if you had a pipe that you wanted to bend then just having vertices at the top and bottom of the pipe will not give you a good result so you would add a few more vertices along the length.

As for performance figures I will do a chart to show timings off each modifiers on a mesh. The plane in the test scene is 38,000 vertices and 43,000 triangles and that runs 60fps+ on my PC with a fair few modifiers running every frame. Of course you can disable the system at anytime to be left with the deformation so then you have no overhead at all it's just another mesh. Or can use it like others have done purely as an editor tool to give variation to existing assets, or producing morph targets etc. I did do a test on an Android Motorola Defy of a 1000 vert sphere with a Bend modifier (quite a complex mod) and that was taking 7ms.

Yes you can add your own modifiers, you just need to derive a new class from the Modifier class and can be just as simple as providing your own Map method. For example:

using UnityEngine;
 
[AddComponentMenu("Modifiers/Simple")]
public class SimpleMod : Modifier
{
    public float    amount    = 0.0f;
 
    public override string ModName() { return "Simple"; }
 
    public override Vector3 Map(int i, Vector3 p)
    {
        p.x += Random.value * amount;
        p.y += Random.value * amount;
        p.z += Random.value * amount;
        return p;
    }
}

Produces the result below.

[Zeronine]

Thanks for providing this information.
I will be purchasing the system and look forward to all the cool new features you have planned. Will provide you as much useful feedback after our team puts it through the paces!
Best

[SpookyCat]

Version 1.12 submitted to the store as well as some small bug fixes the following is new in v1.12:

• Added wip page flip modifier
• Added UV Adjust modifier
• Added UV Tile/Animate modifier
• Added Space Warp support
• Added Bend warp modifier
• Added Noise Warp modifier
• Added Ripple Warp modifier
• Added Skew Warp modifier
• Added Stretch Warp Modifier
• Added Taper Warp modifier
• Added Twist Warp modifier
• Added Wave Warp modifier
• Added colors to gizmo display
• Region gizmos positioned correctly now.
• Instancing bug fixed.
• Hid some params from the animator.
• Added support for uv modifiers.
• Added gizmo icons for scripts.
• Added help images to each script.
• Added editor scripts and gizmo to move offset.
• Added falloff to Spherify modifier.
• Added Bulge modifier, works like Spherify but per axis.
• Added Cylindrify modifier.
• Added context functions to reset/center Offsets and gizmo positions and rotations. (Right click script bar)
• Fixed chance of gimzo orientation being wrong when modifiers attached to parent of mesh object.

[3Duaun]

!! Whoa, so many useful new additions. and did I hear a mention of a "morph system", .... fingers crossed. One of the best tools I've purchased on the Unity Asset Store!!!

[RandAlThor]

What about the physics?
Do mega-fiers also convert or change to different coliders like mesh colider?

Is this working on ios and android?

[SpookyCat]

Hi There
Thank you zhx I look forward to seeing any results you get from the system.

I am working on the morph system now, should be done over the weekend. Again it is based on the 3ds max system so you can have multiple morph channels all running together and each channel can have multiple progressive targets so the artist can really fine tune the morphs. If you have used the 3ds Max morph then that is pretty much what you will get in the next update.

I will be adding the option to update collider meshes after I get the morphing in. Lots more improvements to come as well over the next few releases.

And yes it works on Android and ios As mentioned above a mesh with 1000 vertices and a complex bend modifier applied took 7ms to update the mesh on a Motorola Defy Android phone.
Chris

[RandAlThor]

What if i do use other 3D software like Messiah and Lightwave zbrush and 3D coat (where i can save the morph maps out).
Can i use the morphs also or do i only can use them if i had 3ds Max?

[SpookyCat]

To start with the system will use meshes in your project for targets, so you would import each target mesh as normal and add them via the Gui. Its going to be a major undertaking to do exporters for every 3d package out there so not sure what the best approach to that is. I do have a full exporter for Max but that is no use to Blender/Cinema/Lightwave etc users. Any ideas on how you would like it to work shout now and I'll look into it as well. This is pretty much the reason I didn't release the Morph system ages back as it was linked to Max for its data.
Chris

[Zeronine]

Might be worthwhile to look at Maya blendshape deformer. Years back we used this to achieve good werewolf transformation.
also would like to see a proper morph system modulated by weight map all channels included.
but i'm a lil' greedy!

[3Duaun]

for the morph system, and this is key IMO, I'd suggest going with the ability to load in an external format that support VERTEX ORDER/NUMBERING, aka vertex order for the OBJ format(and most formats). This way, you can have your base mesh, with the mega-fiers script on it, and load in obj's(or fbx, etc) that have been saved with their VERTEX ORDER SAVED, which is the default in most apps, the mega-fiers script can then transform the vertices based on their VERTEX ID#.

This is standard in the industry, its how you load(and export) in transformed morph-targets in ZBrush and most sculpting apps. Import BASE OBJ, then import the morph/blendshape/shapekey/etc exported OBJ with its VERTEX ORDER INTACT, then the app of choice handles all individual vertex transforming. Or, in ZBrush's case, load in the base OBJ, then sculpt away, then export the newly sculpted morph-target as OBJ, then import back into app of choice(Blender/Maya/etc), as a morph-target(blendshape/shapekey/etc).

This will work for C4D/LightWave/Blender/Maya/Max/etc.... anything that can export an obj with its vertex order intact. This has been the standard means used in the industry for porting around morph-targets for years now.

This approach is APP-INDEPENDENT, any app that can export to a vertex-order-respecting OBJ format will work for this method, so nearly every major(And not so major) 3D Suite can do this now.

*****
some reading on the subject here:
http://www.royriggs.com/obj.html (though I'm pretty sure you might already be familiar with this method)