Adam and Eva Base Characters.

Hey guys. I decided to publish man and woman modelswhich I am using for animation collections as independent asset.

http://mr-necturus.com/store/index.php?route=product/product&path=64&product_id=582

It cost only $2.

This Assets supported by 8 animation collections of UNITY MEDIEVAL ANIMATIONS MEGA PACK

List of animation collections:

1. UNITY HERO 2H WEAPONS ANIMATION COLLECTION
2. UNITY HERO GENERAL ANIMATION COLLECTION
3. UNITY HERO Weapon&Shield ANIMATION COLLECTION
4. UNITY HERO BOW ANIMATION COLLECTION
5. UNITY HERO HORSEMAN ANIMATION COLLECTION
6. UNITY HERO SPEAR/STAFF/HALBERD ANIMATION COLLECTION
7. UNITY HERO 2 WEAPONS ANIMATION COLLECTION
8. UNITY HERO WIZARD ANIMATION COLLECTION



You can use this characters for prototype or make additional armor and weapons for them and use in you game production.

Animation clips can be used with any rig type but to redirect it to custom characters must "humanoid" avatar used.

There is a difference between man and woman poses, which makes the difference between femininity and masculinity.

T-Pose pose can be used by artist to create and attach armor, clothes and weapons to characters.
MECHANIM pose added for better re-targeting animations in Unity Mechanim.

Pack including :

1. 2 realistic ideal characters - Adam and Eva.

Eva: 8,532 polygons, 16,932 triangles, 8,689 vertexes. Rig: 75 bones. (2 additional bones for breast)
Adam : 8,591 polygons, 17,072 triangles, 8,767 vertexes. Rig: 73 bones

2. 1 Idle animation clip and 2 poses included.

3. Diffuse, normals and specular 2048X2048, 1024x1024 TIF textures.

4. Time list included.

5. 3D MAX and BIP animation clips are included.

Time list:

1. T_Pose: 0 - 10 fr.,
2. S_IDLE: 15 - 115 fr.,
3. MECANIM: 120 - 130 fr.,

 

They look great. Fantastic job on them.

 

Thank you Archania!

 

Purchasing them now. Any chance these can be adapted to be used with UMA as well?

 

Really spectacular work on your site. I will be purchasing more soon

 

You are welcome!

I will be glad it can be used with UMA. But I really don't know if it is possible at all.
If I understood right base character of UMA must remains the same. And only armor/clothes can be added.
Or I am wrong?

 

And you will be very welcome.

 

I am still learning UMA myself, but from my understanding, the most significant part of the UMA is the underlying bone structure for the mesh. I beleive it is used to keep the rest of the mesh parts together in a comprehensive way. I think any mesh can be used so long as the bones are setup correctly. Once setup the mesh can be tweaked, armor and clothing swapped out, etc.
UMA2 was just released so it might be worth looking into for you. There are new videos being created and the forum for it has been very active. Once I am through with a few more interfaces and some terrain issues I am having I will be digging in, so I will keep in touch and let you know what I find.

 

The sizing bones have to be added so that UMA can manipulate the dimensions of the body, and the meshes have to split the same way the current UMA ones do in order to make it possible to change arm / leg / torso / head meshes. You can download the UMA Content Pack to get ahold of the rigs and meshes.

What Will B (justb) did was he created a re-texture that would provide a different look, with different normals, but using the same UMA mesh. (I hope I described that correctly.) He is also in the process of making different UMA faces, which is helpful. Because these new faces use the original UMA mesh, they will be compatible with the hair and beard slots that already exist.

 

In any case, going with UMA or not I want to develop Adam and Eva and create many armors clothes and skins for these characters.

I am also thinking that it will be nice to make a way that other artist can take these characters and create modifications on their base, if someone like. I just don't know how to license it. I will open discussion about it on publishers forum maybe.

 

I hope you do choose to go with UMA. My impression is that with the sizing bones and re-texturing, there's a lot of customization that can be done while still keeping the underlying UMA mesh. Clothing is added as mesh slots that can either go on top of an existing body mesh, or as a replacement for a body mesh (like, say, a robot arm).

And, of course, new races can be created within UMA, so it is possible to do the various rat, gnome, and reptilian types as UMAs, with costume items that can be easily switched around within each race.

 

For visualization purposes, here's a helmet from Mr. Necturus slotted onto some base UMA characters as part of a software test. The sizing and slotting system for UMA works well. We just need to keep building up the art resources, IMO.

 

I will look into this.
But as I know right now. The only advantage is sizing bones. Only this feature available for non-artist Unity users. All other customization may be done even without UMA. I can take any of my characters and add armor, faces, skins... everything... All these in one way ore another need to be done in external 3D soft like MAX or Maya and only after this may be used with UMA.

 

With my respect there are some armor parts that can fit most of human characters. Helmet and shoulder armor are like that. They easily can be attached to only one bone. Problems start when it comes to chest and paints mostly.

Here skeleton with 7 different armor types attached to. No UMA used.

 

Well, there may be more advantages than just that.

The sizing bones do give the ability to change the shape of a character, but they can also enable a user-defined level of randomization at runtime, providing unique features to each character as they are generated. So you can have group after group of orcs or street thugs, and each time the proportions and clothing combinations are different.

Also, UMA gives the ability to easily serialize characters (text or binary recipe) so they can be rapidly shared over network in a multiplayer game.

 

I accept that UMA maybe a nice solution for crowd characters generated by application randomly. But don't give much for main playable characters which I want to create actually.

 

Ok, I grabbed the new characters. I would definetly buy any clothing sets you make for these.

 

You are welcome sicga.123!

I have plans to do it, after finish to upgrade animation collections.

 

I agree mr_Necturus. The UMA system is definitely a great system to use when in need of a wide variety of characters, but does not hold up in quality for main game characters.

Nice work on Adam & Eva! Though I think she may be a Lilith not Eva.

 

Thank you the ANIMATOR2.
I heard that Lilith was even more beautiful.

 

My two cents is this:
I will be a lot more likely to buy a resource that I know I can use with all of my characters. UMA offers me that. I am only going to use non-UMA meshes/models for non player characters. I am going that route because of the UMA recipes and how it will allow a player to tweak their own character to their liking. If someone wants to be tall with short arms and a big head, they can and their armor and clothing will still fit. While I imagine I can do that with a non-UMA model, I also imagine it will be harder and I will basically need to write a bunch of logic to do what UMA already does.
When I purchase a 3D asset its with the hope of saving time obviously, so having something UMA ready would be really great. That being said, you have some really great models and I would definitely be interest in anything you do with UMA. In particular, I am doing fantasy role playing game featuring humans, elves, dwarves, gnomes, hobbits and dark elves as the main races/species a player can be. I saw your gnomes and elves and love them, but I am not sure I can get them to be UMA on my own
Either way, I plan on getting some of your medieval sets and props next time I get some dough freed up.

 

Of course I understand this approach. It may work if your game is MMO and one player want to be different from another. But even in this case I have notes.

MMO Aion has very dedicated UMA like system working not only with body but with face as well.

Playing it I found following: Every change I made for beautiful default characters which Aion gave me to choose from, made my avatar freaky. More changes I made - more freaky my avatar became.
So After I played some times with this I decided to change hire-stile some colors and that's all.

With systems like UMA you mainly can make you avatar more freaky, not more beautiful. especially when it comes only for body changes only. To change colors, base face and body types (without tweaking) or hair-styles or ti add some hair parts, clothes and armor you don't need UMA ablates. It all maybe done without it. You just need to model enough variants.

Only very very good face changeable system like in SIMS may give you chance to improve default characters face.


Many not MMO RPG, FPS and adventure games don't have systems like UMA. For PC characters like Whither for example. Some give you to change only head parts like Dragon Age. But still Dragon Age has multiplayer.

So my conclusion. Its maybe nice to give to players change their avatars if they like. Mainly head parts, if you have dedicated system to change face. But if you want to make game which tells specific story for people you need only provide some beautiful characters to chose one from be main game hero which will attract most of people.

And this approach I like more as artist because it gives me chance to make something really special and beautiful using existing mans and womans.

And as player I want maybe to change hairstyle, colors of body parts and maybe face a bit to create sign of personalty. Don't rally want to change body proportions for my avatar if provided body is good enough. If it is not good nothing system will make it better.

What I need for this: Several base variant of beautiful attractive man and woman like in Mass Effect. Very dedicated scales face rig system. Ability to change color of materials (simple thing) Several variants of skins and hair parts. These all I need for main playable characters.

But even without ability to change faces parts it may work for me.

 

I would like UMA versions of the elves and skeletons, FWIW.

 

Beautiful characters...but I wish you would make them work with UMA as well.

Here is why UMA is great, not just for an MMO.

If I were making a single player RPG game, I would want multiple characters/npcs. I want them all to look different, not the exact same faces or body shapes. I want them to have different clothes. Since any RPG I make would be story-based, I want the appearance of the characters to reflect their personalities in the story...including face, facial expressions, and clothing. In some cases, I may want to change the clothing.

More importantly, I want consistency. I don't want to buy characters from different artists. My choice of course, would be to contract with an artist to have some made and if I had the money, I would do that gladly. But at least at first, I need something affordable and reusable, in case I need to use them in another game.

If I want a chubby barkeep dressed in a greasy apron, I can do that with UMA. I can give him a sardonic expression that goes with his surly personality. If I want a beautiful girl, petite, and dressed like a rogue who has a mischievous expression, I can do that. If I want a solder woman, with muscles, tall, and with a serene expression, dressed in female chain-mail, I can do that. If I want a skinny guy who owns the local shop or even a child, since UMA is so versatile, I can do that.

I can also use these as the main character! I have already done that with my game in fact. The benefits are that I can purchase clothing on the asset store or even make my own.

Now..on the other hand, there is a market for single player characters that can have multiple outfits, but I think you would do better if you make at least several different faces/heads for the characters. Different body sizes would be nice too, although that means different size clothing will have to be made I suppose. Having a set of different looking characters all made by the same artist would be valuable. Problem is that there would then be games that are using the same character you use. At least with UMA, every character can look different.

 

Here is my answer, Teila: forum.unity3d.com/threads/uma-unity-multipurpose-avatar-on-the-asset-store.219175/page-53#post-2125518

Last post on the thread.

 

Yeah, I just saw it. Unfortunately, I think the UMA people are swamped already but someone might take you up on the offer. Either way, your characters are lovely.

 

Thank you!

Hm... Swamped?

Of course if anyone want to help with this he welcome.

 

If no one else picks it up, I will give it a shot. I am a Blender noob though, so it might take me a bit to get it right. As well, I am still working on other things in my game development cycle, so I am not sure how fast I will get it done. Its worth it though, especially if you're willing to use the finished product to make clothing, etc. for it.

 

Please let me know if characters need to be re-mapped due to UMA requirements.. I can do it using MAX sure.

 

Unity Asset Store link: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/37507

 

@mr_Necturus
So I am near done with remapping the Adam mesh. It might make sense for you to remap the meshes using what I've done with Adam, but first I want to get Adam through to the end stages of bringing the mesh into Unity and UMA. It will give me a better idea of how the vertex mapping works, then I can do adjustments to the weights. Once I get Adam working nicely you might want to have a look and see if maybe treating the meshes in Max would make it easier before I re-rig the Eva mesh. Basically there are 7 areas needing to be vertex mapped and weighted properly, the face (head), eyes, inner mouth (which we are missing tongues for, hehe), the torso (which includes the arms), the legs, feet and hands (which is what I am finishing up currently before moving it into UMA and Unity.
I'll post results as soon as I am able, probably this weekend.

 

Sure I will be glad to see results. And thank you for doing it. I hope many people will benefit from it.
I have a question what do you mean by vertex mapping? Is it UV mapping, or something else?

 

Its mapping the mesh vertexes to the rig or visa versa. I am not sure I needed to even go this route, but what I decided on was to drop the rig that came with the Adam mesh and instead re-rig the Male UMA rig to the Adam mesh, thus the vertex mapping of the UMA rig to the Adam mesh. By doing it this way I am hoping to stick as close as I am able to the Human Male recipes, etc. Of course, being that this is my first attempt I assume I am making many mistakes, that after I bring the Adam mesh(es)/slots in to Unity/UMA will become apparent allowing me to avoid them with the Eva model. For example already I learned it would be better to map the vertexes before slicing up the mesh into its individual slot pieces; there is a lot of repeat work that could be avoided by mapping then cutting, not to mention making overlapping mapping easier. Alas, I am already near done with the mapping of the vertexes only having the hands left, so next time I will improve that part of the workflow.
Another thing I am thinking might be easier would be to use the original rigging, instead of the UMA male/female rigging. It would keep your original mappings intact and I believe if the slots are lines up correctly work just fine. I am not able to test this particular theory out without your help though. As hard as I tried I could not seem to get the Max rigging to align right in Blender. So I imagine to try that theory out I would need for you to cut up the mesh into the seven slots I mentioned, or maybe give me the original max workfiles to see if importing them instead of the FBX files might correct the issues.

 

Hm.... Ok... I can't say I understood. What I need ti do, actually. What means to cut mesh in to pieces for example? I can cut model and give you parts. But I don't think this is what you need actually. It seams we are using different names for same things.

You have MAX files into pack. It is in 3D_MAX folder in Unity project.

It seams me really something very hard to accomplish...

 

Maybe I understood. You need model cut into pieces and rigged same time. I am right?

 

I am not sure what the process is in Max, its been quite a while since I've messed around with it, but what I've been doing to create the slot meshes is duplicating the whole mesh, then removing all of the vertexes, edges and faces of the mesh that aren't for that slot. For example, with the eyes mesh I removed everything but the eyes from that duplicate, same with the rest. I end up with 7 meshes (8 if you count the original). One mesh for each slot, each duplicated from the original then edited. The rigging should work on the individual areas even if they've been sliced up. So then, I will be exporting 7 FBX meshes when all is said and done, one for each slot. Each FBX gets exported with the original rigging as well.
In this rendition I did the slicing up of the mesh, then started the re-mapping of the Adam vertexes to the UMA Male rigging. To do the re-mapping, I looked at the UMA Male mesh and its vertex map to each bone that was mapped and setup the Adam mesh with the same map (using the Blender armature modifiers) to select and assign the vertex groups.

Does that make more sense? I figured once I get the Adam mesh done I can share it with you, which ought to make it make more sense for you I'd imagine.

 

I understood all until stage of remapping vertexes.I think you mean skinning.

If I will know how to cut Eva exactly. Where borders need to be I can cut it and give to you cut and skinned.
This is not a problem.

Do you think it will work at all? It seams pretty difficult...

 

Yes, skinning essentially, I am still learning the terminology. I thought skinning was more for clothing, etc. But its the same process I think.

It will be easy to see where the cuts need to be once I get the Adam mesh out. I will PM you once its done to get you the sliced version of Adam, it will be re-rigged though, so you'll probably notice a different weighting on the bone to mesh map (not sure what to call it). The mouth was the hardest for me to get right. I think I will need to work on it once I have it in UMA and can test it. Basically the rest of the slices seemed pretty easy, the hard part with those will be when I have them in UMA to see if the mesh vertexes are mapped and weighted correctly, e.g. when I size the arm does it deform correctly or not.

The interesting test after that is to take the Eva rig, sliced up with your rigging on it into UMA to see what happens

 

O.K. I wait you will finish Adam then. Lets see it will work.

 

Nonsense. UMA has ability to do facial customizatioan/morphing and overall character customization (size, body shape...), which is must in any modern game even if your character is only human being in the game. Having main character static is history, or very very amateurish.
Even the low poly version of UMA is quite good, there is also high poly version and 3d scanned textures for skin. It is currently best human character asset available. Makehuman mesh is better, but not rigged for game. Also user base is growing and growing.

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/14658

If this is quality not good enough for main character, please show me what is.

Also UMA rig is compatible with MotionBuilder, which makes it suitable as standard. You can easily retarget animations on it.

So from my point of view it makes no sense to build new character system. Better to use UMA as solid base and create assets/textures for it. It saves tremendous ammount of time preparing usable body mesh (good body rig and topology is almost science). And UMA can be used easily without UMA code, you can delete helper bones and use it staticly.

 

Almost any 3d modelling tool have tools for "copying" vertex weights, so once you rig the body, rigging equipment is far less work.

 

Generally... it is always good to make more and better new things. This Universe base on competition. If you don't you will lost.


P.S. And I must to say... Adam and Eva I like more then UMA chanters, with all respect.

 

You dont undestand what is UMA about. UMA is framework. Compete in quality is good idea, but not by creating own standards. What is point of having several incompatible character systems? Which are at the end doing the same and difference is only in available equipment and textures (artistic style)? This system has nice animations, this has nice armor, this has nice boots and together they are incompatible, so without rerigging and modelling you cant combine. And each of these character system is incomplete (missing something to be usable for game). So which system I will choose as customer? Big dilema and each choice means lots of additional work.

Probably the most complete character system is from Arteria3D, it has big variety of equipment, animations But is has its flaws to. Arteria is also switching to UMA system because of obvious benefits (character/face morphing, proffesional body topology, growing user base).

Creating usable character system (with enough content/animations to be usable in game) takes several years of work. Look on the problem from the point of view of customer. Until pack is finished, its value is low. I have no reason to use character system with 3 types of armor and 2 types of hair, it is too little for game. Typical customer need complete pack (skin textures, eye textures, hairs, beards, tatoos, various armours, robes, hats, boots, clothes...it means hundreds of objects). And he cant risk waiting several years and hope, that artist will create rest, if he does not, he will have big problem. Why people are buying assets? Beacuse they have no skills or time to make it by themselves. Who is buying character system? Somebody who is creating RPG with customizable character. So he will not buy such system until it is complete.

Wouldnt be better to use one system as standard (UMA character can be adjusted to any artistic style), so users can easily combine assets, textures and animations from more artists? This would ultimately lead to huge content library for one system, it will save tremendous time to customers and also artists. Artists dont have to develop human body/rig again and again, they can focus on creating content. At the end everybody will benefit from this. If I know there are 10 artists producing content for UMA, than I will use this platform without hesitation, beacuse I know I will find everything I need. In case one artist decides to quit, there are others. So shared framework gives stability, dependency on one content creator is way to hell.

By using UMA you will continue in competing, but you will compete in quality. Only huge company can offord to create its own standard, small companies should join and use same.

PS: UMA assets are not Unity only, you can easily make UMA working on any existing engine. The biggest ammount of work is in meshes/textures/art, morphing/controlling scripts are piece of cake.

 

Its because I want to integrate my characters into UMA framework. But if it will not work I prefer to continue with my base models. I can't command my heart.

 

Why it should not work? Technically it is not big problem. You morph/texture UMA base mesh to look like your base model. Or you can rig your base model to UMA skeleton. Both is possible. Read UMA documentation what must be done to be perfectly compatible. And thats all. In both cases you will build content on UMA rig and this is what is it all about. It does not give you any limitation in what you want to do.

And for community it will be great news to have other UMA compatible content provider, we can instantly start using your assets in our game without any work. And thats HUGE value.

Btw, thanks to UMA rig motion builder compatiblity, it is not big problem to retarget your biped animations to UMA rig. I ve already tried it and once you have done proper mapping, you can run this on 5000 animations in batch if needed.

 

I don't think that blend will work. Maybe I missed some new technology, but as I know blends work only for meshes which have same vertex number and order.

For the rest. I hope we with boysenberry will try to accomplish this. I am busy trying to upgrade my animation collection ASAP. But when finish will have a bit more time to look onto UMA documentations.

I heard one need to use Blender to work with UMA. Its a problem for me. I am not Blender user.

Lest see...

 

You didnt understand me. I meant using UMAs morph capabilities to mimic your model. There are dozens of controls, so you can shape UMA to look like whatever you want.

Or rig your model on UMA rig, using same procedure as creating new race.

Nonsense. You can use whatevertool you want (it is skinned mesh like any other), I am using 3dsMAX + MotionBuilder.

 

You mean I can use MAX to setup my character with UMA controls and make it one of UMA race? Or only for armor creation after this?

This is important.

 

Yes, you can use MAX. You can use whatever modelling tool you want. UMA is mesh + rig. And you can modify/change meshes/rigs etc in any modern tool. Creation of race is about taking UMA rig (skeleton) and rigging on mesh of your choice, do some piece separation + some setup in Unity (or any engine on the market), but that is not mandatory step.

Consider UMA as two parts. First part is modelling and rigging, this is engine independent. You can do it in any tool on market (max, maya, blender...). It is lots of work, there is lots of know how (topology, good weighting, artistic skills..)
Second part are scripts, which are allowing to customise face and body (via dragging of helper bones), putting equip on, etc...This part is different for each engine, currently it is available for Unity, but anybody can create such code on any engine available. You as content provider can provide only meshes compatibile with these scripts (having uma rig), thats all. You dont need to know about scripting at all.

 

Thank you l0cke, I will learn it, sure!