[Released] Sci-Fi Female: Morph Character Pack

I guess I was using the wrong search keywords. Lol.

 

First, thank you for the free pack! Will make you a man Sci-Fi ?

 

Ok, so spot on your "we can" compilation but obviously some items will come sooner than others. In your two lists, you'll notice that a few are texture related; and our efforts in that regard will be more towards a comprehensive system for texturing, for example decals and texture overlays will likely be part of the same system. The same applies with morphs, initially, as you've all noticed, the morphs are closed with our figure and limited (note the Centripal comments) but after we address this, several "features" will be possible like loading morphs dynamically to figures, letting artists design content for rigs, etc.

 

Hey Conanfed, yeah, that's actually our next planned release. In fact, we have it ready, but it is much the same in functionality and content as the Sci-Fi Female Morph Pack- no new features and it still doesn't support cross-compatibility assets. Considering that our first version of cross-compatible assets is near we are wondering if we should hold back on the Sci-Fi Male Morph Pack or release it now and then rerelease with cross-compatibility later. We'll see what happens, I suppose.

 

Depends on how far in the future you expect that to happen. If it's only going to be a week or so, then I say wait. If it's going to be over a month or two, then release the male version. I can't wait for there to be more outfits for the female.

 

Looking forward to what releases you have in store for us, especially tools and dynamics. Some basic wear for medieval fantasy and modern would be great just so we all have something to work with until fuller versions and tools are available.

 

Yup.. I have to admit, hearing about release of another sci-fi instead of another genre was a bit disappointing.. Would be nice if we all had a model to integrate into our environments to test with. Sorry, but a sci-fi model dumped into a fantasy/medieval setting totally blows the mood to even wanna test it... heheh A small sample pack for a couple different genres would be awesome.

 

I'm not sure it matters much. But if you release now you might also find out about other bugs that need squashing, which could be addressed in that later update.

EDIT: And in addition to bugs, you get feedback.

 

I see these stripes all over the body.
When I import Genesis 2 (not the scifi_female_prefab_high), I don't get these stripes.
Do you know what these stripes are caused by and can you change that?

Also I would like to ask if you could give the face more topology. The face is the most important thing for most characters, and I think you have reduced the geometry much too much.

1.000 extra tris for the face would be a good investment.
Otherwise I would not use your model because I am getting worse results than I would get if I imported a Genesis 2 model directly.

 

as above, and breasts are too angular as well - maybe 2.5k extra tris across the whole body would be a good starting point

 

I would like to state again how disappointed I am about the geometry:



I am really not sure what you thought when you retopologized the face. We are not making Second Life characters!

THIS is some face geometry, and I think I should have even used some more tris:


I think your assumptions about the target audience are not correct.

I would think that to satisfy Unity audience you need 4 versions:

"MOBILE": 5k tris
"LOW desktop": 10k tris
"MID desktop:" 20k tris
"HIGH desktop:" 30k tris (some of the current state-of-the-art games even use 40k tris versions, so I am not sure whether it should be 30k or 40k tris here)

I am not sure about these settings, but perhaps other users can jump in and tell their opinions.

ps:
I assume that it is technically not possible to delete tris that are covered by clothes, so having model geometry that simply has a very low resolution on covered body parts would be the only way out.
For example, having additional models like "_armscovered" or "_armsandlegscovered" would be amazing. Since you seem to be dealing with only 2 models (M6 and V6 or V7), this would not take too much time from you, I think and hope.

When I imported Genesis 2 into my project, I always deleted vertices covered by cloth, but since we are looking at a more general approach here, this is what came to my mind.

 

I think we need to go for highly individualized figures like the challenger from the blacksmith demo:

That is why I am asking for better morphs. Using the DAZ portal, I have not found a morph asset that would allow me to insert these wrinkles and to change the nose in such a natural way.

 

Agreed.
We need some realistic looking figures , else we could use UMA.

 

I do not think you'll get that level of quality in a customizable character. I haven't even seen it in a triple A title yet. The mods for Skyrim do not get to this level of quality.

 

GTA V online player characters do not look that good either.

 

You can split the model into parts. Then you can hide the portions that are under clothing by disabling them in the hierarchy.. That assumes you're familiar with Maya, 3DS, or Blender 3D.

 

I was thinking the same thing, especially if you are designing for multiplayer. I could be wrong, but I think you'll have a hard time getting that level of detailed customization and keep tris low enough to run well in a multiplayer environment. And while pulling a DAZ model into Unity and it looking better than these, I think that is a given. I can do that too but it is going to kill my performance unless I heavily decimate the characters and tweak them to the point that they don't kill my game. At that point I'm thinking quality-wise they would be similar to what Morph is putting together (without all the decimator headaches or hiring an artist to rebuild for you).. Granted, if you want unique, that is the way to go. But if you are just looking for some standard model types to drop in, I'm hoping these might be the way to go. They still need to convince me they can do it though. At this point I'm still planning for UMA until Morph3D has more to show.. And show that they aren't just doing Sci-Fi...

 

I've been going through a lot of trial and error to get Daz models to work in Unity, so this pack is incredible!

My only question is that I am not seeing the tools in the inspector after adding the character to my scene? Perhaps this is a Unity tool question? It's almost like your scrips are not getting ran (ex: ListMorphsOnCharacter) since I don't see the sliders like you have them in the video. Instead, I see all the variables the script uses listed out. Does that make sense?

 

I don't need super detail since my camera is fairly high up and if I need more than that I can just use the higher poly model. What I want most is a way to customize a set of characters that will work in my game without crazy performance issues. Efficiency is the key here...even at the high end level. If they can strike a good balance, then I'll go with them over UMA since I find that system so unwieldy to actually use in my game.

This is why I'm really interested in seeing where Morph3D is going.

 

EDarkness - LOD is our friend here. Some of us want higher poly models for relatively close-up, where as for use where there are many avatars on screen, or where they are further away from the camera, you need lower poly models, and even lower for mobile.

We've already been teased with a LOD making tool for this product, so the efficiency and good balance you mention are to be found in creating models of the required poly using the LOD tool. This still lets those who want high poly models use them when needed, without impinging on those who want much lower poly models.

I think what we're saying is that start with higher poly models, as we can't go backwards with the LOD tool, and create more polys. Personally, I would like to start with 30K models, and be able to use the LOD tool to create, 20K, 15K, 10K, 5K LOD stages.

 

@Morph 3D
2 questions, please:
1) Is it possible to dynamically create a new normal / occ map from a wrinkle morph?
2) Is it possible to assign body parts so that we can hide geometry hidden by clothes?

 

I just hope that the LOD tool is easy to use and doesn't create a lot of extra work. Perhaps we're all asking for too much, but honestly, I believe that something like this is much needed in Unity and it's awesome that someone is looking to get it done. I doubt they'll be able to satisfy everyone, but at the end of the day I hope they at least come close.

 

From what I understood of the post regarding the LOD tool; you give it the highpoly model, complete with all clothing, and tell it what LOD sizes you want, and it creates them. I don't know if this is an in-editor thing that works from the fbxs, or whether it's a standalone tool, or one that works from an art package like maya. Can't wait to hear more about it, get some things nailed down.

 

@Morph 3D Found a bug: Your character is moving in place while it should move in root motion. Tested it on a different model.

 

Out of curiosity, how come there is nothing about this on Daz3D.

I know Daz3D models comes with a special EULA and require a separate developer license.

In other orders of ideas, looks awesome so far, please don't give up with this!

 

I guess they are waiting until they have actual tools and content before doing a big release across multiple sites. This feels like dipping a toe in the water, to see what the reaction and requirements are from devs who would buy the product.

Now we've been teased, and our list of requirements is written in the above posts, I wish they'd hurry up and bring on the awesomeness

 

I have a concern about user-generated content creation. On your website you mention that Morph 3D will have right of first refusal. I understand your reasoning behind this, but that's basically saying "if you don't like our contract, you can't sell your stuff anywhere." If you decide you only want to offer a 20% cut to the content creator, people either have to accept it or never sell anything. At least if someone doesn't like Daz's 50/50 cut, they can sell elsewhere. The Daz store seems to be doing just fine without a "right of first refusal" clause.

 

Yep, some clarity here. An open content shop is what we need, or we won't get any content creators. No content creators would be coffin nails to the product.

 

I've had a good play with the clothing system and how it works with hiding...

It seems that each outfit has a 2 layer photoshop skin texture, with the 2nd layer containing alpha information on what areas of skin should be transparent for the outfit.

This is a reasonable workaround, when live culling of the base mesh isn't doable. It does leave one issue though. Say I have individual items of clothing, not whole outfits. How can I mix and match clothes? Would I have to have some sort of texture merging code? Obviously this could be quite slow for runtime use.

Also, can you tell us more about the overlays system. Would this be a custom shader with multiple detail textures? And if so, would a similar system work for building up alpha areas from different items of clothing?

Especially if each item of clothing that required some skin hiding, had it's own mask texture (in a colour channel not the alpha channel - so it's easier to create masks).

 

Been working hard with this package, and have managed to rewrite the CharacterTool script to suit my game's needs better. I now have an avatar system that I'm relatively happy with.

Looking forward to the LOD tool and some of the above feature requests. Great work guys, this is a product that will work well.

 

@Whippets What is your avatar system? For which game type? Not for Resident Evil, is it?

 

I'm writing an multiplayer RPG, so I need good avatars with morphs, interchangable (and colourable) clothing... all the usual elements. So far, apart from the things everyone's listed above, I have a usable system for avatars using Morph3D.

Currently I have a fantasy game with an avatar in sci-fi kit, but that's just a content issue, it doesn't alter the mechanics of the the Morph3D system.

 

Hey Deadly Accurate, thanks for taking the time to dive into the new information we've posted on Morph3D.com. Everything about what we are doing is iterative, we are putting a mark down on paper and then letting people respond, so to speak. The thought being is that we'll be able to build the most useful set of tools, content and community this way. But to your conclusion that if Morph 3D passes on it's "right of first refusal" that you as a content creator then won't be able to sell your work based off our tools and platform, I'm happy to inform you that your assumption is incorrect. In fact, you can still sell that product but with the caveat that if you make any updates to that product Morph 3D will, once again, have a "right of first refusal" on the updated product. We want any content associated with the Morph 3D brand to be QA'd and of the highest quality- our partner company DAZ has found this approach to be a powerful symbiotic system for both parties.

That was a valid and great concern, thanks for giving us the opportunity to speak to that issue.

 

Hey Whippets,
Yup, that's basically what's happening with our stuff in order to hide covered geometry; as a work around we don't consider this system to be an acceptable long-term solution. As you noticed, a big problem is that this system won't let you change just a glove, boot or singular item of any outfit to allow for mix and matching. The good news is that our next update for the Sci-Fi Female pack and for all future content we've a much more optimized solution that will allow for mixing and matching and will take up less space than the current system. Look for that in August.

Longer term, our guys are working on something even "more better" than that, when thinking about overlay systems in particular, we'll a better system than the August update.

 

Ha! Way to take some initiative, Whippets! Well, maybe this is less important to you but we've actually had a dev working specifically on our Character Tool Script for the last couple of weeks. It should be better, cleaner and more robust, next go around but if you have something that we missed and you think we should add to the tool, throw it our way?

 

Interesting stuff on your website.
One thing I'm unsure of... If I have my fbx character model, with all the clothing submeshes - surely I won't be able to have hundreds of clothing items (or possibly not even a handful) without running into the 65k vertex limit for importing fbx into Unity.

How are you getting round this problem?

 

Heh, here's my HumanReferences.cs file, which gets attached to the character fbx instead of the CharacterTool and MorphList. If any of it is of use, feel free to it. I renamed submeshes to suit my needs. Every item of clothing being a separate "game item" that can be crafted, coloured, carried in an inventory, or worn.

 

I'm not sure if I understand the phrasing of your question, as it implies that Unity has a 65k vertex limit on the global FBX file? The 65k limit is for each submesh so we need to make sure that every submesh isn't beyond that threshold, but otherwise an FBX can support loads of submeshes with a combined total that far exceeds 65k. I have feeling that I'm misunderstanding you in some way, so apologies in advance.

 

Cool! Thanks, I'll be sure the devs see this.

 

Ahh, cool. Ignore me, I obviously don't know what I'm talking about. So no limit on number of submeshes, only on vertex limit per submesh. Live and learn XD

Liking the Darwin thing. Having clothing that fits all possible models is a great idea. Best idea I've heard today. Can't wait to try all that out. Now if I can only sort the hiding of body parts for individual clothing pieces (not whole outfits), and have multiple texture overlays on skin/clothing that'll be the last of my major worries put to bed.

 

I apparently didn't express my concern clearly. My problem isn't if Morph 3D passes. It's if the content creator passes due to contract terms they find disagreeable. To give an example, in print publishing, publishers often request right of first refusal for subsequent novels when an author signs a contract. But even if the publisher makes an offer, the writer is free to turn it down and they can still shop their book elsewhere. Can a Morph 3D content creator turn down a contract offer and still be free to sell their content elsewhere?

Because if they can't, there's no incentive for Morph 3D to offer competitive contract terms.

 

I opened the Morph3d Demo scene and I see a lot of warnings that the referenced script on this behavior is missing. Is there some dependency on some other unity package or something? I am using Unity 5.1.2f1.

 

Can you please clarify what's the connection here?

DAZ is extremely strict about using DAZ model in games. Also:

"Q. Can I resell the modified models?
A. No. The DAZ3D EULA expressly prohibits the resale of DAZ3D models without the express written consent of DAZ3D."

I assume Morph3d got an agreement on this, I am right?

Also I am a bit confused, since DAZ made all Genesis tech for morphs, and they own TriaX, why they didn't made this tool for Unity?

 

Hey all,
In an effort to hold to our commitment to involve you, our community, in the shaping of our offerings to you, we have made a little app to give you all a voice in deciding which morphs should be included in our Morph Packs. Check it out here.

It has already been requested several times that we include more diverse and meaningful morphs in our existing and future packs. Therefore, in preparation for our next update and release of the next round of content we are adding many more morphs!

Our problem is that we have access to well over 1000 morphs for our figures and we can't include them all (not until we finish making our own dynamic morph system or until Unity unlocks access to that data with theirs), namely for file size reasons. Our Sci-Fi Morph Pack has about 44 morphs but we can include many many more than that and still maintain a reasonable file size. So, rather than us deciding which of our hundreds and hundreds of morphs to include, we thought it would be cool to give you all a chance to rank which morphs you think will be most meaningful to you.

Oh, and we are currently planning to count votes for the next 5-7 days so don't wait too long if you are interested in participating. As always, thanks for your help and input!

Best,

The Morph 3D Team

 

Why not just add a voting here ? If not possible to alter the OP then do another thread in "Works in Progress" forums including the vote and link it here ? I for myself don't even have a smartphone and even if I had I would not download an app to just vote on something.

 

Agree, why just don't add web voting?

Also, if the app is to big for Assets Store, why limit the content and don't make it downloadable on demand?

 

I imagine it is because they want us to vote on a ton of morphs... making a web poll kind of impossible..

 

And making a program to vote for is simpler? Ok..

 

I hope that was sending data as it went, as I found no Done or Finished button. Did complete it though.

 

About the content, splitting it up into different packs makes most sense either I think. Not everyone would want to download medieval stuff if they do sci-fi or modern games and vice versa. But for amount of content. I would love to see as much as possible of course and hope this develops good.