UMA - Unity Multipurpose Avatar on the Asset Store!

@BrunoColli - PBR is "physically based rendering," which is what the new standard shader does in Unity 5.

 

Yes I completely understand this, but then... it would be good to know the way content is setup before buying it On the other hand I can fix 3d objects myself, it just consumes more time.

 

I am replying to pretty old post, but we have similar issue with black UMA in multiplayer. What we figured out so far, is that it is connected to character controller, to be more specific regenerating black atlas is connected with moving UMA. If UMA is not moved after refreshing texture it is fine, but if UMA is moved, atlas becomes black after regenerating texture.

At first it seemed that black UMA's appear randomly, but now it's clear that it is connected to moving UMA in Z axes or rotating UMA. in PUN, all previous UMAS that where moved before joining the loby will be black to the newcomer.

The issue is not even connected to PUN, it just becomes obvious in PUN. but if we move uma in an empty local scene, result is the same.

Do you have any ideas on how to solve this, or what might be the issue? (It seems like UMA bug)

 

We are still getting this issue too and to be honest it is very frustrating. We are using UNET but I remember I did al old project in PUN with UMA and got this to work, I think the way I did it was to spawn the uma as a child of an empty gameobject but I am not sure I will open the old project and have a look to see what I did and get back to you but yes I do agree that this could be a UMA bug.

 

Yes, it does not really depend if you use multiplayer at all. Just generate UMA , rotate it and try to use textureDirty, you will suddenly get black Atlas.

 

I certainly can't reproduce this. What version of UMA are you using? Which transform are you rotating - does it happen if you use the rotate tool in the Editor or only a script? What method are you using to set the texture dirty? Are you getting anything in the console? Are the overlays correct on the broken UMA if you look at it in the Inspector? If you mark the broken UMA as dirty a second time does it fix it? If you mark the mesh dirty as well as the texture does it fix it?

 

Hi, I use lates UMA2 from assetstore.
1. I create UMA:

2. If I turn Generated Character everything is fine. I enable refresh texture bool and it regenerates fine.

3. But if I turn UMALoader itself (parent object).

4. and click "refresh texture", UMA becomes black.

5.


Now while doing this I just understood that I need to try using generated character out of UMALoader...

 

Ok, got it to happen. The thing I was missing was that you were moving something in the parent transform hierarchy and not the actual character. Weird. Before looking into it I can only guess something is using a world space transform somewhere it should be using local space.

 

Hah! It's from rotating the UMAGenerator object.

The UMAGenerator instantiates a prefab with the camera setup for building the textures and apparently that's sensitive the to transform of the parent object. I don't see why you're rotating the UMALoader instead of the individual characters, but if you take the generator out of that parent it should be a workaround until it gets fixed.

Edit: I put in a bug report and it will get fixed sometime, but no idea when someone will get to it, until then just move the UMAGenerator out of that parent (or stop rotating that parent, which I can't understand the purpose of).

 

Yes, it looks it works Thank you. Our other programmer used SecretAnorak tutorial to make UMA run and probably that's how we ended up moving UMALoader instead.

 

Is PBR costly for a graphic card? I saw some art content using PBR and I'm interested in using it on UMA and Unity.

Before PBR I was used to produce a specular map texture, a difuse one and a normal map. What do I have to produce as texture map in order to use PBR material?

Can anyone point me to someplace where I can learn it? How to make art content for PBR material. It seems pretty new, not many things on google to read

 

@BrunoColli Look into substance designer or substance painter's website, you might not want the tools but they have a lot of great information there about PBR materials and setting them up for unity.

Plus when 5.2 comes out they are planning parity with substance designer.

 

@FernandoRibeiro on the subject of substance designer and unity... my dream world would be to design my characters skin materials in substance painter/designer and then use the blending tools to build overlays for scars, wrinkles, moles, body hair, muscle definition etc. and then bring that substance (with exposed parameters) into unity and utilize my layers to further customize my character's material.

Are we anywhere near that now that there is going to be more unity (pun intended) between unity and substance designer for UMA?

Power to the PEOPLE!

 

Hi there,
UMA handles this kind of texture combination (wrinkles, scars) very well, if you can bake the resulting textures and provide the mask channel for the overlay, it can be combined with the base skin texture. The concept is the same that we use for the overlay body clothes.
Cheers =)
Edit: I completely misunderstood your question, I thought you were asking if Unity would improve the integration between substance and Unity itself. On UMA side, the above answer applies.

 

Fair enough, I was thinking about substances more than separate textures because of size but I guess if it's baked into an atlas then ok... I was thinking for character design for the player.

I know there was a tool for in game character customization for UMA but I seem to remember it hasn't been updated to the new version of UMA... is that right?

 

The standard demo scene has a UI for changing the dimensions of a character, but nothing has been done yet so far as I know to put forth a standard slot & overlay changer. That would be a good idea, if anyone wants to do it.

 

I've modified the elf-ears to be a bit more "anime" style. Could also be used for goblins (etc). Here's a zip with the ears if you're interested:

http://www.aztica.com/images/AnimeElfEars.zip

I included everything from the slot folder that was generated, and the base fbx files. Uses the same overlay as the other ears, so it's not included.

 

@Jaimi, looks cool, did you consider adding that secondary ear tilt as a separate bone so that this can be adjusted by a slider?

And just to be clear, please clarify the license.

 

Did something happen to the PBR branch in github? It looks like it's there but when I try to pull it it says it doesn't exist. Did it get moved or something?

 

I thought about it, but I'm not well-versed in how to use Maya LT yet (trying to come from 3dsmax), so I just morphed them. I'll post an update when I get a bit better if no one volunteers to do it for me.

For the license, sorry for not clarifying. It would be the same as UMA itself, MIT.

 

Also, repeating a request I've heard others make: please don't put files into the Standard Assets folder; it causes lots of headaches for those of us who are actually using the Standard Assets. If you're just putting things in there to get it to compile during the firstpass phase, you can get the same behaviour by putting it into a folder named "Plugins" instead.

 

Seems to be fine. I just did a clone from https://github.com/huika/UMA-PBR.git and got everything.

 

I did just find that. It's a new repository. It used to be a branch on the main repository.

 

Hi, I'm working on it right now. To be honest I already have it, but I need to clear it from 3rd party content to be able to share, and make some explanation text. When I have some free time I will share it. (Not going to put it on asset store, since it is not some automated universal tool and needs handwork to add new stuff, and I will not support it ).

 

I'm working on one also. My version uses Recipes instead of slots though. You have a "base" recipe that defines what your character looks like, and then a set of "Equipment Slots" that each take another recipe. I use recipes instead of Slots/Overlays, so that you can build your own definition of what a piece of equipment is, and have it be a combination of multiple overlays and slots (for example, an undershirt overlay on the existing chest, plus a breastplate & overlay, plus pauldrons and their overlays might be one single piece of equipment) -- this way you have a "one recipe per equipment slot" model. It also has a hiding feature, so you can hide slots when equipping items. (For example - when putting on a helmet, you could hide the hair and/or ears, or putting on a chainmail shirt, you can hide the torso etc.).

It's built on top of the UMAAvatarBase, so you have all the stuff that goes with that (events, etc), and also has the ability to modify shared colors if you set them up in your recipe (hair/eyes/skin).

I can't share it yet, as it relies on some changes I've checked into the repository, but after that version is in the asset store, I'd be happy to share it.

 

@Augis1980, sounds awesome. I totally understand if you doesn't want to maintain it. But if the code is clean and neat we might consider adding it to UMA, in git we have a never finished scene 5 for customization that we manually delete before uploading to asset store. If you have a finished working scene that could be added to uma that will help so many people.

@Jaimi, that is a very nice use of additional recipes, this makes it much simpler than worrying about slots and overlays and I can imagine lots of people would be interested in that.

Keep it up both of you. Don't worry about working on the same goal you're using radically different approaches and both have merit.

 

@Augis1980 and @Jaimi - Thanks, guys!

 

Sounds great! I've been planning on working on a body occlusion solution for UMA, sounds like what you propose can already solve this as well =)

 

Hey Fernando,

I just started with UMA 2 today. I'm really impressed how well the whole system is working, it's exactly what I'm looking for my project. However, I've two questions:

- Is it possible to create own base-meshes for UMA or are we required to use the existing ones?
- How does UMA know where to place slots like MaleJeans01?

 

@silentneedle, you can create your own base meshes/edit the base meshes, however if you wish to use the existing uma clothing/armor you must take care to use the same body proportions.

UMA doesn't know where the jeans go. But the jeans know they start at the hips, go down the upper leg and end somewhere on the lower leg. That means that in order to use a particular set of jeans with uma they must be designed for the uma skeleton or refitted to the uma skeleton.

 

Ah, so this is done in the 3d tool by binding it to the skeleton?

Is there any tutorial how to create a base-mesh for uma?

Thanks.

 

im wanting the same, i want to modify the base mesh since i am a 3d modeller and want to do one more appealing to my project

 

I've been chasing this for several evenings. Apparently my searches to find an answer were prior to these posts in this thread, so I guess that's why I didn't find them. I emailed Fernando and he pointed me to the bug (which references this thread). Now I can move on to new things!

 

You could consider using Dionysus and Athena if the textures are enough for what you need:

@justb and other talented content creators also provides many amazing assets, you can check them here:
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/category/161/page/1/sortby/popularity

 

When creating a own basemesh, is it required to separate the mesh like the uma base-meshes or is it allowed to add more seperations (for example splitting the head into two pieces, face and scalp)?

Unfortunately we can't use any uma created content, as our client doesn't allow public available assets for characters. But I still think uma would be a perfect fit as we need to generate our characters runtime, allowing to switch gear and all that stuff.

edit:

Could someone explain for what random sets are for?

 

UMA doesn't care if you have 100 slots or 1 slot.
UMA doesn't care where one slot starts and another slot ends.
UMA doesn't care if you add two plate armors to the same character, but neither does it take care to ensure that they will not collide and be rendered through each other. (It will most likely be a mess!)
In other words UMA does exactly what you tell it to do, even when that's not what you really wanted.

 

What's about performance? Does UMA characters, once they've been generated, consume any significant more cpu/gpu than a normal character?

As for random sets, it seems those are only used by uma crowd to generate the random slots/overlays for all the generated UMAs, right?

@UnLogick Is your UMA Power Tools 2 UMA 2 ready? If so I'll definitely buy it.

 

@silentneedle, UMA characters uses more texture memory (gpu memory) than a normal character, this is because each character has a unique texture atlas and because the atlas uses full uncompressed textures.
You can get rid of this overhead by setting the atlas resolution scale based on distance and rebuild the textures to achieve an effect similar to mipmaps, doing this greatly reduces the overall memory consumption (to the extent that the village demo have 130 unique pbr characters and I've tested scenes with 800 characters on my system.)

UMA characters also tend to have more bones than normal characters and this gives a slight animation and skinning overhead. You need at least a hundred characters before this significantly affects frame rate on a pc/mac.


UMA Power Tools 2 requires UMA 2!
It removes the bone overhead by removing the additional adjustment bones. Instead it bakes the effect of the adjustment bones into the resulting mesh.

And it has a LOD system that handles the atlas resolution scale mentioned above as well as more. Unfortunately I have no good documentation for it at the moment so it will require some effort to fully use. Feel free to ask questions in the power tools forum thread so that we can share the question and answers with everyone else.

 

It seems like for almost all animations I have, the female UMA's hands clip through her sides. It's like her arms are always held sort of behind her and pushed inwards compared to what the animation looks like on the default unity avatar that is shown in the inspector for Mecanim animations. For example, in Fernando's video in the post two above mine, you can see her hands clipping through her legs. Is there any way to fix this? I don't see any DNA value for "push the arms outwards from the torso" and I don't know if there's a way to modify the UMA female skeleton without breaking everything.

 

This sounds like a problem with the skeleton cofiguration in the animations. Go into the humanoid configuration and adjust your bones.

 

i need to make my OWN base mesh with my OWN content... it is possible to do so with UMA? Fernando you are the creator of this asset you CAN for sure tell me HOW or at least give me a clue...

 

It happens with the animations included with UMA though, and the animations look fine on the male model.

 

It is possible and all you need to do is google it. Fernando created the werewolf race just to show how to do it.

 

Create an adjusted t-pose asset and use that for your female race.

 

Could you explain this a bit more? Do you mean edit the UMA female mesh so that its arms are higher than the actual skeleton arms in t-pose?

 

Wait no I think I see what you mean. I'm looking at it in Maya. You mean her hips are too wide compared to her shoulders so she can't put her arms down vertically without clipping. So I'd need to push the shoulder blades wider on the skeleton or push the hips in. Wouldn't doing that cause all my existing assets that use the default female skeleton to stop working though? Or will they somehow fix themselves automatically?

 

Find the Female_Unified.FBX in UMA/Content/UMA/Humanoid/FBX/Female.
Use the Configure button in the Rig tab of the model inspector to open the avatar editor.
Adjust the limits on the Arm Down-Up motion in the Muscles tab of the avatar editor.
Apply the changes to save the updated avatar.
Use the UMA/Extract T-Pose menu item to save a new T-Pose from your updated avatar.
Exit the avatar editor.
Set the Human Female race data in UMA/Content/UMA/Humanoid/Races to use the new T-Pose.

 

Ohhhhhh ok that sounds much better than trying to mess with the skeleton in Maya. Thanks.

 

I followed these steps, and adjusted the Arm Down-Up on both arms to have a minimum limit of -10 but it did not seem to have any effect. Dynamic UMA's seem to be ignoring the constraint.

Edit: Never mind! I figured out that I had to click on the prefab in the Project folder and do Extract T-Pose rather than clicking on the one in the hierarchy. It's working now.

 

dude in his tutorial he doesn't tell you how to rig it, what type of rig to use or gives you any file examples.... he just tell's you "i made this race you see? now i will put it in the game" that's all... and obviously uma uses a special rig and a way to rig/weight the characters...