[Released] Morph Character System (MCS) - Male and Female

I don't want you to think you're getting ignored but I hate to say I don't have much to announce right now. I can say that I was passed an internal build of the tools a few days ago and got to use them. They will be released when they are ready. Which should be fairly soon.

 

To all that are trying to help, I appreciate the thought, but you're all just telling me to do what I already did, and I stated what I did in my initial post and won't repeat it here. I've had contact with Morph3D, they've acknowledged there are issues with 5.5 and a shader and with the reimport.

 

Cool, glad you've got a solid answer.
Haven't spotted this one myself, as I moved everything over to my own extended Standard shader.

 

We're about to post the last three videos in this series today. If you haven't watched the tutorial series you might find them useful. The series expands on Unity's roll-a-ball tutorial by replacing the ball with an MCS figure. It covers various aspects of the Morph3D API including changing and reading blendshape values, disabling clothing, and attaching content packs. It also briefly covers how to apply a mecanim animation to your figure.

 

Can we create our own clothes and hair etc? I dont mind paying for more content but I dont like the idea that I am buying stuff which someone else could buy 1:1. It wouldn't make sense to release a game which is "unique" and then someone else could reproduce that within minutes with the same content I bought.

 

There are tools coming out soon(tm) for just these sorts of things

 

What exactly do you mean with soon(tm)? I know that many use that as a joke but I think I read something about that here. I also saw that they are working on MCS 2.0 (now in beta?), I guess that will include something like a cloth/hair tool. Maybe they will upgrade to Genesis 3 or the newest DAZ or something like that also. But in the end without a tool to make your own clothes this is useless as of right now (atleast for me).

 

the soon(tm) is probably in reference to that they have been saying that the artist tools will be coming soon ever since the product was released over a year ago.

And yes, the MCS 2.0 they are working on uses Genesis 3 figures.

 

Hello MORPH 3D I am experiencing a lot of clipping in my cloths during run-time, any word as too when this will be fixed ?

 

Most clipping should be handled at runtime by an alpha injection mask. If you are getting clipping there are several things that could be causing it. If you open a ticket here: https://morph3dhelp.zendesk.com and send me screen shots of the clipping I should be able to trouble shoot with you and help you figure out what might be causing it. Then we can post the results here. That way the thread doesn't get cluttered by our trouble shooting but other users can still find out what was going on.

 

Whats an alpha injection mask ?

 

They're in the kit.

 

Each clothing item [should] come with an injection mask. The mask is set as a property on the CIclothing component of a piece of clothing. The mask is a black and white image that should line up with the UV's of the MCS Figure. Ideally anything that the clothing covers should be black (meaning it will be masked out) while anything that is white will not be masked out. This masking happens on the actual MCS figure and not the clothing.

At runtime the system takes all of the injection masks for all of the visible CIclothing components on the MCS figure and overlays them into one image. This image is then placed in the Alpha channel of the Morph3D Standard Character Shader which clips anything in turquoise. This only happens at runtime though as that is when the final alpha injection mask is calculated.

Injection Mask 1
Injection Mask 2
Injection Mask 3

 

Hi Morph_JN,

As you pointed out alpha injection, masks only the figure not the clothing. But we all know that most of the time clothing pieces cause clipping with each other (for example a jacket and a shirt).

Is it possible to change it so that we can define layer numbers on clothing pieces and every injection mask is applied to all of the layers with lower value assigned. (So for jacket layer # should be set 2, and for shirt 1, assuming figure itself is on layer 0 then jacket's alpha mask covers both shirt and figure, where shirt's alpha mask only covers figure)

That way we would have so much less clipping... I don't know if it is technically possible, maybe you could ask the developers and let us know.

 

Don't think that would be possible, then every item needs a specific injection mask for any piece of clothing it could go on top of. Because every piece of clothing and the model all have different uv's it would be a ton of work to make it.

On the other hand, maybe a tool could be made that can see which of the underlying vertices shouldn't be visible and creates an alpha mask that you can then use.

 

Not sure if anyone has tried / had success with it, but maybe something like Simple LOD could remove the covered vertices from the model and thus prevent some sources of poke-through?

 

Bang! That's the issue in one. Clothing on clothing masking, with multiple layers of clothing, especially in an rpg (my scenario) where mix and match clothing is a thing.

 

@nickyoso1 mentioned one of the issues which is that the injection masks are specific to the UV's of the figure that will be clipped. Different clothing items have different UV's so in theory you would need a separate injection mask for each potential combination of clothing. That would get out of hand quite quickly.

The other issue is that the shader for the item to be masked needs to support injection masking. We don't have a clothing shader that supports this, though that doesn't mean one cant be created.

At this point a little background on how the injection masks are currently made might be useful. Our production team will take the MCS figure and the clothing item into ZBrush and hand paint the mask onto the figure, essentially paining through the clothing and using it as a guide. So the masks are created by hand.

If there were a clothing shader that supported injection masking a user could create their own injection mask specific to a piece of clothing in the same way. Just bring both clothing items into Zbrush and use the outer layer as a guide to paint on the lower layer. At this point though there are other ways to handle poke through (I posted a video earlier). So the method I showed earlier (painting transparency onto the texture) could still be used but Zbrush (or some other app that supports 3D painting) could be used to paint the transparency. Or at least it could be used to paint a guide that could later be used in Photoshop or Gimp to clip the texture.

Having said all of that I will speak with the devs after Christmas and check on the following:

1. Are they developing or planning to develop a way to automate the generation of injection masks.
2. If they are would it be possible to swap the MCS figure for another piece of clothing and project an injection mask onto clothing.
3. Is it possible to get a clothing shader that supports injection masks.

Keep in mind that the MCS dev team is SWAMPED right now trying to get Artist's Tools ready for release so even if there are plans to implement these things I wouldn't expect to see them right away.

 

I would encourage the MCS dev to work on the Clipping 1st and foremost!

Also the girls need panties lol every-time they do a flip in a skirt its ummm lol yeah, they need some sort of underwear.

 

Also reducing the time it takes to instantiate the characters. right now for me it takes 1-2 seconds to load a character in, without clothing. if i want 100+ characters in my scene that's like 2-4 minutes of loading and then you still need to load in the clothing + the rest of your game.

 

Yep, everyone likes loading a game then waiting 5 minutes for it to generate the pools of characters so there's no instantiation freeeze whilst actually playing. I'm hoping that the new system will solve this and the poke-through issues. Until then, I'm using the current system for development only.

 

The thing is I haven't been able to get this to work at all with the Morph3D shader. Customer service has tried to help me and it's still messed up. Which is why I think you guys need to find a better way that works 100% regardless of system and configuration. Other systems do, so with this being a basic function, it should always work. The fact that so many people are having problems with it means that whatever solution you guys are using isn't a good one. In my opinion, we shouldn't even be having this conversation since the solution for clothes should be foolproof and work out the box.

 

I am not familar with shader program and I don't know what would be involved with this nor performance impact, but would the following work? (this may be what you had in mind)

1) Give users the ability to reorder the clothing items. Items on top would be closest to skin.
2) Injection mask is also applied to clothing..
3) Injection masks are progressively generated and applied to the clothing underneath. (for example if the figure is wearing a shirt, a vest and a jacket the jacket mask is applied to the vest. The vest mask is combined with the jacket mask and applied to the shirt, and all 3 are combined and applied to the figure)

If this is possible it would solve clothing poking through and it would allow us to mix and match clothing without having to manually generate injection masks (which would be a major pain if we have a system that lets users combine clothing).

 

If all these issues are solved with the new Darwin system, I'd be tempted to treat the current version as a prototype, and concentrate on the new system. What we want is a system that works as soon as possible

 

Question;

Im using Morph3D in a UNET project, i use the following two functions to equip and unequip Morph3D clothing:

Code (CSharp):

1.     [ClientRpc(channel = Channels.DefaultReliable)]
2.     void RpcShowClothing(int inventoryIndex, int equipIndex) {
3.         //Debug.Log("RpcShowClothing()");
4.         if (!inventory[inventoryIndex].valid) return;
5.         noMeshUpdate = false;
6.         ContentPack clothingPack = new ContentPack();
7.         clothingPack.setupWithGameObject(inventory[inventoryIndex].model);
8.         foreach (MORPH3D.COSTUMING.CIclothing clothing in clothingPack.availableClothing)
9.         {
10.             //manager.LoadClothingFromContentPackToFigure(clothing); // this is better than using AttachCIClothing()
11.             manager.AttachCIClothing(clothing, true);
12.         }
13.         manager.DetectAttachedClothing();
14.     }

and to unequip:

Code (CSharp):

1.     [ClientRpc(channel = Channels.DefaultReliable)]
2.     void RpcRemoveClothing(int inventoryIndex, int equipIndex) {
3.         //Debug.Log("RpcRemoveClothing()");
4.         if (!equipment[equipIndex].valid) return;
5.         noMeshUpdate = false;
6.         List<MORPH3D.COSTUMING.CIclothing> clothingList = manager.GetAllClothing();
7.         foreach (MORPH3D.COSTUMING.CIclothing clothing in clothingList)
8.         {
9.             if (equipment[equipIndex].model.name == clothing.name)
10.             {
11.                 DestroyObject(clothing.gameObject);
12.             }
13.         }
14.         manager.DetectAttachedClothing();
15.     }

When i test in the editor everything works as intended, clothing gets attached and removed, the problem is when i build a client and test in a client/server environment i get the following errors AFTER i attached and then remove clothing.

Code (CSharp):

1. NullReferenceException
2.   at (wrapper managed-to-native) UnityEngine.Renderer:get_enabled ()
3.   at JCTTransition.HotfixUpdate () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
4.   at JCTTransition.LateUpdate () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
5. (Filename:  Line: -1)

Has Morph3D been used in multiplayer environments like UNET, am i missing something, is the correct way to remove clothing is by Destroying it?

any help is greatly appreciated.
thank you,
-J

 

Sorry it's been a minute we've been out for the holidays. I haven't heard anything back from the devs since the last time I posted. There's a lot of posts and I don't want to create a bunch of replies so I'll try to address everyone's replies in this post.

@XCO - The current priorities of the dev team are to get MCS 2.0 out and to get Artists Tools out. Those priorities aren't going to change.

@nickyoso1 - MCS 2.0 should significantly decrease load times for MCS figures. If you haven't had a chance to try the beta I would suggest checking it out for no other reason than to see what kind of performance increases you can expect.

@EDarkness - If you're still getting poke through issues send me the ticket number for the ticket you submitted and I'll take another look at it. Since I've been answering tickets I can't think of an instance where I wasn't able to help someone resolve poke through issues (with skin). I've posted a work around a few pages back that shows how you can deal with clothing on clothing pokethrough.

@celebrus - The current injection masks can't be applied to the clothing because the masks themselves are UV specific. The issue is generating injection masks for one piece of clothing that will appropriately mask another piece.

@LukeDawn - Hopefully the new MCS system will be out very soon. I still can't give a release date though.

@jagatai33 - This looks similar to a bug I already have open. If you submit a ticket I'd love to get more info from you to add to the bug report. You could also try creating a content pack and then attaching the content pack rather than using the AttachCIClothing method. The MCS101 tutorials show how to do this in the later videos. It also goes into the best way to disable clothing which is to set IsVisble to false rather than destroying the game object.

 

I just wanted to say I have been having great luck with this product. I like the idea of what the company is doing, the vision, and what it is doing for Unity. I found the tutorials, API and documentation quite useful. Figured out how to call blend shapes from code. (YAY!) Also I have and have spent years tooling around with importing .fbx figures into Unity and it has been quite challenging. Everything is working nicely for me. Of course I need to figure out a few items:

1. I had a heck of a time trying to replace the simple eye shader with a custom one. So I tried to attach new geometry and shaders over the existing eye... but it lags behind... Not a good look have 4 eyeballs floating around a humanoid! I would love to replace the existing eyes with my own creations. Is there a way to do this via code (I'm a C#) Unity Coder by profession or by attachment point. Ideally the best way would be for me to use my own shader... but this failed for some reason. I probably need to replace the geometry of the "lEye" and "rEye". I think this should be easy so I must be missing something here... Any tips?

2. What about Cloth Physics? Can I attach like a cloth sash to these figures with Cloth physics? This also applies to attaching my own objects questions as well.

 

I had problems with eyes too, because the geometry position is dependent upon blendshapes. I ended up making new textures and materials which worked fine. I create a new material and replace the base one when I instantiate a model.

 

I'm using the Lawless Survivor asset with the MCS Male figure. I can add the LSCanteen to the figure "Content Packs" but it doesn't appear in the "Clothing" listing. Is this item attached to the figure using another method? I'm using MCS Male figure with the ootii Motion Controller. The only other issue I have encountered was during climbing a pillar. After the figure climbs to the top and starts to transition to a stand at the top of the pillar the boots flash on and off.

 

These videos might be useful:

 

Hey, just looking into using MCS for our game. Is it compatible with Unity 5.5.0f3? After a few import difficulties getting it to compile properly with Unity's auto-script-update tools, I still have a null pointer error on the Genesis 2 Male\hip\JCT Transition script at game play which I can stop by disabling the script on the prefab, as well as a a flood of "Assertion failed on expression: 'self->GetEnabled ()'" errors that I've been unable to get past. Thanks. Hoping it is, because provided the content-creation system comes out soon, the system looks fantastic!

 

Can anyone confirm if the Free Female Lite is the same version as the full package? Both say Version: 1.0r5, but the free version is dated Jul 13, 2016 and the full version is dated Nov 29, 2016. I know the Lite has reduced morphs, but just wondering if it is otherwise the same because the difference in date is so vast.

 

That date is probably the last time the Asset Store was edited (when the sale ended and items returned to full price).

 

OK, that makes sense then. So, 1.0r5 isn't the new performance optimized version then. I wonder when that's coming.

 

Should be soon. If you haven't yet you may want to check out the beta ( morph3d.com/beta ) so you can see what performance optimizations you can expect from the next version.

 

I tried the beta a while ago, but there were issues even getting it to run on my target platform. I can't remember what the issues were, but it seemed liked the beta was specifically designed for editor-only testing and couldn't be compiled to stand-alone or console. I can't remember exactly what the issue was.

 

Before anything, I want to say that I'm thrilled at the idea of being able to swap clothes and other items between characters, and can't wait to try the artist tools. Thanks and please keep up the great work!

By the way, I'd like to see an option which would make the models anatomically correct for both genders. While I understand the reason for censorship, I believe it should be left to each creator's discretion to decide if their game needs such a feature.

Nowadays, video games are not exclusively for children, as more and more titles target mature audiences. And if we don't get disturbed by seeing exposed chest of a real actress in movies (if they are properly rated) anymore, probably people will realize that there's no reason to be shocked when they see the similar scenes of computer generated graphics in games sooner or later.

Sorry for being preachy, but I just read a previous post about the possibility of including such a feature in future versions if enough number of customers show interests, so I wanted to voice my own opinion.

Thanks!

 

Couldn't agree more

 

I don't need nudity for my game, and I would like to see more everyday clothing and less sexualized clothing options for the women. However I don't see why anyone should be against options for others.

 

On topic people. This is a games dev forum, not a theological discussion.

The more options a system offers, the better. Nobody has to use any part of it they don't want to; but let's not narrow the options down for everyone by invoking politics, religion, or anything else that's personal to an individual or specific group of people.

 

Thou shalt not judge....

 

Free speech is not available on private forums. I really wonder why my fellow Americans think it extends to everywhere. Lots of places don't have the same laws we do. Even here, your free speech does not extend to private places. You cannot walk into my house and say whatever you want. I can make you leave. You can't post whatever you want on these forums.

Look up judgement.

Anyway, I just reported to the mods. So my guess someone will be along soon. I am not going to add anymore.

 

Cleaned up derailment. Keep on topic, and religious, political beliefs to yourself.

 

To any interested,
I am looking for anyone capable of retexturing a Morph3D armor to make a viking style chain / leather armor for a project. Ideally with a tunic inculded so that two teams could be differentiated. You would of course keep the rights to continue to sell on the unity asset store and would be happy to pay for the commission if a reasonable quote. Please reply via PM / conversation if interested. Thanks.

 

Hello!
I have an issue with skin shader using linear color space and deferred rendering path:


This dark area is a skin clipped through the clothes.

Linear and forward rendering, there are no artifacts:


MCS Male (full) asset v1.0r5

 

Apparently they made their shader for forward rendering only.

Contact customer support. They gave me an experimental deffered shader but I couldn't get it working….

 

Thank you, they really send me deferred shader with alpha clip by injection masks. It should works (if we have the same shader =). It will look like that:


But you can change original shader from Blacksmith to support MCS injection masks. I did it and it looks better, I think:


All that you need is add 2 shader files from attached archive to MORPH3D\Vendor\Unity\Shaders\Skin\ folder and select "Morph3D/Volund/Standard Character Deferred (Specular, Surface)" shader for your skin material. I hope it helps.

 

I know the mods put an end to the debate about whether they should or shouldn't be released. I just wanted to let you guys know that every time this comes up (here or in support tickets) I run it by the MCS product manager. I can tell you that it is very unlikely the genitalia for the mcs figures will be released. I feel like I should also add that this was purely a business decision.

 

I believe nobody actually said they 'should' release anything, because I understand the decision is fully within the discretions of the creators of the product, even if it were not from a business consideration.

I just hope there could be such a option and voiced my opinion about it, as I read here that they might provide such a feature if enough number of customers ask for it.

Probably, I should try other options if I ever decide to create an adult game. Anyway, thanks for the information.

 

Honest thanks for the update. First rule of investing is learning proper use of stop loss. All next week will be at our multi-company management / developer session, and I can give the unfortunate news to the team. I'll just have to work through the DABDA (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance) process to move on. I was an early adopter based on the assumption of eventual completeness, along with awareness of the systems root in the Genesis base. All the team members thought it was a good idea. Life was good. Got most of the items in the store based on those assumptions, but everyone needs an assumption fact-check reminder occasionally. For a product with these features the base cost is relatively minor. The True Cost is developers investment in time and total commitment to a system versus something else. Many sleepless nights and hours spent cursing and hair pulling, yet overcoming problems with system since November 2015. But all was ok, Morph might consider the releasing the missing part, it was conceivable, I can even find the posts. After all, the original Genesis characters already have them, right? (Blissful Denial). Now with the final end-game in sight, and then to be informed that the final piece for our plans will simply never be ... the creation we've slaved over for the past year and a half will never be finished, the vision never realized ... well ... okay. After investing so much unrecoverable life into this system (beating my head against this system instead of some other which I probably now have to do too), I can say I am very disappointed. And I wouldn't be so disappointed if it was not in fact a promising product. That kinda defines why one would be disappointed. (Anger/Depression)

Fortunately, we do have other options (Bargaining), it's just MCS seemed so worthwhile for our project. And I have definitely learned a lot thus far. I was moving towards an avatar technology switching middle layer so gotta accelerate that now. Really it just means I will have to finish the interim demo using MCS and "innovative texturing", then de-prioritize following MCS and work on the other options. I will still probably follow MCS for personal projects since I now know it so well, but all my virtual human projects focus on 100% in mind and body, and that includes the ommitted last 10% . At least I have the weekend to ponder how to convince the other two partner companies that no matter what, it's all still good But I do repeat my thanks for your honesty because I feel it is better to know now (killing all false hope, no matter how sweet or remote) than to hang our project waiting for a feature set that will never come. (Acceptance)

Did I mention you could count me was +1 on that optional Gen feature request petition (Let's go revisit denial ...)