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

This worked, found another issue though:

When attaching content from "Vamptress of the Night" I get this logging/error for I think all of the pieces/lods:

I do not own this mesh, skipping: Gen-VL_Pants_LOD0 from: Gen-VL_Pants
UnityEngine.Debug:Log(Object)
MORPH3D.COSTUMING.CostumeItemetectCoreMeshes()
MORPH3D.M3DCharacterManager:LoadClothingFromContentPackToFigure(CIclothing)
MORPH3D.M3DCharacterManager:LoadContentPackToFigure(ContentPack)

Clothes still look mostly right, but I'm not applying any morphs yet (and in fact have JCTTransition disabled, but these issues happen with it enabled as well)

 

How much the 'Artist Tools' will cost after the free period? I'm concerned, because as it today, it does not worth more than $5/month. If we compare to, for example, the Substance-family ($19/m - rent-to-own!) or the Marvelous Designer ($60/m). If you (the company) remove the EULA restriction (to be able to sell my own products) and make the 'Artist Tool' at least half as good as the Marvelous Designer when it comes to cloths and props, I would pay the $20/m for it. But my experience with this company tells me it will be as of today and will be at least $20/m (or even more). Which is way overpriced.

Oh, and I think we heard the "we're working on it" enough already. You had one and a half years to make things right with constant fight with the community.

 

I had one tell me the exact opposite, so who knows? The Asset Store Provider Agreement is here, and it does look like it changed again in November: https://unity3d.com/legal/as_provider
The relevant part is 6.6, which used to say that any paid assets had to use the Appendix 1 EULA, but free assets could have their own license. At one point, back when I asked them, 6.6 wasn't there; they had just removed it so there was nothing about a required EULA. Now it says "shall be subject to Unity's standard EULA attached as Appendix 1, unless otherwise agreed by the parties in writing." So I guess it depends on whether or not they signed some form with Unity, which I'm sure SpeedTree did, but there's no way to really tell for other assets if they did or not.

I think it's the opposite. The general Unity EULA gives you the right to use assets in "a game", so you can use them in a game that's not even made in Unity. The SpeedTree license says if you buy the Unity package you're only allowed to use it Unity; you're not allowed to copy the trees into an Unreal project if you switch engines. This is because they sell the same exact trees in both Unity and Unreal packages and they want you to buy both if you use both engines.

 

But he only joined today!

 

I'll talk to our company next week and see if I can get this answered for you. I am unsure if the pricing model has been finalized however.

 

Can you send me a screenshot?
Are you getting any errors?
What happens if you hit play, same problem?
Which figure and which asset?

 

He represents the company, therefore when I refer to him I refer to the company. I really don't care if he just joined today.

 

This is on the list of items we are going to research this year. We've already discussed doing this both in MCS runtime/editor and in Artist Tools. I don't have a good clear answer for you right now though, so I don't want to speculate on possibilities; I mostly just wanted to let you know it's on our radar.

 

If you can, you're welcome to send me a copy of your project zipped u and your original asset and I will take a look for you as soon as I can.

 

Clothing to clothing poke through is not taken care of by the masks system currently, only clothing/body. In that particular case we probably need to tweak the original geometry on our side and push the shirt out a little more so it doesn't clip with the pants. I'll send a message over to our content team about it though. It's a bit more complicated as we need to refit our morphs after we alter it.

 

Hi,

We just updated to 1.6.1 and Creatures Material is missing!! Can please release the Zombie skin?

 

We are facing problems with the sliders, they are not working.

 

We are currently updating the texture pack. The art team is currently working on refitting these. I'll update the forums when they are finished.

 

What version of Unity are you using and what OS? What happens if you make the inspector panel very wide?

 

@jjanzer_morph
Okay... you asked for it. I apologize in advance if this comes off personal, just understand that frustration comes from passion.

Where to begin. Let's start back with my first experience about 2 years ago with MCS, when I first saw it. I was enamored by the possibilities. I thought to myself, like many others, this is going to take away the need for programmers to seek endless amount of variant models just to populate a world with more than Bob and Sally. Facing the issues with Daz, and recognizing the relationship with them I was a bit skeptical, but I said let's give it a try. Right off the bat, the lite product was exactly what I expected, unfinished, unpolished, slow, buggy, and not at all production ready. Not a problem, I expected this and saw the potential behind it, as did many. And many decided to follow through and support the products development, while being made promises of glory and wonder going forward with faster loading, fixes to bone structures, better injection masking for the clothing, and above all, content creation tools so we could create our own wonderful clothes and rig them into the MCS pipeline. Everyone was sold.
I took a little hiatus from my development efforts, put my game aside recognizing that MCS wasn't the only thing I needed to wait a while on to really see one of my visions to fruition. After 2 years, I decided to revisit the assets and see how things were shaping up. Of all the assets, MCS remained the only one that was still not living upto any of the expectations.

So here we are now, with 1.6.x finally released, whew. Guess I popped back just in time for that long haul of virtually no progress towards production usability. Thinking to myself, poor saps who bought into this... a week later MCS goes up for free and I'm laughing to myself thinking ... has MCS died? Has everyone abandoned it and they're trying to get people back onboard? So I started reading the forums. Oh my.
At the end of my read at that moment in the forums, Morph_JN makes reference to this EULA and what a S***storm this raises. For the first time, it's brought up that "months ago a EULA was put in place" ... oh, months ago, when nobody was using the product they purchased because it still didn't work? mmkay, so let's just sneak in a EULA and pretend that's okay.

At this point, I decided for myself to go read the EULA, having had to deal with enough business contracts to know when something smells funny. I barely even got to the real problems people have, the terminology of the entire EULA reads like it was written on the back of a napkin over friday night drinks.
But okay, we know the EULA is being rewritten. Except, that's the whole problem in the first place. What purpose is the EULA going to serve sitting onto of the asset store EULA for MCS itself? Are you giving us more permissions not already allowed by the unity store EULA? because if it's back to trying to tie our hands on how we use it then it's a wash, you just wasted more money on lawyers that inevitably is going to come out of the pockets you keep trying to get your fingers into.

A EULA which tells us we can only have 50 players interacting on the same server? what the hell kind of arbitrary decision was that, short of trying to dig your fingers into the pockets for more money. Can't "stream" more than 20 items to players? The actual intent of this is lost because the wording is so vague nobody has a clue what the hell it means so of course there is an uproar over it. Cannot sell our own clothing converted through the tools on our own in app store purchase system for vanity clothing and the like, are you absolutely insane? How would you feel if Unity came by and said "Uh yeah, hey, so for every model of clothing you put on your store, we want 30%, because you're using Unity to render them."... that seem fair? that's what you're doing to us.

Furthermore, the bait and switch on the "artist" tools is not cool. But most people have accepted, like SpeedTree Modeller, we'll pay a modest fee for an EXCEPTIONAL tool, but that is not what you're offering. Right now you're asking us to alpha test another product until it's built off our backs testing and gruntworking it for you, then turn around and charge us some unknown amount because "we don't know what our fees will be yet" ... how the hell can you even think about doing business like this?

We will not pay a subscription for a tool whose sole purpose is to bind YOUR SPECIFIC product blendshapes to OUR clothing to make YOUR product usable to us, and then turn around and give up OUR rights on how we can use it.
This is just crazy. I'm really not sure I can be any more polite than this about the business ethics shown thus far by Morph3D. Y'all are a bunch of crazy fools to us.

So, simply put, M3D needs to get in line and stop acting like they're in the Daz world. You're making a product, whom the sold focus of using it are indie developers. Stop trying to screw them at every turn.

I could probably fill an entire forum page myself on the shiet I am feeling about M3D right now, and I'm not even as burned as many others are on this. There is just too much to complain about right now, which brings me back to my point that any dev walking into this S***storm is going to walk away from M3D without any further investment into the idea. You guys got a long way to go to restore the faith of this community.

Edit: You also got my 100th post, congrats, since about 30 of them are on M3D alone.

 

Try replacing the Assets/MORPH3D/Scripts/Editor/M3DCharacterManagerEditor.cs with the one I just updated from: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Byi5u41H4gStRFM3ZC1MZVFIamM/view?usp=sharing
Let me know if that helps any.

 

For the EULA I know they're working through the issues but I'm here to help you with technical ones.

Regarding artist tools... I can discuss the product from an engineering side. I guess simply put, what would make this tool exceptional, what specifically would you like to see from it? This is just the first release, we have a giant list of features we'd like to work on and have to balance them. If you let us know what you're interested in, I will discuss it with the team.

 

Well, that's kinda the question isn't it. We don't know what it is, or what we're getting, or what we're gunna be charged for it. Pretty closed line of communication thus far on this front. So far we are just seeing a tool to attach blendshapes to make our stuff work with your stuff and then get tagged as converted content that isn't our stuff anymore.
But, as for what I'd like to see, which might be a pipedream, is a full suite that compliments creating content packs, from clothing to hair, and maybe even props. If you want it to be exceptional, it has to be the SpeedTree Modeller for MCS content packs. Let me start with a base model and drag out hair like modelling trees, give me the tools to sculpt everything in one place, rather than just taking my 3DS exports and adding some data to them (though do not remove this avenue of import as many artists will still want to use what they are familiar with).
It has to make the actual modelling of clothing simpler, consider using the very same concepts of MCS to create a clothing system that starts with base models and can be morphed out to create different types of base model clothing, and then get down into vertex editing to tweak things. And have a nice setup for texturing which maybe works something like Surforge for on the fly texturing in realtime, just unwrap the model and gimme the means to apply stuff to make textures from kitted stencils/stamps/fabric patterns, etc. Again, see Surforge for this done right.
The tools should also assist with reskinning the base models, let us create a variety of base skins with tools designed to the task from setting base skin pigment, to stamping more distinguishing features, heck I'd even like to see this as something ontop of the standard base textures so players could add runtime blemishes, scars, tattoos, etc.

And I really can't stress enough how nice it would be to have these tools as an editor extension inside of Unity taking advantage of the engine to make all this easier to achieve. I understand your market will exist outside of this for other artists and engines, however this would be the cherry ontop for what we've come to expect of Unity tools in general. But, to every rule there is the exception like SpeedTree Modeller so I can't very well ignore that argument after using it so much Once again, if you wanna charge me $19 a month, your tool better be exceptional and save me a lot of time on the modelling side of things just like SpeedTree Modeller does. I better be able to point and click my way to some easy unique clothing for my game as a non-artist. Subscriptions are for tools with exceptional value, if you get on par with SpeedTree and Photoshop and the big boys doing a lot of real work, then I'll consider the value of it worthy of a subscription.
Until then you're asking people to commit to an unknown cost, for a tool that'll have unknown features, which has a EULA that may restrict our usage of content to an unknown degree. If you want us to alpha test your tools, step one is untieing our hands with restrictions. Step two is letting us know what we're getting into if we invest our time into it, nobody wants a surprise that it'll be some ridiculously priced subscription system in 6 months, which is the current thinking considering the prior bait and switch already surrounding the tools.

 

So I am not an Artist, and I use a Mac. These have led me to have little interest in the Artist Tools so far.

But I am curious, as someone who doesn't really want to spend time doing a bunch of art (hence why I like M3D), would I be able to take existing art like this: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/78106

And adapt it to morph3d characters without having to dive into a separate modeling tool?

 

@jjanzer_morph
I second everything Astaelan1 has said. I third and fourth and fifth it too. I'm a member of most of the Unity indie dev communities through Facebook (as well as some Discord groups, etc...) and can say that these sentiments regarding licensing are quite prevalent even outside of this forum. The only people who aren't upset about the current restrictions are the people who don't bother reading licenses, and I've been going out of my way these past few weeks to cure the communities of that affliction.

The whole world is waiting (I'd say "with bated breath", but we'd have suffocated by now) to see what direction you guys choose from here- to continue screwing with your customers (which frankly, you have to admit you've been doing, even if it wasn't intentional), or adhering more closely to the Unity licensing paradigm that we're all far more comfortable with.

On a side note, I love you @Astaelan1- you're my new favourite person.

 

Assuming you have the ability/permission/etc to modify their content, it's a possibility. Currently the projection system that exists in Artist Tools assumes that you've already fit the clothing to our base figures (genesis 3 male/female models), pre-morphed.

 

Thanks for the response, the best I can offer right now is that I'll discuss these items with our team.

When you refer to modeling the clothing are you referring to a system where we provide you with a set of "base" clothing that is easily customized (textured/deformed/etc), then our tool will handle the remapping/projecting/etc?

 

When the Lead Developer for a project only gets involved with the community when fire fighting is needed, I consider it another warning sign. Maybe he's been here all along under another user name, or maybe it's a temporary presence until the fire is out and the eula riot is buried a few pages deep. It's a concern for me I thought worth highlighting.

 

Take a look at the Marvelous Designer, which is the industry standard when it comes to cloth modeling/creation, or even to the cloth creation and fitting in Blender. You'll understand what we think an "Artist Tool" should be at least.

 

I would imagine Astaelan means a system where you can just use options and sliders to adapt some generic "starter" default clothing options into more unique results. For example, choose "dress" and then some checkboxes for sleeves / sleeveless / frills in X, Y, Z locations, and other common options for the dress type, some sliders for things like the hem length, hem angle, layers, etc, and finally some image references for colour schemes, cloth types, patterns, etc...

It would take years of development, in that direction, to reach the point where you can actually drag individual edges around for adjusting clothes on the base models, rather than just a series of tweakable parameters in the form of checkboxes and dropdown menus- but that would be what a subscription system would really demand, in terms of quality. That's what we get with SpeedTree, when it comes to vegetation systems, and that's the only piece of software I've subscribed to as a direct companion to Unity for a reason.

I personally think that that's asking for a bit much from you guys- we already have Marvelous Designer, and it would be replicating a lot of the functionality there pointlessly. I'd rather simply pay once for the Tools, have some basic import options that would allow us to project our existing clothing models onto the character base meshes without actually pre-fitting them like we do now (if we don't have Max or Maya to do that in- most of us do, but it can't really be assumed), and be done with it.

It wouldn't be worth a monthly subscription, or losing ANY of our rights to our clothing (that's a deal breaker), but it would be worth a one-time charge, and do exactly what we really need it to and nothing more. The minimalist approach like that is also a valid direction IMO.

 

Fair point, I can't argue how you might feel. All I can say is that we've been working very hard for a long time to deliver a lot of new features, performance updates, tooling, and other initiatives. Now that we have some breathing room I'll make it a point to be more involved in the community. I know that may not seem like a lot considering the silence from the past but it's the best I can offer to you right now.

 

Thank you, I will check it out.

 

Make Artist Tools like mostly everybody thought the tools should be.
Offer bunch of ready made clothes / hairs (also facial hair!!!) where artists just can customize them in your Artitst Tools like they want (changing size, color, form, textures etc.) and export them as Clothing Prefabs etc.
I mean take a look to Speedtree Modeler. You get everything from this tool. You can create endless unique trees without having a 3d modeler who needs to create 3D Models with Blender Maya or whatever.
For that I would pay a monthly fee, to be able to create my own stuff fast and niceley with your Tools. Paying for a "Converter" which simply draws the self created stuff with external tools to a Morph3d Character with Blendscapes is not worth than 5$-10$ in the Asset Store in my opinion. I would also not use it right now for free, because it simply does not offer me the main reason I bought M3D and waited like more than a year.

Perhaps you already have this planed but than you really should communicate this already or make things clear before posting that the tools are free for only a limited time. Why is the Tool free because the upcoming features will offer exactly what I am talking about? What are your plans what will it offer in the future... Because as you already mentioned this is the first version and right now it simply does not fulfill its purpose.

Anyway I am appreciating that more of you guys from Morph3d are showing up in the Unity Community now. Here you can find your main customers so you really should take care of them here.

I really hope you get the EULA / Communication and Artist Tool purpose thing working out. You can see how many people post their concernes in this thread which shows that a lot of people care about this product. They want to use it in their products and not be destroyed before a usable and stable version ever came out...

Cheers
Ronny

 

Can you also re-add the skin texture for the voodoo queen 1.6? It's missing...

Edit: i filed a bug report through your website for this as well

 

Thanks! Sliders is works now, but the morph groups still missing.

The groups and names help a lot, it's pretty confusing as it is at the moment. In this image has the version, I left it very big, I hope it helps in the support, if you need more information please let me know.

 

What is the correct configuration of new Morph3D 1.6.1 with the Unity Ragdoll? The configuration below is not good. Can you help me please?

 

I would really like to see that basic functionality of the Artist Tools is provided free. If the rigged character is supplied and only the conversion for blendshapes is processed so the content would work with MCS, it could be free (or at least free up to a certain amount per month). All the functionality other people have pointed out may be on subscription based?

 

Forgive the simmering anger, but like many, I have questions and concerns. I am new to the forum, but not Morph3d. That is because I formerly wrote the product off as a scam. I tried it initially, and got ripped off by the false advertising. All that "make any character you want" stuff.....I wanted a black character, with a beard. They don't have razors in the post-apocalypse, but they do have black people! Buying unwanted voodoo outfit packs to get a skin tone (and only a light skin tone.....Haitians need not apply!) just seems like another way to rip people off. And what about all those fantasy games......beardless dwarves? The promise of thousands of artists working to bring many outfits to the store never seemed to produce more than two or three outfits the entire time! It was all a lie. But the lack of diversity in characters aside, the biggest issue were the technical ones. The poke through issue made the whole product unusable....nobody will ever, ever, ever release a game using the MCS if the poke-through issue isn't solved. don't believe me....ask this forum. How many of us would ever release a game to reviewers when the clothes poke through all over the place? Not to mention those random vertex spikes. It became apparent to me that Morph 3d had no intention of ever fixing that. They were just going to keep insisting that it only happens in the editor, not runtime. The joke was on me!

So imagine my surprise when Morph 3d went out of its way to send me an email announcing a major update, along with the introduction of "literally thousands" of morph stuff in the "upcoming weeks." They were even temporarily giving away the base package and put the outfits on sale in anticipation of this new deluge of goodies! The siren call of the celebratory email lured me back and I assumed that they must have fixed the issues. After all, how could they still be in business with a non-working product almost 2 years after release? So I bought a few more outfits that I planned on adapting to my project (a post-apocalyptic scenario set in the 1700's America Revolution era), even though there were no era-appropriate clothing, and patiently waited for the new slew of bugs to get fixed, anticipating a flood of thousands of new outfits and props in just a few weeks. I would finally be able to get that British Redcoat outfit I've been waiting for! it appears the joke is on me.....again. Ha ha!! Very funny guys. So here are my questions for the Morph3D folks here on this message board, and I know I speak for many others:

1) Should I assume that the polk-through issue and random vertex spikes will never be solved? The answer Morph3D gave to other users suggests the answer is "no," but said in "Morph3D speak" which implies, but does not confirm (something about being really hard for the artists to fix their crappy work, or something like that, without saying "we won't fix it" directly). If so, you can ignore my other questions. The MCS simply won't ever work, and the only other question I have is how to get a full cash refund for all of my prior MCS purchases (not a store credit for a product that will never work). If you do plan to fix the polk-through issue, then when can I reasonably expect this? One and a half years has passed so far......

2) Will we ever get beards? What if I want a Muslim character whose religion forbids shaving his beard? A fantasy dwarf? Someone who likes goatees? Facial hair is a fundamental part of human anatomy, and very visible. That invading horde of Vikings looks like a group of angry clean-shaven businessmen charging the gates if the MCS is involved!

3) Shall I send you a new dictionary? The one MCS is using must say that the word "literally" means the exact opposite of what it actually means. Translating Morph3D speak is hard! Like "literally thousands" of new outfits arriving in the store in the next weeks actually means "literally zero new outfits will arrive in the next few weeks, and we will deprecate a few too, meaning there will actually be fewer outfits in a few weeks!" That email was from January...now March, so we are entering "months." My question for Morph3D....what was the reason for sending me that email? Was it to induce me to buy stuff, like the Lizardman and Minotaur, in anticipation of the thousands of items....just to laugh your way to the bank? It worked...I bought them.....so I guess you win.

4) Final question.....why should I be a customer of Morph3D? What is good about your company?

P.S. To be honest, I still hold out a very thin thread of hope. Call me a masochist. Please do the right thing and make the wonderful product we all believ(ed) you can. My thoughts about the "thousands" of items was that Morph3D would convert the Daz clothing library to MCS, since the existing outfits came this way, and the new system is based on the genesis 3 characters. If so....why nothing? I could really use that 18th century clothing!

 

No. I am a Maya user and you cannot take that clothing into Morph3d's tool and set it to use with MCS.

Here is why. First you have to take that clothing and make it fit the model. That will have to be done in a 3d modeling program. It is not easy, since the character pose will be different so you will have to change the pose of the clothing. Then fit it to work perfectly on the body.

Then you need to rig to the MCS rig, which according to the description of the tool, the rigging is not done in the tool but in a 3d modeling program.

Then finally, you use the tool to create the blendshapes with the Morph3d Tool. Everything else must be done outside of the tool. Possibly they may add rigging, but one of the MCS dudes said that rigging was not included above somewhere. Sorry if I don't want to hunt for it.

I have refit clothes to UMA models and the method would be similar until you get to the blendshapes, which is why you need the tool. Refitting clothing is not easy and it is almost easier just to make your own from scratch. However, it can be done...just a lot of work and frustration if you are not already familiar with 3d modeling tools.

Marvelous Designer is a great tool, but you will also need to use a 3d modeling tool to retopologize the clothing to lower the polys. MD will give you a 20k pair of pants which is not practical in most games. It also costs $50 a month. Plus you could use Blender for free to do the rest if you are willing to sit down and learn it. MD is not hard to learn.

What he said. You have to pre-fit the clothing. That is the tough part. Not impossible though. Pick up Blender and start practicing. Or you can try Maya LT for $30 a month, which is my preference. But Blender is free so a good choice for seeing if you like modeling.

BTW, if you buy that clothing asset on Unity, according to Unity's EULA, you can modify it. So no worries there.

 

I believe the content team is already aware, but I'll talk to them about it and make sure they're working on it. Thanks for reporting it.

 

We changed how the groups work, we'll have an update this coming week regarding it.

I agree scrolling through a giant list is tedious, we do have a search bar at the top but you still need to sort of know what you want. It's not a great "browsing" experience. I think the new group system will help a lot.

 

That mapping looks about right, I don't see anything particularly wrong about it. We do a lot of bone adjustments on our end and I would guess that's causing it. I will take a look at the ragdoll system today and tomorrow and figure out how to make it work with our avatar system.

 

I'll give this a shot in a few minutes. Thanks for the info.

 

I apologize but I have to address only the technical aspects here; I do understand your concern. One aspect I do want to address is the different race textures. I am already working very hard to make sure this happens internally.

1. Our current poke through system only handles hiding the body behind clothing. It doesn't handle clothing to clothing. I did a few prototypes last year that handled clothing to clothing. I just haven't had time to implement these solutions. Some of them require an overhaul to how we categorize our content, and some just haven't been optimized enough for run time use. I will say that this is one of my top items I'm working on.

In regards to the vertex spikes, can you explain what you mean there? I'm not sure and I don't want to answer if I don't understand fully.

2. Yes, we are working on these. Unfortunately I can't give any dates on this, which I know is probably what you're looking for. I can discuss technical issues around this if you have other questions about it though.

4. Only you can decide if the value that MCS brings is worth it to your game or application. I can tell you that we had to spend a lot of time internally to get a base set of supporting core, applications, and tooling. Now that the ground work is there we can release updates, features, and fixes more quickly. I'll be here to answer questions and help out on a technical level as best I can.

 

I tried deleting the .mon files from my project and nothing changed. Still doesn't fix the LOD issue and the scripts are still broken. As a note, I sent some screenshots to you guys the other day that shows the errors I get in detail. If you look up my support ticket, you should be able to see it. I can post them here if that helps as well.

 

Thanks, I will take a look as soon as I can. Just FYI, the mon files contain meta information that tell us how to attach components and ultimately create or update the prefab. You do not want to remove these or the prefabs will not be created properly. I'm assuming you meant so that you could reimport them, though, I just wanted to clarify this in case there was any confusion.

 

Yeah. I followed your instructions of deleting them and reimporting them. Nothing changed and scripts are still not on the models. Not sure what's causing this, but I'm willing to do what I can in order to get it fixed. Honestly, I just want to move on from this so that I can get back to creating stuff for my game.

 

I sent you a message in a conversation, when you have some time check it out and respond and I'll help you out.

 

@jjanzer_morph

1) What happened to the skull caps? i can see the scalp through the hair.

2) The hair looks really bad. I can make it look decent by duplicating the hair and changing one of the materials to fade and increase the cutoff for the other.


Standard Hair


Changed rendering mode to fade.


Use both together increasing the cutoff for the cutout material.


I remember Morph3D using a similar method at release but it was abandoned.

 

I appreciate your response, Mr. J. I hope my negative tone wasn't too much....I am normally a jovial person, but I felt personally hurt by the feeling of having been lied to for the purpose of inducing a sale of a product that doesn't work (and never has) as well as the confusion surrounding the lack of basic functionality that the MCS really needs. I fear your product is doomed unless the simple things are fixed soon. Seriously, with love in my heart, I urge you to fix the poke-through and no-facial hair issues. We can't have a system that is supposed to allow us to make any character we want....as long as they are clean-shaven white guys who can't wear clothes. Can you imagine what people will say about MCS when they discover they can't make some of the most common character types (the wise bearded wizard or king, any dwarf, Viking, pirate, barbarian, Scottish highlander, Janissary, lumberjack, hippie ......the list is huge!). And since every other potential competitor to the MCS does have at least some facial hair (e.g. Fuse) it is hard to see how such a basic requirement will be ignored by the community. The saving grace is that the potential competitors are slow to develop, and the MCS can easily rush through the breach and become the premier character system used by people like us.....as soon as we get our beards! You mention technical issues with facial hair, and while I am just a hobbyist who knows nothing, you should consider posting the issue here nonetheless. There may be a wise soul who can help, and you never know where a good idea could come from. It really is necessary.

You suggest that you may actually have a solution for the clothing issue that isn't implemented (really? implement that thing!).....so I remain hopeful, and will not yet abandon the MCS for a second time at this point. But honestly, if you already know that we will never realistically see these problems fixed in a reasonable time, please just let us know so we can proceed to find solutions that will work.

With respect to your question about vertex spikes. Note the vertex pulled away from the back of the glove below.
This usually happens when the artist has accidentally swept a stray vertex up in a selection, moves that vertex group, and doesn't realize it. There was another post on this forum a ways back that showed a similar problem with an other outfit. I've seen it several times myself. Also, note the poke through on the glove. I know the injection mask is supposed to stop skin showing through, but I think that is skin, not clothing, poking through (at runtime).


Finally, I know you are the technical guy, Mr. J, but would you be willing to inquire with your other colleagues at Morph3D, about what exactly they meant when they said to expect thousands of items in the weeks following their January announcement? The reason I ask is because I assumed the email was referring to some plan to run thousands of the Daz studio clothing library items through the new MCS tools, to produce MCS-ready outfits. Since the already-existing outfits come from the same library, I figure it would be a simple matter to use the clothes already fitted to genesis 3 models to produce the long-awaited diversity of outfits that really are needed to make the MCS worth anything (assuming the other issues we discussed are resolved, of course). There are many items in that library I would be interested in, once the MCS becomes usable. But since no items ever appeared, I don't know what is going on.

I'm rooting for you and Morph3D, despite having nothing but bad experiences over the past year and a half, and I very much look forward to the day (in the very near future...right?) that the MCS is the five-star product I keep imagining every time I think about it.

 

@jjanzer_morph

Nobody likes me. Because I'm that guy, who will ride your ass and tell you that everything you do is wrong right up until you get it right. But in this community, I'm appreciated for it. Unfortunately for you M3D, that means no writing me off with 2 or 3 line responses after I take a good amount of effort to point out your failings.

I understand that you don't have all the answers yet. I understand you can't talk a lot about the EULA. But when you asked "what would you want for a tool to be considered exceptional", I gave you a thorough answer. And all I really get back is "Thanks for the response, the best I can offer right now is that I'll discuss these items with our team." ... in other words, I wasted my time explaining what you asked me to explain? This response is what we've come to expect means you'll take it to the table, where it'll be swept into the garbage and talks about how to dig deeper into our pockets will resume. At least, this is the void we the community have come to know that response to be.

"When you refer to modeling the clothing are you referring to a system where we provide you with a set of "base" clothing that is easily customized (textured/deformed/etc), then our tool will handle the remapping/projecting/etc?"

Pretty simplified view, I would expect your question to require more detail to get a proper response. See @Lysander's response to this, whom accurately explains the expectation from an exceptional version of your artist tools. I recognize it's unrealistic, but if you want to be a subscription tool, with exceptional value, this is what you need to be.

RE:

I'm not an artist. I want to drag some sliders around, click a few toggles, maybe drag my mouse over the clothing with different tools to rip or shred, or dirty it up, or add fraying. Take a good look at the clothing you wear, look at the people in the same office. Imagine you, as a programmer, wanted to make all the shirts you can see in the office, with all their blemishes, stains, frayed cuffs or collars, etc. You have created a system by which the core is designed to morph, why would you not extend this out into many other areas in support of it... Make morphable base clothing. Make morphable animals and creatures.
As I said before, we all went into this expecting that we'd buy base models to alleviate half the work for us as programmers, and reduce our cost for variety. Likewise, aside from the odd game that you run around as a protagonist with the same clothing from start to end, pretty much every game these days involves some level of vanity the player wants to engage in. Fallout 4 lets the player sculpt the entire face, why can't we still even add beards to MCS? And if you think I'm comparing Apples to Oranges, you've had YEARS to achieve these results without having a game to build ontop of it.

@Lysander I have also come to greatly respect the efforts you've put in here, it's saved me from having to fight this tooth and nail alone on the daily basis, repeating myself a dozen times to the same effect. It might be time a few of us band together as a sort of UAS monitor to keep this community what's expected and keep putting the pressure on those who would try to change it. Hell, I'd even take a little place to idle and talk about asset integrations, let me know where y'all hang out.

And this shout out goes to everyone who is here grinding their nails on the chalkboard to get something changed... Like @Teila it's always nice to see you popping in, I enjoy your posts across all the forums as well, and often find you a source that saves me hours of reading. There are a few others of you out there helping us fight the good fights, you know who you are, keep it up!

 

We're working on this currently. The new way of solving this should be more efficient (painted in the shader of the head instead of a separate high poly cap geometry). As soon as we have an update I'll post here about it.

 

I have just upgraded my Morph Character System to the latest version, and for some strange reason it is saying that I am missing 211 dependencies from the Morph3d/Content sub folders such as Ciao_Bella_Outfit, M3D_Female and Micah_Hair.
They all appear to be .MON files, is this normal or something else?

 

I can understand people's frustrations, I definitely can understand why people are upset; there's no need to apologize. I can also tell you that facial hair is very high on the list of priorities. Even from my own list of things I'd like to see done, it's in the top three. The clothing poke through system is also up there b/c from a technology standpoint it will solve a ton of problems and cut WAY down on the time it takes our content team to produce a set. With that in mind, we do have to stay focused on certain items and choose which ones we can develop first and which ones to delay. It's very helpful for everyone here to let us know which items you're most interested in so we can decide if priorities should be rearranged.

Thank you for showing me about the stray vert(s), I'm adding this to my growing list. I'll try to get you an update regarding this as soon as I can. If it's a content issue I'll get the content fixed, and if it's a code issue I'll get it fixed. Either way expect to have it resolved.

 

The mon files handle building and updating the prefabs of the clothing items. If you updated with the base packages the content should all be there to meet the dependencies but clearly from your post there is something wrong. If it's possible could you send me the log and/or a screenshot so I can take a look? You can also try re-importing the Ciao Bella folder and see if the issues clear up.