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

Total noob right here, any way to change the skin color? When I try to change the head color, it also changes the eye color.

 

Not directly, I'll update the shader in the future to support this. The current method is either write your own shader for this support (you can restrict the tint to the uv regions that affect the skin), or to take the texture into an external app and tint the skin there and then use that custom texture in your game.

 

Another problem.

Why the bounds of the clothing when is equipped are way off where they are supposed to be? For example when attaching a skirt the bounds of the screen are around the head of the character, this makes camera culling work improperly as sometimes the bounds would be outside the camera view but the cloth will be still in the camera view, and since the bounds are not on view it will occlude the clothing.

 

This is a bug that is already fixed, which will ship in the next minor release. What you'll need to do is enable the feature under the advanced section of the character manager.

 

I've got a quick question in regards to the asset "REV Hair" (found in the free female Sci Fi pack)


The part down the middle there is very large, kinda ugly, very noticeable. Is it just supposed to look like this? Or is there a specific setting I need to edit in order to make this look better / close that gap?

 

I was wondering if the content team there has any plans for some standard profession assets? Such as:

Police
SWAT
Firemen
Doctor
Nurse
Bus driver
Construction worker
Etc?

 

First thing I did was selecting the material of the hair (or the GameObject in the Hierarchy where this is being used) and change the Rendering Mode from Cutout to Fade and it started to look a lot more similar to its actual look in promotional banners. I see you're still using Cutout, which is the default, though probably not intended by developers.

Eitherway, I'm still having some trouble with certain hair styles, even with the Fade setting turned on. Both Micah Female Hair and Toulouse Hair (please refer to attached files) are set to Fade (and Culling Mode Off) with the Morph3D/Volund Variants/Standard Character (Specular, Surface) shader and you can definitely see the shape of the head behind the hair. Even with Morph3D/Standard (Specular setup) - Double Sided, things don't look much better.

I've checked the textures for both hair styles and there seems to be too much transparency all over the texturized regions, which probably explains why you can see the head shape.

 

For us, being able to change this at runtime is not necessary because we set up scenes specifically for screenshots. So, as long as it works conveniently using Unity's serialization, we'll be fine. The problem in the current solution (as far as I understand it) is that we'd have to duplicate all the materials manually if we have one instance of the character in a deferred scene, and another instance in the forward scene. But that part will be solved with your upcoming uber shader. So then, it's really just a convenience thing of having Morph3d make sure that all materials it uses use the "right" shader, which can be done in edit time.

Such a shader would be quite helpful. We often use emissive maps for eyes to get "special" effects and if the main eye texture (which is part of the face texture) does not add its own color, tint/emission should work. For the general use case, I believe eyes do need their own texture because there are a lot of interesting irises that have more than just one hue in them.

Sorry, I wasn't very clear:

Basically, I was looking for a resource that teaches me how to set up a character in Morph3d from start to "finish", "finish" being selecting different variations of hair / clothing that come with the content packages. In fact, how those variations are selected was the only part that I was struggling with.

Eventually, I figured it out and then realized that probably, you can extend M3DCharacterManager in a way so that such a tutorial would not even be necessary anymore (if that dropdown you added last minute, "Preconfigured Materials", is pushed from CIclothing to M3DCharacterManager ... and if CIhair and CIprop and probably even CIbody get a similar feature that's also available through M3DCharacterManager).

Even in its current, kind of hidden location, "Preconfigured Materials" makes a huge difference in terms of figuring out how this is meant to be used. With CIbody, where there sometimes are different materials for LOD, and sometimes not, getting a nice list of options would make a huge difference. And probably, having just one "item" for a combination of Body, Head and EyeAndLash that fits together, would be the way to go.

Obviously, coding this and making it work reliably takes time - but it quickly will save a lot of time (and fairly boring "work") for everyone setting up a character in the editor.

Hair/hat combined in one asset sounds fine. The only issue with that approach is that for customization, you'd need two materials so that hat and hair color can be controlled separately. And that would break "Preconfigured Materials". So maybe the simplest solution would be to have "hair that works with hat" that is still a separate asset but does require the hat to be complete because compared to "normal hair" it has geometry removed (and would probably come with that hat that it is designed for).

I'll submit a ticket ... Id is 1646.

 

I've changed the setting to fade, and while that did help a tiny bit, that makes the hair turn transparent, like in your pictures.

Edit: Thinking about it, my issue with the hair in particular can be solved by editing the texture directly. The roots need to be extended a little bit.

 

Perfect! It works.
Thanks you. Very good support.

 

Open a ticket at: https://www.morph3d.com/help

For that part line, we have a texture overlay that can be applied to the head submesh (_Overlay) channel. Which means the hairs need to have those textures created so they can be injected in. Or the mesh can be updated to have the caps and/or the mesh can be pushed out a bit more.

 

I think a set of professions like that is a great idea, I'll forward it to the content team.

 

I wrote a new hair shader that I just need to clean up and finalize and release, you can see some early comparison screenshots here: https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/r...s-male-and-female.355675/page-47#post-3028557

It won't fix all the issues but it definitely looks much better.

 

That's great news! Definitely looking forward to that update before we purchase the male/female hair packs from the Asset Store.

 

I would like to bring up this again just to get an update on the plans to have this.

Are any options to have anatomically correct models? even at least on the chest part?

Thanks in advance for your update.

 

Sorry I don't follow you, can you be more specific? You can always PM me directly if you want to as well.

 

is there any fix for this : When i instantiate a Mcs model at runtime there is a 2 to 3 second freeze.

 

Hi, has anyone tried using the MCS models with UFPS? (single or multi-player)
If so did it work and was it straight forward? I.E: just use the information in the UFPS documentation to add a new character.
Thanks

 

What version of MCS are you running, what figure and what assets? How are you instantiating it (can you show me your code)? What platform? How many morphs?

The only noticable delay I've encountered and know about is on Android as we have to extract contents out of the jar file the first time which has a moderate cost but subsequent lookups are fast.

 

I've used UFPS internally for a demo, it works pretty well. I didn't have any problems working with it outside of getting it to work with IK at the same time which took a bit more work.

 

Hi! Some question about mesh - is it possible to have all blendshapes available on mesh without Character manager attached? The mian problem of Morph 3D for me at the moment is the performance. With single model in scene Character manager works fine, but when there are 20 spawning at the same moment - it can be a big problem for the performance. At the moment i'm using custom blendshape change script (that's why i need them to be available at start on the mesh), character controller is disabled becasue of mentioned problem.

 

We don't currently offer any way to bake the character out like this so you'd have to write your own solution for solving this. We create/inject the blendshapes on demand. If you don't need to drive the morphs, you could bake out a final mesh using BakeMesh and then create prefabs from those meshes. Otherwise you'll need to dynamically create the blendshapes/copy them/etc and then put them into a prefab.

 

One other thing, I'd recommend looking into a concept like a resource pool, or queueing up instantiation like that. Not sure if you've already implemented a solution like that though. You can do other things like pre-allocating during scene load as well, so it's not done while being played. Also, make sure you're on the latest version 1.6 is a lot faster then old versions if you're using an old build. I'm guessing you're just loading a lot of assets/morphs/etc and it's just taking a bit though. If you run it through a profiler you can send me the data and I'll take a look for you however.

 

Ok, then what's the best way (for performance) in my situation? I usually have 20-80 characters in scene, with various shapes on face and body and various set of cloth. Is there the most optimal way to instantiate your prefabs without dramatic performance drops? For example what's the best way to add hair to the model?

 

Do they all need to be spawned and running right away? The best approach is to use a concept of a pool that does not go away when you're done with a figure, it's just put back into the pool. To do so you'd use a few "placeholders" that you place in your scene where those figures would need to be. Then when a player trips a trigger or gets within X distance you pop a figure off your pool list and adjust the morphs based on what needs to be seen right now. Once the player leaves that area and the figure is no longer necessary you would remove them from that area and push them back into the list of available figures. I would organize the figures based on clothing sets so that I wouldn't need to do any instantiation/gc during this.

Another simpler approach is to just spawn all the figures but do it a bit nicer...

Attached is an example of two ways to spawn a character dynamically, one blocks (if you press T) and one is a bit nicer and only does ~100ms of work before moving to the next frame.

You have a lot of options, without knowing what your requirements are I can't really say "this is the best method" there are too many ways to solve the problem.

 

Thanks! I'm using Prefabs Pool, so thoretically everything should work. Another question: i'm trying to attach cloth to model at runtime. After fisrt try, everything (exept alpha mask, it didn't work at all) was good, but after second try (no changes made) i'm getting following error:

NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
MORPH3D.CORESERVICES.BoneUtility.cleanAllBoneNames (UnityEngine.Transform bone)

In code i'm using:
character.AttachCIClothing(Shirts[Shirt_Type], true);

What can be the issue? I've tried to use original M3DMale, but getting the same error.

 

What happens if you instead add the content pack instead like:

Code (CSharp):

1. ContentPack cp = new ContentPack(Shirts[Shirt_Type].gameObject, true);
2. character.AddContentPack(cp);

 

Just tried with your code - the same error:
NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
MORPH3D.CORESERVICES.BoneUtility.cleanAllBoneNames (UnityEngine.Transform bone)

Edit: just in case - i'm attaching KG_Tunic prefab, no changes or something was made. As i said before - first time all prebabs worked fine, with shapes etc.

Edit2: hair objects works fine with your code, as well as with mine, cloth still gives an error;

 

I

I've tried to redownload the pacakges and reinstall whole Morph3d folder, women works fine, the male model - doesn't, only hair.

 

When you say the male figure doesn't work, can you be more specific about what's not working?

Does the figure load onto the scene?
Can you attach clothing to it? If not, which assets fail?
Do you get any errors in your console, and if you do can you paste them here?

I'm taking a look at the knight guard tunic right now and I'll let you know if I find a problem.

 

I didn't find any problems with the asset, I was able to load the figure and attach the tunic through scripting just fine using 1.6.4 at runtime. If you create a new project with our plugin and clothing does the issue still occur?

If there is a way you can send your project (or preferably a slimmed down version) to me so I can take a look?

Do you have issues specifically with the Tunic or with all assests in Knight Guard, or with all clothing assets for the male?

What happens if you delete the male in your scene, reimport the male fbx and put it back in?

 

Please check your email for an issue with the Female Outlander character. I believe you need to include a document on how to set up the character. I'm not sure whether you respond to emails or forum questions (I prefer emails). Thanks...

 

http://srecorder.com/s/41ns

Hi I've attached a video above of a skin/eye color system my team and I have worked on. Unfortunately the way the skin system works means that we have the eye turns whatever the color skin has been set to. We tried to work around this by creating an eye shell that surrounds the eye and drawing our custom eye on that, and it seems to work well until we zoom in lose and it masks the eye shell and shows the original eye.

Any idea on how we could fix this and advice on whether you think this solution will work well?

 

[QUOTE="There's always a tradeoff, it would be nice if we were able to provide different ways to address this but we have other priorities right now. I'll make a shader and get it out that will allow people to tint the eye color and or replace the texture for the eye (a very commonly asked for feature). I'll try to let you know when it's ready but I'm slammed at the moment.[/QUOTE]

Is there any movement on this as it is something we really need?

We were using eyes as a clothing item as shown in one of your tutorials below.

However, it seems the eye textures are missing from the latest version. Was this feature dropped? Even then it was only a partial solution as ideally we need to be able to change the eye ball colour, the iris texture and the iris colour.

 

I haven't received an email, can you PM me?

 

Are you saying your custom shell is being culled when the camera gets close? If so I'd guess it would be a bad boundary where the camera thinks the mesh can skip rendering. If so fix the boundary for your shell. If it's still there and rendering but it's literally on top of the eye, you might have an issue like z-fighting but it doesn't appear to be the case in the video.

If you want you can send me your project and I can take a look.

 

Is there any movement on this as it is something we really need?

We were using eyes as a clothing item as shown in one of your tutorials below.

However, it seems the eye textures are missing from the latest version. Was this feature dropped? Even then it was only a partial solution as ideally we need to be able to change the eye ball colour, the iris texture and the iris colour.[/QUOTE]


That was based on our old figure and pre 1.6 version. I'll tell them to mark it as obsolete.

The current release has the eyes in the head texture.

Yes, I'll take care of the shader enhancement and get this out soon.

 

I emailed the owner of the asset on the asset store AND I opened a case (1654)on the morph3d website.

 

Hey everyone,

I've been out of the loop regarding Morph for a while, and had a few questions I hope you guys can answer.

The most broad question I have, how are things in general? When I last checked in, communication was abysmal (looking back over the past few pages, this seems to have greatly improved!) and errors that required weird work arounds from other users were a showstopper.

How are the Artist Tools? Do they work as advertised, and if so, how difficult/ intuitive are they?

Lastly, is there still that old license of you can only use X items? I remember that was receiving a lot of negative feedback. This seemed very limiting to most games, but maybe that's been changed or cleared up.

Thanks in advance! I'm currently at work so I can't check out the actual assets, but I'm trying to find the answers to my questions and figured it wouldn't hurt to ask as well

 

The ticket system is the best way to get your answer as it's properly tracked. Expect our CS to get a reply back to you as soon as they can.

 

Hi everyone,

I just updated our shaders to support eye tinting and texture replacement. It also fixes the deferred shader's eye iris issue. These haven't been fully tested, so let me know if you run into problems.

You can download these at: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Byi5u41H4gStTXFmcXp5QWdfTUE

These will ship in the next release.

 

i will try to update to 1.6 again but i have big problems try trying to do that.
what i have is 4 models that are in the scene
start off Disabled and i just enable them only the first time it take 2 to 3 second
after that it work fine that's 2 to 3 second for each one.

i will instance them and see if that will help i did not think i would need that for only 4 bodys.

i tried instancing for the main seen but something odd happens with Ai they all reach out to the parent game object.

 

M3DMorphEditor i have to remove to get 1.6.4 to work is that a good idea

 

While 2 to 3 seconds is pretty extreme, unfortunately, activating disabled objects the first time often gives you a rather severe performance hit in Unity. So, it is often better to have the objects active but located somewhere "out of view" and then move them into view instead of activating them. That, of course, will consume more memory, so it's always a trade-off. But in many cases (e.g. VR), even 0.1s is way too much, and often, you have plenty of memory available.

The time taken to activate an object can be tracked fairly well with the Unity Profiler, so that's also something you might want to look into.

 

You don't need that editor script (it's if you want to modify a morph file directly which you'd have to export out of our mr files. What error are you getting out of curiosity? What version of Unity? What os?

1.6 is a lot faster in pretty much every way from 1.0. If, after you upgrade, you still see performance issues please run them through the deep profiler and send me the info so I can resolve the problems.

 

The trick jashan listed above (keeping the object active but off camera) is a good trick. We used to have to use that trick in 1.0 for demos due to the instantiation time.

 

I'll respond to this post soon, I wanted to give the community a chance to respond first before I answered. However just FYI, in regards to AT we use it internally on several projects (including Ready Room) to process assets.

 

using 5.6.2f1 and 2017
win 10

1. errors can't download female body
2. male body starts off with default gray shader
3. hair looks crazy (the same as the image lemonrays shared).
4. models hair disappears when you look above it. ( i stopped trying to up date when 1.6 first came out. waiting for a fix for it . This happens even in a blank project. )

scrip is references my ( MorphData maybe thats a bad name: i'm going to change the name and see what happens) data class for saving morphs values. and errors out.

 

Has the M3DMorphEditor.cs been modified at all? It's trying to reference the MorphData class, if you look at the script can you tell me what namespace MorphData says it belongs to? It seems like it might be pointing to an obsolete reference instead of the newer class.

I would guess your installation or upgrade of morph got messed up. When you installed Morph in a new project in Unity did you get these errors (or just the issue with the hair bounding region and nothing else)?

 

Is there something I am missing? With the MCS Male when I install it I get this error:

Shader error in 'Morph3D/Standard-2pass-double sided': invalid subscript 'posWorld' at line 107 (on d3d11)
​

And when I drag the MCS male fbx file to the scene the character is green. Same for female. And clothes. And so on lol.

Edit: Also I am using Unity 2017.1.0f3.