3D Cartoon Avatar Creator

Unity Engine
1

Hi All…my first post to the Unity Forums…and I’m bubbling over with excitement as we start our project.

We want to to create low poly cartoony 3d characters for “Planet Earthlings.” In the future players will be able to choose different alien races so we’ll have to have multiple meshes, but to start we have one mesh with various options for textures for: head, hair, eyes, nose, mouth, upper body, lower body and shoes.

What is the best (meaning fastest running) way to create an avatar creator where players can choose from the different visual options and then have that player avatar for the game?

Thanks in advance,
Greg

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Have I posted this in the wrong place? Anyone out there with some advice? Assistance GREATLY appreciated. Cheers.

3

Not to be difficult, but your question isn’t really very good.
Your asking what is the best and fastest running way to create a system that half of the game developers around here are developing.
So I guess the answer to your question is to use code bits to code it up properly.
On the other hand - you are only swapping textures on the fly, a lot less complicated than character generation systems others are developing, so that might make the system you end up developing the best fastest running system in the neighborhood.

Might do some researching on the subject, because there are a sack load of topics asking similar questions.

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Hey theANMATOR2b…First of all…THANKS! Really appreciate your reply. I was worried the question was too general, but you’ve given me another view I hadn’t considered. I promise you I was researching this question for days and haven’t found anything here on the Unity forums or elsewhere. Perhaps I’m searching for the wrong thing. Any suggestions?

I guess I was thinking there would be an existing framework for this, but haven’t found anything in the Asset Store.

All the best!

5

Another more code-knowledgeable dev might be able to answer this question better than me, but I think you should search for run-time texture swapping. There may be a framework in the asset store that is similar, something like this, but instead of swapping sprites - you will be swapping textures. Maybe this one.

6

Thanks again…I’m going to search for texture swapping now. Perhaps I need to post another question in a thread about layering materials. I’ve read about it, but so far when I put a PNG with alpha on a mesh with multiple material slots I get only the bottom most layer showing on the mesh. I’m guessing I’ll need to figure out how to make that work before we can swap textures to get this effect. Appreciate you taking the time to help. Cheers.

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Hey theANMATOR2b I’m finally working on this creating avatars specifically for the project. Did you have any experiences with avatar creation over the past months? Thanks!

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Yeah - that’s pretty much my wheel house, though my specific discipline is character animation.
If you’d like to discuss offline you can PM me.

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Hey theANIMATOR2b…not really sure what happened to my forums account, but haven’t been getting any notifications about my posts here. Just happened to see your last reply when browsing today. What would be the best way to contact you directly? Can you e-mail me at: greg (at) planeteartlings (dot) org? Cheers, Greg

QUOTE=“theANMATOR2b, post: 2530162, member: 655602”]Yeah - that’s pretty much my wheel house, though my specific discipline is character animation.
If you’d like to discuss offline you can PM me.[/QUOTE]