You can use this characters for prototype or make additional armor and weapons for them and use in you game production.
Animation clips can be used with any rig type but to redirect it to custom characters must “humanoid” avatar used.
There is a difference between man and woman poses, which makes the difference between femininity and masculinity.
T-Pose pose can be used by artist to create and attach armor, clothes and weapons to characters.
MECHANIM pose added for better re-targeting animations in Unity Mechanim.
I will be glad it can be used with UMA. But I really don’t know if it is possible at all.
If I understood right base character of UMA must remains the same. And only armor/clothes can be added.
Or I am wrong?
I am still learning UMA myself, but from my understanding, the most significant part of the UMA is the underlying bone structure for the mesh. I beleive it is used to keep the rest of the mesh parts together in a comprehensive way. I think any mesh can be used so long as the bones are setup correctly. Once setup the mesh can be tweaked, armor and clothing swapped out, etc.
UMA2 was just released so it might be worth looking into for you. There are new videos being created and the forum for it has been very active. Once I am through with a few more interfaces and some terrain issues I am having I will be digging in, so I will keep in touch and let you know what I find.
The sizing bones have to be added so that UMA can manipulate the dimensions of the body, and the meshes have to split the same way the current UMA ones do in order to make it possible to change arm / leg / torso / head meshes. You can download the UMA Content Pack to get ahold of the rigs and meshes.
What Will B (justb) did was he created a re-texture that would provide a different look, with different normals, but using the same UMA mesh. (I hope I described that correctly.) He is also in the process of making different UMA faces, which is helpful. Because these new faces use the original UMA mesh, they will be compatible with the hair and beard slots that already exist.
In any case, going with UMA or not I want to develop Adam and Eva and create many armors clothes and skins for these characters.
I am also thinking that it will be nice to make a way that other artist can take these characters and create modifications on their base, if someone like. I just don’t know how to license it. I will open discussion about it on publishers forum maybe.
I hope you do choose to go with UMA. My impression is that with the sizing bones and re-texturing, there’s a lot of customization that can be done while still keeping the underlying UMA mesh. Clothing is added as mesh slots that can either go on top of an existing body mesh, or as a replacement for a body mesh (like, say, a robot arm).
And, of course, new races can be created within UMA, so it is possible to do the various rat, gnome, and reptilian types as UMAs, with costume items that can be easily switched around within each race.
For visualization purposes, here’s a helmet from Mr. Necturus slotted onto some base UMA characters as part of a software test. The sizing and slotting system for UMA works well. We just need to keep building up the art resources, IMO.
I will look into this.
But as I know right now. The only advantage is sizing bones. Only this feature available for non-artist Unity users. All other customization may be done even without UMA. I can take any of my characters and add armor, faces, skins… everything… All these in one way ore another need to be done in external 3D soft like MAX or Maya and only after this may be used with UMA.
With my respect there are some armor parts that can fit most of human characters. Helmet and shoulder armor are like that. They easily can be attached to only one bone. Problems start when it comes to chest and paints mostly.
Here skeleton with 7 different armor types attached to. No UMA used.
Well, there may be more advantages than just that.
The sizing bones do give the ability to change the shape of a character, but they can also enable a user-defined level of randomization at runtime, providing unique features to each character as they are generated. So you can have group after group of orcs or street thugs, and each time the proportions and clothing combinations are different.
Also, UMA gives the ability to easily serialize characters (text or binary recipe) so they can be rapidly shared over network in a multiplayer game.
I accept that UMA maybe a nice solution for crowd characters generated by application randomly. But don’t give much for main playable characters which I want to create actually.
I agree mr_Necturus. The UMA system is definitely a great system to use when in need of a wide variety of characters, but does not hold up in quality for main game characters.
Nice work on Adam & Eva! Though I think she may be a Lilith not Eva.
