Avatar by Creative Pudding

Community Showcases
1

Hi Folks,

We are proudly presents our unity character package Avatar, which is designed to make your life easier when you are working with characters.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen many packages which provides animations or AI or something else as an add-on to your characters. We found most of them very hard to work with or almost impossible to re-use in your own game.

We believe, the key is to make it easy to re-use and customize to make it unique for you own game. We followed this line and we build up a small platform around the character, which allows anyone to extend it with custom needs.

The main goal of this package is to provide an easy way to make your own character smart with adding AI, high quality biped animations and more.
Using this package, you can set your own character as Player to walk, run or controlled by AI as NPC within 1 minute. To prove it, we made a video as well :slight_smile:
Switching between male / female animation is easy as 1 click.

Our main goal was to make it easy to use, therefore we made all we could to make it very easy to integrate, customize or extend.

The package also comes with many bonuses, like dressing animations, character selection page, characters with 3 different dressing codes, some 3d objects like active mirror, etc.

We are looking for your questions and ideas to make it as good as you wish!

Check it out on our product page:
www.creativepudding.com/avatar

Unity3D Asset Store:

CleanSourceCode:
https://www.cleansourcecode.com/index.php/avatar.html

Online Demo:
www.creativepudding.com/avatar-demo

Have Fun,
Creative Pudding

2

That’s a good looking package. Can we change things like clothing, or body/face morphs at runtime? Are you planning to make multiple heads/bodies for each gender that the same clothing will fit?

3

do you have any screenshot? or example video?

4

Hi Whippets,

Dressing / Cloths:
Currently our dressing example uses skins, so we “switch” the character with the right skinned version. If you make your own characters with the right cloths as skin, you can switch them.
Dynamic dressing - skinned mesh as cloths - is in our road map, then you can change as real cloths.

Updates/Extensions:
We are planning to make continuously updates in the next few months, to complete the Avatar package as we designed. Then we will looking into bigger add-ons, which would goes into extensions.
We want to add anything we can into the update (so it’s free after you already have Avatar), but these content must fit in size and in design.
Those ideas, which not fits, will be made as a separate extensions. Each extension could have different prices, some even free. We simply don’t want to mess the Avatar with too much content: keep it small and easy to use.

We have many ideas on our road map, but we want YOU to choose from or tell us your OWN idea.
We want to make this package as a platform to control your characters, so please feel free to add your own requests here.

Which idea will be implemented in which order, depends on your request. Simply the more requested one has the chance to come first.

Some of our ideas:

  • multi-player mode
  • sound system (so you hear steps, talks)
  • more AI
  • more animations (swimming, fighting)
  • 2D platform animations (designed for 2D)
  • hand animations
  • facial animations

We have the tool and knowledge to create any animations, AI or scripts we want.

So please, think BIG!

cheers,
Creative Pudding

5

check it out on our product page:
www.creativepudding.com/avatar

asset store:
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/24476

online demo:
www.creativepudding.com/avatar-demo

6

Switching to the right skinned version for each piece of clothing is ok for outer clothing, but what if an Avatar needed a choice of shirt, jacket, and coat? Would we require a separate skinned model for each possible combination, or could we build up layers of clothing as required?

Coming from an MMORPG building background, I’d like to be able to change all these things in my own character creation page, and be able to tailor the colours of each item of clothing without affecting the colour of other clothing items or skin. I certainly am thinking BIG XD

7

You are absolutely right. The current version is only support “character switch”. So if you have the same character in multiple dressing codes, you can switch them. This is indeed, not the preferred way and the reason we released as BONUS.

We want to make this part perfect with skinned mesh, so you can really change cloths, but we run into many obstacles and we wanted to release the idea at least. Mainly, changing cloths using animations or running with a skinned mesh on is way under or quality yet. Once we can make it looking good, we will release it.

However, you can change most of the parts of the package easily, so if you wish, you can only use the characters selection page from demo, and implement your own way of layering the cloths.

cheers

8

Cool, good info there :slight_smile:

It would be good if there were morph bones so that weight, musculature, and facial changes could be made. This way, skinned clothes would still fit whatever morphs were made.

9

Thats a good looking package, just fiddled around with the online demo :wink: Is there a way to make turning a bit more responsive? Its a bit difficult if I’m just walking around the house…

10

Would it be possible with this package to also have the animations in a bvh format in a separate folder to apply to my cat rig in 3ds max to bake in with my twist bones and extra elbow and knee bones… could I then bring the baked fbx’s in to update the animations you already have in the package?

I hope I’m clear…

11

Yes, it is possible to tweak it with simply adjust the Input Axis values (drag, sensitivity, gravity).

The code uses 2 input modes:

  • one built-in, what you can see now. Think about this as a fail-safe settings or Avatar default.

  • Input Manager axis settings, which is what you would use if you want to change the settings

You can switch with 1 flag.

Hope it helps!

12

It’s clear…
I cannot tell from this info if your cat would work or not, because it is about how you do your modification.
The key here is Mecanim. If you are using Mecanim to animate your cat, then yes, it is possible to connect. Avatar is only a “bridge” between subsystems like mecanim or ai. If something works in Mecanim it will work here as well.

However, Avatar is designed for bipad, humanoid animations, but we also checked it and we can animate a dog without problem IF BOTH the dog AND the animation is set correctly. So even real dog (not humanoid type) can be animated with this method.

In other words, if you can make your cat moving with your baked fbx using the Mecanim state machine, then the answer is yes. It is possible to connect to Avatar.

If you want a safe answer on your special case, then I would suggest to connect with us by mail (support@) and we can check if it would work or not before you would buy anything.

13

This is a good idea, we will check this out later.

14

I’m sorry… when I say cat it’s CAT a rigging system inside 3ds Max (Character Animation Toolkit)… Sorry for the confusion I saw how my post could be misconstrued…

My biped rig uses extra bones and twist bones so I was planing on baking my animations in max before bringing them into Unity so hence my concern…

15

ahh… I’ve got this wrong this time :slight_smile: Seems I had too many animals in my head :slight_smile:

In theory your model should work, but since we’ve seen many wrongly made rig or animations, it is really depend on the way you made both.

Anyway, the best would be if you could send your character and fbx (modified by max) to us, we can check it for you. I am also curious what type of problems and solutions people came up with and how could we bring a solution for them with Avatar.

16

Fair enough, this could be a real challenge… it has CAT muscle strand (set as bones) in the shoulders and hips, max stretchy bones with their scale xyz exposed as by this example:

And twisty bones in the upper and lower arms and upper and lower legs.

So it would be very interesting if this rig works with avatar.

I’ll pm you my rig in a bit…

17

interesting we will see. It’s actually not a question that could we support this in Avatar - because we could -, but how much time and effort it takes… we might add some support or we might create a tutorial showing how could you implement it for yourself.

Avatar uses a class named Avatar, which connects the dot. When you are using a walking avatar, it’s actually uses another class, named LocoAvatar, which is inherited from Avatar. This LocoAvatar grab the controls, transfer it to moves etc. This little class is the interface between your own animation and “commands” like direction and moves.
If you extend Avatar this way, AI and the rest will work with your own custom class.

In your case you will need your own custom Avatar, probably from LocoAvatar, which handle the extra bones.
The question here is only how could we use your baked animations with the rest, because yours is legacy types while
ours is humanoid. It’s seems to me only technical details, not a real obstacle. Avatar was designed to be able to handle these issues… (even if we were limiting our-self to humanoid types as first)

Anyway, the package contains all the documentation with samples and tutorial about how to create your own:

  • custom animator (like the LocoAnimator, so you can add swim or sg else if you have your own animation.)
  • custom AI
  • add your own character model

So you should be able to do this by your own. However, we are still looking how our customers can use the package, where they need help, where are the problems they run into.
That’s why I offered my help at first, so I can see how difficult this would be… give you an example and let’s see if you are satisfied with the results.

18

about thinking big:
Our idea with dressing here is even more that you wrote here. We not only wanted to be able to switch the cloths dynamically, but to play the right animation with it… so it would looks even more realistic. Selecting the dress with picking them up, and checking them as in real, then play the animation to put it on. That’s our goal with dressing.

We want to add this, but we are not yet there with quality.

and again, first we want to see where are the real requirements / needs from you guys.

19

I’m really loving this idea - but I can’t see clearly how it will work with multiplayer,in an MMORPG scenario, where the server does all the work of AI, movement, collision, etc, and broadcasts the results to those clients that need to know.

Once the client has those details, putting on a wonderful display of changing clothes, casting spells, etc is all down to the client playing the correct animations at the correct time.

Your Avatar system, as described, seems to bridge client and server, which is cool for single player, but needs to be separated for client/server systems, and probably needs to be just an API for the server which has no display.

20

As with all the rest of the “subsystems” like animation, sound, networking we only want to give you a frame, so you can use what you have already or what you prefer later.
All the example, contents is for giving an easy way to start it immediately without any knowledge on any subsystems.

When it’s about multi-player mode, I would more likely say networking support. So basically as now you can manage your Avatar with keyboards/joysticks,etc or with AI script as NPC, we are planning to add support for network model, where you get your control over network (basically your state or events). So you could use TCP/UPD to get/send states and every npc which set to network mode, will use these data to update itself.

When it’s about YOUR game, you might already have your own networking or your own server or you use DB back-end… anyway, it’s different all the time.

Using Avatar you can add your own multi-player module and control it via network the way you want. However, these would requires some programming skills…

The current state of Avatar is not contains any example about how to add your own network stuff, neither any networking functionality, but only the very basics.
However, using Unity own networking system and the documentation of Avatar it would not be hard for a programmer to add this functionality by his own.

Basically, you need to sync a few float/bool parameters like speed or direction via network and set/get these by Avatar as simple as a function call or parameter. All the rest, which character, which animation etc will be managed automatically.

As always, before we say we support it, we want to test it and add some example with some content to start it up without any knowledge. This will be in some future updates, depends on requests.

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