Can't decide how to create my humans and monsters and how to animate them

Unity Engine
1

Hello,

we are a small bunch creating a crossover game between minecraft and medival rpg.

So we need a male and a female hero, some npc, some human like Monsters and later some animals etc.

We are new to unity. We decided not to create our humans totally on our own, there seem to be so many choices right now.

I found makehuman, mixamo, something inside the asset store called uma2. Animations can be found free on the net (scanned ones), in assets or in mixamo again. Make human and mixamo both have Basic clothes we could improve. Uma2 seems to have some possibilities to let the user Change meshes in real time which is also nice.

Our people should be able to wear clothes or armor, use weapons and tools, have some basic animations and some special animations, and perhaps some Kind of head turning, eyes opening and Basic facial animations (lipsync would nice but is optional).

We got one blender Artist with us. But it would be cool if we do not Need to make everything from the scratch on our own, but some additional work is of course okay. We are able to spent a bit Money if it spares time, but not too much since we are Hobby developers.

It should not be extreme high poly and not totally low poly.

Any advice in this jungle please?

Thanks a lot, that would be great!

Firlefanz

2

Hello and welcome to Unity!

Well, you just asked for everything. :slight_smile: Fortunately, it’s all possible in Unity. Each piece will take a while to learn, though, so build time into your schedule for it.

Use Mecanim’s Humanoid rig. This way you can use any animation regardless of the model’s underlying skeleton. You can learn all about it on the Animation tutorials page. Unity has raw motion captured animation on the Asset Store. To make them usable, you may have to polish them up a bit. You can find other animations on the Asset Store, Mixamo, CMU Mocap Database, etc. If you get weird foot sliding or rotation issues, import your animations with the Bake checkbox ticked and Based Upon set to Original.

For head turning, you can use Unity’s built-in IK (inverse kinematics, or procedural animation) system.

The Asset Store has good, inexpensive choices for eye movement, such as SALSA with RandomEyes and Realistic Eye Movements. SALSA also does lipsync approximation.

If your characters need to change between many different outfits, something like UMA 2 may be your best bet. Eli Curtz was working on facial animation for UMA. Plus, it’s a free community project. (If you make improvements, please contribute them!) You may want to buy better-looking UMA avatars if you don’t like the appearance of the default avatars.

If you use Mixamo Fuse to create characters, the models are built with outfits. If you don’t have a lot of outfits, you can make a different model for each outfit and swap models as needed. Mixamo does a good job of rigging skeletons, and you can choose a rig with facial animation support. Fuse makes high-poly models, but you can run them through Mixamo’s Decimator to reduce poly counts.

Or you could get your Blender artists to rig separate outfit meshes onto a base model. At runtime, disable all the outfit meshes except the outfit that the character is currently wearing.

3

Thanks for the reply.

We are trying to use make human chars and make own cloth and armor using blender now with free animations. :slight_smile:

Have a nice Weekend!

4

Were you able to change clothes with MakeHuman?