Free character creation in Unity

Unity Engine
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Hello guys !
This is a message for users and Unity team.

With the help of Mixamo and Adobe Fuse, programmers can concentrate on coding, need to do less graphism because they have free human models and animation.

I would prefer that Unity make a tool or free asset to do that directly in their software. Because :

  • We wouldn’t need to use a third party software (we don’t know how long Fuse etc will be free).
  • We will be able to customize in game if there is a script.
  • Like in the free software open source Makehuman, we have a base nude human model and we morph it.
    Then we choose clothes. It creates a model that we can save in our asset.
  • We have also a script to do it in game. A player can create his own model, store and change it later, very useful for multiplayer games.
    Then for animations, we just put the mixamo one’s because the bones are humanoid.

I think it’s an important feature in a game engine and a priority for Unity.
What do you think about it ?

Thank you for your attention.

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There’s a character creation system called UMA, available on asset store and on github. Default body options are a bit lacking, though, but you can always add your own.

There are also multiple products on Asset store aimed exactly at that. For example, there’s Morph3D which comes with a free/lite version.

And as you mentioned, makehuman can already be used in unity, although to be honest clothing creation process in it is a bit arcane.

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https://feedback.unity3d.com/ is the correct way to request features in Unity, unless specifically asked for ie in beta or in response to [Official] posts.

Thanks for your thoughts though :slight_smile: just bear in mind traction might not happen on forums (it’s not illegal to ask obviously!) - just makes it a bit easier for Unity to see what enough people might be asking for with the feedback site.

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Thx for your replies.

@neginfinity I will try these. UMA looks interesting.

@hippocoder I saw that people have already posted that idea so I gave my support :
https://feedback.unity3d.com/suggestions/please-implement-character-creation-system-base-mesh-slash-morphs-slash-hair-slash-clothes

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Personally I think this is a terrible idea. You will end up with many people with the same models and animations and an increase in the asset flip mentality. As a programming I completely understand where you are coming from, but generic models/animations aren’t a good solution. Just think of the amount of games that use the standard fps controller, most of them are pretty terrible and doing the same thing for art would be even worse.

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If the tools are decent then “same models” doesn’t have to be an issue. A lot of variation between human models can be pretty subtle, so having a reasonable library of different base pieces and then some scope to make subtle variations (scale, position, angle, color, maybe shape tweaking for the bigger parts) could make people look different enough.

For animations… who cares? They’re often going to be blended with other animations, they’re going to be applied slightly differently in each game (different speeds and such) and in different combinations, and I doubt that most gamers would pick up on your characters using the same blended motions as other characters in other games.

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I prefer the idea of seperate software for specialist tasks like modelling. Same as I don’t expect Unity to provide an IDE for me as a programmer.

But it wouldn’t surprise me if it happens.

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+1000 points for checking for an existing request before posting a new one

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I do. :frowning:

Seriously - anybody else tired of seeing the side barrel roll monkey flip jump used initially in the gdc 2013 mecanim project?

Unique animations like that can’t be blended into anything else to make it look different, and a lot of people will see it and think it’s a unique animation so they want to use it in there game.
Those who tend to use non-custom animations (like the mit mocap library) tend NOT to take the time to do animation blending so ‘stock’ mocap animations will look the same as other products that use the same base animations.

Although I agree walks, runs, and idles if blended well can look fine even unique if attention to detail and time is provided to make quality animations - same as the model, the texture and other elements of a character asset.

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Yes. So many times yes. It was cool for one demo in 2013, but then I guess people just thought “oh hey, this must be how you do character controllers and animation now! I think we’re ready for a public demo!”.

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I was thinking again that this kind of tool is essential.
In a lot of games, we see a kind of character customization even if it’s not very advanced.
For example Diablo 2. It is old and seem simple.
But your character finds clothes and change its appearance.
Complicate to do that in Unity…

@Kiwasi You like to use other softwares.
Sure, it will always be necessary in a big project.
But for example Unity made a terrain editor in its software very early.
However we could make terrains in Blender.
Why they did that ? Because it’s very convenient and faster.

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You are kidding me right? This is one of my general concerns with a character created built in Unity. It might well end up on par with the Unity terrain tools in quality. Useful for a dirty prototype, but not much else.

Unity doesn’t need more prototyping tools. It’s already awesome at prototyping. It’s the high end stuff that needs more work. Stuff that you would see in a final game.

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We often still have to because the Unity terrain system is simply that bad. We were promised a new one at least as far back as 2014 and it’s still in the research stage of development.

https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/official-new-terrain-system.255232/

Create a copy of the body parts you want clothed and add mesh data to them to represent the clothing. At runtime simply replaced those parts with their clothed counterparts. That’s how it works in Skyrim and many other games. From their tutorials that’s how it appears to function within Adobe Fuse and Mixamo too.

https://helpx.adobe.com/fuse/help/create-custom-fuse-clothing.html
https://community.mixamo.com/hc/en-us/articles/203791536-Tutorial-Creating-Custom-Fuse-Clothing

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Actually, they did it because terrain is a special case where having a pre-made mesh is often a sub-optimal way to render. If your terrain can be represented as a heightmap then it’s more efficient to generate a mesh on the fly… which you can’t do by exporting a model from Blender.

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What’s interesting about this is (and I realize we are getting a little off topic but meh), on one hand this frustrates me because it is a prime example of my biggest frustration with Unity: They seem to struggle with improving their engine. I personally feel like it really says something that the terrain system has been in the state it’s been now for so long. Thank goodness for the asset store, or just rolling your own meshes or finding decent terrain shaders.

But… everyone wants a freaking voxel/infinite/procedural/floating islands in the sky frankenterrain system which is crazy and unrealistic. I guess in many cases, Unity’s customers will just have to rely on the asset store for solutions. But that’s STILL isn’t an excuse for the abysmal progress, in my opinion.

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I don’t think Unity should be building a feature like this into their own interface. Unity is not about producing art assets, which such a project would be very much focused on.

That said, I do think that the Asset Store community should pursue such a project. This sort of content is right in their wheelhouse. A big problem with such a system is that you would have to dial back the personality of any such system in order to allow for the flexibility of creating reusable assets. Any personality, style or flair would have to be consistent across all created assets. Without this you would end up with very cookie-cutter, dull graphical assets.

This is why I feel that the Asset creation community are the ones to tackle efforts like this. Just one single solution isn’t going to suffice. But multiple different options might.

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I don’t think that is an accurate assessment. Unity is always improving, a lot. Particles, rendering, effects, ui, animation, animation features, performance, vr, platforms and many, many more things. It is constantly improving, mostly in areas that are very common to most games.

Sure, terrain is old, but it isn’t exactly a deal breaker, clearly, it could be improved, but obviously it isn’t a limitation. Not all games use terrains, and if the built-in terrain isn’t a good fit, you can just model them, or pick one of several other options available. Improving the terrain will be helpful to some, at least those that use it. A built-in character solution is pretty much the same, but even less useful. Terrain is a tool and can be used for many many styles, and uses. Characters are completely different thing. UMA is useful, and about as far as it needs to go. Unity isn’t a modeling tool. A generic built-in characters system isn’t going improve the development of the tier of quality shipping games. (which is ultimately Unity’s goal, successful games result in sales for Unity, crappy generic games help no one). It would only be a benefit for metric buttload of generic, one step above tutorial/asset flip games out there. While a terrain tool (improved or not) can and has been used in quality games, generic characters wouldn’t be.

I would much rather Unity continue to improve and add features that are commonly used, and help developers improve the development and quality of their games, rather than build toys to help people just playing around continue to cram kongregate full of generic stuff.

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It is the Unity Community that is building UMA. That is the Unity Community project.

Problem is, although this is a great system, it doesn’t please everyone. For some, it is too difficult. They want drop in. For others, they want high poly Daz quality characters. Others have no idea how to create their own content, or they own skins or put better shaders on the characters.

So…the complaints about ugly, difficult to use, etc, come slamming at the all volunteer Unity community that builds UMA. It really gets tiring, you know.

Now folks say that the Unity community needs to stand up and do this. But what they are really saying is that the Unity community members should volunteer their time to make a system up to AAA standards.

UMA is not ugly. The characters are beautiful if you know how to enhance them or take the time to learn. You can make your own races or even convert assets from the asset store into your own races, complete with the ability to customize the characters in-game. In the near future, there will even be optional blend shapes. And you can EASILY make your own custom content if you can use Blender and now with Chris’ Skinn asset, you can rig the clothing too.

And who is doing this? A group of very dedicated people who work very hard to bring something amazing to you for FREE!

I am just a mod on their Slack forum but I have seen how hard they work. If you want AAA, go buy a system out there that cost lots of money. Deal with Morph3ds limiting EULA. If you want Free, take what you can get and enhance it yourself. Making a game is something you do. Unity and UMA are tools to help you. But you still have to do it.

Richard, please know this was not at all aimed at you, just the community in general. Your quote just sparked my interest in this thread.

I defend UMA all the time. A system this powerful for free is absolutely amazing.

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Thinking about it none of the games I’ve made have used characters of any sort. Few of the games I play use characters of any sort, and those that do couldn’t be built via a generic system. Looking around at local developers using Unity, very few use characters.

It’s a small sample size. But from where I sit the majority of Unity developers don’t use characters at all. And those that do wouldn’t be interested in generic ones.

Which puts Unity back at improving fundamental things. Better particle systems. Better lighting. Faster everything. More threads. Less bugs. And so on.

Incidentally the same argument probably explains why Unity is running slowly with the terrain system. The absolute number of devs who would use it is low compared to other features.

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Speaking of which, trying to get proper character from a generator… and attach animation to them is very difficult and wastes a lot of time.

I recall going through what felt like a hundred of mixamo animations without finding anything suitable. Even finding the “right” walkcycle can be difficult too.

On other hand… RPG maker is popular, and there are plenty of games in it. Face generator in it was cool, so I see the appeal. Howedver, rpgmaker has very small number of animation frames, meaning generating stuff for it is easier than for a 3d game.