Raise the bar with run-time swappable clothing and gear!
With Mount Points 2.0, you can swap out our character’s clothing and equipment at run-time. Use the “Skinned Items” list to preview clothing in the editor and then have your character appear with it in game.
Mount Points 2.0 also includes an advanced skin masking system that allows you to hide the the character’s body that’s under the clothes. No more bleed through.
With Mount Points, you can simply drag two objects together and when their mount points get close, they snap together like magnets. Drag the objects away from each other and they come apart. Mount Points manages the relationship, orientation, and scale for you. Mount Points doesn’t try to recreate Unity’s hierarchy, it leverages and simplifies it.
Use Mount Points with characters from Morph3D, Mixamo, UMA, and everyone else…
Features
Mount Points supports the following features:
Does mountable through code mean that I can stop messing around with enabling and disabling mesh renderers for weapons and such? Just pop an object from the world into the player or ai hierarchy in game and take off, huh? Sounds like a better way to do it to me. Thanks.
I read somewhere that it was suggested you take all 10 swords/guns/etc, attach them to your player, and then enable and disable the meshes as you need. That just seemed so crazy to me.
What you said is exactly right. Given your character (with mount points setup) and a sword (with mount points setup), you can create and connect at run-time. Just use a line of code like this:
There is a little setup at first since you have to create the mount points for objects you want to do this with, but it literally takes me 15 seconds to put a mount point on a new sword and save the prefab.
Side note…
For anyone that doesn’t know, if you buy the Motion Controller before EOD Friday 3/28… I’ll send you this for free. Otherwise, it should be on the Asset Store late next week.
Took longer than expected, but Mount Points is released!
I’ve gotten great responses from pre-release users. My favorite from Matt: “I had written plenty of custom tools to do this very thing but none were as modular or effective as this one.”
If you choose to get it, please let me know what you think. I really do want to create tools people find useful.
On the flip side, if you have an issue, don’t hesitate to email tim@ootii.com. As you can tell from my other products, I really do care about customer support.
I have questions depending on your new mount points asset.
Can i made a mount point in his hand and then as an example let him grab a rope and that rope can then lift him up or swing him around?
Can i use this only on my player or can i let different characters have mount points and let them grab each other?
Can that work with ragdolls and/or animations?
I think of using this to make some things look more dinamic.
The answer to all of these is ‘yes’, but obviously you’ll have some implementation work to make the scene happen as you described.
What I mean is that Mount Points uses Unity’s hierarchy to parent objects together. So in your question about animations… when a sword is attached to a hand and the hand is animated, the sword moves. That’s exactly what you see in my demo.
In the case of the rope, the hand mount point would be the child of the rope’s mount point. Then, the hand (and theoretically the character it belongs to) would move. I haven’t tried this. The only thing I could think that would be an issue is if the skeleton truly follows the hand. You might have work to do there, but that would be outside of Mount Point’s control.
How well do you feel this would lend itself to snapping together other instantiated prefabs at runtime? For example wall panels, foundation blocks etc that have been designed to fit together but would need to be placed precisely.
Would it be possible to assign a specific vertex on a model as a mount point?
Is there a limit to the number of mount points on an object?
Would it be easy enough to make sure certain objects cannot connect to others? For example; a Ceiling might snap connect to a wall, and a wall to a floor, but a ceiling would not connect to a floor.
Appreciate this is probably moving away from your intended use case but any thoughts would be great.
Also, could use use this asset to make mount points from the character to a chair or wagon seat or a character to a horse? Looks like a very useful asset!
No limit to the number of mount points and you can nest them as deep as you need to. Although things could get buried.
What you described (wall panels, blocks, etc.) makes total sense and is doable now (in edit mode). Unfortunately, I only have drag-and-snap code at edit time. That said, I don’t think it would be difficult to have it be for run-time as well.
You can do snapping through code at run time (as I show in the demo), but that would mean you’d have to clone the current drag feature and then call the snap code. The biggest challenge I’d have with this is supporting a generic drag feature (ie handles like the Unity editor has) that would work with everyone’s unique games.
Current there are no exclusion lists. That’s definitely an interesting idea. It wouldn’t be too hard to have it based on name or tag.
As far as having a mount point tied to a vertex, that’s tricky. You can tie it to any position you want based off the root position or a specific bone (if you have them). In fact, you could create a mount point that looks like it’s floating in air. So, in that sense you could place it where ever you want. However, if you’re taking about tracking a vertex as it moves (ie a skinned mesh), I don’t believe that’s possible since most of the skinning work is done on the GPU.
Lots of interesting ideas and I don’t think they would be too difficult to do. I’ll add these things to the ‘to-do’ list, but I’m not sure when I’ll get to them. Priority is based on my time and people’s interest. +2 to interest from the both of you
There isn’t anything that would automatically force the second arm bone to bend.
What you would do is put the mount point on the primary hand and then attach the two-handed sword to it. Then, you’d use standard animations to bend the secondary arm bones towards the hilt. It would look like it’s being held by two hands, but it’s really only using the mount point in one.
(That said, I am working on a skeleton and bone solution now and that’s an interesting case to solve for. )
For the secondary hand, I guess the idea is to use, say, a left hand IK target to a child Transform of the weapon at a secondary location? I’m a noob when it comes to character animation and haven’t even gotten IK to work properly yet, so if you were to include an example of such a thing in a future update, that’d be a pretty appealing feature.
Exactly. If you’re using Unity Pro, Final IK, or another IK solution you’d use the IK target to pull the left hand to the weapon.
Animations. In this case, you’d use an animation tool like Maya, Motion Builder, or Blender to create an animation that has the left hand where you want it. This is especially true if you’ve got a sword swing animation or something.
I’ll put the example on my list of to-dos. Seems like a useful thing to show.