[Released] Morph Character System (MCS) - Male and Female

Morph Character System - Male and Female
MCS Female
MCS Female Lite
MCS Male
MCS Male Lite

Documentation (.pdf Google Drive link)

COMING SOON: Too many bugs are present in the “Performance Hot Fix”. We’re cleaning them up now and when things are good and tidy we’ll re-release the link to the Github repo. Apologies for the inconvenience- cheers!

MCS Male - Overview

https://vimeo.com/139433426

MCS Female - Overview

https://vimeo.com/139526153

Morph Character System
The Morph Character System (MCS) is a revolutionary new way to create custom characters for Unity. It puts an unprecedented amount of control in your hands, giving you the easiest and most powerful character creation experience. Whether you’re an artist or a developer, now YOU have the ability to create unforgettable and unique customized characters.

MCS begins with two base figures, MCS Male and MCS Female, each sold separately. At the heart of the system is the powerful ability to morph character attributes to your needs, all controlled by simple sliders in a custom GUI. You could create a zombie or a goblin with a single slider, or choose from among the many face and body morph sliders to dial in your unique, custom look. You not only have creative control, but also tremendous value as you are now armed with endless character possibilities to populate your projects.

Morph 3D has built a community of top artists around the world to bring you high-quality, add-on content packs that are compatible with the MCS figures and sold separately in the Asset Store. We’ve made one of these add-on packs available for FREE. It’s loaded with five MCS compatible outfits, props and more. Download the MCS Female Sci Fi 01, here.

Features Include:
•1 Outfit
•1 Hair
•1 Weapon

350 Morphs
• Morphs are configured with simple sliders in Editor
• Partial and full creature and monster morphs
• Body shape and scale morphs including muscular, lean, portly, etc.
• Aging morphs ranging from 5 to 70 years old
• Hundreds of face and body morphs for detailed customization
• Visemes and phonemes for speech animations
Character development GUI
•Basic GUI included; source code provided for specific GUI’s
•Customized names and groupings of props, morphs, hair and costumes
•Drag-and-drop bundle system to easily add new content packs
Developer API
PBR Textures and Materials
•Optimized PSD’s
•PBR Skin shader based off of “Volund” Shader
Prop attachment point system
•Easy presets
•Use code to control layout and placement
•Unlimited attachment points
•Auto mirroring of props
LOD support
•Easily choose from various levels of detail with a single slider on function call
Import and Export
Save your character designs as prefabs
Auto setup of imported characters ad GUI
Dynamic Skeleton System
• Fully rigged for Mecanim
• Access skeleton morphs at runtime
• Adjustable height and proportions for characters

MCS Morph Previews
MCS Male - Morph List
MCS Male Lite - Morph List
MCS Female - Morph List
MCS Female Lite - Morph List
Learn more at:
http://morph3d.com
A note from the developers:
A big thanks to everyone for checking out the latest and greatest from our team. MCS is the result of all of your input that was given to us in our first character product, the Sci-Fi Female: Morph Character Pack (now deprecated and rolled into the MCS). That pack was built in such a way that it could never be more than what it was. Hence the need for MCS, which allows for us to build you a vast library of add-on content for your characters. So, unlike the previous character pack, this is a system, one that we have a great vision for and one that will become better and more robust in the coming months. This thread is for you all to continue to have a voice with us and to let us know what we are doing wrong and what we are doing right and what should fix ASAP.

We can’t wait to see what you guys can do with MCS!

Cheers!
The Morph Team

3 Likes

Several things:
1.) looks good and easy to use, thank you
2.) there are 2 errors in the other thread
3.) your documentation link doesn’t work, it will bring people into their own dropbox, not in yours. You have to get a dedicated publishable url

Apologies regarding the DropBox link.

Here’s a drive link for the pdf: https://goo.gl/1E9m0Z

It’s good to know this project didn’t die off. I was getting worried.

MCS Female Lite 9/16/15 release
Known issue:

MCS Female Lite includes a scene titled “MCSFemaleLitedemo.unity”, this was included by mistake, it contains a prefab that is broken and will generate a number of warnings. Best for all if you just ignore and delete this scene.

As noted on the MCS Female Lite store page.

MCS Figures 9/16/15 release
Known issue:

Upon initial import of any of the MCS figure content packs the all .fbx files need to be reimported. Assets and resource for the MCS figures need to be loaded in a specific order and .unitypackages do not guarantee import order. Reimporting the .fbx files triggers our custom importer and links project resources properly.

As noted on the MCS Female Lite store page.

Hey @berk-maketafi and @IanAtMorph3D , MCS looks to have a lot of great potential as a character system in Unity. I was wondering if you have any details about creating custom content for MCS that you can share?

Similar to what @chiapet1021 asked, how hard/easy is it to turn items we already have into the custom content? Say I already have a pack of swords, and wish to make those be used by the MCS character.

This does look like a great tool though, glad you guys didn’t just disappear.

1 Like

I’m guessing swords and other props are pretty easy to add, although I haven’t tested out MCS just yet.

It’s clothing and hair that I’m more concerned about. There’s obviously some stuff that happens under the hood to make sure those meshes conform to any morphs applied to the head or body.

3 Likes

I would think swords/weapons wouldn’t be a problem since you can attach them to empty gameobjects at the locations you want them attached. Clothing, on the other hand… I think that will be where we could have issues. Would love to hear more about the tools for that…

And what gives? Sci-fi again? Where’s the love for the fantasy folks? A demo that included one simple outfit for each genre would rock, instead of the genre specific ones. I’m fine with the $50 packs with the multi-outfit genre specific stuff, but would be nice if the free demo set had a look that would fit into our environments for us to at least feel like it fits while we test it… :stuck_out_tongue:

2 Likes

We’ll be working on artist tools in the near future, these tools plus a rubric for creating models will allow users to create Morph3D compatible content.

4 Likes

Swords was a bad example, I just meant converting items in general that are already created into MCS content, instead of starting from the ground up designed for MCS. Sometimes it is easier to rebuild for something than it is to convert it over. I’m just hoping it isn’t the former :slight_smile:

Regarding props (guns, swords, etc), please reference page 8 in the documentation we posted in this thread, you’ll want to look at the attachment point system.

3 Likes

Thanks @IanAtMorph3D ! Understood about the props piece. I’m definitely looking forward to the artist tools and other information on how to make compatible content.

1 Like

MCS Figures 9/16/15 release
Known issue:

The MCS figure “Content Pack” tool has a serialization bug:

  • Properly import MCS figure (that is to say, import, then reimport .fbx files).
  • Place a figure in your scene.
  • Modify the figure, add content packs to figure, modify blendshape settings.
  • Save and close the scene.

When the scene is opened again the content pack references will disappear from the “Show ContentPacks” tool list, this prevents removal of added clothing, hair and props via the content pack GUI tool.

If you open up the MSC figure’s hierarchy in your scene you can delete the costuming items off of the figure. This doesn’t, however, fix the broken state of the Character Manager inspector, you’ll need to save the scene, close it and reopen it.

Are ContentPacks necessary or can I just add and remove one clothing item?
In the worst case for a full outfit you would have 5 content packs with maybe 5 items each in 4 LODs loaded.
This results in 95 from 100 unused SkinnedMeshRenderers.
I tried it, I can add just the jacket, but it is apparently not possible to remove it without errors.

  • morphs don’t move teeth. Mouth open, smiles or phonemes result in an upper row of teeth in the middle of your “mouth opening”
  • JCTAdapter.LateUpdate gets called on all objects every frame, resulting in about 20ms cpu time and 3.1mb garbage for one character
1 Like

Hi!

This project seems extremely promising. The models are of high quality, it seems very flexible and modular so that you can use it as a complete character system rather than just for single characters, it also seems relatively easy to use once you get the hang of it, and the price is good. I really hope you succeed with this.

Considering the importance of reading the readme file, I would recommend that you put a notice and maybe a link in the top of your descriptions in the Asset Store with install instructions, to avoid further bad reviews caused by this.

I’m just testing out the MCS Female Lite, and it seems to work well, except that I’m getting some very bad frame-rates for just a single dressed female character. If I disable the character, I’m at 600 fps, after enabling it, it falls down to 45 fps. I’m in Linear/Deferred mode, and it seems to be the CPU that’s the issue and the function JCTAdapter.Update(), if I read the Profiler right. I have a very good GPU and a decent CPU, so performance shouldn’t be a problem.

I got some conversion warnings when importing the free sci-fi pack, but the MCS Female Lite installed without problems. I did noticed that some outfits and hair in the free sci-fi pack have some seams and overlaps with the base model (they don’t fit perfectly), but you might already be aware of this.

Thanks, and keep up the good work!

Installed both packs but it is very confusing - no prefabs, none of the textures loaded for any of the assets, having to dive into the character hierarchy to try and find & edit things etc.

the interface that IS visible is empty (no morph groups, props, hair etc) and very difficult to understand.

There may be docs, but as a ‘plug and play’ system, it is pretty lacking currently.

Since I know how the sausage was made, I’d recommend steering clear of generating hair and clothing for the MCS for the moment. Until we publish artist resources and tools it will be extremely time consuming to get things working with the MCS.

Thanks for bringing these issues to our attention.

Re: Morphs not moving teeth, in which MCS figure are you seeing this behavior?

Re: JCTAdapter inefficiency, yeah this came to our attention a day or two ago, we have a fix that we’re testing.

Re: Costuming Items and Content Packs, content packs are a bit of a misnomer and the “Show ContentPacks” tool is a little confusing as well. You’ll have noticed that when you “add” a content pack you’re dragging a .fbx into the Content Packs tool, sometimes the .fbx contains a single item, sometimes an entire outfit of clothing. Basically the .fbx as a container defines the granularity of control that you have over items present on any given character. Thanks for making this comment, it will figure into how these tools continue to evolve.

General information on updates for the MCS figure packs, currently the Unity Asset Store is about at 14 days of lag between submission and approval for new and updated products, so any update to the official asset store package is a few weeks out. As soon as we have a patched up version of our dll we’ll make it available via GitHub, details soon.

You have to reimport the morph3d-folder for the magic to happen, as stated in the readme and documentation.
If you drag the fbx in the scene, everything will be there.

@IanAtMorph3D : I encounter the teeth-problem in MCS Female Full.
At the moment I am trying to use your API, which has a method for adding just one item of the content pack. It will work without problems, but I can’t remove it, since I can only remove a full content pack. I can just set it invisible.
If the fbx is the most granular thing to add, I would ask kindly to split the fbx into single objects (if it is not possible to do it myself), since I am probably not the only one wanting to have the jacket from the starter pack and maybe a t-shirt from another. I don’t know how performancehungry disabled SkinnedMeshRenderers are, but I figure that 95 unused objects could be avoided.