I wonder about this exact concern as well. It feels a bit “clunky” to have a bunch of overlapping SkinnedMeshRenderers where you selectively mark only the few that you want to see as visible. In the case of an avatar system with interchangeable clothing/armor, that could get very complex very quickly.
I would like to see a method of instantiating–or better yet, drawing from an object pool–the submeshes to be displayed. This would be extremely helpful at runtime. I’m not sure how much of a pipe dream that is.
Unity newbie here so please forgive my ignorance, but how do I go about creating animations for the MCS characters? I don’t mean loading precreated animations, but making my own. Does this system come with some tool for making keyframe animations of the skeleton?
@jwvanderbeck Animation creation does not appear to be in the scope of MCS right now. There are assets on the Unity store that allow you to manipulate rigged meshes to create animations in the editor. However, as someone who’s looked into creating animations, I have to warn you that it’s a pretty complex endeavor. There’s a reason why there are paid professionals in the gaming industry for it.
Very easy setup. I just followed the instructions and everything worked well. The only issue I have is after pressing play and stop the prop returns back to its default position and rotation. Other than that is very user friendly and not complicated at all.
I am concerned about the cpu usage though, for me and many others that will be a big issue.
Anyway congratulations.
I will keep following the progress of this asset.
Ps
I love that you have the lod control in the inspector.
I am one of those paid professionals. Well in VFX anyway. But having the skills doesn’t do me any good if Unity has no means of animating.
How can this be “outside the scope of MCS”? Since these are assets that exist only inside of Unity, I need a way to animate them. If this was my own character I would just animate it in Modo, but since I am in Unity how am I supposed to animate it? I have to buy some additional third party tool for Unity in order to do animations?
If you want to, Skele for example is quite cheap and 50% off at the moment. Or, if the software you usually use allows export to fbx you are set. Just read about Mecanim and animation retargeting.
MCS looks fantastic. The only reason why I didn’t buy it on sight is a lack of content/closes. I wish at some point I will be able to obsolete Fuse with your pack.
Ah, sorry for not understanding the context and your background.
The reason why I say “outside the scope of MCS” is that at least for now, this asset appears to be focused on the models and the quality therein. Have you read much on Unity’s Mecanim animation system? The idea is that for any model that is rigged for Mecanim, any animation that is also Mecanim compatible can be used on that rig. So you create or procure your animations somewhere else, then apply them via a Mecanim Animator component to a Morph3D model (which is designed with Mecanim in mind out-of-the-box).
As @montyfi mentioned, Skele is an in-editor tool for animation creation. I’m not an animation expert, so I intend on using something like Mixamo (or perhaps paying you ) for animations, then assembling them in Unity.
Just to confirm what others have said - get into mecanim (intimately) and you will quickly come up to speed on how animations are created for any characters who are setup for mecanim, both humanoid and generic.
You will enjoy creating content specifically created for Unity - in your preferred animation package.
Hey again Shawn, trust me we haven’t forgotten about you and the fantasy folks. I personally feel that what we have queued for our fantasy packs will be some of the best content we have to release. Hang in there man, we’re almost there!
On that note, we worked really hard to make an actual “character system” and as such it’s now much easier for us to get content online for MCS than it was with our previous approach. We’ve already got our next add-on pack nearly ready for submission and as soon as that’s submitted, we’re immediately onto our first fantasy add-ons!
Has anyone tried to integrate this with ORC, UFPS, Realistic FPS, or any other First Person/Third Person setup? Would be neat to see how you handle the various weapons and any unique First person arms, plus Player spawning with their particular settings.
Sounds good… Was just a bit discouraging to see another sci-fi release. But in looking closer, it looks like it was probably more of an update to the existing to make it available to the MCS system? Figure that is the case since it requires Female MCS or Female MCS Lite. Will there be a similar pack released for all the other genres to give us something which fits into our systems to test with soon?
In planning a game with multiple clothing options, I really hope some of the other issues that folks like @chiapet1021 have mentioned are addressed. For single player or small coop multiplayer, having all the clothing options attached to the model might be ok. But I really worry about larger multiplayer scenarios.
At any rate… It is good to see you guys posting again. Would be great if someone on the team could keep us up to date and keep the buzz going in here. Honestly, it has been so quiet in here for so long I half wondered if you guys had given up. You guys should keep someone in here keeping us excited about what is going on and what is coming in the pipeline!
I’m busy working on helping test some assets for other devs and working on a couple of my own projects at the moment. But when I get a chance, I plan on testing this with ORK (I assume that is the one you were meaning to reference in your list?) and Makinom. Maybe if they get me a fantasy character, I’d be motivated to test it quicker… heheh hides from Morph3d folks
I have Pre-integrated Skin shader and also alloy that has character shaders, I can change out the stock shaders for these right?
Also will we have access to have fbx’s of the characters to create our own morphs, also would we be able to add bones to the rig for armor or appendages e.g., tails, extra arms etc.
Also is the mesh segmented so we can change out legs for paints, or upper torso and arms for shirt?
you can, but you shouldn’t. The included shaders have an additional texture map to make sure that no skin is visible through clothing while animating.
the fbx files are included, I wouldn’t make morphs before there are official informations about user-generated content. I thought there was a post about it in this thread, but currently I can’t find it…
Hi. I had a look at the included skin shader with the extra alpha channel.
I think It would not be a big problem using another custom skin shader or the unity standard shader. The alpha mask you use seems to be a merge of the textures in the Injection Mask folder for the clothes used. Take this and put it in the alpha channel of the standard texture, use a cutout shader and you should get the same result removing the body for the parts covered.
This is Mike from Crazy Minnow Studio, creators of SALSA with RandomEyes lip sync, eye movement, and facial animation system. We wanted to let everyone know that SALSA now supports 1-Click lipsync using MCS models.
Congratulations on the release Morph Team, we’re fans already!
