Introducing UCC (Universal Character Customisation), a customisation tool that can be used to create morphs and modifications on any model in your project!
Hey, the way it works is that you have to import the mesh in the editor and set up the modifications at edit time. Once you do that, you can change the values on the modifications you’ve put on your mesh at runtime but you can’t change the vertex selection or the weights.
So if you’re talking about adding a modifier to a procedural mesh (i.e. create a mesh at runtime and then add modification to it) then no, it doesn’t do that.
I understand it work mainly by using curves. What if I wanted to morph only a single vertex, say I had 1 edge of armor I was trying to tweak to fit a character. Is the process use a selection cube, drag over only the one point and then use the tools? Is there an straight move a vertex to a specific Vector3, for precision work?
Are there any runtime allocations for these morphs, like what is performance cost and speed on mobile? I imagine a skinned morph takes some calculation time, but once it is morphed does it still require memory or CPU per frame?
Sample scripts for the various use cases:
Morphing armor based on character selection.
Simple custom character at runtime with simple UI.
A sample of an animated character, not a still skinnedmeshed, we need to see the mesh animated after the morph are even while morphing in an idle position or a variety.
I was wondering what impact the morphs have on animations. What happens if I have existing animations on a model with skinned mesh clothes, and I morph the character. Will there be unexpected deformations due to the animation on the altered model, or any other surprises?
That’s how it’s done at the moment but the next version will most likely include a way to let you choose and move individual vertices to where you want them to be. The curves are only there for adding weights to your vertices. If you’d rather not use them, you can remove the Weighter component and use the Transformer to change the vertices without any weights but that usually looks quite bad.
There’s a bit more memory usage per mesh but it’s kept to the bare minimum needed to get fast updates. It works really well on mobile (tested on a OnePlus One) and there’s no extra CPU usage per frame as long as you stick to using on-demand updates (i.e. you call UpdateMesh() only when you change something).
There’s already an included example scene that shows these things. I’ll try to upload a build somewhere to show you what I mean
Hi, most animations will still work as long as the morphs you make aren’t too extreme. Skinned mesh clothes are supported too but right now you have to duplicate modifications and do some drag-and-drop to make it work.
It’s also completely undocumented because I’d like to replace it in the next version. If you buy it for that and want to try out the current method then message me and I’ll make a video
I have characters with separate clothes, RPG style. They were modeled in 3dMax and exported as separate meshes. So, I was thinking of using UCC to create more NPC characters from our existing base character and clothes. It would be very nice to be able to work with the character and clothes at the same time, but I am not in a big hurry and can wait if you are going to revise the process.
If you develop a drop in player character creation system, I would be interested in that too.
It’ll stay the same price for at least another 3 updates (read: at least a month) while I finish off and polish the Mesh Customiser’s features. Once that’s done I plan to move on to the Texture Customiser and that’s when the price goes up.
Hey, I’m planning to make video showing how the current system works at some point tomorrow so I’ll post here when it’s uploaded. Look forward to hearing your thoughts on it.
Could you explain what you mean by “drop in player character creation system”? (I’m collecting ideas of things to add in the future)
Hi, the current price will stay for at least another month and then go up once I add Texture Customisation. Once it’s out of Beta the price will go up again but that’s at least 2 or 3 months away.
It’s hard to say what the final price will be at this point (depends on final feature list and how much of my time it’s taking up) but it’s safe to say that you’ve still got a lot of time to observe it’s development before you decide
I was imagining a Unity3d “character creation” scene, where the player selects a base character, then uses UCC to change its appearance to suite the player’s taste. The character would then be saved or baked and used to play through the game. Lots of RPGs have character creation built in, and it seemed to me that UCC could be used for this.
I was hoping that part of UCC would be a system designed for this purpose that could be “dropped in” to a unity3d scene and not require much hook up for the base characters, maybe hair, beards, and lots of wonderful UCC sliders.
I really think you have the best approach, so much so, that I just bought UCC.
I’m impressed with the video. From what I see, I can immediately modify my NPC characters with their clothes. This is great!
My one comment is that my game’s player characters have many items of clothes, RPG style. If I let the gamer modify their player character, how do I get the clothes to fit their chosen alterations? Or is this system better suited to player characters who only wear one skinned outfit?
