UMA - Unity Multipurpose Avatar, is an open source avatar creation framework, it provides both base code and example content to create avatars. Using the UMA pack, it´s possible to customize the code and content for your own projects, and share or sell your creations through Unity Asset Store.
With UMA, it´s easy to populate a huge area with random characters, create and customize an unique NPC or even generate main characters with full customization. In all those cases, UMA makes it possible to share content as clothes and accessories between avatars, simplifying the process of content creation.
UMA has been under development for more than a year now, it started as a personal project and after 4 months Unity Asset Store sponsored this project so it could be open source and available for everyone. Joen has been contributing since then, and for the last 6 we started receiving both help and amazing feedback from the beta test group.
Today is December 25, and Unity couldn´t be giving a better present to me and it´s amazing community, UMA is available at AssetStore =)
Gratz Fernando - great project you’ve given us, and special mention to Joen and the beta crew for bug fixing, head banging, hair tearing, and frustration in general. Job well done.
Thanks for all the nice words guys =D This is just the beginning, I hope we will see plenty of content for UMA on AssetStore on following weeks.
Merry Christmas! =D
Why is it free? I know you have a deal with UT, but… Still, something like this should not be free. This stuff is hard to build.
Well, congratulations! Looks very useful and fun to use it.
You have links to how to create content for this?
And how are the model on performance? Has any standard models made with this been tested or have any spec’s? I would love to see some.
There might be some slowdown first time you show a character, that is Unity preparing the meshes and textures it’s built from. The entire character is still rebuilt every time it’s shown!
Pressing F1 will switch to the Legacy Combiner that is slightly faster, but doesn’t handle additional bones. (Like wings and horns.)
Full Mecanim Humanoid support! Avatar is created at Run-Time and will match the proportions of your Character!
Support for Legacy could be added. But unless someone (new) steps in and makes it, I expect non-humanoid to be supported before Legacy animations. Strictly speaking there is less than 10 lines of code requiring your character to be Mecanim Humanoid.
Demo Scene 1, shows the generation of a crowd of completely random characters.
Demo Scene 2, shows the loading of 5 persistent characters.
You can also notice that each time you load my web player above you get the same characters in the same positions. Once you press Page Up and Page Down their numbers change but the selection of characters stays the same.
If you in Scene 1 select one ore more characters, (the root of the character, not the skinned mesh!), you can use the UMA|Load and Save|Save Selected Avatars (asset) menu item to save those characters into assets and link to them in Scene 2.
(And mine too)