“Indie” in most cases does not mean “we have money” xD, so, no, is not for indie devs XD
I’m an indie dev, and I would never shell out near a grand to generate human characters that are poorly optimized and I’ll have to redress them in my custom garments. Also their textures would have to be redone to work with my custom shaders
I guess different strokes for different folks, there’s not really any alternative for developers that want realistic character models besides paying an artist themselves, or going to unreal.
Also, while I agree with you about the effort needed to make a AAA production quality from the raw model, the fact is the raw model is far ahead in terms of hours of modeling goes. The extra work you lament doesn’t seem to be anything compared to the modeling itself for most people who are not modelers (like myself). So from an Indie perspective, I would use it, even if my production wasn’t AAA production in the end. Reallusion brings a more accurate model within my grasp. Period.
Sad but true. And now they have Metahuman Animator, which is undoubtedly amazing. And there is nothing for us like that in Unity, aside from authoring your own rig
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Why not MakeHuman? Is totally free (i think is even open source) is used to create realistic humans, it has lots of settings for head, torso, legs, arms, genitalia and details for mouth, eyes all that stuffs, i mean, yeah is not metahuman, but you can create a really good base shape with really good topology on makehuman to start, you can also install plugins from the community…
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I remember MakeHuman… I could use this for NPCs and build base meshes from it to create a new character. Would have to make the topology animation ready
Hmmm I think it’s less about meshes and more about the workflow pipeline and quality of the character skin & overall looks. I think “realistic characters” boils down to multiple high resolution textures and advanced shaders that take skin, eyes, and hair into account to produce a AAA quality style character.
There’s lot of free characters out there or characters from the asset store etc, but they tend to not look AAA or they’re not fully rigged for cinematics (facial mocap) like MetaHumans or Reallusion. Unity’s Digital Humans looks amazing, but they’ve done little to help the community, there’s no one from the wider community either A) using it or B) making tutorials for it, which is kind of the kiss of death for a Unity feature.
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This right here. And for most indies, the amount of work needed to do high end characters is astronomical, especially in the rendering front. And most younger artists don’t want to put in that level of work because they want something fast with minimal stress. Also, unless you have some 3d printing and engineering knowledge to build your own HMC, Metahuman Animator gets your facial animation ready to go.
Speaking of quality work, Check out SakuraRabbit on Instagram. The models in Unity look amazing
mmm that is not correct IMO, while textures, shaders, hair and all that stuffs are really important, the meshes is the most important thing in realistic character creation, in fact, the topology and the details of the mesh will be what defines your workflow if you do not do it right (even the rig is more important)
BTW The screenshot i posted is from a basic mesh with almost zero customization.
Now this is a personal opinion but, IMO and i know this is a very unpopular opinion, a good indie does not care about hyper-realistic humans, just imagine the amount of work to create an enviroment that match the character, good indies will show their ideas in a simple way, so, i get it, hyper-realistic humans are not for indies.
I insist, if you need realistic humans but you are an indie a very good solution is makehuman, you can create your own skin later, that is easy
This is just one tab:
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I’ve used MakeHuman in the past for NPCs, and I would optimize it with a lower polygon counts and tweak it in ZBrush. Now my hero characters are done by my hand.
I just wish Unity had some kind of tools for rigging and facial animation in engine. I’m sure there is an asset that will do this, but I have to search for it
can you explain to me why that would be useful?
Not only is this a reasonable opinion, it is unrealistic for an indie to expect to produce AAA quality without a new generation of tools available, like MetaHuman. Since MetaHuman is not available for this audience, I would agree with you; and I would even say that Halo Reach level quality is good enough for an indie game. What would make an indie game sky rocket is not the quality of model, but the art being clean and the story being unforgettable. These are my targets.
A studio haz gots to know its limitations.
Mainly to get things working in engine straight away. Imagine being able to Livestream motion capture data onto your character in Unity with a rig that can be quickly processed in real time
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Halo: Reach is still a great looking game
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Beautiful results! Especially the female character design! Was this using any special character creation software or did you model them yourself?
Yeah, I don’t disagree with your point. There’s certainly layers of depth that goes into making a game. Devs make games for all sorts of reasons, telling a story they feel they need to tell, recreating a style of gameplay they enjoyed for others, making a game for profit, etc.
There’s definitely a segment of indie devs out there that feel you don’t need realistic character designs to make a good game and they’re not wrong. There’s a number of games that are from AAA studios that have been successful that don’t have any cinematics and feature low fidelity representations of character designs.
Thank you. This will probably make some people flip out but I got the Daz3D characters to work pretty good in real time. The hairs are CGTrader assets.
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What is temporarily impressive are graphics (e.g., modern day hair textures and effects) because everyone knows these are dependent upon technology which is ever increasing. These present the initial WOW factor, not much else.
What lasts a life time are amazing stories, iconic music, clean art work, and memories of playing well designed game experiences.
But on the flip side, none of this means you can go back to the original Half Life graphics and animations and expect anyone to take you seriously.
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Nice… Daz has always been somewhat of a difficult import, more so because the characters often have a lot of issues with hidden meshes and geoshells. Mostly I have gone to importing Daz models to CC4 then Unity with decent results. They’ve also been ultra slow to update import tools, do they have anything updated yet for HDRP?