Adaptive Character System

I've been working on an adaptive character system in Unity to mitigate the cost of production and increase the amount of character variation. Yesterday Polygon released an article containing some of my technical description of the system: http://www.polygon.com/2014/7/3/5863785/ubisoft-female-characters-assassins-creed-the-mandate
You can also watch a short video of the system in it's current state here (animations are placeholders, nothing final etc):

 

really cool and useful system... great job...
by the way.... your game looks awesome....

 

What would be the advantages of your system over UMA?

 

Having looked at UMA there's a very big difference in how it fundamentally works.
UMA is primarily a a rig where the deformation bones have been individually parented to the animation bones so that it allows non uniform scaling of the deformation bones without affecting the children. You could do this to any mesh and get a UMA-like rig. It's a nice solution to the problem, but it's a very different one than the one I'm using.

My system is primarily using vertex positions from a huge dataset of morphs. This gives a great deal more options for what shapes we want to pull because it's not limited to changing the scale and position of specific weighted areas. Any vertex can be moved anywhere to make the new shape which gives more artist control and flexibility. We converted this dataset to 'Endomorphs' in Modo / Lightwave so that we could reduce or increase vertex and triangle count while maintaining the integrity of the dataset. The result is that the morphs are maintained even if the vertex count is changed.

For each morph produced there are some special polygons that describes where the joint should move to for this morph, this part of the dataset is exported to the BVH format from MakeHuman. The system combines the vertex positions with the corresponding bvh offset to calculate where the new bone rest position should be.

The last part which I don't know if UMA handles, but the weighting of the cloth / armorset etc is calclulated on the fly in my system using one of several pre defined weighting rules, so there is no need to rig the cloth pieces, and the system automatically deletes all parts of the mesh that is underlying the cloth. It can also combine arms/legs/upper-body etc from different armor sets.

So the advantages to this approach over the UMA approach are:
- Greater artist control in producing the variation, since they can move any vertex individually.
- LODable rig complexity (Since the rig could have any number of the initial bones while maintaining the shape).
- Very little artist time spent on rigging per cloth/armor piece, just pick rule from a drop down in unity.

 

Are you planning to release it on the Assetstore ?

 

Interesting comparision with uma - do you think your asset could be merge with uma? i ask because uma is open source, free and author allow create paid addon for uma so it would be good if community would have one powerful tool for character system

 

That's very interesting, would be cool to see the source code....