Best method of building lots of 3d animated NPCs?

Hi all,

I'm just wondering what would be the best method to create many different NPCs for my adventure game. Most of them will be civilians walking around town on set paths. Some will be unique to the storyline.

At the moment I have UMA and the UMA Power tools asset for making prefabs from UMA generated content. I have installed Makehuman and created a few models.

UMA I have found to be quite complicated but at the moment I am considering the following workflow:

Step 1: Create meshes in Makehuman.
Step 2: Create clothes using Makeclothes plug-in for Makehuman
Step 3: Import Makehuman mesh and clothes into UMA and generate multiple variations of my original humanoid.
Step 4: Rig and animate one rig for each mesh.
Step 5: Create prefabs from models.

As I'm quite new to Unity3D I'm wondering first of all do I have this workflow correct and second of all is it the most efficient workflow to get good results when generating large numbers of NPC's?

If you are an experienced Unity 3D dev I'd really appreciate your advice regarding whether or not this is how you would approach the problem and if not then what you would do instead.

I am willing to spend money on assets but as it's just a hobby I can't spend too much.

Thank you very much for your time.

 

For a quick answer without performing any research before hand I would focus on having a small number of base meshes (2-4) with a number of clothing sets (2-4 starting number) that can be swapped out or randomized.
I think having one standard animation rig that can be used for all the base meshes would be the optimal solution - with a large library of animations to be usable by all NPCs.
The variation of the chracters would be
visualized through base skin texture variations, different clothing sets, different hair and maybe head meshes, and morphs/blend shapes.

This is dependent upon the level of detail of your NPCs - lower = easier of course.