[Deprecated] Runtime Tools for Morph Character System (MCS)

I'd be glad to pass along the information I have gathered:

The previous CoreBlendshape and blendshape type has been replaced with the CoreMorphs and Morph types, however the new types do not contain all of the methods that CoreBlendshapes had. Functionality such as Blendshape Groups have been completely removed as well as GetBlendshapeByID(), these were two very important parts of MCSRTT!

Fortunately something like this could replace the GetBlendshapeByID() function:

GetComponent<M3DCharacterManager>().coreMorphs.morphLookup["LocalMorphName"];

'Local Morph names' previously called DazNames or blendshape Ids are now in a dictionary as part of coreMorphs rather than in asset form like version 1.

As for blendshape groups I will have to recreate that functionality in MCSRTT.

Morphs now need to be added to the character (I'm not sure if there is a UI for this since I have 400+ errors I need to go through first for scripts to compile), from what I understand they are attached/detached similarly to clothing. This is good since characters won't have all those bones enabled all the time increasing performance.

So it seems that they have redone a lot of their core system but kept the stuff commonly used intact, unfortunately MCSRTT dug pretty deep into the original MCS.

As far as Runtime Tools for MCS (MCSRTT) I need to fix all the errors and re-implement blendshape groups, as for the reptilian and minotaur characters I'm going to cancel integration with those (since they are not on the asset store anymore as of right now) and move back release of the new camera system until after I release an updated compatibility patch.

I may also write a editor extension for better visualization of the new system.

 

I have begun recreating blendshape groups and rewriting the race system has been easy. Repairing the system should move along quickly as well; expect a patch before the end of the month (unless the asset store process takes over a month like last time).

Edit: Done fixing MCSRTT's errors, going to begin testing to make sure everything still works.

 

Things are looking good, the next update should include:

-Updated for MCS 1.6.1
-Improved character creation camera
-Runtime randomization of clothing/hair (randomizes shirts, pants separately ect..)

I might take things a set further and include support for changing character skin materials as well.

 

Going through every morph ID by hand today to make sure they match up with the old blendshapeID's as well as adding new ones and removing old ones and sliders. Took 6+ hours to do the first time >_<

 

Great. Let me know when I can buy.

 

I am wondering if it would be helpful if I submitted a version that has all the errors fixed so owners of Runtime Tools for MCS don't have a ton of errors even if the system isn't fully functional, with a warning for new purchasers until all the ID's are fixed. (Like or something if this would help you)

 

I think that's good. Waning should be really obvious so you don't get the usual bad review from people that don't read.

 

As a purchaser of this asset, im good waiting. Someone will (as stated above) not read, then get snippy in a review.

 

I have submitted a version of the asset that has the errors resolved. The warning is in the description, update notes, changelog, and here on the forums. If I get an unhappy reviewer, I'll be sure to point that out in the comments. Typically when I look for assets I don't look at just the stars but read the reviews and comments by the publisher. I just want to make sure that those who may have already integrated this asset into their projects can continue to work unhindered.

 

@FirefightGI ,

Really tempted to purchase this Asset. However, one of the criticisms of MCS Male/Female and associated is that you have to buy any number of additional assets to get sufficient clothing/armour for a playable RPG etc. Tell me more about Runtime Costuming. What about third party assets (3d armour, clothing)? Skinned meshes only?

[edit]

Also, how about Playmaker actions/integration to make this Asset more saleable?

 

The asset will work with any clothing items either bought from Morph3D or made yourself with their artist tools.
As the asset stands it is just a compatibility patch so those upgrading from MCS 1.0 to 1.6 don't get errors in their project, a few features (including runtime costuming) have yet to be updated to work with MCS 1.6. PlayMaker actions are not planned for this asset, anything this can do is easily accessed via Unity's inspector without coding required. I do however recall seeing a playmaker actions asset for MCS on the asset store you may try to find.

 

Any ETA for when the other features will be fixed?

Also you should consider integration with Inventory Pro.

 

I would say it will be finished by the end of this month; if it will be published and on the store by that time I don't know.
I have used an older version of inventory pro and I can't recall if it works this way but when an Item is equipped you might just be able to call a EquipItemById() function in MCSRTT in the inventory item's onEquip() function. But I may consider a full integration.

 

Awesome. Thanks.

 

Hi,

@Duffer123
My old asset is no longer available.
Some new actions are available for free on the Playmaker Forums.

@FirefightGI
I hope to check your asset soon

 

@cwmanley ,

Excellent. Thanks.

 

I had been lazy with updating ALL the Ids since there are over 400 of them and it was pretty much manual copy and paste and checking for new/old ones in the existing lib (about 6-7 hours of that) so what do lazy programmers do? Write some code that updates the library automatically! So in about an hour I have updated all the Ids, this will make things easier in the future.

 

The code has been updated and new features are being tested.
-Ids, Ageing, race and randomizers have been successfully updated to MCS 1.6.x
new features will include:
-New utility functions
-Material changes for the built-in character races.
-Re-added blendshape groups, however these are hardcoded.
-Randomization of clothing, hair.
-Equipping of clothing.
-Optimizations and code improvements.
-Character camera smoothing improvements

 

Not quite ready to submit for review, still need to write up new documentation and make updated videos.

You guys are going to love the new editor extension for the character manager, two new things it can do are categorize clothing into shirts, pants, shoes ect.. and assign materials that are used by races across all LODs.

 

The asset is updated and available on the asset store, be sure to use the latest version of MCS and let me know if you find any bugs.

 

Hi. Does it work on mobiles?

 

Hi =)

Your asset is reallye excellent !
I love your work <3

But little question, you know a little tutorial for the Artist Tools. Because, i try to create a new item in the artist tool, but my clothes doen'st work with the morph on the avatar :/ .

I dont understand my error
You think, you can help me on this ?

Kiss,
Best regards,

by Stephanie Brunie, (MindsGame Girl3'DArtistCo.)

 

I can't think of a reason that it shouldn't work, but that said I have not tested on mobile. MCS + the character creation UI tools offered in this toolkit should not have a problem. Features such as real-time ageing may have a performance hit.

 

I have not had the chance to use the artist tools yet (I tend to stick to the programming side of things) I would go to Morph3D support first, they are usually pretty helpful. I would also try and figure out if your problem is with the art tools, MCS or if it is my package then come back here and I'll try to help the best I can.

Make sure the artist tools generated a mask if you are having clipping problems.

 

Going to run some tests today on the latest version of MCS (1.6.4) they may have added a feature that disables unused morphs, this feature was added in MCSRTT in update 1.1.b
Also if you have run into an issue with randomized clothing/morphs not updating at start MCS 1.6.4 may address those problems as well. I would still advice caution before updating though.

 

Is this asset now fully compatible with MCS 1.6? If so, you might want to update the OP at the start of the thread. There is still an advisory there warning that this asset is not compatible with 1.6.

 

Also, how reliable are the results of randomly generated MCS characters? I've found the MCS system itself to be a bit unreliable in my experimentation with it:

 

It should be fully compatible with MCS 1.6, however not every scenario has been completely tested since MCS 1.6.1 and forward as we have been hard at work releasing another asset. (I'll be sure to remove the compatibility warning from the thread). The system's random clothing generation system is a custom editor that allows you to specify what a clothing item is (hat, shirt, pants...and so on) and will randomly pick clothing from those lists you define at start and enable them on the character. Results such as clipping, overlapping are relative to how MCS handles clothing and your own custom clothing design. The random clothing system simply provides a way of distinguishing a shirt from pants from a left shoe so they can be added randomly.

 

Thanks for getting back to me, that all makes sense. Have you observed clipping to be a common issue with MCS, or have I been using it wrong somehow?

 

Clipping seems to be pretty common, I really am more of a programmer than an artist, but from what I understand MCS creates something like a mask texture for clothing that renders out the character's body if the character mask overlaps with the clothing mask. In theory you should be able to adjust the masks so fix specific clipping issues. You might be able to generate new masks with the artists tools or maybe manually edit the existing ones. I would contact the Morph3D team for assistance though, personally I have not tried to resolve clipping.

 

Thanks, that's fair. I just worry about trying to procedurally generate characters if I can't rely on the underlying character asset to look right with arbitrary adjustments.

 

It is just a bit tricky, studios handle this problem differently. If you figure out a way to really refine the clipping masks to where it is not really a problem with the characters body then you can do the following:

You could try to make whole outfits i.e. pants, shirt, gloves as a whole set, then standardize it, make it so all the parts are a standard size, it is then easy to add overlays of other clothing and knowing that the overlays were built over your standardized clothing so clothing wont clip with other clothing (think Elder Scrolls, Fallout, or Star Citizen).

If you can afford it, pick up this: https://www.marvelousdesigner.com/

 

I tried running the Demo_Character_Creation and got a number of errors. Any idea what could be wrong?

The first error happens when the scene starts to play
The second I have no idea
The third when switching to female
The last error happens when I try to move a slider on the female on update; sometimes when I run it, it happens for male sliders

I also can't switch back to male after female.

 

What I need to know:
1) What version of MCS are you using.
2) What version of Unity are you using.

The first error might mean you are missing an MCS asset, it may be standard male or female clothing, you can probably re-assign different clothing through the MCSRuntimeManager, the error is originating from the getRandomClothes() method, randomizable clothing is assigned in the MCSRuntimeManager.

The other 3 might be a version incompatibility issue, anything referring to keys or dictionaries are referring to the morphs, if one is missing from either the male or female character and you try and modify it, you will get errors because it is not in the dictionary for that character (sometimes Morph 3D likes to change if a morphs name is the same between characters).

I have yet to update to Unity 2017 and may have missed a MCS update.

Currently I am extremely busy with a major update for our other asset Modular AI and getting a game ready to pitch to investors. There might just be a certain slider that is causing this problem, in that case just isolate it and not use it until I find time to publish a patch.

Edit: Just checked it out with Unity 2017, somehow the clothing randomizer lost its references between Unity versions (or so it seems) I added this button to manually clear the lists above line #69 in the MCSRTT_RuntimeCharacterManager_Editor.cs:

Code (CSharp):

1. if (GUILayout.Button("Clear All Items"))
2.                 {
3.                     targetRM.backPacks.Clear();
4.                     targetRM.shirts.Clear();
5.                     targetRM.pants.Clear();
6.                     targetRM.leftShoes.Clear();
7.                     targetRM.rightShoes.Clear();
8.                     targetRM.faceMasks.Clear();
9.                     targetRM.jackets.Clear();
10.                 }

I am still looking into the other problem.

 

I just need to rant a bit:

I have been thinking the last few days that I might just say screw it and write an asset that can create/edit/remove blendshapes from skinnedmeshes without going through 3rd party modeling software. I don't like having to rely on unfinished/unsupported products such as UMA, MCS, iClone to have characters with blendshapes in Unity.

UMA is far from AAA and tutorials are lacking,
MCS still has clipping errors, DLLs, dumb EULA and requires external tools for clothing, and no beards!
iClone from what I hear is not very indie friendly either.
MakeHuman still requires external software.
Mixamo/Fuse has been taken over by the adobe overlords who are removing features on the 22nd.

I have had to jump through so many hoops to get good quality characters and am even still waiting on MCS to add support for beards.....BEARDS not to mention their stupid character clothing converter that they should have just made in Unity to begin with, total cash grab regarding the EULA. And that this asset is held together with more duct tape than code since MCS breaks it with every update.

I am seriously considering making a tool that lets you make blendshapes in Unity on any character, lists them out and allows you to interface with them using UI...OH OH and I would make it so clothing is accurately mapped to the weight of the blendshapes and creates mask based on layers to resolve clipping. Heck you could get MCS, delete all their DLLs and modify the blenshapes manually without having to go through their weird inspector.

I have already written a framework that can get all the bones out of characters and allow some special animation tricks ect.. why not let you modify vertices too. In the time it would take any of the above companies to make their products viable for a AAA commercial game without making their user base jump through hoops I probably could make something like that.

Does Unity offer anything to create blenshapes? No, even the documentation tells you to make them in third party software first. Is there anything that lets you CREATE blendshape on the Asset Store? Not really, maybe something that lets you animate vertices in a similar manner but not true blendshapes baked into the mesh. Is there any modeling tools on the Asset store that let you create clothing? No, might as well create a Unity version of marvelous designer while I'm at it.

For indies to create procedural/realistic/AAA characters with customizable faces, clothes, proportions on a budget something needs to be done, UMA was a good try but in my opinion over complex and under documented.

This is not directed at anyone, but I might just go make the next UMA.

 

Latest MCS (1.6.4) and Unity 2017. If I really had to I could redo the changes I've made to my project up to this point in a Unity 5 install, but I don't know if/how I could get an older version of MCS.

I know it wasn't directed at anyone in particular, but I can't really disagree with anything you said in the rant. I'm not an artist by any means and trying to build a character customizer like you see at the start of so many games today has been an absolute nightmare. I initially walked in thinking since it was such a common thing there'd obviously be a lightweight open source asset for it. I've been absolutely flabbergasted with what actually is available and all the flaws, as you've brought up for all the different packages that each address only some of the task.

Edit: To be fair, the blendshapes tutorial by Glauz on youtube was very good and probably helped me the most at figuring out what's going on. Problem there is I'm only just learning how rigging and such works. I don't want to go anywhere near trying to build something to get clothing working on top of animations and blendshapes.

 

You should be able to go to the download manager on the asset store and download previous versions, sometimes they are even listed on the store page or you can ask Morph 3D for a previous version. Weird thing is I have been using MCS in a game and I have not gotten errors there like in the demo scenes and the versions are all the same. When I have time I'll look into the demo scenes. You could also try to go to Morph3D>MCSRTT>Create and create UI from there and hope that prefab is more stable than the demo scene setup.

 

You know UMA is opensource, so you could contribute to it if you think it is lacking in something. It also supports blendshape now.

 

If you don't want to go through all the trouble someone is already doing it. I talked to this guy since before he released the beta. I think he was PM by the MCS guys and they prob told him not to say that it worked with their assets so that people used the Artists tools. The asset is called SKINN Vetex Mapper by cwmanley

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/86532

If you decide to go make a better and easier to use UMA, think about the CC in Black Desert. That's what we all need.

I'll offer to help modeling.

 

I actually think we need more of a framework to define zones in any model with presets on how those zones can be edited and how.

 

Honestly I have not used UMA in about a year since in my opinion MCS is a bit easier and looks better.

Oh well would you look at that; Skinn Vertex Mapper, pretty much does everything I would want to do. However it seems like it makes blendshapes by just resizing bones, and I'd make it so you actually edit the vertices. I do have a tool somewhere that lets you add bones so maybe that wouldn't be a problem. Sometimes I wish it would be financially viable to do a collaboration with other asset developers without it being like a top seller or having some kind of funding.

Facial zones have been a requested feature of MCSRTT for a while now, it is probably something I can make some kind of UV mask for that overlaps the blendshapes but the only way I think I can do that with an existing system like MCS would take a lot of trial and error, or maybe if I had complete source access. There is always a way.

 

I think SKINN allows or there is a plan to allow to add new bones. I don't remember. I've been off unity for a few months. I'm going to tag @cwmanley cause I think you both can collaborate.

EDIT: https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/skinn-vertex-mapper-released.456494/page-2#post-3143185

 

I just wrote a little tool that allows you to add bones to any mesh (like started an hour ago), I bundled it with my pre-existing tools that read out bones from SkinnedMeshRenderers (currently Humanoid, working on generic/legacy with a little help from Partel Lang the author of Final IK) I got this working with the UMA and MCS base meshes.

I might make this into something, I would like to allow the user to manually map vertices to blendshapes in addition to bone based blendshape modification.

Edit: I wish I knew more about how BoneWeights worked internally though, they're like magic ATM; not that it matters to much.

 

I have announced UCP this will replace MCSRTT when it is released, it will act as a start to finish character pipeline from modeling, rigging, texturing to clothing. Owners of MCSRTT will be able to upgrade to UCP. However the release will also mark the end of MCSRTT, it has been to difficult to maintain MCSRTT when MCS changes. That is part of the reason why this asset will be deprecated on release of UCP.

I am hopeful that UCP will be able to be an adequate replacement for MCSRTT. With it you should be able to port your MCS character and clothing meshes to a more Unity friendly workflow, edit/add blendshapes, pretty much do what MCSRTT did and more for any character mesh.

 

Hello .. How can I change clothes over an inventory? So I would like to pull an item to a certain slot and the morph character should attract it ..

 

Create a dictionary with item IDs and the corresponding CIclothing objects you want to attach, then have a monobehaviour on your slots that will have an ID variable that corresponds to the dictionary. When you change the ID of the active "item" in the slot i.e. when you drag an item there have it execute an event that retrieves the ID from the active slots and looks up the ID in the dictionary then use this:
M3DCharacterManager.AttachCIClothing(CIclothing clothing, bool clone_item);
with clothing being the CIclothing item found in the dictionary with the given ID to attach it to the character that has the M3DCharacterManager component.
MCSRTT does not have a built-in inventory system but supports runtime clothing randomization on Start().

 

I have addressed some issues with the demo scenes and have written an auto-update tool.
The auto-update tool will sync the BlendshapeIDLib with any changes to the coreMorphs for both the male and female characters, meaning no more mismatched keys when Morph3D changes blendshapes.
The fixes and auto-update tool will be submitted to the asset store within the next few days.

 

HI All

Where can i get MCS Artist tool?

 

You can get it here: https://www.morph3d.com/morph-artist-tools

 

Will owners of MCS Runtime Toolkit be automatically upgraded to Ultimate Character Pipeline when it's released, or will the two exist as separate assets?