FULL BODY IK, Mech Spiders and much more about to hit the Asset Store!

Figuring out a price for this is indeed very difficult. Normally you would just look at similar stuff on the Asset Store and go from there, but there are no analogues for this on the Store. Cant really look at at external products either, like HumanIK for example, I've read it costs tens of thousands of dollars PER PROJECT, cant verify this though, because the prices are not public.

But the Asset Store is an entirely different ecosystem, it has volume which helps us deliver with only a fraction of the cost. I can tell you though it is not going to be anywhere near Mixamo's all year access price as far as I'm concerned. But it's not going to be 40 bucks either, people sell 3D characters for that price that is only a few days work. I would be just mugging myself and I would choke on providing support for every kid with "look at my first game (GTA style)" asking for it, bringing down the quality of support for everyone.

I do share the ideology though with UT that game development should be accessible to everyone, I believe the same thing should apply to advanced animation tech. There is an enormous gap between the quality of animation in AAA and indie games. That is largely because technology like HIK and Euphoria are being kept elitary only and unreachable to indies, so that even the most advanced of indie devs, like Overgrowth, could not get their hands on it. When David Rosen asked NM for licensing Euphoria, he was simply responded with: "Euphoria is currently not available to the public, we only have deals with a very limited amount of publishers and quite frankly I assume it would be much too expensive for what you are doing, sorry." (http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/11/why-we-are-not-using-euphoria/). And thats ancient technology by now in software years! I understand it is very expensive normally to develop systems like that, but the Asset Store sure opens up new opportunities to explore. It doesn't really matter if you sell a 100 000 dollar product 10 times or a 10 dollar product 100 000 times. Only difference is that with the latter, more people get to enjoy the awesomeness.

So to conclude this stream of thought, I don't even know the price yet and you probably will know it when you see it on the Asset Store. After all, it doesn't even depend on me 100%, because Unity does have a word in it. Asset Store pricing guidelines. For those of you on a tight budget, there are always madnesses and sales on the store, that I hear are quite beneficial to everyone. . It doesn't even bother me if you pirate it for personal fun or evaluation, maybe it would even be for the better, because I prefer a pirate user to a disappointed one and a zero review. Besides, as you said, Final IK would be quite easily recognisable in a game . If AS had some built in way of making evaluation versions I would surely consider it.

 

...and Lazygunn, respect you partner, talk things through with her, she is more important than Final IK

 

Seriously the most awesome asset i've seen yet, i was like wow through all the videos. Better still, legacy usage!!

I feel unity will be kidnapping you soon Mr Lang as this blows mecanims similar features away!!!

Take a bow Mr Lang, take a bow.

This + legacy + my own tools = me extremely excited!!!

 

haha oh dont worry its our humour, she'd be perfectly fine, actually i showed her your first videos in the thread and shes the furthest from being techy or computery as you can imagine and she was very impressed when i explained what was happening. frankly if you can impress her with a computer thing then you did very very well

 

-hah, cool, it didn't even occur to me that I could use this to impress women.... sweet

 

Puppetmaster sounds so amazing! It's what I've always wanted on a game engine. The time has finally come! :-D

I think I speak for everyone we're really grateful that you're doing this, keep it up!

 

Partel Lang this is simply amazing, presentation is pure awesome. Thank you also for putting time into making it and it certainly does help a lot on significance on buying decision becouse having video proof makes me more confortable on purhcase that words aloane.

 

Du to many "incredible" "amazing" "awesome" written here, Partel Lang discovered he could ask more than expected for its product.
I am now worried about the final price of Final IK.

This was written there less than a week, but seems far away.

 

To add to the good mood i'd also like to say the music makes me laugh when it times up with something, so host that somewhere too. Also you'd be surprised regarding females and talented codey stuff in some social circles chap, looks like a good 2014 for you

 

Oophs!

But, there are always asset store sale offers

 

Yeah..

Anyway, I'm there. Not necessarily Day One as expected.

 

Wow guys, thank you a lot for all your kindness, the anticipation and the faith that you have in this is truly amazing. Really absolutely great community that we have here, thanks again . And don't worry I won't get carried away with the price.

Btw, ZJP, thanks a lot for introducing this on the French forums

I will post some more videos very soon, but today I really need to take a break

Cheers and thanks for the good mood,
Pärtel

 

You're welcome.

 

This looks awesome. Put me down for an instabuy if it's decently priced.

 

@Partel How does your IK system cope with extra bones? For instance, with UMA we have a number of extra bones, that it would be very handy to include in your IK system. In fact, the way UMA works, people can make new "parts" for UMA, like a tail for instance - which would have new bones.

So for UMA, we can't predict in advance what bones could be present, so it would be really cool if your IK system can read through the bones on starting, and give us access to all bones present. This would be handy for all rigged models, not just biped humanoids.

 

That is a very good question. Internally the way it works is that IKSolverFullBodyBiped inherits from IKSolverFullBody, which is kind of a generic solver that just contains the chain and all the constraints and handles solving. The only reason I made IKSolverFullBodyBiped (quite recently actually) was to simplify the set up for bipeds and add a very small bit of extra functionality. Basically all it does is tell the IKSolverFullBody that it should have 4 limbs and 9 effectors and provide a custom inspector for that. That said, I do plan to make IKSolverFullBodyGeneric some time in a future version, but it's not going to be in the initial release.

I am also planning to make a demo about special characters, just to see how much exactly could be done with the biped solver, because I don't even know it myself yet. Actually I can't think of any reason why we could not use it for quadrupeds as well, but I will confirm that later.

About the tail and other special bones, as you might have noticed from the videos, when you add the component, you can see the very low resolution IK chain on the character. Your character might have lot's of spine bones and twist bones in the forearms, but they will still be mapped onto that low res chain, and once the chain is solved, the result is mapped back on the character. That is so because a simple model like that provides crazy fast performance and great solver stability. As you may have noticed, even the head bone is excluded from the solver. That is because it is just a bone and you may rotate it however you please after the solver is finished and I can think of very few unlikely scenarios where an animator should drag a character specifically by the head (maybe hanging up someone? Thats sounds like job for ragdolls instead ). Besides, you can always simulate it by dragging both shoulder effectors instead.

Now about the tail, remember you can always just drop on a CCD or FABRIK component and use that instead (with rotation limits if you like), I cant really think of any Full Body IK use cases for that either, and if you really needed to drag something from it's tail (that's just mean ), that also could be simulated with the pelvis and body effectors. Even with extremely special cases like 4-handed characters, I think we could get great results if we defined the master (upper maybe) pair to be solved by Full Body, and the other pair by the simple Limb IK component. I believe it would make a great effect and remember, we can keep the performance .

 

Thanks Partel, that's a full explanation of the working of FBIK. Apart from the tail, I can think of a number of benefits, if we could get certain extra bones.

Imagine the MMORPG style /kiss emote for example, especially when avatars are of different heights. An IK point on the mouth would greatly simplify and reduce the number of expensive MOCAP animations needed, by ensuring that the two mouth IK points join together.

With mouth (and nose) and hand IK, eating and drinking, facepalming, and dozens of other emotes may be possible. Another example might be dancing, or shaking hands, or high-five, where hands must join together.

An "ass bone" may be very good for sitting on an item, no matter if the chair, wall, or other object is at a standard height or not. No amount of fixed animations could cope in such circumstances.

I'm seeing a lot of possibilities, if we can give a few specific extra bones to the Solver - and possibilities that would save *a lot* of cash outlay creating fixed animations, and do a far superior job of it than the fixed animations ever could.

 

Really really awesome tool you've got here. We are certainly going to buy it!
Keep up the great work!

 

Woah ye havent think of it that way thats actually very true you can pretty much decrease number of animations by ton doing things like that. Good idea.

 

Obviously, I should add, that the model could contain an "ass bone" and it would be nice to be able to pass this bone name (along with a few extra) to the Solver, as bones to take into account.

 

I want to make a Sims - like - game someday

Of course, Now it is not possible It is only just a dream

But I think it can be possible faster than I have expected

 

Don't dream... Do. You have all the tools you need and answers when you get stuck, right here with Unity

 

Here's an answer to your emote question

So you can get the same result without adding any bones and all that complexity to the solver. It is just a small piece of quite simple code.

About the ass bone, you could just do it by something like...

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. yourCharacter.ik.solver.leftThighEffector.position  .y = chairHeight + yourCharacter.assFatness;
3.  

Cheers, and merry Christmas to all!

 

Well, that's just brilliant XD - 11/10 for time and effort just to show it's possible.

I'm sold, this is a must to go with UMA

 

Eep!! NSFW!

 

No need to be safe for work, its holiday

 

WOOHOO!!

Merry Christmas everyone!!

 

Ahaha epic! If you keep that system complety dynamic in game i am sure most people would derail it from gameplay and just do funny stuff with it.

 

Game-changer.

 

Haha! +1

 

I'll probably get lots of support requests from adult content creators

 

:sad:

 

Lol. Thanks for the updated video.

 

Here's one more that might be of some use:

Remember, you can always subscribe to the Youtube channel to get to all the videos if this thread gets too long.

Cheers,
Pärtel

 

Yeah, sorry about that just wanted to remove the possible copyright problem, but it wasn't the same without Barry White

 

we will know the power of asset store.. I look forward to Collaboration between developers

I now look forward to the UMA

 

@OP and all.
Merry Christmas

 

Heh, I am one of the above XD
Most of my budget was due to go on hiring a mocap studio, and willing actors - but I'm seeing all sorts of possibilities which might cut down the amount of mocap I need to spend on - which would be of huge benefit, and provide a final product that's superior to any amount of fixed animations.

 

Well I consider both the fighting/war and the sexual youTubes videos to be adult. I hope to do others things myself with FinalIK.

 

The possibilities are endless... FBIK is going to make a huge difference

 

Wow, Partel, just watched your vid on pinning. I have characters that range from 1m to 2.144m in height, and pinning will make such a difference to combat between 2 differently scaled avatars.

I'll be really interested to see the code, to see how we can organise all these possibilities, and call the correct set of pinning/or emote on any character when required.

 

Wow! This exactly what I need for a project I'm working on right now. It's an instant buy from me when it hits the asset store.

Regarding pricing, here is my 2 cents. There are a couple of boundary points that sort of set your price. At the very highest end, you can't cost more than Unity Pro itself. On principle nobody will pay that, plus at that point it starts to become more cost effective to either write your own solution or sub contract out to have someone write code for you. In addition, you have some pretty strong assets like playmaker, NGUI, etc, that offer a similar amount of value in the $50-100 price range So my guess is, after looking at all the videos, you can probably charge between $100-200 for the asset. And for what it's worth, I'd pay anything in that price range in a heartbeat.

Can't wait for this. Two months is too long!

 

Yes, some will take that to mean I am doing children's things or boring things but how many activities happen in the world that aren't sex or fighting or even involve living creatures and for what percentage of the time? FinalIK is a big part of the average indy feasibly doing something other than RPGs or FPSs. Seems the big studios have interest in nothing else. Technically though you can slap RPG on any genre, even FPS, and be 'technically' correct although most know what is meant by RPG.

 

BTW, can you imagine what we can do now with this top notch quality pack ( MOCAP ANIMATION PACK - Male 1 - Mobility) and FULL BODY IK !!!

 

This videos reminds me...those anyone know of a good example source code for the Unity Technology Mecanim Locomotion Setup in the Asset Store were they have converted the two horizontal = Input.Axis(x) vertical = Input.Axis(y) to use the data being generated from a NavMeshAgent attached as a component to an avatar rather than the data from a joystick, mouse, or keyboard?

That would really be useful for testing the fluidity of animations of created animations....

 

Indeed, procedural IK only takes you so far. If you are aiming for real AAA quality and you want to compare your game with the Assassins Creed or Max Payne 3, you'll still need top notch mocap base animation for the IK. Luckily, the content from Motus is just that .

Bless you for that thought, Goat. Here's one completely non-violent and non-sexual in true Christmas spirit

(Free Christmas stuff by BRAiNBOX from the Asset Store)

 

Hi again, I hope you all had a nice holiday!

Anyway, Mister D, who spoke earlier in this thread asked me whether it was possible to use Aim IK to aim the 2 pistols of his cool looking Adventurer character .
So here are the results:

 

hi Pärtel
i love it!
ur ik system rules! been messing around with the built in unity IK system but never got such good looking results and that with only one aim animation, simply amazing. let me know if u need more animations to test different setups.
good job
cheers

 

I've been mostly concentrating on the Full Body and Aim IK components so far, but as I have said, there is much more to Final IK than that. So please, let me show you something about the Rotation Limits. I'm sure some of you will get some cool Steampunk ideas from that .

Rotation Limits can be used with the CCD, FABRIK and Aim IK components (Full Body Biped IK uses it's own dedicated constraints). Other than IK, you can use them to constrain the rotation of whatever you like, for instance when you need to create turrets, limit the range of animation for some bones, limit camera movement and so on.

It is important to note that all Rotation Limit and IK components in Final IK use Quaternions only, so there is no wacky Euler "if (eulerAngles.x > 180)" stuff going on that you can find from some examples on the internet. That guarantees us axial independence and much better stability and continuity of the solvers.

Pärtel