procedural character generation

Hi there Fernando

with clothing, does an alpha texture get applied to the skin mesh to hide it underneath the clothing, just like Second Life?

The performance is not optimal this way is it?

I really love the design that is coming out for SL avatars - the items are so extensive. I hope UMA can provide such a variety. I am eager to start creating some items of the asset store.

Having gone thru the process of creating my own avatar system I can appreciate how much work you have put in.

Great work.
R

 

Hi Fernando

one thing I have been experimenting recently with is rendering high resolution skins in Cycles (using SSS) - front, side and back views - then "stitching" them together to create the final skin. I found "painting" skins very time consuming and ultimately did not give me the photo-realistic look I wanted.

This is one of my painted skins. It was in development so excuse the messy dressing.



R

 

There´s no need for applying transparency on avatar base mesh to avoid it appearing over the cloth. Proper skinning handles shape variation, and it´s aways possible pre calculating body occluded areas to avoid including tris that wouldn´t be visible. I´m not sure if I´ll provide this out of the box, but it has already been tested in many versions.

Ps: first time I´ve found artists had to do this on SL, I got an : O expression on my face

 

I believe there will be many visual styles for both avatars and clothes =) The content I provide is just meant to be an example of how UMA works. Baking the sss into diffuse is tricky, specially because you lose the dynamic variation based on camera position, but it usually gives nice results

Cheers!

 

Wow! We just got #1000 post and didn´t even noticed! Lol

 

So, any news on the new version? : p

 

Sure! Official release will be next week

 

Cool, sounds like good timing : )

 

Official 1st release or Official new beta?

Andy

 

Official official Official official
as far as I know =D

 

Sounds like a very official release then : )

 

OFFICIAL? WOW? Congratulations

 

Looks like Nicole Kidman

 

By Official I mean it´s just leaving beta to it´s first release, nothing really fancy =D
But there are a huge number of improvements since last version.

 

As the project is moving out of beta, can we assume that the avatars have been finalized? Or will we need to wait until the official release before attempting to create content for UMA?

Also, do you plan to support the new blendshape feature purported to be available with Unity 4.3?

 

UMA - Smart Overlay Library + Mecanim API

 

Hi there! I'll be able to answer tomorrow =)
5 am here, need to take a plane in a couple hours Hehhee

 

Hey, sorry taking long to answer, I've got offline for some time.
All base meshes are on final stage from my side. =) I'll upload them together with the first release version on following days.
About blendshapes, I'm still not sure what changes will be necessary when they are available and documented. I provide all necessary to have facial animations based on bones, but I take in worst case, you can create the avatar with a separated head, in case blendshapes require an separated skinnedMeshRenderer.

 

Hey,

Take a look at facegen

http://www.facegen.com/demos.htm

Some sample faces created with it :

http://www.relativitybook.com/CoolStuff/facebank.html

Some screenshots of the facebank :





Note that these are done with the base sample content pack of the soft. lol.

Autodesk's demo tool for making characters (non commercial, unfortunately), using the same technology :

http://projectpinocchio.autodesk.com

The same technology is also used by Elder's scrolls Oblivion, iclone, poser's face room.

Eve online doesnt have such range of races and face morphs.

The price is high for games ~1000$ per project, just to export some 900 polygons textured face model in obj lol !

The facegen tool has a great random face generator, i mean everytime you press it, you could export the model and use it as is, unlike for example poser, where the generated face is weird most of the time.

 

Hi there! Not sure I follow. You plan using facegen together with UMA? You would just need to work on head/neck junction, but it´s possible
Cheers

 

Hi,

No ! im only exposing the features of facegen. Stitching their head on a model wouldnt be a cheap solution lol ! Their license is as expensive as unity, and just to generate a face, not the body, this means you'll have to make a body texture and adjust the color to match the head, definitely not a viable solution.

I just wanted to show how they manage to handle diferent races and face morphology.

To deal with races or gender or age, they are not only swapping skin textures, they use some blending of color/tone maps for different regions of the face.

Plus, like i said previously, the generate button is magic. You dont get exagerated facial features like a too much distorted nose or some overlapping issues.
With about 15 face textures for female, and 15 male, you get a huge mount of variation. And for the shape, there are like 20 to 60 sliders to control every part.

Plus, aditional sliders to control face expression. And anothr set of sliders to control visemes for lip sync.


And also, the most amazing tool is the generation of 8 faces with similar genetics, with control of the evolution amount.

 

very very very nice

 

Oh, got it! =)
I´ve worked with Facegen a long time ago, so I really can´t remember, it also generates normal and specular maps? that would be really important. Back then I was testing having a custom topology for the head, and it worked really wel.

 

No, the Facegen modeller only exports the final blended diffuse map.

But in the Facegen sdk, there must be some kind of suport for this.

I've made a quick search :

According to this page : http://www.facegen.com/about.htm
"2011, August. Autodesk licenses FaceGen for Evolver."

Autodesk used facegen sdk for Evolver, wich has become the project pinocchio http://projectpinocchio.autodesk.com/.

When you export a character made with pinocchio, it has normal, and specular map.

Then, to replicate this, i think if the texture artist creates spec and normal for each different skin texture, if in the game you blend multiple diffuse maps, then normal and spec should be mixed the same way. I mean aplying the same type of operations to diffuse spec and normal.
If you watch closely, there is only the aging system that is blending some aged skin texture (wih wrinkles and stuff) on top of the current detail texture.

--------------------------------------

Do you think facial bones can handle everything needed for the different kind of face deformations inside of uma ? It is great for the body limbs resizing, but when it comes to morphing, take for exampe the belly, a simple non uniform scale isnt enough for having some good fatness to happen (lol, my poor english)
Ive seen many apps using blendshapes/ or whaever vertex interpolatio technics to perform the mophing tasks : marvelous designer's avatar system, poser, makehuman, facegen, and many more.
Most of the time the use a simple obj file as a morph target for each extreme deformation.
And they manage to mix it with bone deformation wen it comes to facial animation.

Im not an expert of this domain but to me it seems possible to replicate it inside unity.

Did you get enough feedback on the uma package Fernando ?

 

Hey, btw, welcome to the forum =)
Traditional morphing wouldn´t let clothes with different topologies properly adapt to avatars shape dynamically and in real time, without having previous knowledge of possible deformations.
I would suggest testing the beta project to see what are the possible variations, but keep in mind this is just a small fraction of what can be included. You can still consider using Unity blend shapes, I take they will provide a lot of extra power to UMA : ))
Btw, the new version, still not public, includes extra adjusts for belly, so you can get pregnant woman and beer belly as well.
Cheers!

 

Ive already tested the beta 6 package and the content pack, and played with the armature in blender =), many weeks ago.

For the little game im creating, i dont want to reinvent the wheel in unity, and i need a good character system so i think ill use uma because its in an advanced state already.

Will you add a dedicated forum where users could post on specific topics ? Because fetching 50 (52 actualy !) pages of this growing thread is terrible lol.
And you got about 133 subscribers on youtube (including me lol), i think a lot of them are waiting (maybe craving) to see how it is evolving.

Would be good for submitting bugs, or request and posting your annoncements to the community. I dunno if wix can handle a phpbb or something similar.

I think you can get a good hosting plan online in a few hours for less than 20 $ =), i can help a bit if you lack a web developper.

Uma also needs more things, a good wiki, documentation, tutorials, etc.

 

This is such an impressive project! Shows how long it's been since i've been on the forums properly, UMA has come along so much! As soon as I have more time I'd love to have a go.

 

I have read a few early pages and the last 4 ... so I'm just getting up to speed on this thread, although I have watched quite a few videos on your YouTube Channel.

I have a question about the baking of SL textures to the UMA character. In the video you bake from the SL avatar to a UMA model that is in a T-Pose and you describe as "having the same volume". The standard UMA character seems to be in an A-pose, so is the T-Pose UMA model available somewhere?

cheers, gryff

 

Excellent, it's next week already! Are things still on track for a release?

 

It´s still unclear if Unity itself will host UMA somehow after Beta test. We will have it at GitHub on MIT license and AssetStore, but as Unity have the rights for UMA, I´m not sure how UMA support will work. I´ll keep working on it at my free time, but the official sponsoring contract itself ended two months ago.

 

Thanks =)
There´s a huge amount of changes done on the version still not public, hope you guys like it!

 

They are still not available online, I´ll upload those to the content creators kit.
Btw, do you have the link for any good SL male skins?? Didn´t managed to find any good texture for testing male one.

 

Hehehe =D
Got back from Unite Brazil yesterday. Joen worked hard on some structural changes on the project, those required me recreating all Assets like overlays and slots, and changing part of the code, that´s why it´s taking a bit longer. Those changes are VERY important and couldn´t be done after release, so I´m doing all I can to get all ready for release.
In worst case, it will be on the beginning of next week, but if that´s the case I´ll provide an 1.0.0.7 version with the latest changes tomorrow.

 

You might want to try this OpenSim link:

Skins

The skins by "Vanish" are made using the "Eloh Eliott" template - which I played with a little when I spent time in SecondLife so they should work for you. Not sure about the quality though - that is your call ;-).

Browse through the pages - see what you can find. Click on the title for each skin to go to download page. Ohh and some of the skins are face only - for the makeup I guess. Try the male "Base" skins

cheers, gryff

 

If you are releasing on an MIT license on GIT, I assume you aren't planning on charging through the asset store? If so, please consider setting up some sort of donation option for those of us that want to support your efforts. This is beyond unreal to offer as a free resource and I personally want to provide some sort of compensation for the time and effort you've put into this. The functionality you're providing the Unity community is amazing.

 

Yes, free means slow developpment, except if there are a minimum of skilled contributors.

A character system is an important part of a game. For an online game, it is the main feature. If you played a game like Lineage 2, Aion, Tera, guild wars, and so on, the world itself is useless, without the characters, you can have the best environment design of all times, if you cant have a diferent apearance from your neighbor, and customize your gear or your face, it would be less attractive.
In L2, most of the time players are talking about their gears, the gear they want to buy, the different builds possible, etc. I ve seen its the most important aspect of an mmo, and i played more than 30 of them.

And in dota games, the player himself is buying the skin, quite amazing how they care the apearance of the character they play.

The same skin for everyone can still be fun in some fps like urban terror or GunZ, or CS.

In the unity assets store there is some random low poly solo characters, each one have a different style from another, if you are lucky, the publisher did some other characters with the same style. In a game you cant put a toon next to an hyper realistic human, you must apply the same style to all characters. Except for party games, where there is every kind of popular character.

These assets have less chance to be bought than a good character system solution.

What does mean that the sponsor contract has ended 2 month ago ? Does this mean unity isnt interested anymore on supporting uma ? Or just nobody noticed since 2 months i has ended ?

If you cant get support from it, you will get from the guys who need a good character system for their unity games.

Unity itself isnt free, if someone is not planning to spend money to sell his game, then why choosing to use unity ? lol.

Now to speed up the developpment of uma, like any software, it requires skilled workers, and money, even the most useless human in a town needs money to buy anything to eat, or to move his car or by bus, or to pay his internet, and bills. Working for free is a suicide,exept if you ot a good plan for whats coming in after.

In my case, i could spend a few dollars in the asset store for it, not more than 100 $ i think, 150$ max if there is no choice, and actually, there isnt lol !

Plus like i said, there is a lot of people who could post their skins to the asset store. that will motivate even more the developpers to buy uma (if its not free). Im not spending a cent untill i see a good community of artists around this project.

To make a good skin you need a 3dsk account, or some good reference, and do some simple texture projection. You can do this with blender for free. There are some good tutorials on projection painting on youtube.

I mean for 35$/month you get access to 3dsk library. You make skins for uma and sell them in the unity assets store.

And as everybody needs money, there will be the same success as secondlife billions of skins, daz 3d thousand of skins, poser millions of skins, etc.

This is how i see it can become a good business for everyone.

For my part, i just want to use it the sooner possible and why not buying some good skins, if someone makes some for a decent price i mean not more than 10 $ per skin. The other day i said facegen had 15 different skin details for male and female, i counted them in fact there is 30 + 30 different skin details. This means, the same face topology, and morphology has a lot of possibilities.

For example an assets store publisher could even sell some race packs for uma, custom expressions packs, etc. There is a lot of possibbilities. The same global benefits as mecanim that is offering motion retargeting for the mass, and publishers selling good motion capture packs.
And mecanim is the main reason im using unity. If there were an open source retargeting library i wouldnt spend my time and money with unity. Motion retargeting has just been released in blender, it exists in motionbuilder since decades (big lol).

Make some polls :

- who needs uma ?
- who is going to spend money on uma ? how much ?
- how many time can you wait untill the final release, what are your deadlines ?
- what features do you want to see in uma ?
- will you contribute if there is a crowdfunding campaign to speed up uma's developement ? how much can you donate ?

If you cant get enough funding, this means you need to talk to more people, in many different developper forums.

Then make some roadmap and gant chart so we can see who is doing what.
And if there is some task without a contributor, maybe someone else can contribute.

Like i said previously, if you publish some good tutorials, documentation, wiki, make some contest, some tournament i dont know, any kind of marketing strategy you could imagine, explain how anybody can start making content for uma and sell it on the assets store.

The day you publish uma, the same day there will be some good packs to buy on the asset store.

Just watch the link given by gryff, opensim-creations. It confirms evrything im saying.

When you open a door, thousand of people enter in the room for any reason, who knows why ?

 

renaud974: in 2.69 ? Or are you talking about the "Motion Capture Tools" of Benjy Cook? which have been around for a while.

FernandoRibeiro: did the T-Pose UMA character get added to the "Contentent Creators Kit" yet?

cheers, gryff

 

Yes, made in 2011 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VhbSrau-0c
You can read "Developed as part of Google Summer of Code 2011", gsoc events are pushing open source softwares with decent features from time to time.

Meanwhile motionbuilder had retargeting since 10 years, after a quick google research, i found a link from 2002 talking about motionbuilder's retargeting : http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131339/product_review_kaydaras_.php

10 years to get a feature into an open source software. And not having 1/4 of today's features of motionbuilder.

At this speed, one would prefer to spend money rather than wait forever.

 

Surely Unity will host the UMA Asset and the content pack as from what I've seen in the forums besides MMOs proposals aggravating some people the second highest cause of trouble is someone getting tricked into buying crummy art assets or art assets that aren't delivered.

 

Ohhh thanks! That helped a lot. I´m using one of those for testing the male SL->UMA =)

 

Hi there KrisToe4!
First of all, welcome to the forum =DDD
I´m happy with your offer. Without Asset Store sponsoring this project, it would probably not be open source or would take way longer to be available. Thanks to Joen Joensen help, this project evolved to something even more powerful and flexible.
UMA will aways be free at Asset Store, and open source.
You don´t need to compensate me, I´m supper happy to provide this to the community! Consider helping improving UMA even further if you´re a coder or an artist, as a way to help both me and community : ))
Cheers

 

Sorry to crop your message, I´ll comment it below =D

What does mean that the sponsor contract has ended 2 month ago ? Does this mean unity isnt interested anymore on supporting uma ? Or just nobody noticed since 2 months i has ended ->

Ohhhh sorry if it looked that way! Not really! I´ve just been together with Caitlyn at Unite this week, and Unity interest on UMA grows bigger with time =D
We had a six month contract, and it simply ended, nothing wrong on that. The scope of the project was done, but we decided to improve UMA even further, this was only possible with Joen (@UnLogick) help.

Now to speed up the developpment of uma, like any software, it requires skilled workers, and money, even the most useless human in a town needs money to buy anything to eat, or to move his car or by bus, or to pay his internet, and bills. Working for free is a suicide,exept if you ot a good plan for whats coming in after.

UMA Core functionalities are ready In fact I´m just adjusting the last scripts to upload the 1.0.1.0 RC1, we should have the official release at the beginning of next week. After that, it´s up to you guys to create content and make some good money selling them at Asset Store =DD

 

Yay =D
Hehehe packing everything today! Last hours

 

and

Good, I'm looking forward to running some of my own tests on the SL->UMA transfer ;-)

cheers, gryff

 

Exciting stuff!! : D

 

Hahaha : D

 

Haha - perfect image merge!

 

Hi there guys!

Here´s the 1.0.1.0 content pack, for content creators:
http://www.huika.com.br/UMA/ContentPack_1.0.1.0.rar

 

Nice (and thanks for the warm welcome).