[Released] Morph Character System (MCS) - Male and Female

Morph Character System - Male and Female
MCS Female
MCS Female Lite
MCS Male
MCS Male Lite

Documentation (.pdf Google Drive link)

COMING SOON: Too many bugs are present in the "Performance Hot Fix". We're cleaning them up now and when things are good and tidy we'll re-release the link to the Github repo. Apologies for the inconvenience- cheers!

MCS Male - Overview

MCS Female - Overview

Morph Character System
The Morph Character System (MCS) is a revolutionary new way to create custom characters for Unity. It puts an unprecedented amount of control in your hands, giving you the easiest and most powerful character creation experience. Whether you're an artist or a developer, now YOU have the ability to create unforgettable and unique customized characters.

MCS begins with two base figures, MCS Male and MCS Female, each sold separately. At the heart of the system is the powerful ability to morph character attributes to your needs, all controlled by simple sliders in a custom GUI. You could create a zombie or a goblin with a single slider, or choose from among the many face and body morph sliders to dial in your unique, custom look. You not only have creative control, but also tremendous value as you are now armed with endless character possibilities to populate your projects.

Morph 3D has built a community of top artists around the world to bring you high-quality, add-on content packs that are compatible with the MCS figures and sold separately in the Asset Store. We've made one of these add-on packs available for FREE. It's loaded with five MCS compatible outfits, props and more. Download the MCS Female Sci Fi 01, here.

Features Include:
•1 Outfit
•1 Hair
•1 Weapon

350 Morphs
• Morphs are configured with simple sliders in Editor
• Partial and full creature and monster morphs
• Body shape and scale morphs including muscular, lean, portly, etc.
• Aging morphs ranging from 5 to 70 years old
• Hundreds of face and body morphs for detailed customization
• Visemes and phonemes for speech animations
Character development GUI
•Basic GUI included; source code provided for specific GUI’s
•Customized names and groupings of props, morphs, hair and costumes
•Drag-and-drop bundle system to easily add new content packs
Developer API
PBR Textures and Materials
•Optimized PSD’s
•PBR Skin shader based off of “Volund” Shader
Prop attachment point system
•Easy presets
•Use code to control layout and placement
•Unlimited attachment points
•Auto mirroring of props
LOD support
•Easily choose from various levels of detail with a single slider on function call
Import and Export
Save your character designs as prefabs
Auto setup of imported characters ad GUI
Dynamic Skeleton System
• Fully rigged for Mecanim
• Access skeleton morphs at runtime
• Adjustable height and proportions for characters

MCS Morph Previews
•MCS Male - Morph List
•MCS Male Lite - Morph List
•MCS Female - Morph List
•MCS Female Lite - Morph List

Learn more at:
http://morph3d.com

A note from the developers:
A big thanks to everyone for checking out the latest and greatest from our team. MCS is the result of all of your input that was given to us in our first character product, the Sci-Fi Female: Morph Character Pack (now deprecated and rolled into the MCS). That pack was built in such a way that it could never be more than what it was. Hence the need for MCS, which allows for us to build you a vast library of add-on content for your characters. So, unlike the previous character pack, this is a system, one that we have a great vision for and one that will become better and more robust in the coming months. This thread is for you all to continue to have a voice with us and to let us know what we are doing wrong and what we are doing right and what should fix ASAP.

We can't wait to see what you guys can do with MCS!

Cheers!
The Morph Team

 

Several things:
1.) looks good and easy to use, thank you
2.) there are 2 errors in the other thread
3.) your documentation link doesn't work, it will bring people into their own dropbox, not in yours. You have to get a dedicated publishable url

 

Apologies regarding the DropBox link.

Here's a drive link for the pdf: https://goo.gl/1E9m0Z

 

It's good to know this project didn't die off. I was getting worried.

 

MCS Female Lite 9/16/15 release
Known issue:

MCS Female Lite includes a scene titled “MCSFemaleLitedemo.unity”, this was included by mistake, it contains a prefab that is broken and will generate a number of warnings. Best for all if you just ignore and delete this scene.

As noted on the MCS Female Lite store page.

 

MCS Figures 9/16/15 release
Known issue:

Upon initial import of any of the MCS figure content packs the all .fbx files need to be reimported. Assets and resource for the MCS figures need to be loaded in a specific order and .unitypackages do not guarantee import order. Reimporting the .fbx files triggers our custom importer and links project resources properly.

As noted on the MCS Female Lite store page.

 

Hey @Morph 3D and @IanAtMorph3D, MCS looks to have a lot of great potential as a character system in Unity. I was wondering if you have any details about creating custom content for MCS that you can share?

 

Similar to what @chiapet1021 asked, how hard/easy is it to turn items we already have into the custom content? Say I already have a pack of swords, and wish to make those be used by the MCS character.

This does look like a great tool though, glad you guys didn't just disappear.

 

I'm guessing swords and other props are pretty easy to add, although I haven't tested out MCS just yet.

It's clothing and hair that I'm more concerned about. There's obviously some stuff that happens under the hood to make sure those meshes conform to any morphs applied to the head or body.

 

I would think swords/weapons wouldn't be a problem since you can attach them to empty gameobjects at the locations you want them attached. Clothing, on the other hand.. I think that will be where we could have issues. Would love to hear more about the tools for that..

And what gives? Sci-fi again? Where's the love for the fantasy folks? A demo that included one simple outfit for each genre would rock, instead of the genre specific ones. I'm fine with the $50 packs with the multi-outfit genre specific stuff, but would be nice if the free demo set had a look that would fit into our environments for us to at least feel like it fits while we test it..

 

We'll be working on artist tools in the near future, these tools plus a rubric for creating models will allow users to create Morph3D compatible content.

 

Swords was a bad example, I just meant converting items in general that are already created into MCS content, instead of starting from the ground up designed for MCS. Sometimes it is easier to rebuild for something than it is to convert it over. I'm just hoping it isn't the former

 

Regarding props (guns, swords, etc), please reference page 8 in the documentation we posted in this thread, you'll want to look at the attachment point system.

 

Thanks @IanAtMorph3D! Understood about the props piece. I'm definitely looking forward to the artist tools and other information on how to make compatible content.

 

MCS Figures 9/16/15 release
Known issue:

The MCS figure “Content Pack” tool has a serialization bug:

1. Properly import MCS figure (that is to say, import, then reimport .fbx files).
2. Place a figure in your scene.
3. Modify the figure, add content packs to figure, modify blendshape settings.
4. Save and close the scene.

When the scene is opened again the content pack references will disappear from the “Show ContentPacks” tool list, this prevents removal of added clothing, hair and props via the content pack GUI tool.

If you open up the MSC figure’s hierarchy in your scene you can delete the costuming items off of the figure. This doesn’t, however, fix the broken state of the Character Manager inspector, you’ll need to save the scene, close it and reopen it.

 

Are ContentPacks necessary or can I just add and remove one clothing item?
In the worst case for a full outfit you would have 5 content packs with maybe 5 items each in 4 LODs loaded.
This results in 95 from 100 unused SkinnedMeshRenderers.
I tried it, I can add just the jacket, but it is apparently not possible to remove it without errors.

- morphs don't move teeth. Mouth open, smiles or phonemes result in an upper row of teeth in the middle of your "mouth opening"
- JCTAdapter.LateUpdate gets called on all objects every frame, resulting in about 20ms cpu time and 3.1mb garbage for one character

 

Hi!

This project seems extremely promising. The models are of high quality, it seems very flexible and modular so that you can use it as a complete character system rather than just for single characters, it also seems relatively easy to use once you get the hang of it, and the price is good. I really hope you succeed with this.

Considering the importance of reading the readme file, I would recommend that you put a notice and maybe a link in the top of your descriptions in the Asset Store with install instructions, to avoid further bad reviews caused by this.

I'm just testing out the MCS Female Lite, and it seems to work well, except that I'm getting some very bad frame-rates for just a single dressed female character. If I disable the character, I'm at 600 fps, after enabling it, it falls down to 45 fps. I'm in Linear/Deferred mode, and it seems to be the CPU that's the issue and the function JCTAdapter.Update(), if I read the Profiler right. I have a very good GPU and a decent CPU, so performance shouldn't be a problem.

I got some conversion warnings when importing the free sci-fi pack, but the MCS Female Lite installed without problems. I did noticed that some outfits and hair in the free sci-fi pack have some seams and overlaps with the base model (they don't fit perfectly), but you might already be aware of this.

Thanks, and keep up the good work!

 

Installed both packs but it is very confusing - no prefabs, none of the textures loaded for any of the assets, having to dive into the character hierarchy to try and find & edit things etc.

the interface that IS visible is empty (no morph groups, props, hair etc) and very difficult to understand.

There may be docs, but as a 'plug and play' system, it is pretty lacking currently.

 

Since I know how the sausage was made, I'd recommend steering clear of generating hair and clothing for the MCS for the moment. Until we publish artist resources and tools it will be extremely time consuming to get things working with the MCS.

Thanks for bringing these issues to our attention.

Re: Morphs not moving teeth, in which MCS figure are you seeing this behavior?

Re: JCTAdapter inefficiency, yeah this came to our attention a day or two ago, we have a fix that we're testing.

Re: Costuming Items and Content Packs, content packs are a bit of a misnomer and the "Show ContentPacks" tool is a little confusing as well. You'll have noticed that when you "add" a content pack you're dragging a .fbx into the Content Packs tool, sometimes the .fbx contains a single item, sometimes an entire outfit of clothing. Basically the .fbx as a container defines the granularity of control that you have over items present on any given character. Thanks for making this comment, it will figure into how these tools continue to evolve.

General information on updates for the MCS figure packs, currently the Unity Asset Store is about at 14 days of lag between submission and approval for new and updated products, so any update to the official asset store package is a few weeks out. As soon as we have a patched up version of our dll we'll make it available via GitHub, details soon.

 

You have to reimport the morph3d-folder for the magic to happen, as stated in the readme and documentation.
If you drag the fbx in the scene, everything will be there.

@IanAtMorph3D: I encounter the teeth-problem in MCS Female Full.
At the moment I am trying to use your API, which has a method for adding just one item of the content pack. It will work without problems, but I can't remove it, since I can only remove a full content pack. I can just set it invisible.
If the fbx is the most granular thing to add, I would ask kindly to split the fbx into single objects (if it is not possible to do it myself), since I am probably not the only one wanting to have the jacket from the starter pack and maybe a t-shirt from another. I don't know how performancehungry disabled SkinnedMeshRenderers are, but I figure that 95 unused objects could be avoided.

 

I wonder about this exact concern as well. It feels a bit "clunky" to have a bunch of overlapping SkinnedMeshRenderers where you selectively mark only the few that you want to see as visible. In the case of an avatar system with interchangeable clothing/armor, that could get very complex very quickly.

I would like to see a method of instantiating--or better yet, drawing from an object pool--the submeshes to be displayed. This would be extremely helpful at runtime. I'm not sure how much of a pipe dream that is.

 

Unity newbie here so please forgive my ignorance, but how do I go about creating animations for the MCS characters? I don't mean loading precreated animations, but making my own. Does this system come with some tool for making keyframe animations of the skeleton?

 

@jwvanderbeck Animation creation does not appear to be in the scope of MCS right now. There are assets on the Unity store that allow you to manipulate rigged meshes to create animations in the editor. However, as someone who's looked into creating animations, I have to warn you that it's a pretty complex endeavor. There's a reason why there are paid professionals in the gaming industry for it.

 

Very easy setup. I just followed the instructions and everything worked well. The only issue I have is after pressing play and stop the prop returns back to its default position and rotation. Other than that is very user friendly and not complicated at all.

I am concerned about the cpu usage though, for me and many others that will be a big issue.

Anyway congratulations.
I will keep following the progress of this asset.

Ps

I love that you have the lod control in the inspector.

 

I am one of those paid professionals. Well in VFX anyway. But having the skills doesn't do me any good if Unity has no means of animating.

How can this be "outside the scope of MCS"? Since these are assets that exist only inside of Unity, I need a way to animate them. If this was my own character I would just animate it in Modo, but since I am in Unity how am I supposed to animate it? I have to buy some additional third party tool for Unity in order to do animations?

 

If you want to, Skele for example is quite cheap and 50% off at the moment. Or, if the software you usually use allows export to fbx you are set. Just read about Mecanim and animation retargeting.

 

Or you can just use modo. You need the skeletal animation only, Mecanim will put your skeletal animation and the MCS mesh together.

 

MCS looks fantastic. The only reason why I didn't buy it on sight is a lack of content/closes. I wish at some point I will be able to obsolete Fuse with your pack.

 

This is awesome. Will definitely be buying these packs when you come out with some good clothing packs, and your tool to create our own.

 

Ah, sorry for not understanding the context and your background.

The reason why I say "outside the scope of MCS" is that at least for now, this asset appears to be focused on the models and the quality therein. Have you read much on Unity's Mecanim animation system? The idea is that for any model that is rigged for Mecanim, any animation that is also Mecanim compatible can be used on that rig. So you create or procure your animations somewhere else, then apply them via a Mecanim Animator component to a Morph3D model (which is designed with Mecanim in mind out-of-the-box).

As @montyfi mentioned, Skele is an in-editor tool for animation creation. I'm not an animation expert, so I intend on using something like Mixamo (or perhaps paying you ) for animations, then assembling them in Unity.

 

Just to confirm what others have said - get into mecanim (intimately) and you will quickly come up to speed on how animations are created for any characters who are setup for mecanim, both humanoid and generic.
You will enjoy creating content specifically created for Unity - in your preferred animation package.

 

Hey again Shawn, trust me we haven't forgotten about you and the fantasy folks. I personally feel that what we have queued for our fantasy packs will be some of the best content we have to release. Hang in there man, we're almost there!

On that note, we worked really hard to make an actual "character system" and as such it's now much easier for us to get content online for MCS than it was with our previous approach. We've already got our next add-on pack nearly ready for submission and as soon as that's submitted, we're immediately onto our first fantasy add-ons!

 

Has anyone tried to integrate this with ORC, UFPS, Realistic FPS, or any other First Person/Third Person setup? Would be neat to see how you handle the various weapons and any unique First person arms, plus Player spawning with their particular settings.

 

Sounds good.. Was just a bit discouraging to see another sci-fi release. But in looking closer, it looks like it was probably more of an update to the existing to make it available to the MCS system? Figure that is the case since it requires Female MCS or Female MCS Lite. Will there be a similar pack released for all the other genres to give us something which fits into our systems to test with soon?

In planning a game with multiple clothing options, I really hope some of the other issues that folks like @chiapet1021 have mentioned are addressed. For single player or small coop multiplayer, having all the clothing options attached to the model might be ok. But I really worry about larger multiplayer scenarios.

At any rate.. It is good to see you guys posting again. Would be great if someone on the team could keep us up to date and keep the buzz going in here. Honestly, it has been so quiet in here for so long I half wondered if you guys had given up. You guys should keep someone in here keeping us excited about what is going on and what is coming in the pipeline!

 

I'm busy working on helping test some assets for other devs and working on a couple of my own projects at the moment. But when I get a chance, I plan on testing this with ORK (I assume that is the one you were meaning to reference in your list?) and Makinom. Maybe if they get me a fantasy character, I'd be motivated to test it quicker.. heheh *hides from Morph3d folks*

 

I have Pre-integrated Skin shader and also alloy that has character shaders, I can change out the stock shaders for these right?

Also will we have access to have fbx's of the characters to create our own morphs, also would we be able to add bones to the rig for armor or appendages e.g., tails, extra arms etc.

Also is the mesh segmented so we can change out legs for paints, or upper torso and arms for shirt?

 

- you can, but you shouldn't. The included shaders have an additional texture map to make sure that no skin is visible through clothing while animating.

- the fbx files are included, I wouldn't make morphs before there are official informations about user-generated content. I thought there was a post about it in this thread, but currently I can't find it..

 

Hi. I had a look at the included skin shader with the extra alpha channel.
I think It would not be a big problem using another custom skin shader or the unity standard shader. The alpha mask you use seems to be a merge of the textures in the Injection Mask folder for the clothes used. Take this and put it in the alpha channel of the standard texture, use a cutout shader and you should get the same result removing the body for the parts covered.

 

Fair enough but what about adding the extra bones?

 

Hello everyone!

This is Mike from Crazy Minnow Studio, creators of SALSA with RandomEyes lip sync, eye movement, and facial animation system. We wanted to let everyone know that SALSA now supports 1-Click lipsync using MCS models.

Congratulations on the release Morph Team, we're fans already!

Our addon supports MCS and DAZ3D characters with support for Genesis, Genesis 2, Genesis 3, Emotiguy, and Dragon models. Workflow info is available here.
http://crazyminnowstudio.com/posts/using-daz3d-characters-with-salsa-with-randomeyes/

Product info here.
http://crazyminnowstudio.com/projects/salsa-with-randomeyes-lipsync/
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/16944

 

RE: User generated content for use with the MCS. Our development road map has plans to write artist tools to help you folks generate and adapt your own content. For the moment we'd advise against trying to generate content, mainly because we don't want you waste your time. At the moment our content production process is incredibly complex involving 80+ steps to go from existing content to MCS compatible assets. It's a very labor intensive process and has quite a few technical gotchas.

RE: Morphs, Carpe Denius is correct. Our process for dealing with morphs/blendshapes is quickly evolving and it underlies a lot of what we're working on.

Hint: Your best bet for self-generated MCS compatible content will be with props. Check out how props are structured in the project hierarchy.

We're excited that you folks are excited about our project, we love your feedback.

 

I am interested..but not until we have the tools to make our own clothing. I don't mind buying asset packs but because our cultures are original, we need to be able to make our own clothing. I read on your website where you say you are going to give out basic tools but better tools to those who sell through your store.

That seems to say that if "you sell stuff through us, you get the best tools". But what if we just want to make clothes because ours are so specialized that no one else will make them? We get basic tools?

Will these "basic tools" allow us to actually use our own 3d models made in Maya or Blender and create clothing that will fit and morph with the character? Will it auto rig to the character or are you going to provide us with detailed instructions on how to do this? Why not release the entire tool set to the community? The more content developers you have, even if they sell on Unity's asset store or even just use in their own games and release screenshots and videos, the more product you will sell.

What is the time frame on these tools? I have a character system now but while I love it, it has issues. However, there were months between the first Morph3d release and this current one, and still no custom content creation. How many months before the ability to make our own clothing?

I don't mean to be pushy, but as a developer, we have to plan ahead. I can't dump our system until yours is done but don't want to put a lot of time into making clothing for our current system until we know if we are going to switch. It seems we only hear from you guys when you release something so should we expect another long dry spell with no news?

Interaction here will help you know what people need and what are skills are in the community. It will also help us to set our development schedules so we can use your product. I could use prototype characters until yours is out but can only do that for so long.

Thank you.

 

I missed that, but agree 100%. Why create two separate tools? Just create one and release it for content creators to use, regardless of whether or not they are going to sell to the community. Who knows, maybe by not tying people's hands and giving them the ability to fully tap into their creativity you may end up with designers who later decide to sell in your marketplace who had never thought they ever would. If they only get a subset of tools because they don't decide to sell up front, they may never feel their stuff is good enough because of the limitations you have placed on them...

I also agree with the interaction. I've spent a lot of money on UMA stuff (well, a lot within my limited budget anyways).. I need to see a little more and have an idea on what is going on with Morph3D before making a decision to scrap what I have and go to your system or keep purchasing for UMA. So a lot more communication and interaction with the community would be ideal.

 

Ditto. UMA is a pain at times but their developers are great and work with us, even opening a chat channel. They are dedicated to custom content and the community helps each other out. I am a bit concerned about a company that limits tools and gives us very little news. It worries me. I have had too many "too good to be true" experiences since using Unity and spent too much time waiting for 3rd party assets.

 

I'm getting skin bleeding through the clothes when I make the girl FAT. I'm looking at the Female Lite version.

 

The alpha injection service doesn't run in editor mode (only at runtime), play the scene and the poke through won't be present.

 

Having tried out the Morph3D MCS Male Lite and Female Lite models on Windows 10 and Unity 5.2.0f3 recently.. and thinking these will be a great resource once clothing addons and the toolkit is available... I installed the hotfix 1.01 and reimported the Morph3D folder as instructed... and I got a lot of issues. Stretched textures for hair and clothing on using the editor game play preview and then, even though I had reimported. And it seemed that the character prefabs dropped into a scene did not have the "M3D Character Manager" script component attached. So I went back to basics and did everything again in a clean new Unity project to see what warnings or errors I got. I hope this report is useful.

I created new Unity projects and reimported the Male Lite and Female Lite characters separately into them and noted all warnings and errors. With the Unity Asset Store version (1.0) I get 9 warnings for the Male Lite character and similarly for the Female Lite Character




I then once again tried to place the Hotfix 1.01 DDL and Editor script replacements in place and reimport the Male avatar, but this time I get 2 errors and a number of warnings...



When looking at the character in scene it has lost its "M3D Character Manager" script component and the hair and other textures stretch out to some fixed 3D point when you move or rotate the character. there are also thousands of warnings about a script behaviour missing, presumably due to the missing "M3D Character Manager" component.



I hope this info is useful.

 

I got a simular issue while trying to add the ponytale hair to the Lite character.

 

The chest bones point in the wrong direction.
There are some rigging problems as well:



And again: Can we please get wrinkle normal maps that we can use if we want to?

 

Ah, yes I had errors when adding the SciFi package Ponytail Hair and some of the outfits too... but for the tests reported above I kept it simple and only used the content packs that were included with the Male Lite and Female Lite packages themselves. If those can get sorted out the addons may then be a similar fix.