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

That might have been the case, to be honest I had to remove the M3D character to move on with prototyping animation stuff. After however long it's been now and not a single reply, I'm a little dismayed at the companies push of a product that is nowhere near ready for use and lack of communication on the only means of communication we have with them.
I'm not bitter, but I'll be withholding my cash for this product until it's further along, matured for even prototyping usage, and I think I'll even wait until the content tools exist to at least add some initial clothes, and helmet props fitting to my game. Really am looking forward to this product, it could save many hours in modelling and texturing for both player and NPC characters.
Glad you were able to get the bones remapped, I figured that'd be the only way currently. I'm not keen on having to work around such simple things as bone mapping for a product that's designed to work with Unity but doesn't have a correct avatar mapping, the fact that you can't build and run a test build (might be due to unity changes since they released for a specific version of unity), and breaking standard imports of other assets were my final straws to pull M3D. But I'm keeping my ear to the ground on this and will watch the forum when the next update comes out, hopefully it'll be a large fix release.

 

Astalean1 I agree with you 100%. Their release was not handled properly, but I am still holding out hope for this product as it has the potential to fulfill all my needs. I watched their talk from Unite Europe and they seem to really want to listen to the community. So far they seem to be defensive rather than acknowledge issues with their product. I hope this is not the case.

Our game will need perhaps a hundred or more characters. I am hoping that with a dozen or so base characters, and swapping clothes, clothes textures, hairstyles, and some morph adjustments will get is where we need. Being able to age our characters from a child to old age was something we wanted to do, but wasn't sure if it was something we would be able to implement. It is so easy with MCS.

We are about a year from release, so have time before we have to decide on our character system, and Morph3D is currently our first choice if it lives up to its potential. I have a few thousand dollar budget for the characters/clothes, so get this right and take my money Morph3D.

 

Hey there @Astaelan1, first off, thanks for the verbose and thorough bug reports- a couple of those have been instrumental in us addressing issues. So, cheers to you!

Second, we've been working hard to deal with the major known issues that you all have been reporting over the past few weeks and we're getting very close to submitting our first update to the MCS products! Notably: performance is extremely improved and you'll now be able to compile MCS to games, and we've also done a fair amount of optimizing of the folder structure and placement of files.

So, yeah, keep a watch on us as you'll definitely be seeing a steady evolution and improvement of the MCS products and supporting ecosystem (Documentation, Add-On Content, etc.).

Thanks again!

 

Hi,

I recently bought Morph3D to play around with but I have run into a major issue:

You can't seem to build any project that references the MORPH3D (i.e. "using MORPH3D") classes since M3D.dll references UnityEditor, which from what I understand cannot be exported in a build.

Has anyone had any luck building anything?

 

Hey there @lazloring, you are right, it won't compile and this is an issue that we've fixed internally and we are now in the process of QAing this and other fixes. That said, you should see an update to your MCS product very soon. Thanks for taking the time to report this and thank you for your patience!

 

@Morph 3D,

Just curious, will clothes/hair have morphs also?

 

Hey @celebrus, are you referring to morphs that change the hair/clothes so that they have different "looks"? For example, like driving a morph to add spikes to armor or driving a morph to lengthen a beard or ponytail.

That is something that is certainly doable and something we want to try out, but so far, none of our content has cool features like that- yet. The morphs with our clothes and hair, right now, are only to allow for them to resize properly as the base mesh adjusts.

 

@Morph 3D

That is exactly what I am talking about. Was just curious about it, more features can come later. I know there are a lot of issues to work out and the release of your tools. Thank you for your response.

 

Cheers, glad to hear from you guys even if just to know I wasn't blowing hot-air To be fair, none of us would be so edgy if we weren't so excited about this product. I'd jave been happy to do more extensive testing, but I hit a point where I couldn't go much further heh. Looking forward to the updates, but it may be a while before I swing back around out of my own prototyping (but let's be honest, when M3D works right I'll be eager to get back to morphable characters, my team can't wait for the content tools either).

 

The content tools is where I really hope this will shine. I can't wait to make my own equipment, and such to provide to this asset, and others.

I have a spot for this in my PS4 game under development, but need the option to add content in house to suit our Asian fantasy style.

 

I am at a loss as to how to use MCS. I got the free one, but instead of giving me a standalone tool they imported it into my Unity 3D. I then dragged the 3d Model of the MCS female onto the scene but don't know how to add skin, clothes, etc...

What am I doing wrong?

 

Hmm, have you tried reading the documentation guide? there is a doc link on the first post in this thread so read that.

It covers things like needing to re-import the asset, which if you are saying there is no skin, sounds like you might need to do. Also, it talks about the steps needed to get clothes and hair and such on the avatar. That is as far as I have gotten so far,but it all worked for the male lite version anyway.

 

I want to start by saying that MCS is pretty awesome. I'm evaluating the Male Lite currently and all the basics are working perfectly. Super to easy to work with, so thanks for that.

I am however, running into a problem with scripting the M3DCharacterManager. Specifically when I try to modify the BlendShape Groups. I can see there are public methods like GetAllBlendshapeGroups() and GetAllBlendshapeGroupNames(), but they return zero count lists until I manually select MCSMale from the Hierarchy.

Maybe I'm missing an underlining unity mechanic that is causing this, but I thought I'd toss it out there to see if anyone else has overcome the same problem.

 

Ah so a bit more progress. I managed to make the M3DCharacterManager make the group names and values accessible by code. Here is what I did for anyone who is stuck in the same spot. Let say you have a script attached to MCSMale/Female and you want to change the blendshapegroup values through code:

transform.GetComponent<M3DCharacterManager>().InitBlendshapeModel(); //This method makes the values accessible

//These will now work
transform.GetComponent<M3DCharacterManager>().GetAllBlendshapeGroupNames();
transform.GetComponent<M3DCharacterManager>().GetAllBlendshapeGroups();

//and you can do stuff like this
foreach (CoreBlendshapeGroup bsg in transform.GetComponent<M3DCharacterManager>().GetAllBlendshapeGroups())
{
bsg.SetGroupValue(Random.Range(0, 100)); //Randomize your BlendShapeGroup Value
}

The problem I now have is getting model to be redrawn with the new values. I can see in the editor that the new numerical value has been set, but the model does not reflect the change unless I manually change the value using the Inspector. There has to be a method that I'm missing, that needs to be called after changing the values. I tried
transform.GetComponent<M3DCharacterManager>().ApplyBlendShapeChanges(); but it doesn't change the visual appearance of the model.

 

I ran into a similar problem. I'm not sure if this is a bug or not, but this is how I solved the issue:

Make a variable somewhere in your script:

publicM3DCharacterManagercharacterManager = null;

And then in the Update method put the following:

if (characterManager == null) {
characterManager = GetComponent<M3DCharacterManager> ();
characterManager.InitBlendshapeModel();
}

Hope this helps!

 

Thanks for pointing out the init method.
I couldnt get it to work with the blendshapes but it works if you use the GetComponent<M3DCharacterManager>().SetBlendshapeValue("BlendshapeName", "floatValue") method.
The following code successfully assigns random values to all Blendshapes.

M3DCharacterManager manager;

// Use this for initialization
void Start () {
manager = GetComponent<M3DCharacterManager>();
manager.InitBlendshapeModel();
foreach (string name in manager.GetAllBlendshapeNames())
{
manager.SetBlendshapeValue(name, Random.Range(0, 101));

}
manager.ApplyBlendShapeChanges();
}

Didnt try with groups but i guess it should work familiar.

Also i have a bunch of questions for possible future content we are getting. Will it be possible to assign other skins? Besides more cloth coming will there be stuff like Horns, Tails or Wings in the future? (Doesnt have to be the near future ). Im mainly having a medival Fantasy setting in mind but it would also be good for things like aliens or other monsters.
And is it possible to expand the sliders past 100 points? For example to create giants or heavily deformed characters?

 

Hey there everyone,
We're happy to announce that our MCS Male and MCS Male Lite (the MCS Female packs should soon follow) updates have been approved by the Unity folks and have gone live. Here is a rough list of the improvements that we've made:

MCS v1.0r1 Additions and Fixes
-Improves memory allocation on JCTs
-Reduces processing overhead on JCTs
-JCT calculation are now on demand
-Misc GUI fixes
-GUI feature addition - reset button
-GUI feature addition - save to blendshape group
-Simplified folder structure
-Removes stray files
-Removes skeleton renaming on importer - allows users retargeting via standard Mecanim dialogue, figure skeleton import fixes
-Improves Bone Service performance
-Splits importer into separate DLL
-Fixes issue with building final products
-Adds accessories to importer process
-Material importer is separate file for custom editing
-Attachment point layouts are now available as scripts
-Temporarily removes Keiko Hair from MCS F: Sci-Fi Female Bundle 01

Thanks to everyone that has helped us find and fix these bugs and issues! We certainly have more improvements to make and features to add but we wanted to fix and release the most pressing complaints and requests first.

Cheers!

NOTE: Because of these drastic changes and improvements be sure to start a new project to explore the updated MCS products. Backwards compatibility is not a friendly process, it's possible but not easy.

 

Sounds good. I will do a test tomorrow morning.

Any plans on the release of more content you want to share? Next was a scifi package for the male character?

 

Awesome! I hope it meets your expectations and you all see it as a massive upgrade

The Sci-Fi Male content was submitted the same day as the upgrades to MCS so hopefully we'll see them live here soon.

 

What's the word on the content creator?

 

Awesome. Gonna try it out later today. You guys do need to hurry up and add in some new outfits.

 

First of all, thanks for the update.

1. When are you going to address the twisted chest bones?
2. Are you going to fix the LODs? As somebody else already said they look like automatically decimated while manual retopology would be much better.
3. The nose morphs that somebody else suggested... are they in the pipeline? They sound like an amazing idea to me.

 

Thanks for the update, much improved.

A couple issues.


1) The T-shirt is showing through the vest.

2) When the vest is morphed, the lines are not spaced evenly. Is there anything that can be done about this?

 

Hey there @celebrus "poke through" between clothing is a hard thing for us to address. We have a few ideas that we've been exploring, some more elaborate than others, but haven't determined a solid solution yet.

We did write some code that can give specified content a slight offset which would handle scenarios like yours but it would have to be dialed in manually by the user. Theoretically, you would have to identify the clothing you want to shrink or expand and dial it in until it "fits" the way you want it to. Would that be a valid solution?

 

That's cool @EDarkness let us know how it goes!

We submitted a bunch of Sci-Fi outfits at the same time as the MCS upgrades, hopefully, they get approved soon.

We're finishing up our first fantasy outfits right now, too.

 

Do you have any screenshots to show of the upcomming scifi and fantacy assets?

 

Specifying an offset may help, though most of my characters will be dynamically generated. If you are working on finding an ideal solution I can wait for a higher quality product.

 

FINALLY! Looking forward to seeing what you guys come up with for the fantasy folks!

 

@Morph 3D There seems to be a major bug in the latest update.

Using version 1.0r1 for both the MCS Female and Sci-Fi Bundle, if you put the short ponytail on the MCS female and then adjust any of the character's phoneme blends the following happens (see attached image).

Do you have any suggestions for how to fix this?

 

Couldn't you use the alpha solution already at hand for your character?

 

Hey @lazloring thanks for reporting this! We've replicated your error and have determined that the "short ponytail" and the "toulouse" hair suffer from this problem. It appears the other content behaves as expected. We are finishing up the fixes on those 2 hair styles over the weekend and we hope to have a download of them available for the community first thing next week. Cheers!

 

@celebrus and @Carpe Denius at the moment we use what we call "injection masks" to prevent body poke through into the clothing. Unfortunately this type of masking can be resource intensive so we decided to keep things simpler and more efficient by masking only the base figure geometry. While at Boston Unite the Unity devs suggested that z-buffer information can be set at the shader level (causing the rendering engine to ignore polys that poke through) , when our schedule permits we'll spend time researching and experimenting with this technique.

 

It's the first day I try this MCS and I see the bone system has a problem with the jaw and shoulders. and when I animate the character his mouth is widely opened. Is there a fix for that? I really like this product and hope it does have a solution for this!

 

@lello200 The open jaw is not a MCS problem. I had the same problem, it is an easy fix:

The animation you might be using involves jaw bones.
Animator.Jaw Close and Animator.Jaw Left-Right. Animator.Jaw close have a value of 0 which causes an open mouth.
If you select that line in the animation window and open Curves, you can edit it by dragging end points to a value of 1.

This way you will get a closed mouth.

But I think Unity should make the default value 1, that would be a time-saver.

 

The MCS Male package has a bug: the avatar has no skin. (This bug is present in the newest package.)

In case anyone else encounters this bug: I was able to fix it by painstakingly copying all of the shader settings from the MCS Female package (which I also have), with the obvious texture changes from Female to Male. E.g., change the Shader from "Standard" to "Morph3D/Volund Variants/Standard Character (Specular, Surface)". There are 10-15 settings that need to be changed in order to make the skin appear correctly.

 

There are a couple of shader errors in the MCS Male/Female packages. They don't seem to prevent the avatars from rendering correctly, but these errors do show up in the debug log:

Shader error in 'Morph3D/Standard-2pass-double sided': syntax error: unexpected token 'float' undeclared identifier 'unityFogFactor' at line 177 (on d3d11)

Shader warning in 'Morph3D/Standard-2pass-double sided': comma expression used where a vector constructor may have been intended at line 175 (on d3d11)

 

Hi Oren,

I have the latest MCS Male and Female (Lite) packages and I am exhibiting neither of the issues you have mentioned. Have you reimported both packages?

MCS: 1.0r1 (Oct 13, 2015)
Unity: 5.2.1p3
Windows 10

 

I'm using the full versions (not Lite). I did reimport the packages.

 

Ahh, I haven't tried those. I guess there is an issue with those.

 

@orenh could you give us the exact context for the errors you're experiencing (e.g. was your project new? Or, was it a project you had been working with and you upgraded the MCS resources in the project?)?

 

@IanAtMorph3D , I bought the Female version (since it has the sci-fi pack that male does not) and my assumption is that Daz3D assets are not currently on the roadmap as something that can be imported into Morph3D?

 

@Morph 3D Will you enable us to do something like this in the future? Can you tell me what this would require? I am curious to know how the wrinkles could be achieved. Thanks.

 

@IanAtMorph3D , it's a new project. I imported the Male/Female packages from scratch.

Both shader errors are caused by a missing semicolon in Standard-2pass-doublesided.shader line 175. Once I added the semicolon, the shader problems disappeared. It's the last line in this block:

Code (csharp):

1. half4 c = UNITY_BRDF_PBS (s.diffColor, s.specColor, s.oneMinusReflectivity, s.oneMinusRoughness, s.normalWorld, -s.eyeVec, gi.light, gi.indirect);
2. c.rgb += UNITY_BRDF_GI (s.diffColor, s.specColor, s.oneMinusReflectivity, s.oneMinusRoughness, s.normalWorld, -s.eyeVec, occlusion, gi);
3. c.rgb += Emission(i.tex.xy);
4. c.rgb *= (.7, .7, .7)

 

Hello,

I have been trying the free version of MCS Male Lite in my project, and I am experiencing a few incompatibilities and crashes. I am using Unity 5.2.1p2. I did not use it in a "fresh" project, but one that I had already been working on for some time. I did follow the starting instructions, and reimported the entire Morph folder.

The main one, for me, is that the system works great in the Unity Editor -- but when I build my game, the game will not run. The Unity starting splash screen appears, then the game hangs, and eventually crashes. I noticed in my game builds output log that it had 4 warnings. I don't have the exact log right now, but it had something to do with the Hair shader with verbage like "Warning Hair/Verdon/SomeShader does not have a vertex function", and another one was the same Verdon shader but had to do with a shadows setting in the shader (or shadows function), and then 2 others that I cannot remember right now.

I deleted the hair standard shader, and replaced the ones on the hair with another shader type, and that allowed my game build to actually load and run. However, I still experience crashes about 1 minute into the game.

If I deactivate the Morph model in my game scene, my game runs perfectly fine.

It looks like a great system. And it is working great in the editor -- even playing my game in the Editor it works perfectly fine. But in an actual game build, it does not work currently. I hope some of this information might be useful.

Thank you.

I'm attaching a portion of the crash output log from my game build as well:

 

Wrinkle maps are a pretty awesome feature, and it's one of the things we'll be doing R&D on in a texturing system that's in the works (this feature is part why we're shipping with Volund shader variants which Unity does custom shadows and wrinkles with). However, if it's something you need urgently or simply want to tinker with, you should look at Unity's blacksmith wrinkle map example : https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/39924. If you are handy with ZBrush, you should be able to generate the maps the way their example needs them and get them working.

It's a pretty great proof of concept, though for a very particular type of output (a badass cinema scene), so for our more general use and the unpredictable uses creative Unity devs might have, we need to do more work to figure out performance side effects, limitations, how to integrate it in a more generalized and seamless way, etc. (There's also the pesky details of file size, and complexity when shipping - at a worst case scenario - 350 wrinkle maps for our 350 morphs)

Good luck, and please post the results of any experiments!

 

@Velo222, we always appreciate feedback, especially with details, so thanks for taking the extra time. I'd like to take a look at your issue, and have a few follows ups. One part of it sounds like a platform specific shader issue. What platform are you compiling to? If it's mobile, what specific device are you testing on? We're outlining an automated build process improve QA and knowing devices in use by real people would be helpful. Any other platform specific details, or unique settings, plugins, etc would be helpful as what I'll do is try to recreate the scene as you have described and start to ID then kill the bug.

 

I appreciate that. I'm not sure how much I can help though, but I'll try. I am compiling for desktop standalone (pc). I'm not working with mobile at all currently, just pc only. Now that you mention plugins though, you have me thinking. That could very well be the issue.

I am using an asset called "Aron Granberg's A* pathfinding", which has some plugins, as well as an Nvidia Hairworks plugin (I got from github). I am not using the Hairworks plugin on the MCS character at all. But I did notice that the hairworks assets I'm using were "blinking" as if they were disappearing on some frames. The Hairworks plugin does NOT support shadows at this time. So I have to disable every single shadow creator I can in my scene in order for my hair assets to not "blink". Which I attempted to do with the MCS character. I know for a fact the Nvidia Hairworks plugin I'm working with is very "rudimentary" and unstable. But it never crashed until I introduced the Morph3D character. For some reason the Morph3D character causes my Nvidia Hairworks assets to go crazy with the blinking. That's the only way I can describe it.

I am using Windows 7 currently. Let me know if you would like any more information.

 

Hey that might be it, since I haven't been able to reproduce it yet. I did some google-fu and found these githubs :
1) https://github.com/unity3d-jp/NVIDIAHairWorksIntegration
2) https://github.com/kennux/TressFXUnity

I'm betting on option (1) or one I didn't find. Which link should I include in my test?

 

Yep. Option #1. That is the one.

 

Hi. This asset is pretty much exactly what I am looking for. The price would be ok, if I knew what I can expect from the full version. In the trial version, the body customization options feel very limited. And I guess there aren't many outfits in either version, right? So... how much will you ask for those content packs? Also, is it possible to extend the system and make custom outfits and morphs?

And another question: do you have any plans to release MCS for Unreal Engine some time?