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

Sorry for the problems, we are aware of a lot of content issues. Yes the props are updated for 1.6.3, which will likely go out at the end of the week. You are not doing anything wrong, it's definitely on our end.

 

Thanks for the info, I'll see if I can replicate this and I'll get back to you when I can. I assume for the gpu you're using an intel chip?

 

I'm still seeing incorrect hair attachment for the Hair Pack. I add the BirthdayGirlHair to the MCS Female 1.6.2 and on the left side you can see bald head.

 

I believe this is fixed now, and will ship with 1.6.3. You may need to recreate your prefab once the update comes out though.

 

The hair is being worked on, I'll let you know when the content team starts shipping them.

 

If you could open a help ticket with this information, I would be more than happy to look into this further. You'll receive a faster and more direct response via submitting a help ticket and it helps me as well in case I have any questions for you or need any additional information.

EDIT: you can do so here: https://morph3dhelp.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

 

Any update on Artist tools and auto skinning?

 

Hi

Quick question, would there be any issues moving the Morph3d folder into another folder? I'm not talking about the one in StreamingAssets, I'd just want to move the one in Assets.

Thanks,
Chai

 

We make a lot of assumptions about where things are if they are core, so I would not recommend moving anything like the figures or special meta files. For content you can move it. The only thing I can think of off the top of my head that might break will be the auto lookup for alternative materials that's associated with the CIclothing component, but that's not a required item.

 

They've had very good results with it and are working through some final issues. Ian can tell you more about that though.

 

@jjanzer_morph @Razzle_Dazzle3D or whoever may be able to answer this.
Hi, I am sorry to get into the whole EULA stuff again, but I would like to know whether the current version on morph3d.com is "final" by now.
If so I would like to know if this is supposed to allow people selling their own content that was converted for MCS?

I am asking because this really is not clear for me right now.
I totally get that reselling MCS-content in any way (even as in-game DLC) is prohibited (I still think you should allow character prefabs, since there is way more to a character than just the model. But I get your point, on this).
I also understand that you may use converted content that you (or someone in your company) created in your games any way you like.
But I don't really see if one may sell MCS-compatible content in the Unity3d-Asset store or anywhere else.

Sorry if this has been clarified already, in that case please just point me to that post.

 

Right now if you are interested in re-selling assets that you have created and processed through Artist Tools you should contact pa [at] morph3d [dot] com

 

Can you explain the purpose of the Streaming Assets folder? Can it be deleted if I am just creating a stand-alone non-network game?

 

The streaming assets folder is where the morphs are kept. If you delete it your morphs won't work. I would not recommend deleting it.

 

@Morph_JN
I am a developer (hobbyist concerning games / professionally otherwise) with basically no artistic skills whatsoever. So MCS seemed like a godsent to me, at first. All those 1.6 release issues and the refurbishing of the EULA stifles my enthusiasm considerably, though.

Right now I just would like to estimate how the market around MCS might evolve: If there may be a flourishing market where I can find assets that work with MCS in abundance or if it will be only your stall with the slow release cycle you have shown in the past.
Think of it as "estimating future frustration levels". So I would really appreciate a proper answer here in this thread.

 

Sorry I'm not quite sure what answer you're looking for. Are you asking whether there will be a robust marketplace for MCS assets? If that is the question my answer would be we sure hope so. Hopefully that answers your question. If not let me know.

 

I would seriously consider their performance up to this day. They were no 7 consecutive days when the product were in a working order as it were advertised in the entire 1.5 years (maybe this is a little exaggeration, but unfortunately a slight one). Either it was super-slow, super-poke-through or hair doesn't work. You can always find something in a bad shape from release to release.
And you should throw in the especially dangerous, amateurish EULA they're trying to shovel down the users' throat.

They promised, they will clear up the EULA. They didn't. They call 'Artist Tool' a basic converter software, which has a non-sense EULA (seriously).

So, after all, it's up to you. But read back a couple of pages before you decide. Do you think they will clear up all the bugs and problems they didn't during this last 1.5 years?

 

My first question was whether you are still working on your EULA or whether you consider it to be "final" for now.

My more specific question was if you intend to let people sell their own stuff that is MCS compatible, or if you will make sure that your company is the only source for purchasable MCS content.

As I said this is really not clear to me right now. And the EULA fails to clarify this question to me.

I am actually fine with any of the two scenarios. I just want to see more available content and maybe be able to ask someone who has the skill and time to make a specific, non-exclusive, type of clothing that I, and others, then could purchase.

 

I already purchased quite a bit of their content before the 1.6 release. The initial stuff I got there was actually quite usable for my purposes (I didn't need more than three Morph3d characters at the same time).

The current situation is a huge mess, of course. And the EULA is admittedly in a strange place.
But what nobody seems to understand here is: They just want to protect their IP and business with that EULA.
I do not think that they are actively trying to screw us over, they just don't know any better or don't trust us developers enough. Or at least their lawyer doesn't understand the Unity3d community at all.

And let's face it, there are some real sleazebags using Unity3d. Those asset-flippers on steam are despicable. And if you add those to the picture you will immediately understand why quite a few points in that EULA are not a completely bad idea.

Also, right now they seem to actually be putting in quite some effort.
So I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, because I know how projects and businesses can go. And if you get sidetracked 1.5 years can be nothing for a small company.

In the end there is no alternative for me anyway (UMA is not really to my liking, and the content that is available for it even less). I can just hope that the MCS gets fixed and I finally get to use the products I purchased.

 

Having the same issue since importing TPC. Very excited as your clothing system is the core of my inventory/equipment system.

 

Here's a suggestion to compensate for all the recent problems:
Continue that 60% sale for a few more days until they are fixed for real and available in the asset store

 

This is correct. If you want a little more info I chose to move the morph data here so it can sit on disk instead of in memory and we can specifically pull specific morphs on demand without loading the entire thing into memory. This isn't much of a big deal for a desktop system but is very useful for mobile systems with extremely limited memory. You'll find 4 files for each content item there (usually), each one is for a specific lod. If you know you'll never use a specific lod it is safe to remove these if you want to reduce your build size. There are a few other reasons for this decision but memory is the primary one.

 

One thing I'd like to see improved is a simple way to eliminate LODs completely. I can delete them manually, but as I recall it was a little tricky to get it just right and still work. Maybe this has already been improved and I just don't know it. For example, for my main player character I'm only ever going to see her up close so I just want to set to a single LOD of my choice and remove the rest to save memory. It would be nice to just have a simple one click method to remove a single LOD or a set of LODs that I won't be using for a particular character.

 

@jjanzer_morph Just wondering, once the latest update comes out, am I going to have to redo all of my NPC prefabs?

 

We've thought about supporting this out better but haven't decided to move forward on it since it's still possible to do this manually and it hasn't been a commonly requested feature. It is a good idea and one that we may offer first class support in the future but it's going to be at the bottom of the priority list for a while.

 

Probably, it depends on where the issue occurred. From my testing I found that the serialized data was wrong which means that a new prefab had to be created. That said if the state in your scene graph is correct, you should be able to just destroy the prefab of this data and replace it with a new one then use that new one. The short answer is, it depends, but it's most likely that you'll need to recreate the prefab as the written state won't contain the correct data in most cases.

 

@magique, @jjanzer_morph Either one of you mind explaining how you go about removing LODs manually?

Thanks,
Chai

 

Ugh. That's a bummer. Creating NPC prefabs takes a LONG time and having to redo them again and again is frustrating. I think I need to look into having a way to create NPCs quickly without having to remake prefabs if there's a problem like this. Would it be possible to save the NPC morph data, costume data, and then create the NPC on the fly? How slow is this process? Would it be future proof, or are morph locations going to change again at some point?

What about skin options? I think the easiest way to do it would be to have a material with the correct skin color that uses the skin texture, and have multiple materials that use the same texture for different skin colors. The problem now is that eyes are connected to this so they get the color as well which looks...strange. I'm trying to avoid loading in so many textures to keep memory usage down. How do people generally do it using Morph3D?

 

Will creature skins return with 1.6.3?

 

The creature skins are already available in 1.6.2 which is out right now. They'll also be in 1.6.3 but you don't have to wait for 1.6.3 to get them.

 

I think I said a few pages back that we are still re-working some sections of the EULA specifically the Content Creation Tools section. The EULA that is up is the one that is in effect right now, but that doesn't mean it is final.

Currently if someone wants to re-sell MCS content they have to resell it through us.

In terms of a 3rd party content market we'd love to recruit as many artists as possible. The more people creating content for MCS the better in my opinion. If anyone is interested in reselling Morph 3D content they should email:
pa [at] morph3d [dot] com

 

Does that include the egyptian (voodoo queen) skin texture as well? I looked in the 1.6.2 female but couldn't find it...

 

In your scene graph, look for the CIBody component (it will be called M3DMale/M3DMale or M3DFemale/M3DFemale), under that node you'll see multiple lods, just remove the ones you don't want to use. You'll need to repeat this for the content as well. The Costume Item component takes care of reloading these.

 

Those are still being worked on and so they won't be included in this update unfortunately.

 

We appreciate the understanding and the support. As Janzer has noted in a previous post (located on page 42 I believe..) we have made some massive changes behind the scenes with our MCS in order to update the figures and streamline new content very quickly - and these changes have not been made without some growing pains (admittedly, for everyone involved).

At this point, we have no interest in making excuses for bugs or broken content, all we can really do is apologize for the rough transitional period and fix the issues that do arise as quickly as possible. We are also taking steps to prevent this from happening in the future.

We appreciate the communication and all of you who have written in either on the forums or via help tickets notifying us of bugs or general issues / concerns. Your feedback is important to us and we really do listen to what you guys have to say.

 

1. Yes you can, we've done this internally for our own projects as a way of serializing the state. Unfortunately we don't have plans to release this functionality as it's simply not ready to make it's way into the core system. We are planning on this for a future release and it's already penciled in to work on.
2. I assume you mean how slow is it from a CPU time type quesiton? If so, this is something that is very fast from our own experience. If you wrote your own approach I would expect the same, you should only store the state of properties (which morphs are active, which clothing assets are attached, etc) and then when "loading" unpack all that info and allocate/attach/drive/etc.
3. Morph locations will be stable for some time but in the farther future they will be updated.
4. You can tint, you will run into the issue that teeth/eyes are on the head texture, so it seems like you're aware of this. What you could do is limit the tint application via a custom shader based on uv coordinates or do something else like vertex painting, either way tinting w/o altering the teeth/eyes will require you to do a custom shader. If there is enough demand I'll update our current skin shader to allow a tint that only affects the applicable regions. All that said we do plan to release additional textures/materials for skin but I'm not sure what the time frame is like for that.
5. We solved the problem by UV restriction with our shaders for our own projects, it does have a slight performance impact in the shader though.

 

I'm glad I found this post. I have been searching for why props on my character would disappear and cause an error at runtime for a few hours now and finding that it is a known issue just saved me a bunch of time. Now I can continue to write code.

By the way, I love how easy it is to change each property/BlendShape at runtime. It's going to make a great character creation and dynamic NPC tool

 

I dropped 'female zombie1.6' onto M3DFemale_LOD0 and have attached the result. Is there a different way I should be applying the texture?

 

I'm not sure what you mean exactly when you say you dropped it on M3DFemale_LOD0? As in model in the hierarchy, or in the scene view? Anyways, what I did was select M3DMale_LOD0 in the Hierarchy panel, in your case the same one you were talking about, navigate to the Skinned Mesh Renderer component in the Inspector panel. There you will see a section called Materials with a > before it. Click the arrow to expand the Materials list. In your Project window navigate from M3DFemale folder into Materials->Creatures->Zombie and you will see three materials, body EyeAndLash, and Head. Drag EyeAndLash and drop into Element 0 of the Materials list in the Inspector; Body into Element 1, and Head into Element 2. Those are specifically the order MCS uses here: Eyes, Body, Head. You just repeat these same steps for LOD1 and so on.

 

Ok they separated them out - thanks for that

 

Thanks for the information. I thought about how I would go about doing this since going forward I don't want to be worrying about rebuilding the whole model by hand every time you guys update. With a bunch of NPCs, it's just too much of a pain in the ass.

So that brings me to my next bunch of questions:

What is the best way to get rid of unnecessary LODs? There are 4 there, but I usually only use the next to the lowest for NPCs since the camera is so far away that there's no need to some high res models.

What would be a good way to store morph information for each NPC (and the player)? I was just going to include a copy of the morph3d script in my save data and then copy that information onto the Morph3D dummy when the NPC is being built. Not sure how much memory that will take up, but if there's a faster/ better way I'm all ears.

Where is the best place to store clothes/hair/etc.? Should they be stored in the streaming folder, or in the Resource folder like everything else that needs to be loaded when the game is running?

Speaking of that, do you have any tutorials that go into how to add clothes/hair at runtime? To be honest, I've never messed with this, but I guess now is as good a time as any.

I'm gonna be prepping this system today so I can finally update my project and move on. Been sitting on this whole thing for over a week now with no progress. Thanks for the assistance so far.

 

@jjanzer_morph I sent you a PM. I'm having compile issues again for Wii U with 1.6.2. You previously provided a fix for 1.6.1, but it seems not to be included with 1.6.2.

 

OUCH! morph3D looks very promising (and I'm probably doing something wrong as I am a humble newbie) but when creating a shorter than standard adult I get the bones still at the standard adult height, and the character is therefore unusable - can anyone help me? I have looked on their website and the forums and could not find any relevant help . Many thanks - I am new at unity and 3D but I'm super eager to learn. Cheers!
relevant

 

Umm did somebody say creature skins ? What, where, how could I get please ?

 

I googled like crazy and still cant find anything on bones not following the body when creating a shorter creature (kid leprechaun etc). I find it impossible to believe this is normal, I am necessarily doing something wrong and I cant find what, as a result I am stuck in my work which is for school - please help me jjanzer_morph and morph 3D gurus! many thanks to you all!!! signed: feeling very very stupid and depressed.

 

Unity 5.6 is now released!!!

It's not a Beta anymore!!!
Well, Morph3D support has promised that 1.6.3 will be fully compatible!!!!

 

As for now it's not

 

Anyone know of any good tutorials for adding hair to a model via code?

 

I appreciate all the effort that you are devoting to getting this working. Since we didn't see 1.6.3 last week, do you foresee it this week or further out? Not rushing you, I just want to plan how to move forward with my project based on when we might see the update. Thanks

 

That's been my question for a while now. Each day my team asks me when 1.6.3 will be available since no one can move forward until our avatars are functional again. Having said that, I'd much rather have to wait another week to get a 1.6.3 if it means a completely stable version. Everyone is asking for corner case fixes but what we all really need is for the basic functions of the avatar to work. If accommodating the random requests is prolonging or distracting from a stable 1.6.3 release then please postpone that stuff. Prefab issues, hair packs and clothing not working perfectly, and any shader issues (being able to change skin color without affecting teeth for example) should all take precedent. Fix those things and I'm sure everything else will fall into place.