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

We don't currently have a clothing-to-clothing poke through system. The system we have in place is for clothing to skin. It is something we're working on though.

 

Did you modify the FBX directly and then put it right back into Unity? If so we don't throw out the skinning solution, we use whatever is on there. We do throw out the bones so that the clothing inherits the figures bones but the original skinning solution should persist.

Did you run the asset through Artist Tools maybe?

Let me know if you have any more info, or can PM me the asset and I can take a look. I believe what you're trying to do should work fine.

 

Does anyone have any tips on OPTIMIZING loading times (PC/PS4) when loading The Morph 3D characters ?

 

What parts are you referring to, like a scene that has a large number of morph assets, or loading the assets dynamically? Have you run the loading through a profiler? If I had to take a stab, I'd assume your textures should be reduced which would help a lot. The morph data should be streamed from disk so that part shouldn't matter too much.

 

Sorry ive been working on this for the last 4days and Im starting to go crazy lol. It may not be the Morph characters. I feel like im close to figuring out whats causing it, but man Optimization is a killer... lol

 

May I ask is there any way to combine multiple clothing items together and turn them into one prefab that can than be applied at run time ?

(moments later)

Turns out you just put them into a GameObject and turn them into a prefab lol... so... im good... TY

 

error begins with: "vertex counts do not match between blendshape:..." has anyone else had trouble getting morph sliders to affect their character in the editor? It'll affect the hair and certain clothing when I try to modify the face or body features but the actual face or body won't morph at all.

 

Did you change the import settings of the fbx? If so unity will change the vertex counts/order and they will no longer be compatible with the morph data we provide.

 

I wanted to animate MCS models in Macanim itself, so I tried making a simple gesture in the animation windo but as soon as I try to add a keyframe the model shrinks as if in a half squat with her mouth open and any rotations I do on the rig don't get keyframed. Is this how it's supposed to be, can you not animate MCS models insinde unity or am I doing something wrong.

Edit: So I tried doing the same in unity 5.3(Was using 5.6 before), the crouching issue is still there but here I was able to keyframe the bone rotations, still looking for help.

 

I'm wanting to alter the clothing at runtime. There are helpful tutorials about adding and taking away clothing which I've used (with the previous MCS models) but I'm not sure what is the best way of changing between clothing 'Texture Variations' at runtime. Are there commands for doing it and for finding out which variations are available?

 

Are the figures morphed at all? If they are try removing the morphs and doing the animation then morphing and playing. We do a lot of things with the bones but they are done at runtime and not during editor unless you explicitly enable them (which messes up serialization so I don't recommend doing it unless you have to).

 

We don't currently do anything to make this easier for you. You'll want to scan and track the possible variations yourself or put them into a resources or similar folder so you can access them at runtime.

 

Thanks, I figured that's what must be at the root of the problem. However I don't believe I messed with any settings except for the "generate lightmap UVs" which I've always done for .fbx files.

 

It looks like using that option can make unity alter the vertices. We have a method for remapping the verts if they come out of artist tools as we build a map for handling this case. I'll take a look if we could generate a map from the base settings, then let you change the import settings, then use the calculated map to update the morphs. I'll keep you posted, this will take some time though.

In the mean time what you might be able to do, if you need this data, is to duplicate the fbx and calc the uvs and then build a map to map from the original vs dupe'd fbx and transfer the lightmap uvs to the original at runtime. It's not ideal but a potentially workable solution for the time being.

 

Why does this happens?
This character has some morphs that makes it bigger. If I use default morphs (everything on 0) it looks good.
I equip her using this: mM3DCharacterManager.AddContentPack(cp);

How do I fix this?

 

Hello,
Im having problems making this work with Realistic Eye Movement. There are 2 issues:

1. When saving the looking down pose for the eyes and running the game, the eyes will pop out of their sockets. This issue wont happen if I don't set the looking down pose.
2. This one is worse, if I use a full body morph like Young, then the center of the eye game objects gets moved, thus making the eye rotate around a center and not within its center, so eyes will pop out of their sockets.

Anybody has a workaround?
Morph3D, are you going to release a fix for this issue or you have a solution?

Thank you

 

Also another issue, Im getting the following error with the Standard-2pass-double sided shader:

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2. Shader error in 'Morph3D/Standard-2pass-double sided': invalid subscript 'tangentToWorldAndParallax' at line 117 (on glcore)
3.  
4. Compiling Vertex program with DIRECTIONAL _NORMALMAP _PARALLAXMAP
5. Platform defines: UNITY_NO_DXT5nm UNITY_ENABLE_REFLECTION_BUFFERS UNITY_NO_SCREENSPACE_SHADOWS UNITY_PBS_USE_BRDF2 SHADER_API_DESKTOP UNITY_HARDWARE_TIER3 UNITY_COLORSPACE_GAMMA
6.  
7. hader error in 'Morph3D/Standard-2pass-double sided': invalid subscript 'tangentToWorldAndParallax' at line 263 (on glcore)
8.  
9. Compiling Vertex program with DIRECTIONAL _NORMALMAP _PARALLAXMAP
10. Platform defines: UNITY_NO_DXT5nm UNITY_ENABLE_REFLECTION_BUFFERS UNITY_NO_SCREENSPACE_SHADOWS UNITY_PBS_USE_BRDF2 SHADER_API_DESKTOP UNITY_HARDWARE_TIER3 UNITY_COLORSPACE_GAMMA
11.  

 

That shader is obsolete and will be removed in the next build. If you have any materials still using it, switch them to the standard double sided shader instead.

 

I can't tell if that's the alpha injection failing or the clothing failing to sync the morph. What happens if you drive a morph after you added the clothing, do you see the clothing move or does it stay static?

 

I can take a look at this later, but my first inclination would be to contact the developer of Realistic Eye Movement first, it's possible they know what the issue is already.

Also, what version of MCS are you using?

 

Im using 1.6.
The 2nd question is unrelated to Realistic Eye Movement, The problem is that when I try to rotate the eyes after a face morph like coral body has been applied, because the morph modified the proportions of the figure, then the eyes are not centered in their axis, thus making eye rotation work wrong.

 

Another problem Im having is with clothing clipping. Cloth looks fine when the figure is static, but as soon as it starts animate, things like skirts will go trough skin, the alpha mask works fine hiding some part that should be hidden, but other parts like the tights are clipping trough the skirt. Also some cloth will clip with other cloth.

I tried to workaround this issue by setting the body size blenshape of the cloth to be bigger than the character, this way the skirt will be slightly bigger and mitigating some clipping, but the blendshapes of the clothing are being reset at runtime. Do you have any other workaround for this issue?

 

Does this only happen if you aren't in play mode? Or if you are playing an animation?

Below is a picture in the scene view of the lEye being rotated in play mode. If you are doing this outside of play mode the bones are not in the right position (they are only activated in play mode). I doubt that's the problem you're experiencing.

Does REM move the eye outside of rotations at all? Is there a way to trigger it per-frame? If so try triggering it to update after the JCTTransition.OnPostJCT call which is fired after we move our bones, animation has occurred, and before render.

 

Clothing to clothing pokethrough will be addressed in a future version, that feature is not available in 1.6.

 

jjanzer_morph, hello. I have a question about EULA.

We are going to create custom clothing for MCS Male and Female without using of your Artist Tool. We are going to develop our own tool which will copy blend shapes and skeleton weights from MCS character onto our custom clothing.

Are we allowed to do this without any additional payments? (We bought MCS Female before it became free, so it supposed we can do with it whatever we want).
Or it is somehow violate your EULA and we should pay you for each custom clothing despite the fact that it was created using our own methods?

 

I had worked a little with Morph3d before in small testing projects, at 1.0, and now started importing it "for real" in our main project. Unfortunately, it seems that there was no update for the documentation - the video tutorials still show the 1.0 workflow instead of the (apparently quite different) 1.6 workflow for getting the system into a project.

So, what I did was: Import MCS Male, follow the instructions for "Update" (even though as far as I can tell, I never had Morph3D in this project - but Update was the only option). Also imported MCS Female and two content packages (both version 1.6.1, Vintage Cover Model and Bowtie Beau to be precise).

When importing the models / prefabs from MORPH3D / Content / M3DMale and ...Female into a random scene, I got some of the triangles "see through", like in this screenshot:



Those polygons flicker in and out like crazy when doing things like move the character or change the camera.

The materials used use "Morph3D / Volund Variants / Standard Character (Specular, Surface)". When selecting "Standard (Specular Setup) - Double Sided" the issue goes away but I'm not sure if that breaks anything (I changed it directly on the materials).

Also: Is there and written and up-to-date (1.6) documentation on how to use the system? I saw the API but I'm looking for editor level docs. Videos are fairly cumbersome / time consuming to get a quick overview.

... and ... do you have a forum? Your site has "Community" but that just seems to be a fancy name for "Blog". One thread in the Unity forum is better than nothing but not exactly easy to navigate (might be someone asked the same question before me but 55 pages is a lot of stuff to look at).

 

Get used to it. This gigantic thread is your home base for any questions, and I don't recommend searching anywhere else. Going to Morph's website for answers is like going to a public library with no books, where all they have is a single computer hidden in the basement of the building that is logged into Amazon so you can order whatever book you originally were interested in reading. Also the library has no bathrooms.

 

By the way. I want to ask something long time ago.

DAZ even know that you are selling their content on your own store and Unity Asset Store?

Cyclops Suit
https://www.daz3d.com/cyclops-suit-hd-for-genesis-3-male-s
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/87372

Sci-fi Saboteur Outfit
https://www.daz3d.com/sci-fi-saboteur-outfit-for-genesis-3-female-s
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/88351

Retro Space Suit
https://www.daz3d.com/retro-space-suit-textures
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/47690

Seems like all content from your store it is a content from DAZ store.
Even MCS Female looks like Genesis 3 mode from DAZ.

DAZ EULA even allow this?

 

It is most likely that Morph3D is a DAZ business, but still want to know if that is true.

 

I'm guessing you're using deferred rendering, if so switch from the standard character shader to our deferred skin shader, that should fix the triangles you're seeing until we release an uber shader that supports both later.

No we don't have updated documentation, sorry. Our forum is not live yet either. I know this isn't ideal.

 

Can you pm me your email and I'll forward you to the person in charge of licensing?

 

Yes Morph 3D is a part of Daz 3D.

 

Okay, it explains something.

Why email? I think many people from this thread want to know this.

The fact is, that original clothing from DAZ store looks much more better than its low poly adaptation for MCS. It was baked very unprofessional.
Besides that, you are mislead people by showing them high poly screenshot which actually does not exist in the package.

And Artist Tool is buggy and no one even don't know its price. I even can't find EULA on your website in order to read it more carefully.

Considering all of this restriction, we want to download quality clothing from DAZ store and adapt it to MCS using our own methods in order to achieve better quality and better workflow.
I think many people also thinking about it.

So we want to know, are we allowed to do this or not?
Can you please show this comment to person who in charge of licensing?

 

A bit clarification for my previous question.

Am I understand right?

If I bought something in the Asset Store, I can do with this asset whatever I want (except I can't sold it on another store)?
So if I bought MCS and its content packs from Asset Store, I can modify it as I want, I can add more clothing (using own workflow) and even sell this clothing as in-game content.

This is correct?


You are definitely should place your EULA somewhere on top of your website and also in Asset Store. And also you should translate EULA from legal-speech to human-speech.
Because if I will not read the forum, I may continue to work with MCS without any aware about restrictions. And later I may receive unpleasant letters from your lawyers.

 

Sure I'll forward the info for you. I don't speak for any of the legal or marketing stuff related to our products just the technical side so I can only directly help with those issues.

I'd suggest opening a ticket with the same questions so you can have it tracked and make sure you get a proper answer.

You can open a ticket here: https://www.morph3d.com/help

 

Okay, thanks for the fast answers.

 

jjanzer_morph

Well. About technical side.
Artist Tools still unusable.

Bugs:
1. It can't export items. Progress bar stopped on 37%.
2. It can't open existed project. progress bar stopped on "Reading data"

Usability problems:
1. Add possibility to control camera using mouse. Arrows it is not serious.
2. Add possibility to delete 3d models and items.
3. Right after start, it shows list of existed projects, which can't be opened by clicking on it. I am still need to open project file using browser.


Update:
After a few attempts, it managed to export result, but after I imported it into Unity, item have very small scale (however in Artist Tool everything was displayed correctly).

 

I'll send the info to the people that built Artist Tools, they will likely need the following: your AT project files, the fbx file you imported, and the resulting .mr/export files.

 

jjanzer_morph, okay. thanks you. I will test Artist Tools a bit further. If I will encounter some stable bug, I will send you a project folder.

Also I have an important suggestion.
I just checked MCS Unity Asset Store, actually content packs no so bad, BUT, it is shame that all textures have only 2048 resolution. This is a reason why some of them looks bad.

If you are already started to adapt content from DAZ to MCS, can you please bake 4k textures instead of 2k?
Baking of 2k textures seems like waste of your efforts.
Your content could looks much more better! Original high poly models often have good quality. But low poly adaptation could be better.

 

Been using morph for awhile now and decided to try out artist tools. Keep getting the error "pre-flight failed" with nothing else.

Any ideas what might be causing this?

 

I'm quite sure they're using 2048 for those DAZ models too so I don't think the quality you seek has anything to do with loss of texture resolution. You'll find that polygons aren't getting scaled down either in the Morph products. The difference in overall quality between DAZ and Morph appearances is mostly with lighting and also a little to do with shaders and materials. Anyone's personal inadequacies with advanced lighting techniques and Unity's own deficiencies in complex lighting are 99% of the reason that your Morph attempts don't look like DAZ renders.

 

swansonator, even if original models have 2k resolution, if low poly adaptation will be baked with 4k resolution the result will be better due normal map. In 4k normal map, more details from high poly geometry will be transferred onto low poly model.
4k Ambient Occlusion map also may improve a result.

 

jjanzer_morph, hello.

I have a technical question:
I added clothing to character using a code:

Code (CSharp):

1. m3DCharacterManager.AttachCIClothing (ClothingComponent, true);

Clothing was added, but alpha mask of added clothing was not injected into material of character. (alpha mask exist on clothing component, I checked it)

Also if I will try to add the same clothing via Unity inspector, alpha mask will be injected properly.
I checked manual and search but didn't found an answer.
Can you please help with this issue?

----
Also I want to say that we started to change our opinion about MCS. Now we started to really like it. Seems like you are receiving too much undeserved hate from some people in reviews and on this forum.

 

Oh, I see. That's a bit tricky because we use cameras with Deferred shading for certain screenshots, while we usually strictly use forward rendering for the actual gameplay. Having this massive amount of materials to be changed makes needing different shaders for different cameras a little cumbersome.

One thing that would help tremendously with issues like this is if you had a property (or two or three) in M3DCharacterManager that lets us select the shader(s) we want to use. I can see how this may seem conflicting with the upcoming uber shader and I'm not deep enough into Morph3D to know whether we could also use the Standard shader without causing trouble ... but in general, I try to avoid custom shaders and the way this system works it seems like having one central place for each character to select the appropriate shader, and then having the system assign that shader appropriately to all relevant materials would be a huge usability improvement as long as the shaders are similar in terms of their input.

This could even be a global configuration setting that is applied to all characters, with the option to override it for each character.

... and ... I can see no difference between Unity's Standard shader and Morph3d/Standard (Double Sided) ... at least not at first sight.

When I use Skin Deferred (for body/head - not for EyeAndLash), eyes look creepy. And it seems there is no way to control eye color separately from the rest of the character. I do use Morph3D/EyeAndLash for the EyeAndLash material but it seems to have very little effect. Here's a screenshot illustrating the issue:



Here's how it looks with Unity's Standard shader:



I was really surprised to see that the eyes apparently don't have their own material / texture. That makes changing eye colors separately in character customization near impossible. It does save a drawcall ... but that lack of customization options is a very heavy price for a single drawcall (I kind of doubt this matters much even on mobile in 2017).

Not live yet sounds good ... do you have any estimate on when you'll have it live? I'm sure this would make things much easier for you, too.

So, re documentation: It looks like a lot of the tutorials cover Unity basics related to animation, which I very much hope are no different when using Morph3d. Is there any place that describes how to actually set up a character? Using morphs is kind of trivial and seems to work the same as in other packages (DAZ, Poser and friends), assigning props is also straightforward ... but ... how can I customize those props?

In Vintage Cover Model, I have a folder Materials with the different variations of "VCDress". I looked for a way to switch those out conveniently in M3DCharacterManager / Clothing but all that lets me do is disable things.

Ah, ok, found it ... two levels down in the objects, with all kinds of other settings around it that are (currently) not relevant to me. I guess if you make that dropdown-list available in Clothing (and Hair) on the M3DCharacterManager, next to the Enable/Disable buttons, I wouldn't need documentation.

Another issue I ran into: Bowtie_Beau / Retro_Hat does not work with BritHair - hair will extend over the hat. I have seen a few issues like that, where changing morphs even only within fairly reasonable values will result in skin coming through clothes.

One final thing: "MORPH3D" is a really ugly name for a top level folder in my project that I cannot put anywhere else without risking to break the system when adding new content. Why not simply "Morph3D" like you did in all other cases that I have seen so far? I renamed it but it looked strange.

 

I believe the only difference is that Morph3d/Standard (Double Sided)'s culling mode is set to Off instead of Back (however, the property is not explicit in the Editor in any of these shaders). So, Morph3d's shader will render the mesh both ways, while Unity's standard shader will only render the front face. You will notice the difference if you tweak between these two shaders for the jacket in CiaoBella's default clothing package, or a character's hair.

In most cases I think it won't make any visual difference, though. Unity's shader is probably cheaper because of the back-face culling property.

 

Started using Morph3D's MCS (v1.6) the other day and, despite some issues with skin poking through when using certain morphs (e.g. CiaoBella's Top cloth + Heavy morph), I'm quite impressed with the system so far.

Right now, I'm experiencing quite the opposite problem of the poke through issue. When I use CiaoBella's Jacket cloth, certain parts of the skin in the character's neck are being incorrecly omitted (please refer to the attached files mcs_shot1 and mcs_shot2). In mcs_shot3, I'm purposely hiding the jacket with an alpha value so you can get a better idea of what I mean.

I understand that you're omitting certain parts of the skin texture to prevent poke through, but this process probably requires some manual fine-tuning (or an improved algorithm) to prevent cases where the cloth mesh is not "overlapping" the skin, which I believe is how the algorithm works and the problem with this type of jacket collar.

Is there anything I can do on my side to prevent this behaviour? Should I expect an update addressing this issue?

Thanks!

 

I think this is due to the fact that the clothing item isn't being tracked in the model.

Try instead to do the following:

ContentPack cp = new ContentPack(clothItem.gameObject, true);
m3dCharacterManager.AddContentPack(cp);

Let me know if that works for you.

 

Yeah that makes sense, I'm not sure how common of an issue being able to swap shaders out at runtime outside of style changes would occur. Do other people do this on a regular basis? It's something I think we could consider doing. We are planning to solve a similar issue in the next major release by having a concept of materials that are a little higher level then unity's materials, that then internally generate unity materials (somewhat like the material mon files you see next to the .mats).

It's the standard shader but unculled so it will draw front and back faces.

Thanks, that's definitely a bug and I can get that fixed in the next release.

There's always a tradeoff, it would be nice if we were able to provide different ways to address this but we have other priorities right now. I'll make a shader and get it out that will allow people to tint the eye color and or replace the texture for the eye (a very commonly asked for feature). I'll try to let you know when it's ready but I'm slammed at the moment.

We have the updated docs I just haven't had time to go through and check it out. I'll do that this week and we'll try to get them hosted by next week.

Sorry I don't understand what you're asking, can you be more specific, what are you trying to do?

Agreed, that dropdown was just something I added last minute as a quick helper to make proofing easier for us internally and figured it might be of slight use to others. Ideally this would be promoted up higher in the object and/or to the figure level. These types of improvements aren't likely to ship until the next major release as there are current working methods (just taking the mat and drag/drop/replace it). But I do agree it would be nice to have it very conveniently bundled up in a nice editor section.

I'd submit a ticket on our website and have the content team look at it. I think the easiest workaround that wouldn't require clothing might be to have the hair/hat combined instead of 2 separate assets. The latter would require us to build new tech to make it work, whereas the former could be completed w/o new tech which means it's probably more likely to get out sooner that way.

Agreed, the reason is simply legacy; we have a cleaner name/namespace/etc in the next major release.

 

Yep, that's correct. We only use the double sided when necessary (a lot of the clothing is designed this way).

 

That means our alpha injection masks are too aggressive. I did write an improved algorithm for generating these masks that has some new features like hole patching and edge walk-back. However not all the clothing has been updated with the the new masks. A lot of the clothing also gets hand edits to help address small issues like this.

If you want to fix it yourself, you need to find the alpha injection mask that's inside the clothing folder and update the mask by hand.

If you want us to fix it (and you should report these issues regardless of what you choose to do), submit a ticket here: https://www.morph3d.com/help and the content team will clean up the texture and re-release with the fixed textures.