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

They lied from their first video demo when they claimed the developer tools would be available "in the next 24hrs".

It took a year for them to release the dev tool, and it was PC-only.
Obviously they knew the tool was not anywhere near close to ready. There is no pretending that wasn't a BOLD-FACED LIE to customers for a money grab.

 

So all the Morph3D stuff is now gone from the assetstore.

 

I've started using Reallusion's Character Creator 3. It's a good option, which allows you to import from Daz Studio and export for use in Unity. The downside is that it is a pricey option. Even after you've bought the application and export pipeline, getting the clothing assets is expensive.

 

What's the Daz license like these days for games?

 

I'm not 100% sure about all the details. I do know that if you purchase content from the store that there is a separate license to use for export in games. For one outfit I have it was $35 I think. What I don't know is if there is some sort of license required for the base free figure content such as Genesis Male, etc. I'm trying to find out about that.

[EDIT]
Seems like their licensing for base Daz content is cryptic, convoluted and crazy. I'm probably going to cut out the Daz part of the process and just strictly use Reallusion content in CC3.

[EDIT 2]
I was trying to make and import a CC3 character today and it works fine at highest LOD, but when trying to use the auto LOD feature it is completely broken. The models look like crap and the texturing is all messed up. So, if you do use CC3, just be aware of that. You are better off using an alternate mesh decimation system to reduce poly counts such as SimpleLOD.

 

Thanks for the info. I think for now, I'm going to stick with UMA, as it will be easy to swap-in new models and clothing without altering the codebase.

 

So I've sent 3 support requests in the last week, and have not received any sort of acknowledgement from Morph3D. Two were sent via the normal support address, and one sent through an information request address.

Maybe they'll respond after March 5th ...?

 

I just hope whatever I purchase from them this time they don't make free. They don't even pretend to care that I bought their stuff (MCS Female / MCS Male was originally $50) and many other various pieces both on and off sale. If they came back and made a good product that's all well and good. Yet, at the end of the day they really don't care and that's truly unfortunate.

 

It's March 5th...

I wonder what they're going to do, because what they have now is crap. I hope they set this whole thing right, but I don't have much faith in them.

 

Agreed. I have a lot of content I wanted to use for my game, but it's having issues with the current build on my platform of choice so I've had to abandon it. I tried CCZ#, but that's crap too at the moment. So now I'm trying UMA 2.

 

Yeah, looks like a missed deadline for MCS. Seems like someone in charge keeps shooting for the moon, rather than building a proven space suit and survivable launch / re-entry vehicle first.

 

Unfortunately, their announcement might have nothing to do with MCS anyway. We are just being naively hopeful probably.

 

And ... they don't mention a year either, could be they are targeting March 5th 2025.

 

I was thinking the same thing! lol

 

Yeah, my guess is that it has nothing to do with us at all. We're probably abandoned, as my unanswered support ticket indicates. It's probably some new version of their character creator portal system.

 

I wonder if they're going to say that you can use whatever they're doing with Unity BUT you're subject to their silly licensing...which was a serious point of contention with Morph3D.

 

It's also possible that Morph3D pulled their art from the UAS in advance of this new product in an attempt to force buyers into using their portal system.

 

That's also likely. I wouldn't be surprised at all. I think they want to be able to control things more and letting people do whatever they wanted with the Unity setup and EULA wasn't in the cards. So forcing folks to buy in again and to only use their store sound like something they would do. I hope I'm wrong, because I'd be pretty pissed if that was the case...especially if they aren't going to do something for those of us who stuck with them until the end.

I wasn't even able to use my $20 in credit on their store, either.

 

Seems like they want us to call them Tafi from now on, an avatar company. Don't see a lot of products, business behind it yet though.

 

I would say that Morph3D products are abandonware now. Lots of money down the drain from us to feed their new focus.

 

I guess they're going all in on VR stuff. Particularly avatars. Man, what a waste of time. I won't support anything from them going forward.

 

"We have important news, stay tuned!"
News: "We have a new name!"
They can't even really deliver information, I am highly skeptical that they can follow through with an actual product.

 

It does say MCS is part of their product plans so we'll just have to wait and see.

 

Where did you see that? I'm looking at their site now and it doesn't mention MCS at all. Though, they still have all of the old Morph3D stuff there.

 

It was there, but now appears to be gone. However, I just found this on their MCS page:

MCS is becoming open source. Check back April 1st

https://www.morph3d.com/morph-character-system

 

Meaning "We're not going to be supporting any of our old stuff any more, but by making it open-source, we get to feel all magnanimous and wonderful. Suck that up, plebs."

 

To me it means that I can go into the code now and fix any issues I might encounter. And perhaps there will be some ambitious community members that might take it up and maintain it, improve it, and add features.

 

I'd be okay with that. My game heavily uses Morph3D so I'm stuck with it if I want to release this year. But if it gets improved, I'm all for that.

 

Still following this thread. Have to take care of my assets Character creation is still low priority for my project. Sure there are lots of use cases and possible ways to implement. Wonder how many others out there that do want to take care of their MCS assets. For now, gonna wait for some magic to happen ;-) Cheers

 

April 1st? April fools day!? Ok then...

 

I was wondering if the name change coincided with selling to different owners, but the website has (to the best of my recollection) the same headshots for the executives.

If the company had been sold, the might have been reason for pulling the assets from UAS, and it might also be why customer support for MCS wasn't working.

 

I guess that makes a bit of sense. It would make sense why they would make MCS open source as well. Maybe their hands were tied before and new ownership would give them a bit of flexibility. I do wish they would at least drop by here and let us know what they're thinking. Considering how we spent money on their product and really didn't get what we were promised. That last update never even came out.

Either way, I guess we'll find out what's going on soon enough.

 

Does anybody have a list of all the MCS blendshapes that do work with the initial avatar (that don't need modified bone transforms)? This would allow me to create some prefabs that do not require any of the MCS runtime scripts (especially the bone transform updating). I guess all the facial blendshapes should work fine, but I'd like to have a list of all the ones I could use.

 

I guess the April Fools is that they said check back April first for their open source announcement, and it's April 1st and there's no announcement.

 

Heh, heh. That's the joke....

 

I've been checking their website everyday for the last few days.... and there's no update. still shows the same "come back on april 1st"... maybe they mean 2020....

 

I sent them a message asking for an update and letting them know everyone thinks it's just an April Fool's joke, but they didn't respond. They obviously haven't learned anything about customer communication yet. I will not support their products ever.

 

... and neither will they...

 

They sell mcs assets at a far more competitive pricing than their parent company "daz3d"... those creator licences are well over my budget. personally i'm just planning to port content over to UMA and the mcs asset library can be very attractive if priced right.

 

Yeah, but they don't sell MCS assets any more. They've been pulled from the store.

 

They have no reason to make MCS open source.. unless their new strategy is to sell more assets ported from daz3d.

 

They must have a reason because they said it is going to be open source. I don't believe it was any sort of April Fool's joke. But we will see at some point I suppose.

 

I think they plan to release the source code as open source. But not the models, as those belong to daz and the artists who made them.
Still, if you've already bought them, download them and convert to UMA. Best of both worlds. DOS has some amazing characters coming to UMA soon - every bit as detailed as the Morph3d stuff. Very impressive.

 

My guess is that MCS / Morph3D / Tafi is just gone now. No employees, absentee ownership, and unable to successfully sell to a foreign buyer. I don't know how representative this is, but from their LinkedIn page, only the original COO remains, they have basically no employees, and their Sr Operations Mgr was hired last August, after having traveled around the world "brainstorming," and previously he was a 8th and 9th grade teacher. (Not to be down on him, but it sounds like a placeholder hire.)

If I'm wrong, we'll hear something from them ... an update on their Twitter account, most likely.

If I'm right, then the only indication will be the website falling offline when it expires.

I would offer them .... $1 for the whole thing.

(And then I would restore the missing models I'd purchased from their store.)

 

Oh I had never seen the twitter and the announcement they had become 'Tafi'. interesting...

 

New models for UMA? Now that's very good news. Is there a Discord for UMA these days?

 

Sounds good, but the thing UMA has always been lacking is good AAA quality skin. That fact was ultimately the reason I chose MCS, the skin textures are just orders of magnitude better.

 

I thought that was what they announced a couple of months ago. It would be crazy if even that is gone now. Gotta wonder what would be the point of this if they were just going to die a few months later.

The most frustrating thing about all of this is that they could have made it work if they would have focused on making the whole thing user friendly and being faster getting things working. The base was there. Hopefully someone else comes in and fills the gap. Still not sure about UMA and I doubt it will work with the version of Unity I have to use right now, too.

 

Why can't you use the MCS skin in UMA?

 

I suppose I could, if I wanted to convert the MCS body to UMA. but the other problem is as I mentioned before MCS uses morphs, not bone scaling to handle body shape etc. It would be way too much work to get morphs working in UMA

Also I don't like how UMA doesn't generate the body until runtime, it just creates too many headaches.