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

The Artist Tools are available and maybe you can use that to make beards. It's something I've wanted them to add from the beginning. Having a dwarf with no beard is just wrong. Heh, heh. After I solved a few of the issues with the current release, the plan is to look at what is needed to add beards and facial hair. Maybe we can start some dialogs on how to do things like that here.

 

If I think of a way, I'll certainly post a solution. Another problem I have that maybe you could help with? Whenever I load an outfit, the LODs of the various parts of the outfit are messed up, where some of them vanish at odd times (leaving the see-through mask beneath it active) as the camera pulls away. Nobody else mentions this, so I assume its me. Do you know what I'm doing wrong?

 

This commit is the one specifically about material persistence: https://github.com/volfin/mcs/commit/379d119150eb8557d23b010138c126735ed9d8f6

I tried to isolate my commits. Doing those changes should work for 5 if done alone. Though where I change from TextureImporterType.Bump to TextureImporterType.NormalMap might be a 2017+ thing, I really don't remember. if it complains about TextureImporterType.NormalMap, the stick with TextureImporterType.Bump.

 

just overwrite the files in your project with the files from the git. it really should be that easy. Note though, there's a small chance that the scripts rebuilding could break existing characters and cause you the need to rebuild them. The system can be touchy. so always back up before doing something like this, unless you're prepared to do that.

and to be clear how you use this:


it adds 3 material slots on the C Ibody script that you plug in your custom character materials. This way it knows what to use and doesn't keep changing back to the defaults all the time.

 

@ceebeee I finally got this setup in Visual Studio and have it connected to the Git repository. This is my first time using Git as I usually use Perforce. It's a good learning experience, so I decided to continue on with this. What's the best way to test this in an actual project? Just copy the files over to the project? Since the DLL files haven't been built, I wonder if that will get in the way.

I already made a fork for the work I'm gonna do on this, but I've never really made a Unity asset to pass on to others so I'm kinda winging it. Any assistance you can provide in getting this done would be great. Once I get it this setup, then I'm gonna do some general updates to it so that everyone should be able to just use it without any trouble on versions not 2019.

 

It depends how you use it. If you use it as a DLL, then just copy the modified *.cs files to your project (or modify those files with the changes) and build. If you run it as source and let Unity build it, then you'd copy the source files to your unity project and overwrite the *.cs files there (or modify the source files there). In short, wherever the original *.cs files are in your setup, modify those.

 

Hey everyone i wanted to add something i found out today.
I took a MCS character in Unity 5.6 used Meshbaker on it and then saved that mesh and prefab and moved it to Unity 2019.2 and it worked with a handful of my selected blendshapes.

 

If I remember correctly, to avoid any troubles it's best to use the DLL build. Just copying the files into my project is simple, though. I'll start working on it next week. Looking forward to getting this working.

I looked over your additions to the injector script. Any particular reason you did it the way you did? I assume that there's something that forces the scripts to switch back to the default textures. I figured this was something forced through the material shader, but I may have been wrong about that.

 

I just copied the changes MCS made in their build to fix the issue. All I know is it works.

 

Ha, ha! I suppose that works. I'll check it against my own build as well.

One thing I'm definitely going to do with my build is to condense the number of update functions across the whole project. It'll have one update point for each character to make it more controllable and easier to manage across a game. I'd like to make it so that a user can call specific updates whenever they want, or they can just update the whole model automatically. That's something I'll work on down the line.

My goal with this is to make the whole thing stable, lean, and something that works across the board. I'll look into the Unity 2019 issue and if you guys want to throw some ideas around to fix this, then I'll take suggestions. Updating each model would be hard to do and I'm not sure if I personally want to take on that task. Maybe we can look more closely into what @JBR-games was talking about as it might be able to solve that issue.

Another thing I'd like to look more closely at is how clothes/accessories/facial hair are converted from Daz 3D into the old Morph3D. I don't think this whole system can work unless it can be expanded on going forward. That means adding more things available for people to use with their characters. The one thing I REALLY want to get working is facial hair and possible cloth/hair physics. I'm gonna start with facial hair. Daz has models with facial hair, so it would be simpler to just be able to bring that into the system as a whole or find out what's needed to make this available for each model.

Finally, another long term goal I have is to make clothes useable on both male and female models. So if you want to put a dress on the male model, you'll be able to and vice versa. In order for this kinda system to work long term, it needs to have this kind of flexibility. On top of that, it means more clothing options for all of your characters.

I've only looked at the code on the surface, and I'm not sure how much work each one of these things is gonna take. If anyone has any suggestions, post them here. This is hobby work for me, but after looking at my other modeling options, adjusting Morph seems like a better use of time than learning a new system and all of that. If I can save others the trouble we early adopters got with the way this whole thing was handled from the beginning, that would be great.

 

I believe MeshBaker has full source code, but with that said I believe it makes a new mesh and takes the existing blend shapes and adds them to the model. it no longer uses/needs MCS code .New code would still be needed to interact with morphing between the different pieces and I'm unsure how many blend shapes can be kept. I was originally using it to bake the model and cloths down to 1or2 materials and meshes for performance. But at minimum one can bring their models into Unity2019 + with at least some blend shapes usage.

 

I've run into a problem with the open-source version of MCS from github (MCS-1_7-CodeAndShaders.unitypackage and MCS-1_7-Female.unitypackage).

Most things work, except the morph targets. They don't do anything like they're supposed to, and most don't seem to do anything at all.

For example, here she should be showing a mixture of fear and confusion, but I see... nothing.



Am I missing something?

 

As outlined a couple pages back, there were changes made in unity 2019 that break the system. it really only works for 2018 and below. However someone came up with a partial fix a few posts back.

 

Thanks, I'll look back through the discussions.

 

Back to this thread after a break, here's the current status as far as I understand:

• MCS is incompatible with Unity 2019 because the vertex ordering changed. While @jjanzer_tafi said this would be an easy fix, there has been no progress since last May: https://forum.unity.com/threads/rel...s-male-and-female.355675/page-72#post-4521415
  
  
• MCS is licensed under LGPL, which makes it illegal to use in any AOT build, which includes all game consoles, all mobile phones and tablets, and even standalone builds using IL2CPP. This was reportedly going to change, but it's been a dead issue for the past 6 months as well. (https://forum.unity.com/threads/rel...s-male-and-female.355675/page-72#post-4584619)

For these two reasons I'm tempted to say that despite the honest and generous efforts from Tafi to open source this asset, it's effectively impossible to use it in production at all. Which is really disappointing because they'd be two relatively easy fixes on Tafi's end.

Our team would really appreciate a status update / ETA on these issues. If they're never going to get fixed, please let us know so we can confidently start looking at other solutions.

 

This is huge. We will be looking into this over the holiday .

 

So I've been working on making adjustments to the Morph system, but I've run into a couple of problems that I hope someone can help me with. I have been working on this in Visual Studio on my Mac, but for some reason I can't get it to build. Apparently there are some issues with the Unity DLLs. Anyone have some ideas on another way to compile this, or would it be a good idea to just do the whole thing in a Unity project?

I want to put out a build next week, so I want to get this fixed. @jjanzer_tafi, any suggestions?

 

The more specifics you can provide the more likely we will be able to help you (error messages, screenshots, etc.).

 

Personally, I've moved on from this. I was using this with LipSync Pro but then found that I could create a custom character in Fuse and take all the current lipsync info over to it with no fuss.

then, of course, there is Tafi... Not the same as this but still, the demo is up and running and their custom characters are already available in one application and they do say you can request the SDK if you tell them about your project so why not just get the Tafi SDK and use the custom character kit they are making now?

In my case, I uninstalled it because the cartoony look of the characters and the fact that they mostly all looked basically the same (just different textures on different places) and the clipping of the clothes through one another was terrible... but mostly that cartoony look they force upon me 9no realistic and no anime, just cartoony), that made me ultimately uninstall the demo...

But still, it works, they are working on it and the SDK is available to request if you have signed up for the beta so why still struggle with this abandonware?

 

The main issue is that I have it pretty integrated into my game already. Removing it would be hard and I don't have a good backup that has clothes and stuff. As far as I can tell, Fuse doesn't allow for clothes to change on the fly. With Morph, I can create NPCs on the fly and that makes things a lot easier to deal with and use one model to make characters when I need them. I've been looking at other options and none of them do it as simply as Morph does it. If I was just going with generic characters, then Fuse might be a good way to go. I would imagine that others have the same issue. We just don't have a good solution for this.

I agree with the pokethrough. It's something I'd like to look over and find a better solution to.

Not sure about the Tafi thing. Those are the same guys that promised us they'd get Morph into shape and here we are. They shouldn't be trusted. I lost so much time due to waiting on them to fix things or roll out even basic updates.

Looking over everything, I think it'll just be better to get this working. There are a ton of outfits out there and they can be mixed and matched to make some interesting stuff. Would be great if we could get new outfits made, but being as this is basically DAZ, perhaps we can take some of those clothes and do something with them.

Perhaps as a community we can turn this into something decent like it should have been in the first place.

Oh, and I tried out Reallusion stuff and it takes some serious work to get characters looking good. I just didn't like how their editor works. I didn't look into changing the characters on the fly, but just making an orc in their editor was a pain. Maybe it was just me, though.

Not much to say other than the project does not recognize any of the Unity references. I've linked to UnityEngine.dll for Unity 2017.4, yet it always says it can't find them and errors out. I just loaded the Git project into Visual Studio so nothing special there. Did my updates and wanted to test them out, but when trying to build it won't link to the Unity DLL files.

 

Can you PM the details of the output log to me?

What version of Visual Studio are you using?

If you have access to windows or linux you could try building on there using mcs or csc as well which will output a dll that will work on a mac.

 

I'll see if I can get that to you tomorrow morning. Thanks for looking into to this for me. I suppose I could build on the PC, but I do most of my work on my Mac, so that would be the best way to go if possible.

 

I will take a look at the vertex issue with Unity 2019+ at some point, and I apologize there is no "official" patch yet but it's mostly due to how busy we are and I do not have much free time to look into it.

However I have modified the license this week to allow an exemption for static linking which gives you permission to build the library into your binary w/o using it as a dynamic lib. This resolves your second issue.

 

Made a few changes to the Morph system and I'm calling this version 1.8 for the moment. Most of the changes are mainly to streamline things and to practice distributing it via Git. Gonna push to get the build out next week and I guess people can try it and see what they think. After this, gonna see what can be done about Unity 2019+ users. I'll admit that I'm not super familiar with that issue, but I'll install MCS in 2019 and research it. Perhaps some folks can chip in and we can put our heads together for a fix that will work for everyone running at least 2017 and newer. I'd like to keep Unity 5 in the mix, if possible, as well.

The main thing I want to see if we can do is find a good way to distribute this thing for the general user. We'll see, I guess.

 

I'd like to see this available as a package in Package Manager with full source code.

 

It's something I'm looking into now. Maybe if there's enough support, Tafi/Morph guys will indulge us a bit. I understand that @jjanzer_tafi is going out of his way to provide at least a little support, and I appreciate that. Ultimately, I'd like for folks to just be able to get the whole package from the store with the source and both male and female base models for free.

 

Hello, folks. Just a little update on my progress with MCS 1.8. My intention was to release my build today in both an update to the Git repository and a .unitypackage people could just add to their project. However, in my effort to try and break the updates I made, I found a huge bug that breaks the pokethrough. Not sure what happened, but it's definitely broken and rather than release something that is going to break people's games, I'm gonna hold off until I can track down this error and fix it once and for all. With pokethrough being such a huge problem with all other versions of MCS, I think I'm gonna try to find out why it breaks and just correct it at the source of the problem. It's even stranger since I never touched any of the core function as I was only looking to consolidate Update/LateUpdate functions. Everything else was untouched. However, I wonder if the system as a whole is just balanced on a knife and little changes can send it over the edge. Oh well, I'll update this thread once I know more.

Also, I've found that adding scripts to clothing items before they are added to a model will break the system, too. Example, adding cloth physics to a dress will break system when that item is added to the model. I'm gonna look into that more as it was not something I had any intention of messing with right now. The other issue takes priority, but just an interesting bug I found while poking at the system for strange behavior.

If anyone has any suggestions, let me know. Maybe I missed something somewhere and perhaps someone has more insight. I'll admit that I'm in the early stages of understanding the whole MCS system. More knowledge is definitely needed.

 

I guess you know the basic concept, and this might not be of great help, but I'll sum up how I understand it. The MCS pokethrough solution is based on cutout shader mode used for the body and head materials. For prebaked prefabs you could use a prebaked alpha mask that would work perfectly fine. The complex part is how the alpha mask is build at runtime to allow dynamic exchange of content parts. Each content part, e.g. shirt comes with it's own mask. To create the final mask a render texture is used to overlay all the different individual masks. Think of photoshop layers, where each layer is a MCS content part, e.g. shirt. If something is broken, either the individual alpha mask is broken (check the individual MCS components on the parts) or the final render texture alpha mask for the body and head is broken (check the material).

 

The issue is that recalculating isn't working at all...unless the system breaks, then the whole system works fine, but then the ability to remove the clothing/hair/prop breaks. There's something messed up at the basic level that seems to work, but doesn't actually work. I've been combing through the code to try and isolate the problem. I'm guessing it has something to do with how models are cataloged when added to the project. When that system fails, it seems to fall back on another method of doing things and that is the correct way so clothing/hair is attached and stretched to the body correctly. Otherwise, the alpha mask takes over and anything outside of the basic shape of the base female/male body will be masked, but anything below that will poke through. What this shows is that clothes don't actually fit the body and it has some strange poke through/cropping going on.

I had not planned on looking at that system directly, but I guess it has to be done as anyone using the morphs to make the body larger or smaller will find that their clothes won't fit at all and they'll have a bunch of issues they won't be able to solve since it's something to do with the code. Of course, I haven't ruled out that this may be a shader issue, but my first guess is that it's how prefabs are handled since breaking that seems to cause everything to work properly.

 

I don't think there is a concept of stretching and fitting cloth to the body. It's all about blendshapes. The body and the cloth share the rig but thats all. Could it be that the blendshapes and or the blendshape values of your cloth are out of sync? (have a look at the cloth skinned mesh renderers and the blendshape values, they should always match the body and head values). Also note that I don't think the mask gets stretched or fitted in any way. It's a fixed 1 to 1 mapping of the IClothing's AlphaMask that is directly used to cutout the body texels (independent of any blendshapes or type of cloth). Each pixel of any IClothing's AlphaMask matches the exact same pixel in the body AlphaMask. I'm not using the git repo code base (still using the old 1.6 dll) so I can't help you with that a.t.m. Hope you can get some help from the auther.

 

Heh, my terminology for all of this is terrible, I'll admit. I'm not good with jargon, but yeah...the blendshapes aren't lining up when recalculation happens unless the whole system breaks. Based on the information you've provided, I think I've been looking at this the wrong way...which is probably why I haven't been able to find the problem. I'll change my approach as I think it may lead to finding what's going on and providing a fix.

Thanks a lot for the assist. With everyone contributing we can get this thing into shape, I think.

 

I'm not sure about that; on import the system remaps the skeleton of the SkinnedMesh of the clothing to the character skeleton. It's not clear to me whether that's a straight-forward 1:1 conversion or if there are some extra offsets applied. This might be specified in the .mon file that comes with every clothing item.
The mapping is necessary because at runtime the BoneService and JCTTransition components on the hip joint adjust joint offset for animations to work properly when blendshapes are applied.
I don't think this has much to do with EDarkness's pokethrough problem, although the cloth materials with correct alpha maps are generated in roughly the same step as the joint remapping, so who knows.

Hopefully I'll be able to dig into this some more again next month when I have a new character-based project coming up.

 

There's a lot to digest, but I'm gonna spend the day running tests on the whole system to try to nail down the problem. There's obviously a problem, but not sure where it is. Deconstructing the whole system should shed some light on it, I hope. The alpha injection system seems to be working fine, from what I can tell. Starting to think there's something amiss with the blendshapes. I'll post my findings, if I have any, later today.

 

Happy days are here..at least for me. All of the testing, searching, and the like has had me pretty stressed, but I got it figured out. Won't go into detail as to why it was all messed up, but I will say that it is important to include the streaming assets with each clothing/hair item. Ahem. With that in mind, I'll push through my first update tomorrow. After that, I'm gonna clean up some of the warnings as there's some deprecated code that needs to be fixed as well. Thanks to everyone for the help, because I wouldn't have been able to track this down otherwise.

 

Took all damn day, but I managed to get the 1.8 update out. Not a whole lot of changes, just some stuff under the hood and the consolidation of update functions across all clothing items and models.

Release is here: https://github.com/EDarkness/mcs/releases/tag/1.8

Models will update normally, if you don't do anything, so those who don't care can just move on with life without any issues. However, if you are looking to update models/clothes/hair on your own terms, then you can do so by using the following methods:

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. MCSCharacterManager.FrameUpdate();
3. MCSCharacterManager.FrameLateUpdate();
4.  

Make sure you turn off automatic updating on the model or everything will update twice. That's a lot of overhead for no reason.

You can access the update toggles manually by using:

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. MCSCharacterManager.autoUpdateModel = true (or false);
3. MCSCharacterManager.autoUpdateModelLate = true (or false);
4.  

(true = do auto updates, false = manual updating)

Also, a couple of things to make sure the system will run smoothly in your project:
1. Always install the files in the Streaming folder. They are extremely important and if they're missing the whole system will break. There aren't any warnings, either. I'm thinking about adding one as a reminder.

2. NEVER add any extra scripts to a clothing/hair prefabs. This is also super important, because doing so will break the system, but there will be an error when that happens...generally. Any extra items on clothes will cause problems. If you want to add clothes that have physics, then that is a no go currently. Same with any other scripts you want to add to those clothing prefabs. I find this to be particularly tough, because it limits what can be done to clothing prefabs in general. I tested this with a bunch of different scripts and I couldn't get any to pass through the check when the prefab is added to the character.

Alright, this should do it. I'll look at doing another update in a week or so unless something is severely broken. Remember that the whole MCS system doesn't work in Unity 2019 yet. I did some testing this afternoon in Unity 2019 and wow, it's really messed up. No worries, though. We'll figure it out...one way or another.

If @jjanzer_tafi lets me, I'll post the project with the actual code as well. Since I can use that in my own game, that's what I've shifted to since it's a lot simpler to keep up than having to mess around with DLL files and the like.

 

Great effort, EDarkness! Looking forward to test it out.
StreamingAssets contain all the blendshape data for the character and clothing/hair used at runtime, so yes that's important

 

Heh, heh. It's all a learning process. It's funny, I've been using this whole MCS asset from the beginning and yet knew so little about it. I figured those files were used for something else and sometimes didn't include them in my project. I guess it's these little things that makes doing this job fun, eh?

 

sorry if this has already been answer on here.. but i bought a handful of character types with the plan to buy more . is there any way to get the other depricated clothing ?

 

Yes, the MCS Mega Bundle contains 180+ assets:
https://www.daz3d.com/mcs-mega-bundle

 

A note about those assets is that some of the outfits are from the early days of Morph/MCS and aren't organized in a good way so they can't just be added to a project. They'll need to be adjusted to fit within the current structure of the system. Since these aren't public domain, it would be hard to make those adjustments and put out a new .unitypackage with the adjustments without causing problems.

 

For anyone curious, there is a free asset in the store called Skinn:VM that can add skinned mesh clothing to Fuse figures (any rigged figure), in the editor and at runtime.

Video tutorial (for beginners)

 

@wetcircuit Thanks for posting that. It's another way for people to use the figures they've created and add clothes and the like. Heh, maybe this will be the easiest way to have dwarves with beards....

 

while were at it..
another great helper ive bought and tested
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/modeling/skintools-108514

Description
♦ SkinTools is an powerful editor extension for create and modify skinned meshes

♦ Edit existing skinned meshes: Refine, delete hidden geometry, create Level of Details of already skinned meshes, blur weights, add or remove bones.

♦ Skining transfer(projection): Bind clothes to characters, transfer skinning from one character to another in one click. Blur bone weights, exclude undesired bones and mesh parts for perfect result

♦ Create skinning from scratch: Map Bones feature is an simple , powerful, precise, artist-friendly solution for make smooth skinning from scratch. Paint texture mask for each bones in prefered painting software then choise corresponding bones transform in Unity3d. That is all! You can mix transfer skin data and map bones methods .

♦ Non destructive skinning pipline: With SkinTool you can continue 3d modeling after skinning stage. Refine model, skinning and rig any time you want, just press one button to generate new one.

 

I bought this in the last sale… haven't used yet
I want to make… well… breast bones for some jiggle. Not sure if I can add bones to an existing skeleton though.
Seems better (more reliable) than a softbody deformer, but I haven't tried yet…
Have you done that? Do you know of any tutorials? Skin Tools has just a couple promo vids.

 

i think skintools is similar to skinn ,in function. I've only tested it by adding back packs..

maybe dynamic bone is a better option for "jiggle"

 

Right, but I have to add the bones.

 

I always figured there was something out there that helped with adding "jiggle". I mean, it's such a common thing these days. I imagine the bones would have to be added and then it's treated as a cloth. I'm just guessing since it's not something I've personally looked into.

I found this video:

There are quite a few more out there, too. Very interesting stuff.

 

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/physics/magica-cloth-160144

this new Asset looks interesting as well, although i havnt tried it..

 

It occurs to me on this general subject that in development you should test the body to see how it reacts not just when upright, but also when upside down or supine, when rotating, etc., to see if everything is still behaving realistically.

In the video there was also a spastic type reaction when the system was first enabled. Probably a way of coping with that would be to have dampening high at first, then eased off. I played a game that featured a cloth or jiggle type mechanic of this nature, and every time a character appeared they would "pop" like that. It seemed sloppy, like the devs of that game should have tried a little harder to prevent that.

Another idea in relation to using VertexMotion is that I think it is now set up so you can have it as a texture, and not solely as vertex painting on the model. Not sure about that. But if so, that would in theory enable you to have more accurate control over how the body deforms in relation to clothing items, as you can mask off the deformation where clothing is present.

 

I've just spent a lot of time messing around with Cinemachine. I'm liking it a lot so far, but I realize that I would like to have a way for Blendshapes to be saved for each character I make and then add them back in where ever I want. So if I'm in another project, I want to be able to import a new blendshape file for a particular character. Maybe this is something I will do next week on top of the code cleanup I was planning.