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

I think LODs have been messed up for a long time. I always got the impression that people generally only use LOD0 and don't worry about the rest. In my own game, I don't use anything but LOD0. Since it's a top down game, the player will almost never see anything past LOD0 anyway. Honestly, I'd like to find a better way to doing it.

I'll put it on the list of things to look into.

I have a build that basically ready to go with fixes a couple minor things that I linked above. As you find things that need to be fixed, just let me know and we'll take a look and get them worked on. There are still a ton of things that I need to jump into with regards to the whole MCS system. There's a lot of stuff under the hood and I just kinda tackle it as problems come up.

Oh, and that whole "double click" the name thing in 2019.3 threw me off. I'm so used to older versions of Unity, that I keeps stumbling over that even now. I wonder if there's a way to get the old functionality put back?

 

Thanks @CommunityUS . Cant believe it was that basic... Still morphs were messed up. So restarting again..

 

Thanks @EDarkness . Works now. Had to import the 3d model first, then the 1.9_dll to get it to work.

 

Hi all. Wondering if it's possible to use the MCS clothing with MakeHuman (via MakeClothes conversion)? Apologies if this has been asked before—my googling found nothing on it.

I own a HEAP of the Morph3d MCS assets, and while it's great that the project went opensource, the inability to use any of it with 2019 without jumping through a thousand hoops feeling like I'm pretty much stuffed until Tafi gets around to properly updating MCS for it, so just looking for another option in case the update to 2019 takes ages or never happens.

Any advice gratefully received. Thanks in advance.

 

I was following the MakeHuman project for a while, can you link where this MakeClothes conversion info is?

 

First, thank you (and EDarkness) for all your tireless efforts in trying to make MCS usable for us hopeless artist-types, who understand so little of the technical stuff. You both are awesome. Technical issues aside, I don't understand why there would be a licensing issue preventing a user from exporting a clothed model with blendshapes into a 3D modeling program, for the purpose of adding to it, or improving it, or otherwise making it useful for a game. If one has purchased assets from the Unity store, or the clothing pack from Daz, that person has a right to use that stuff in a "closed" game, as long as the assets are not made available for separate download. So you can't sell models or clothes, but you can use them in a game. I see no reason that adding wrinkles to a character in Zbrush, or adding your own face morphs in Blender, or creating LODs in Maya, would not be allowed. You could even take the clothing items and rig them to another model that you made, then re-import to Unity. Is there something I don't understand correctly about the licensing?

 

I would like to release the .covx files for all of the clothing and hair that has been released...as well as reorganizing the clothing that doesn't work because they changed how clothing works in MCS 1.7. This would allow some of the "hoops" to be avoided. As it stands now, the only real thing holding back 2019 users is the lack of .covx files. Of course, this wouldn't even be needed if we could just fix the models themselves. The problem again comes with licensing. The base models are fine. We could fix them and distribute them without problem. However, clothing is still being sold on the DAZ3D website and that means that only people who paid for content should have access to it. How do we determine who paid and who didn't? That's something that Tafi and DAZ have to work out. Which leaves us in a messed up situation. I would LOVE to distribute the files for converting to everyone. Maybe Tafi will give us permission at some point to do so.

The way the morphs are with the clothing, I don't know if it'll be possible to use them in other programs. I guess it can't hurt to try and see what happens.

I'm gonna release MCS 1.9.2 sometime this week. Give it a try, man. I think it should allow you to use your stuff in 2019 without a whole lot of headache.

 

Wasn't planning to release today, but it just works out better if I did.

New release: MCS 1.9.2
https://github.com/EDarkness/mcs/releases/tag/v1.9.2

Not a whole lot of changes, but the biggest one is no automatic updates AND new MCS Male and Female files for Unity 2019. It's so simple this time. Just install 1.9.2, then install the new male and female packages! No converting necessary! If you're using Unity 2017 or anything before Unity 2018.4, then don't install these male and female packages. They're made for 2019 users.

This week, I'm gonna make an effort to release the .mr files for all of the clothing/hair in the game. It's gonna take a while, but I'll get it done. If you want something specific, then let me know and I'll make that a priority. Once you have the .mr files, then you'll just install them over the original ones...and...that's it! No restarting Unity, either. Simple. So outside of having to install a small update file for the clothing/hair, it's just like it's always been for Unity 2019. I kinda feel good about that. Long term, I'd like to update the clothing/hair files directly so you'll just need to install one file. The issue is distributing and licensing. I'd like to see if @jjanzer_tafi can upload the new files to their server and those who have paid can just get them from there. We'll see if we can make that happen.

Of course, there's always the possibility that I missed something, so let me know and I'll see about getting it fixed. My testing so far has been without error.

Enjoy!

 

No, you are right, I think I misunderstood your question. There's still the technical problem, which is that there's currently no way to get the model and blendshapes into or out of Blender or Maya.

 

Nice! I'll take a look at it soon. Thanks for your work once again

I think this is 100% the way to go. I wasn't a big fan of sharing the conversion map files (your covx or my json) because they essentially contain all the vertex information which someone could potentially use to recreate the mesh for free. The MR files are just offset values, which are useless without the original model and therefore shouldn't pose much of a copyright issue. It'd be nice if Tafi could give us an official green light for that, but I'm also down for just going ahead with making the 2019 compatible MR files for paid clothing available.
I'm working on a new project over the next 2 weeks where I'll have to convert a lot of the clothing and hair, so I'd be happy to help generate and distribute these files.

 

I'm gonna setup a server with all of the updated files on it. I'll let people just download the .mr files from there. It'll be the simplest way to do it. And when we can, we can have the full updated files that can hopefully be added to Tafi's server for those who purchased the clothing. That may be getting ahead of ourselves, but it's nice to have goals.

I'll provide more information later this week. Might be a little slow since I found out I have Shingles and that's making this a lot harder to do. Still, it was nice finding out that replacing the .mr files can do the job. Now I can focus on providing those and that'll make it a lot simpler for people to use the MCS stuff in newer versions of Unity. Woot!

 

@EDarkness Oh no! I hope you feel well soon and your symptoms are mild!
I've also set up a server for hosting the files already, but it'll be good to have multiple distribution sources.

I'll get in touch with you as soon as I have a list of the assets I want to use for my project so we can more easily divvy up the conversion jobs and prevent double work.

 

@EDarkness Got everything working on 2019.3 with your build (1.9.2) and the morphs you provided. It looks very impressive with URP.

When trying to build it, I see the following error both with SRP/URP. Any thoughts/tips on how to fix this?

ArgumentException: The Assembly UnityEditor is referenced by MCS_Core ('Assets/MCS/Code/Plugins/MCS_Core.dll'). But the dll is not allowed to be included or could not be found.
UnityEditor.AssemblyHelper.AddReferencedAssembliesRecurse (System.String assemblyPath, System.Collections.Generic.List`1[T] alreadyFoundAssemblies, System.String[] allAssemblyPaths, System.String[] foldersToSearch, System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2[TKey,TValue] cache, UnityEditor.BuildTarget target) (at <90d4bcb003fb405fb09241aed2f178aa>:0)
UnityEditor.AssemblyHelper.AddReferencedAssembliesRecurse (System.String assemblyPath, System.Collections.Generic.List`1[T] alreadyFoundAssemblies, System.String[] allAssemblyPaths, System.String[] foldersToSearch, System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2[TKey,TValue] cache, UnityEditor.BuildTarget target) (at <90d4bcb003fb405fb09241aed2f178aa>:0)
UnityEditor.AssemblyHelper.FindAssembliesReferencedBy (System.String[] paths, System.String[] foldersToSearch, UnityEditor.BuildTarget target) (at <90d4bcb003fb405fb09241aed2f178aa>:0)
UnityEngine.GUIUtilityrocessEvent(Int32, IntPtr)

 

@pradf4i Been out of it for the past few days. I'll take a look at the .dll later today to see if something is going on there.

 

Thank you. Hope you are feeling better now..

 

Still hurtin', but tired of staying in the bed so I'm trying to be at least a little productive.

As I figured, some of the way they had MCS setup in MCS 1.7 puts UnityEngine elements into the main build of a project...which is a major no no. So I went and fixed it so now editor code isn't compiled with main builds. This should fix any problems with builds going forward. I'll try to get this new DLL build out tomorrow.

 

In the spirit of disclosure, looks like I won't be able to get the DLL update out today. Looks like I'll need to move the editor files completely out of the DLL or it won't work. I generally use the code version of MCS in my game, so I can avoid any of the DLL issues, but the DLL files I've generated don't like the editor files and I think it's best to just move them out of the DLL completely and store them in the correct editor folders like they should be. Gonna do this tomorrow as I didn't plan on spending a whole lot of time with the MCS stuff today. I apologize if any one was expecting it today.

This is one of those times when I wish they would just let us distribute the code version of MCS....

 

Weird, I've never had those UnityEditor errors building with the 1.7 MCS_Core.dll, only with the MCS_Importer.dll. That one's easy to fix by changing its settings to only run in editor, since that's the only place it's used anyway:

But that's not going to work on the Core.
I haven't done much with 1.9 yet because it has a bunch of stuff that I already had my own solution for. I also like to keep a version around that is as close to the 1.7 release as possible with only the necessary bugfixes. I'll see if I can share my DLLs, but I'm still in the process of developing and testing them on two of my projects so they're not fully verified yet.

 

Sorry for the delays, guys. I got everything taken care of and this shouldn't be a problem going forward. Just a little oversight on my part. New DLL package is available with the changes. I've done a few builds and it's working great as far as I can see. Let me know if there's any wonkiness going on.

https://github.com/EDarkness/mcs/releases/tag/v1.9.2

 

Hi EDarkness. I've been working with your DLL and MCS revisions, so the first thing I want to say is THANK YOU.

MCS Male and Female are working well "out of the box", but I am noticing that some props (like shoes on the Ciao Bella outfit) are disappearing too soon (e.g. at LOD1).

I did find this series of posts about what may be a related issue: https://forum.unity.com/threads/rel...s-male-and-female.355675/page-40#post-2983991

Sounds like this may have been an issue that MCS's content team was working to resolve. Perhaps they never did?

It looks like there may be a script somewhere that is reacting to the LOD distance by turning off mesh renderers that should be turned on instead.

Looking forward to your response. Thank you again for all your hard work on this—it is very much appreciated.

 

@BDFgames I've noticed a couple of the gloves in another pack are doing the same thing. This happens in all versions of Unity it seems. I'll add it to the list of things to look into in my next revision. It's something I'd like to solve sooner rather than later, so thanks for bringing it up.

This weekend I'm gonna put up some .mr files so that more clothes can be used. Since the Ciao Bella outfit was given for free, I thought it would be a good idea to put that one out there so it could be used without issue. Having more outfits out there will make it easier to find issues and fix them. It'll be a little bit of a slow burn since there are ton of outfits for both male and female models.

As for the future, the next revision will be mostly trying to clear up warnings and convert over the deprecated code. I'll also look into fixing this LOD issue as it's been annoying me as well. Beyond that, the next fix will be trying to allow for each model to be modified so we can add cloth physics. This is something I REALLY want to do, but it's going to be a bit of an undertaking and I'd much rather get the whole system stable before I start messing with more of the core functionality of the system. But being able to do that will allow for boob and cloth physics, I think. That'll be a nice change.

Also, I want to fix eyes so that we can change the color easier than we can now. Gonna have a friend of mine look at the base models to see if something can be done.

I'll post the info about the .mr files in a couple of days.

 

Thanks, EDarkness.

I did also notice that I can't currently modify body-shape, as the clothes act as a limiter rather than "stretching" with the body morph. From reading earlier in the thread, I'm thinking that might be a known issue?

 

Which outfit is causing this issue?

 

Hi,

This is a bit of a long shot, but I am using the pre-github version of MCS, and I am trying to load character asychronously, and I am running into an issue.

No matter how I try to load the characters, I am getting noticeable "stutter" or framerate drops.

I have tried placing the characters in a scene and loading it asychronously, as well a using resources.loadasync, etc.

Resources.loadasync is fine, the issue comes when I instantiate the characters. It only occurs with MCS characters.

I am assuming that MCS is doing something performance intensive on instantiate, or on wake, on enable, etc. Can anyone think of any way that this could be solved? I can load complex scenes asychronously with no issues, it's just MCS that is causing the problem.

I know I could do the loading at load time, but that would mean loading a large number of characters that may never be seen or interacted with at the beginning of the game, which would seem wasteful, so I am open to any suggestions.

Thanks!

 

I didn't realise until you asked that question, but it seems to be just the Starship Male and Female packs (that I've seen so far, anyway). Ciao Bella seems to work fine.

 

Those outfits (as well as a few others) haven't really been updated from their original release when the MCS system was released. It's something I'd like to visit at some point to update some of those old outfits to work with the newer setup (MCS 1.7 and above). Those old outfits really need some love.

Every time a MCS character is instantiated, the system does some verification under the hood. This causes processor overhead. There's no real way to avoid it, either. The old MCS system was terrible at this. MCS 1.7 and newer handles this better. I'd recommend trying newer versions to see if that works better for you. Old MCS is a little bit of a mess.

 

Understood. Thanks again for all your hard work on this.

 

Hi again. I've noticed the DAZ MCS assets' clothing and hair generally work (or seem to) even before the .MR files are edited in the StreamingAssets folder. Are the .MR files only needed in specific use-cases?

 

I also noticed that the Runtime Morph Path in the Core Mesh script seems to point to nowhere (either wrong path, wrong filename, or both). I can't seem to edit that script to see what it's doing, though. Wondering if that could be causing the LOD issues?

For example, in the path shown in this screenshot, the path is:

MCS/Starship_Crew_Uniforms_Female/valBridgeShoes_Right/valBridgeShoes_18556_right_LOD2

This path seemingly misses the Content folder and puts an underscore instead of a space in valBridgeShoes_Right — any thoughts? Do these need to be corrected, do you think, or are these paths perhaps not actually used?

 

Thanks for your reply. I'm not sure which version I am using, I think it's the version just before the github release, so I'm guessing "old" mcs? I will consider updating it in the future.

What I am doing now is loading the prefab using loadasync, (one character at a time), then instantiating with the M3D character manager script active, and then setting the character manager to active, all from a coroutine. This seems to work ok, when I split up the work like this.

I am currently working from the editor, from a reasonably old computer, so I suspect in a build on a faster machine this should at least be acceptable.

Thanks again!

 

That's the old system, which is why those outfits need to be updated to function properly with MCS 1.7 and newer. Some of them may kinda work, but I wouldn't release software with them in the state they're in.

.mr files are just reference files for vertex data. I don't remember when they switched to .mr files, but old MCS used it's own reference data, which is why some of those old outfits kinda work.

If you're using the version before the GITHUB release, then you're definitely using old MCS. But you can try to do what you can to get it to work for you.

 

In regards to LOD issues: All models have a LOD Group component that automatically controls LOD based on camera distance. However MCS also has its own independent LOD system, controlled by the LOD slider on the Character Manager. If you zoom out, clothing will seem to disappear because the LOD Group is trying to enable a mesh that is disabled by the MCS LOD system.
The best solution is to disable/remove all LOD Groups from all MCS models and either set the LOD via the Character Manager or write your own script to make it variable based on distance.

@BDFgames The runtime morph path is relative to the StreamingAssets folder and excludes the extension. The one you posted is correct.

 

Okay for future reference, I'll be putting .mr files in this location:

http://mcs.omc-games.com

Still uploading stuff, but I want to work in @ru_erikvdb to get more things out there quicker. I didn't realize how much actual MCS stuff there is until now. Whew.

EDIT: Gonna make it a little prettier later this week. Just want to have the stuff out there for folks right now.

 

Do you know the reason why they implemented their own LOD manager? It's not obvious to me.

 

Hi Jesse,

Thank you for open-sourcing MCS and clarifying the licence. I know legal stuff is a bit annoying, but I wanted to ask a few things about the licence as it stands now:

• What are the licence terms for the mesh assets in MCS-1_7-Male.unitypackage and MCS-1_7-Female.unitypackage? If the terms are LGPL that is unlikely to be acceptable to asset stores or publishers. This wording is bound to conflict with the standard terms used by these companies: "You may convey a Combined Work under terms ... that ... do not restrict modification of the portions of the Library contained in the Combined Work and reverse engineering for debugging such modifications."
  
  
• You say we have "full permission to statically link, including through tools such as IL2CPP, the MCS library" but what terms apply to the resulting binary? Do we have permission to license it in any way we choose? This may seem a bit pedantic but of course no one wants to finish a game and then have a publisher's pedantic lawyer start asking these kinds of questions.

I think I know what you're trying to achieve with the licensing. You don't want someone to use your work to build a closed-source "MCS 2" but my impression is that you don't want to restrict how MCS is used in games. If it would be helpful I could suggest wording that will help achieve that—let me know if you'd like that.

 

To make sure all meshes are in the same LOD state. If some of the clothing is in a different LOD state (e.g. when the character is right at the edge of the threshold), the alphainjection mask and morphs might not align properly.

By the way, the conflict with the Unity LOD Groups is only an issue in Unity 2019 and later; Unity can now autodetect LOD meshes and it thinks it's helpful by automatically adding the LOD Group component. It's not part of the MCS models by default.

 

@MoreGalaxies Glad you could put this stuff to use. It reminds me that I still haven't added more .mr files. I'll do that this weekend. I've been neglecting my own game by working on this MCS stuff so I've been spending the last couple of weeks diving deep into my own project. Anyone waiting for .mr files, I apologize. I'll add more soon.

Not sure about the reptilian stuff, but I can look into it. I don't remember if there was a MCS setup for that, but it would be interesting to check into.

 

Anyone using MCS in a mobile project / Quest VR? What sort of optimizations would be needed to run this on mobile or in VR?

 

Still no response, huh?

 

Does anyone know a simple way to see what each MCS outfit looks like? Like a "master list" or something? I have the Daz Outfit pack, with hundreds of outfits, but they are listed only by name and have no picture to indicate what they look like. Downloading each outfit, importing it to unity, and adding it to a MCS base character is just to see what it looks like.....that is not good!

 

That was always a sore spot, but you can probably have some success by doing a google image search using the name and see some old art that was used for the Unity asset store. Maybe append MCS morph3d as search terms.

 

I've always wanted something like that, too. Are their pages on the Unity Store still there? Also, I think those outfits were from DAZ, so if you search for the outfit there, you should be able to find it. That's what I did a few months back when I got the outfit pack.

As for hearing from Jesse, you can give that up. They haven't posted anything here in a long time and they don't seem to be interested in keeping in touch, either. Probably have to send them an email directly if you want a response.

 

This is something I want to work on. I already did what @EDarkness suggested as well, finding previews from DAZ based on the item names but annoyingly the MCS packages will frequently have different content. Especially female shoes are often replaced.

I was hoping to create an automated system for converting all the packs to 2019 and indexing their contents in the process, but with a bunch of packs being corrupted or incompatible that's a bigger pain in the a.s.s. to solve than to just run everything by hand.

I'm planning on working on MCS tools again in the upcoming weeks. What I hope to end up with is:
1) a catalog of pictures of all items and which pack they belong to.
2) a list of all items arranged by type (top, bottoms, shoes, hats, accessories) which is useful for random character creation.
3) a whole bunch of converted mr files for 2019
4) an improved toolkit for doing your own conversions
5) URP compatibility (I already made URP compatible shaders and a tool to convert all materials, just need to clean it up a little)

 

@ru_erikvdb - Not having to change URP Shaders manually anymore will be great! Looking forward to it! BTW, Is 'URP-> lit' for the body and head , Eye and Lash as unlit, 'Render Face = back' the right setting? The eyes look a little off in URP.

 

@pradf4i There are a few problems with converting the MCS materials to standard URP shaders:
- The original EyeAndLash shader has custom logic for creating light reflections. Without that the eyes will indeed look different.
- The original Volund Character shader has an extra texture map "Overlay". I use it to easily swap eye colors.
- A lot of the texture maps have different names from the standard shaders so they don't get copied over automatically.

Unfortunately shader code is like black magic to me, so I have no idea how to recreate the EyeAndLash shader, however I managed to create some custom URP shaders using Amplify Shader Editor (ASE) to fix the eyes a different way and at least get all the texture maps right. I've used ASE because that's what I've been using for a while, but I'll convert them to Unity Shader Graph so everyone can edit them.

 

@ru_erikvdb - Thanks. Can you share the URP shaders on ASE as well when you are ready. I am using ASE for other items and prefer to leverage it.

 

Converting files takes a whole lot of time. Glad I can save some of you guys that work, because it's long.

Anyway, put some more .mr files up for people to use. I also started including pics of the set as well. Nothing amazing, but you'll get an idea of what the set looks like. I included props, too. I'll have some more in the middle of the week. Pics have the same file name so they'll be easy to find.

Files are here:
http://mcs.omc-games.com/main/

Pics look like this:


They're simple, but they include what's actually in the set. The only thing not really shown are the optional colors that some of the outfits have.

@ru_erikvdb You know, I've never figured out how to change eye color properly in MCS, so I just purchased some eyes and used them. They give a lot of flexibility with eye color and whether eyes are cat eyes, etc. I should probably find out how to change eye color normally...if it's possible, though.

Also, this coming weekend, I'm gonna go through some of the broken sets and see if I can fix them. There are a couple of outfits I'd love to use in my game, but they're currently broken so they won't work. I see what the problem is for some of the files and I think their issues would be easy enough to fix. I guess I'll find out this weekend.

 

Like I said I use the Overlay channel for it, which is like a layer on top of the albedo, with textures like these: https://www.socsci.ru.nl/vr/resources/mcs/textures/
To apply them:

Code (CSharp):

1. Material headMaterial = GetComponent<MCSCharacterManager>().GetHairMaterial();
2. headMaterial.SetTexture("_Overlay", eyeTexture);

Note: The texture order for LOD0 meshes is different from the other LODs, which is why GetHairMaterial actually returns the head/eye material. For lower LODs you may need to call GetEyeAndLashMaterial instead.

This is probably not the most efficient method. Since I've had to make my own URP shaders anyway I'll probably set it up so I can set the eye color in the shader instead, but that requires change to the base albedo and setting up the right texture mask (they're slightly different for male and female) so I won't put that in the URP shader I'll release.

 

I forgot one thing, some of the .mr files have a * in the name. These files are from models that have a problem. Like one of them doesn't have the right mesh renderer on one of the leg pieces. My goal is to fix the original files, but I needed a way to let others know there may be an issue. Basically, they work for most parts, but maybe one part is messed up. Once I fix them, I'll remove the *.

Also, does anyone have the original "underwear" skin for MCS Male/Female? I noticed the other day that they weren't included when Tafi released everything. I got rid of my old Morph skins so I don't have it anywhere.

 

Sure thing, I uploaded them to the texture folder linked in my previous post.
Edit: ah this ended up on a new page, here's the link so you don't have to click back: https://www.socsci.ru.nl/vr/resources/mcs/textures/