UMA Orc Race Starter Kit

Hello there UMA fans. Are you tired of bald, fluorescent underwear-wearing humans in your UMA project? Do you long for more variation? Well now the waiting is over..!



With the new "UMA Orc Race Starter Kit" you can have bald, fluorescent underwear-wearing Orcs running around in your UMA project in no time.

The UMA Orc Race Starter Pack contains a brand new race based on the existing UMA human models. This means most* existing UMA human slots will fit. New DNA converters mean your Orcs can be fully modified using familiar sliders while still remaining that special kind of ugly.






The UMA Orc Race Starter Pack contains:

• Orc Male & Orc Female Race Definitions
• Male & Female Custom Body Slots
• Male & Female Greenskin Overlays
• Male & Female Neutral Overlays (for full colour freedom)
• 1 Male Hair Slot
• 1 Male Beard Slot
• 1 Female Hair Slot
• 1 Content Definition pack for quick setup

This pack requires UMA2.0 which is freely available here: UMA2
If you’re new to UMA and want to learn, try my video series: A Practical Guide to UMA

Coming Soon to the Asset Store [Pending Approval]

* Due to the extra ugliness added to the shape of the head, some human helmet or face covering slots will not fit correctly without modification in an external modelling application.

 

Awesome! The male face has a lot of character, BTW.

 

What exactly do you mean by neutral overlay?

 

I have implemented a number of races using the humanoid base model/dna, varying the available skin colors/eye colors/faces/hair etc on per-race/per-gender basis. However, even given this, frankly the races all essentially look the same, because no matter what you do with the humanoid dna, there is only so much you can do. Orcs basically just look like green humans with orc faces. However, some of that is animation - clearly you want different gaits/animations per-race.

This is fantastic. However, in my opinion, I still think they look too much like the base model. It is hard to tell without seeing more screenshots.

In any event, the next most important thing about new races, in my opinion, is maintaining slot compatibility. Once you deviate from this it becomes problematic, for both architecture reasons and simply for asset store availability of equipment.

Finally, ideally the humanoid value structure would stay the same, and only the dna converter would be different. However, this would pose a a problem when you have races with additional appendages, like tails I suppose, but for the most part the tropish rpg races all are humanoid.

I have fairly deeply integrated UMA into my game, for both players and npcs, including specific per-race/per-gender constraints, randomizing bodies/heads for npcs in addition to specifically creating them in an internal editor, and fully networking it all. I have also implemented a full, pluggable equipment system using a few of JustinB's equipment sets for prototyping.

Here is my best attempt to recreate your male screenshot in my character creator. This uses JustinB's face/body packs:

 

The neutral overlay has had all saturation removed so is essentially greyscale. This makes it easier to accurately choose any colour variant and not simply tint the skin.

Thanks for the feedback, and I must say your character creator looks very impressive. These Orcs are made using the base model with a heavily tweaked bone structure, they even have bendy ear bones, which I will activate in an update. I did start with a brand new mesh but decided to try and make them as compatible as possible with existing human slots. (Justin's marvellous barbarian kit springs to mind). However, I've pushed the boundaries with the head shape. If I make it more compatible then it loses it's orcishness, however I'm currently looking into a solution involving a tweak to the UMA bone structure.

 

Looking forward to these just hope they are not made on a student license

 

Good point, I'd forgotten about that. My hair and beard are. Luckily the Orcs are not, they are made using DNA manipulation. I will have to withdraw and re-submit wthout accessories for now. Time to get to grips with Maya LT.

Thanks for that, I nearly landed in hot water there.

 

Have you tried them with @justb's hair and beard packs? Wondering if the DNA mods are enough to prevent us from using Will's hair with them.

Glad you caught that before getting into trouble!

 

The hair I've tried from Will's pack seems to work fine, my only problem is with helmets that partially cover the face at the moment. I'm working on a possible modification to UMA itself in order to correct this and open up possibilities for more extreme facial adjustments in future.

 

Very cool! Would love to see some animal/humanoid type races such as dragonkin, cat/wolf/bear/other were-like type races (humanoid based but with head/tail/fur variations) which are UMA based both for playable as well as NPC characters that would be able to use UMA armors and such.. Even humanoid type races like sprite/faeries having wings.

Things like that are currently missing in the UMA arena for fantasy based races.

At any rate, love your videos and love the looks of what you are doing here. Keep up the awesome work!

 

No problem. Just remembered that you talked about the student license in one of your videos. Is Maya LT the way to go? Don't know anything about it's strengths or limitations. How about Blender? Never tried it but is free.

Still like to know if anyone have have the swapped head with separate ears, mouth and nose attached to the body and would like to share it. Id much rather work with it that way.

Anyway hope it was not too much work wasted. You have done so much for this community already.

 

Nothing is wasted, It's all a learning journey. This just accelerates what I had planned for V1.1. I'm removing the slots and simply providing my new Custom DNA Converter. This will allow Orc mutation to be applied to any base mesh that shares the Human Bone Structure. That means you can have high poly orcs if you have purchased Fernando's high poly human slots, like this:



I'm tempted towards Maya LT purely because of the stability of the FBX exporter and my preference for Autodesk products. Blender is so very alien to me, I think I'd take much longer to get to grips with it.

As for the separated head, I just imported the lot into MAX, every fbx file overwrites the bones from the last one, but since they are shared it doesn't matter. Try it.

 

Exactly what I have planned in the long term. If I can get a couple of changes pushed into the base UMA skeleton it should open up all of these possibilities (such as nice pointy faced goblins) and allow all current helmet assets to be used.

 

Hey @DirtyHippy Your missing the fangs in that pic.

Try messing with the DNA. You can pretty much make the settings whatever you like. I made a thin anime girl with a huge arm before. It does have it's limitations though as far as poly stretching goes.

@Secret Anorak Nice.

I'd love to do some more races, custom faces and cool characters. I've been pretty busy recently with new job, moving and RPG starter 2. Will hopefully get to more of that eventually.

Another studio also ran into the helmet issue recently. We solved it by just limiting the DNA and making the helmets a bit larger. If you look at Oblivion or Skyrim they pretty much do the same. They also have some helmets without eyes (just black). When you start weighting the helmet to noses, cheeks and such, you end up with a deformed looking helmet. You could always increase the size of it I guess for large noses but I'm not sure what that would really look like. In my current opinion it's better to limit the DNA and resize instead of customizing for parts of the face. But you never know. It might look alright. (sorry to hijack the thread just saw that I was tagged).

@Shawn67 Someone asked about tails and horns recently. I may be doing a really basic version of those for RPG starter 2. Horns, tail and possibly some wings. Might be another pack later on.

 

Oh a new DNA converter sounds amazing. Have never been a fan of the old one. Have been playing with it to see how much you could do with races like elves, dwarfs, and orcs etc. but found it lacking.

I noticed that you can't adjust the trapezius even though the bone is present. It is kind of important in dwarf and orc design. Also you can adjust breast size but not the back's ( let's call it thickness ) which in my opinion makes it look a bit weird.

I will try that method of combining the lot ty.

 

I'm actually looking to introduce a HeadGearAdjust bone parented to HeadAdjust so headgear can be moved/scaled independently if required. This of course would mean current helmets would have to be reskinned to the new bone. Since it would never be rotated, the Matrix maths distortion nightmare wouldn't be an issue (thanks to Joen for scaring me with that)

 

woot woot !!!

dwarf will be next ?

 

Hi SecretAnorak,

Thanks for the orc race starter kit.

I have started using it with OrcFang . The fangs seems to penetrates through the lips (attached photos). I tried changing the mandible, and played around with the DNA, but can't get it right.

Have you tried the fang with the orc starter kit?

Would be good if you can assist in this matter?

Thanks

 

Hi there,

Sorry for the slow response, for some reason the forum isn't pinging me any more.

I'm guessing those fangs are from Will B's rather marvelous face pack. Unfortunately I didn't look at making them compatible when I made this kit, the facial changes are too extreme, however, If you bear with me, I'll see if I can knock up a set of fangs this week sometime.

 

Ya the fangs are from Will B's face pack.

Ya that's fine, I will wait. Would be good if you can come up with something similar to like in the attached photos below .

Cheers