UMA - Unity Multipurpose Avatar on the Asset Store!

Looking at the Male_Unified fbx that comes with uma i did see that its top level joint has a -90 rotation. Could this be the problem im having?

 

I don't think I saw in any of your posts that you confirmed you set the extracted T Pose asset to the correct field on your RaceData (You've only said you extracted it). Did you do that?

 

That's an artifact of Unity importing the FBX, and fixing up the coordinates. Unfortunately that won't cause the error you are seeing. Something is wrong in the skeleton (duplicate bones or something). When you import your fbx, does the hierarchy look the same?

 

Kenamis- I did up reload it into the RaceData. Thank you for confirming this.

Ok.. so I got it working. I added another bone above Global and roated it -90. So if your saying I dont need the -90 it must be the other bone I added above Global?

Thank you both.

 

Ok, I did another test. Notice the rig on the left is distorted. This one has a highest level joint at 0 rotation for the X but the one on the right with -90 for the X works correctly. Is this excepted? I did rig these in Maya where rotation comes in at 0,0,0. So if the UMA system was developed with blenders -90 rotation in mind, could that be it?

 

Unity does all kinds of extra stuff to make sure things import and look right. This can cause issues like you are seeing. If the things you have done make it work correctly, then great - I would go with it. If you can make a short writeup, I can add it to the docs also.

 

thanks for the git repo, but I still have a problem where i get this error spammed every frame in the editor

Code (CSharp):

1. NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
2. UMA.CharacterSystem.DynamicCharacterAvatar.LoadMesh () (at Assets/UMA/Core/Extensions/DynamicCharacterSystem/Scripts/DynamicCharacterAvatar.cs:473)
3. UMA.CharacterSystem.DynamicCharacterAvatar.OnDrawGizmos () (at Assets/UMA/Core/Extensions/DynamicCharacterSystem/Scripts/DynamicCharacterAvatar.cs:439)
4. UnityEngine.GUIUtility:ProcessEvent(Int32, IntPtr)

I am using Unity 2018.3.xxxx

I dragged in the prefabs that the quick start recommended

 

Looks like it can't find the placeholder mesh - Did you move them? Anyway, you can turn that off in PlaceHolder options.

 

I only have UMA 2 installed, is there an asset requirement that's not mentioned?
I have removed the examples mostly because it has broken/incompatible scripts

Code (CSharp):

1. Assets\UMA\Examples\DynamicCharacterSystem Examples\Scripts\Scene2and3\TestCustomizerDD.cs(158,15): error CS1061: 'MouseOrbitImproved' does not contain a definition for 'SwitchTarget' and no accessible extension method 'SwitchTarget' accepting a first argument of type 'MouseOrbitImproved' could be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)
2.  

Code (CSharp):

1. Assets\UMA\Examples\DynamicCharacterSystem Examples\Scripts\Scene2and3\TestCustomizerDD.cs(854,13): error CS1061: 'MouseOrbitImproved' does not contain a definition for 'TargetBone' and no accessible extension method 'TargetBone' accepting a first argument of type 'MouseOrbitImproved' could be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)

Code (CSharp):

1. Assets\UMA\Examples\DynamicCharacterSystem Examples\Scripts\Scene2and3\TestCustomizerDD.cs(854,45): error CS0117: 'MouseOrbitImproved' does not contain a definition for 'targetOpts'
2.  

 

other than the placeholder not showing, I have the UMA character throwing itself off from my avatar root
>Player
>Root (UMA)
the player has a custom character controller that handles physics and motor controls but UMA seems to have a mind of its own and adds its own physics

it also is in the ground and I have not found how/where to amend this

https://gyazo.com/fa7e20c033503e1bda0fdbeadba3b437

 

Hey there,
still fiddling with the Blendshapes and looking to find a workaround...

I noticed that in SkinnedMeshCombiner.cs in the InitializeBlendShapeData function the BlendshapeFrames are always created with an Tangetsarray if there are normals. This also leads to HasTangets to be true in UMAMeshData.cs since the array length is set to vertex count.
Dont know wich other sideeffects this has...

SkinnedMeshCombiner.cs

Code (CSharp):

1. private static void InitializeBlendShapeData(ref int vertexCount, Dictionary<string, BlendShapeVertexData> blendShapeNames, UMABlendShape[] blendShapes)
2. {
3.     int blendShapeIndex = 0;
4.     foreach( string shapeName in blendShapeNames.Keys)
5.     {
6.         blendShapeNames[shapeName].index = blendShapeIndex;
7.         blendShapes[blendShapeIndex] = new UMABlendShape();
8.         blendShapes[blendShapeIndex].shapeName = shapeName;
9.         blendShapes[blendShapeIndex].frames = new UMABlendFrame[blendShapeNames[shapeName].frameCount];
10.  
11.         for (int frameIndex = 0; frameIndex < blendShapes[blendShapeIndex].frames.Length; frameIndex++)
12.         {
13.            //Two Times hasNormals in original code
14.             //blendShapes[blendShapeIndex].frames[frameIndex] = new UMABlendFrame(vertexCount, blendShapeNames[shapeName].hasNormals, blendShapeNames[shapeName].hasNormals);
15.             blendShapes[blendShapeIndex].frames[frameIndex] = new UMABlendFrame(vertexCount, blendShapeNames[shapeName].hasNormals, blendShapeNames[shapeName].hasTangents);
16.             blendShapes[blendShapeIndex].frames[frameIndex].frameWeight = blendShapeNames[shapeName].frameWeights[frameIndex];
17.         }
18.  
19.         blendShapeIndex++;
20.     }
21. }
22.  

 

It's trying to load the "male_unified" or "female_unified" mesh. If you've deleted those, it will get an error trying to show the placeholder. You can turn off that option in the DCA if you don't want to have those files in your project.

As for the errors, it looks like you have an older version of MouseOrbitImproved in there somehow - maybe from an earlier release?

 

Most likely it has a utility slot on it to add the physics. You can remove any of the utility slots from the DCA that you don't need.

 

That looks like a bug. I'll pass it by kenamis.

 

Hello! I am considering using UMA2 in my project but I have a quick question.

Currently, I am using MakeHuman to create my base mesh, and I pass the clothing I create in other software into Blender, which uses the MakeClothes plugin to create outfits for my base mesh.

However, I just came across the UMA2 project and am curious if it can help me optimize my workflow. However, I have concerns about the setup, since much of my character setup requires knowledge of the bone hierarchy before runtime, since many of my scripts reference various bones, which are tagged. In my VR application, it is especially important to know the position of hand and head bones for my scripts.

In regards to my application, I personally have no need for 'unique' characters, my current game flow simply has one protagonist and one stock enemy model. Under these conditions, would you say that UMA is not necessary for me? It seems that UMA shines when I want to have dynamic character instantiation. However, I also want to have modifiable outfits for my character at runtime, which is what led me into considering UMA in the first place.

Ultimately, how do you get around the issue of not having a bone hierarchy prior to runtime?

Thanks!

 

Bones are available at edit time if you run the included "Bone Builder" - UMA will detect that you have precreated the bones, and not recreate them.

UMA has some performance advantages - it pieces together as much of the model as it can and builds texture atlases for you on the fly. It also has an LOD script so you can decrease textures on the fly as needed. In addition, it has built in atlas scaling, so you can tune the character for performance.

Whether these are enough for you to consider UMA, and the extra work of setting up your new race and building slots, I don't know.

 

Hello. I am trying to create cloth models in Marvelous Designer and export them as .fbx file to Unity. Unity sees those as a regular mesh and not as a skinned mesh, so I cannot directly use them in the slot creator. Do I need to first take them to Blender and turn them into skinned meshes? Please advise. Thank you.

 

You'll need to import it into Blender, and rig it to the appropriate mesh (male/female). I recommend using Blender 2.8, and following the instructions in the content creation doc (I've attached the latest version).
You'll need to download the Content Pack from here which contains the blends:

https://github.com/umasteeringgroup/content-pack

There are some Marvelous Designer avatars to help during design in MD also.

Note that you have to remove the rotation from the rig (see the doc), and then fit your clothes to the character. Then transfer the weightings from the character mesh to your new mesh (using Data Transfer modifier). You'll need to touch up any bad weights using the weight painting. Don't attempt to auto assign weightings from the armature, as that will break everything (the wrong bones will be weighted).

It sounds complicated, but it only takes about 5-10 minutes once you've got the hang of it.

 

Yeah. How hard would it be to add other armor to uma?

 

Yep. The post right before yours has the content creation doc attached.

 

Its not too hard honestly. SecretAnorak has a whole set of videos showing how to do it. Once you get the hang of it, takes a few minutes to convert something.
Usually I scale them close, then use a lattice to fit the better. The sculpt And then finally do vertex adjustments for the small things.

 

Keep in mind the videos by Fernando are ancient. There might even still be some up from when he was developing UMA before it was released.

 

Yeah - The mesh combining and recipe system makes it so you don't really have to do that. For something like the inner mouth, you just have to drop it out of the human base recipe, and it won't be included anymore. For the eyes - since they share the same material, they should already be combined and optimized.

For TBS/RTS games, I think lowering the bone count, and lowering the texture resolutions (and atlas size) would probably matter the most - especially textures. Each UMA gets it's own unique atlas, so if you have 100 on the screen, then you have 100 unique atlas textures (or 200 if you have two materials). Lowering texture size is really easy - you set it on the generator, and in the texture import settings. If you're overlaying textures, you would have to adjust the coordinates. Lowering bone count, it would probably be best to start with removing a bunch of face bones, and cutting down the number of finger/toe bones.

Of course, if you're looking for thousands on the screen, you're going to have to do special programming, etc - UMA is not a good fit for that.

 

Thanks for your response...
It works now!
Iwas using the o3nUmaSimpleLod and it lacked exactly that part of the script.

Thanks again

 

Hi, right now UMA is using 1 skinned mesh renderer with submeshes and multiple materials. Is there some way to use separate skinned mesh renderers for each submesh/material set, so that it is just 1 mesh and 1 material per renderer? I'm doing some other processing on the meshes and the submeshes/multiple materials cause some issues. Thanks!

*EDIT*
Oh, it seems like OptimizeTransformHierarchy will not work with UMA regardless... so not that important for me to know anymore.

 

Hello! Well done to everyone making UMA work!

I am currently working on a project featuring a humanoid character with a fixed appearance, but I need to be able to scale different parts of the rig (bone scaling) during runtime without messing up animations or my IK setup (FinalIK). Which is why I'm considering using UMA.

UMA, which handles bone scaling and works with FinalIK, seems to be the only reasonable solution to this that I have been able to find. However, UMA also comes with a lot of unneeded baggage and much of the setup process seems to relate to these features that I don't need, like multiple races, clothing customization, etc.

If I may be so bold to ask, is there a way for me utilize the bone scaling part of UMA without having to deal with everything else? Or is the bone scaling so integrated into the system as a whole that this is not possible? Have you considered making stripped down version of the bone scaling system, without the other stuff? And finally, is there somewhere I can learn about the runtime bones scaling you are using for UMA?

Thanks!

 

Hi,
I am working with UMA and can't seem to get the Mecanim function SetLookAtPosition to work. I have tried searching but can't seem to find any clues.

Is this just something that is not possible? Should I be using FinalIK instead? Or is it just something simple that I may have missed?

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

 

Just in case you change your mind, you can do that, by setting the flag on the material that it requires a separate renderer.

 

You can rig your models the way UMA does it - which is create duplicate bones (called "adjustment" bones in UMA terms), and weight your vertexes to the adjustment bones instead. That way the modification of the adjustment bone doesn't affect the children.

 

At that point, it's just a model, and all the mecanim stuff should work just like anything else. That function has to be called inside the OnAnimatorIK callback, so if you're not doing that, it might be the problem.

FinalIK and AnyIK work great, but should not be required for looking at something.

 

Thanks Jaimi, I will dig a little deeper.

I do have an ethan model that is working side by side with the fbx that UMA is using that is not working. I am not sure as to why but if I get stuck I will ask a follow up question

 

OK I think I may have solved it. The animation controller seems to be the key. As to what specific aspects of it need to be set I am not too sure but I should be able to get it all down soon.

 

Ok I forgot to turn IK on for that layer...... *hangs head in shame*

 

Hi all,

I've started to use UMA on my project, and I would like to ask (sorry if it's already been covered):

Is there any easy way/procedure to get a random pose? I dont mind if it might return a slightly unrealistic pose as long as most of the random output is plausible

 

The pose would be controlled by the Animator you have attached. You could not assign an animator, and then just move and rotate bones.
But easiest thing would probably be to setup an Animator that contained various poses on various layers, and then mix em up. This isn't really something specific to UMA, as you're really dealing with an animated mesh at that point.

 

That was my initial approach, I will go down that path then.

Thanks!

 

They are stacked because their textures are separated, not atlassed, while as assets. At runtime, UMA will atlas the ones that are used by the UMA. So if your head is hidden (like by a helmet) then the texture for the head will not be included in the atlas and saving some texture space.

 

Awesome, thanks!

 

Thanks for the reply. I've already done what you suggest in preparation of my model for UMA, but as far as I can tell this on its own will only help with scaling the width of bones, for adding more or less muscle mass to an arm for example.

To be clear, i'm want to scale/stretch the length of a bone(ex: the left upper arm), thereby also moving the the position of the child bone(the left lower arm/elbow), but without scaling the children and messing up animation/IK.

 

Hi guys, i need your help. I am a progremmer, and i dont understand anything in 3d modeling. I have two fbx files. When i import first file to UMA(racedata, baserecipe, slot,overlay and etc) it succes but another model have bbig problems.I cant undestand different between two models
First model, allgodd:
fbx - https://drive.google.com/open?id=1uHZbQPQeoz9C12q1jnPWD2RpS6R-nte4
image - http://prntscr.com/naez2m
Second model, huge problems:
fbx - https://drive.google.com/open?id=1h4gE6e9sSWa6MjFHmIaiP0_VbX4e2Qcz
image - http://prntscr.com/naf06x
Please explain me

 

What are you baking? If you are simply unwrapping textures, then assign materials as needed, select the one you want to adjust the UV for from the dropdown.

 

The female looks like a scan - is that right? Anyway, the model has 224,242 vertexes and 80,008 triangles - those are both too many. In addition, whatever created it has made it icompatible with Blender, and it won't import correctly there, so I can't figure out what else might be going on.

 

Please forgive me if this question has already been asked, but I've been searching google and this forum for quite some time and I cannot find the answer. I also watched the entire 101 and 201 series at SecretAnorak to get familiar with UMA.

I'm creating a game and I would like to be able to pick up visible items of clothing on the ground. I have already done this with some non UMA helmets I have. It was really easy to get the models to render. I just create an empty game object and drag a mesh onto it and add a material and now I have a visible representation of the mesh in the game I can interact with.

Now that I've switched my character to an UMA model, I'm trying to make a copy of the Freebie Robe that comes in the UMA examples so I can put a model of it on the ground and pick it up. Here are the problems I am having in trying to get a mesh from any of the UMA stuff:

1. I searched the entire UMA directory on my hard drive for FBX files and couldn't any corresponding to the robe. The robe simply has a slot file that seems to map to an asset file at \Assets\UMA\Content\UMA_Examples\HumanMale\Slots\Clothing\M_Freebie Robeset Robe\M_Freebie Robeset Robe_Slot.asset. Although this asset seems to have some Mesh Data attached to it that I can see in the inspector, I can't figure out a way to grab just it's mesh and pull it into my scene. I also can't figure out how to export the mesh data from the unity .asset file. I downloaded an FBX exporter, but it seems to require a gameobject, which I can't get because I can't pull the robe slot or robe recipe into the scene.

2. In order to try to make some progress on making the in game items, I found that the UMA_Contrib folder has a folder that contains the Male_TallShoes regular meshes and skinned meshes. I can pull those mesh objects into my scene directly, but when I attempt to apply the textures from the textures folder, there are 4 of them for the shoes, and dragging any one of them onto the shoes mesh replaces the current texture.

So I'm looking for information on how to
1. Somehow export that robe mesh (and textures/materials) from the uma slot file in .asset format to a separated mesh I can put it into my scene
2. Apply all of the textures associated with the robe to the mesh (maybe I'm only supposed to apply one of them, I need some guidance).

 

1. The robe is from WillBgameArt.com - you can download the fbx source file from his webpage. If you're looking for a generic solution for exporting fbx models from Unity, you'll need to check on the Asset Store. the only one I'm aware that works 100% is the one from Unlogick.

2. Every submesh will have it's own material. You can set those by inspecting the "SkinnedMeshRenderer" component and updating the materials in the materials section.

 

I haven't baked in Blender - though the original models were done that way, so I really can't help with that. I found this video, not sure it will help:

This guy:

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/44942/baking-only-one-material-on-multi-material-object

Seems to think it should just work (bake to the correct materials)

 

Hi we also find this memory issue in 2.8 latest version.
After we rebuild in global library, we found that the memory grows to 2Gb in profiler (as we have more than 300 items in the game for UMA).
So how do we do it by on-demand loading for saving memory? We need this for running on mobile.

Thanks very much!

 

The only way to do that is to move to Asset Bundles, and manage the loading and unloading of them.
But if you are in a situation where anything can be created/accessed at any time, then you really need to look at paring down what you have in the library - lowering texture sizes, making sure they are compressed as much as possible, removing slots that you do not need, etc. You may also need to look into building lower poly versions of some of the slots.
If you are using Blendshapes, you should reconsider that as well, as those are massive memory hogs.

Edit: I have not rewritten the global library yet. That will come when we move to addressables - probably in version 3.0

 

Hello,

Yesterday I tried the 2019 RC of Unity (2019.1.0f1).
Had only some Errors in console from some UMA samples which I deleted. After that it worked!

But some of my UMA characters had some deformations (when very muscular or fat).
Now I want to try an update from GitHub, I found Nothing Special for 2019, so should I test the Develop branch?

Thanks a lot. Great work, I love UMA ​

 

I think a lot of games would have a lot of different slot and overlay options in their complete library, which would fall under two or three scenarios of usage.

1) The player and their party (whether it be NPCs or other players in a multiplayer game) would have highly customized looks, and thus could have any slot / overlay from the game loaded, but a relatively small number of slots / overlays once customization is complete.

In this situation, during character creation the library could be empty except for those items selected by name from a list, which are then loaded into the library and made available to show on the character.

2) Local population / enemies ... these would probably follow themes. Like if you ventured into the north of the game, everybody might be wearing their snow clothes. In the desert, people would be wearing their desert garb. In the city, they'd have their urban wear. And probably the player would encounter no more than, say, three enemy group types at a time, but there could be scores of different groups in the game's complete library.

In these situations, as the player moves from one environment to the next, the library would dump old slots / overlays and load new ones.

A third scenario would be more of a MMO type multiplayer scenario, where other players coming into range would need to have their slots and overlays dynamically loaded into the library, and as they move out of range those slots and overlays should be removed (provided no one else is using them).

I think in concept the asset bundles / addressables should be a great way of handing all of these scenarios, but I'm going ahead and mentioning them just in case UMA isn't being built for one or more of them for some reason.

 

Yeah - the develop branch is the one that is up-to-date.
The problems you are seeing might be due to the change in the DNA controller for the default races. You might try switching to the "legacy" versions of the races that use the legacy DNA controllers.