UMA - Unity Multipurpose Avatar on the Asset Store!

Hey Raimi,

thanks for the hint. But I am already using the legacy races, Right?



After update to 2019.1.0f1 (Release Candidate) my troll Looks like this:



I upgraded to the develop branch, but stays exactly the same.

I get no warning, no error message…

I am not using wardrobes or receipes. I am using Standard UMA bodies.



Any idea what'S wrong?

Thanks

 

Is it possible you reduced the skinning quality to one or two bones per vertex?

 

I did not, but yes, the update of Unity did. Got it now. Good Point, thanks a lot!

 

Hello, i need a help. I create assetbundle from race, load to server and i can load this race. After time i made same actions and i have error with new race

files on server

 

Thanks for that. I managed to combine the textures in the UMA pack with the meshes in the fbx files and got them into my scene.

I'm now trying to make my own UMA armor using blender and running into a few problems. The screenshot shows them.

1. My character is really simple and doesn't have any textures or bump maps. I tried using the slot creator but it seems to require textures an fails if you don't have them. Simple materials won't cut it either. Is there any way to use UMA characters with regular materials that aren't textures?

2. I got around issue 1 (kind of) by going into blender and making a UV map and then baking 4 items for each piece of armor: specular intensity (aka gloss?), textures (aka diffuse?), ambient occlusion, and normals. Blender doesn't seem to have a metallic bake option so I couldn't do one of those. I then used the slot creator in Unity and ended up choosing the UMA_diffuse_normal_specular_occlusion material because none of the other options seemed to match the maps I was able to create in blender. At this point I finally stopped getting generator errors and slot creator errors and was able to put my new items on my UMA. However, I'm not sure what's wrong because:

A) Uma created multiple slots for each of the items and those slots seem to correspond to the different colored materials used in the blend file, even though the meshes are all one object (you can see in the screenshot). How do I fix that? Couldn't find a way in blender to fix that since they were already a single joined mesh.

B)As you can see from the screenshot, The matte texture I have in the diffuse map and the blender model did not get applied. Instead my guy looks like a shiny power ranger.

C) Even though the skinned mesh that UMA created properly shows all parts of the armor, on my character, only one piece of each armor is showing. In the case of the legs, only the kneepads, and in the case of the chest, only the shoulders are showing. With the helmet, that highlight ring over the top and around the edges is gone.

Is there some general advice you can give on how to properly export from blender and create or apply these UV maps to get what I have in blender to show up on my character based on the above?

 

Put the UMASimpleLOD component on your DCA, and it will do automatic LOD for you. Look at the "UMA DCS Demo - Random Characters" scene for an example of using the LOD system.

By default, it does texture LOD - as that doesn't need any assets created (It's the most important for UMA, since each character has at least one unique texture asset). To do slot level LOD, you create additional slots, appending _LOD# to the end (with # being the LOD level). For example, if you had a slot named "shirt", you could create slots "shirt_LOD0", "shirt_LOD1" - and then you would have 3 LOD levels - the base, level 0, and level 1.

Note that you do not have to create all the different levels. You could leave some slots without any LOD, and some have only a "_LOD2" for example.

 

You seem to have created a bunch of materials in Blender. If you don't want to texture map them, simplest thing to do is to create a material with a small white texture, and use that material on your armor. If you create multiple materials, unity will import the blender file with multiple submeshes and multiple materials. Then the slot builder will create multiple slots. You can combine all of those slots into a single Wardrobe Recipe (just dump all the slots on the drop pad). You can create your own UMAMaterial, you don't have to use the ones included. There's some documentation here:

http://umadocs.secretanorak.com/doku.php?id=knowledgebase:uma_material

 

Hi, is there a way to make the generated atlases more square rather than default to a tall rectangle like this:

Since this atlas is a bunch of separate source textures being atlased, I imagine it could be a square instead.

I know it's a strange question, but I am exporting my UMA characters as prefabs and then including them into a larger atlas, and the tall rectangular shapes cause issues.

 

Hey guys,

So I've been trying to implement cutscenes via Cinemachine and Timeline with my UMA characters, but there's no way I could preview them in Edit mode, and if I make the cutscenes with other humanoid models there's an obvious offset in between.

So my question is:
Is there a way to preview UMA models in timeline?
Or, is there a way to view&change the timeline in playmode?

Thanks guys!

 

You can lower the atlas resolution to 1024, that would force it to go horizontal faster. But otherwise, no. But UV coordinates are in percentages (0..1), so you could in theory simply resize the texture also, but you will lose resolution.

 

There isn't anything built into UMA to see them at edit time. Using UMA Power Tools, you can export them to a prefab, and use that. I think I saw that DK UMA Free had the ability to show them at edit time, but I've not actually used that. We do plan to add this in the future to the base product, but it won't be until 3.X version I believe.

 

Because Mip-Mapping isn't smart, and is more about drawing than about saving memory. There are measurable gains when recalculating the texture and building a smaller atlas. Of course, mipmapping is available also.

When using the texture LOD, you can double, or triple your framerate with a large number of visible UMAs. Of course, if you have like 5-10 visible UMAs it doesn't matter. But with 200? It matters a lot.

Sorry - I keep forgetting this is in 2.8.1. You can get the RC from Github, or wait for the release of 2.8.1. You can also pull the develop branch - which at the time I am writing this will be what is released to the Asset Store.

https://github.com/umasteeringgroup/UMA/tree/develop

 

Does UMA power tools have the ability to export O3N's fantasy package to prefabs for 2.8 for a non UMA environment?

 

I would assume so, but probably best to ask on their thread:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/free-o3n-male-and-female-uma-races.499258/

 

Hello! When importing a fresh UMA package from the asset store into Unity 2018.3.2f1, I get the follow console error

Code (csharp):

1. Assets\UMA\Core\Extensions\DynamicCharacterSystem\UMAAssetBundleManager\UMAAssetBundleManagerSettings.cs(490,5): error CS0103: The name 'BuildScript' does not exist in the current context

Anyone know why BuildScript wouldn't exist?

 

Probably a different compile error - because BuildScript.cs should definitely be there.

You might want to delete the UMA/CORE folder and then reimport, just to make sure there isn't anything goofy hanging around from a previous version.

 

I believe the correct place to ask would be the power tools forum thread https://forum.unity.com/threads/uma-power-tools-in-the-asset-store-now.221290

The answer is yes... with the caveat that you have to use the latest uma rc and get a beta version of the power tools.

The current limitations of power tools bone baking is:

• No uma 2.7 cloth support
• No uma 2.8 mesh hide support

There is no similar limitation to the prefab creation, which should work with all uma features.

 

Hello! I'm VERY new to unity and UMA and am having some issues. The following error is coming up:

UMAData: Recipe or Generator is not valid!
UnityEngine.Debug:LogError(Object)
UMA.UMAData:Validate() (at Assets/UMA/Core/StandardAssets/UMA/Scripts/UMAData.cs:252)
UMA.UMAGeneratorBuiltin:HandleDirtyUpdate(UMAData) (at Assets/UMA/Core/StandardAssets/UMA/Scripts/UMAGeneratorBuiltin.cs:189)
UMA.UMAGeneratorBuiltin:OnDirtyUpdate() (at Assets/UMA/Core/StandardAssets/UMA/Scripts/UMAGeneratorBuiltin.cs:272)
UMA.UMAGeneratorBuiltin:Work() (at Assets/UMA/Core/StandardAssets/UMA/Scripts/UMAGeneratorBuiltin.cs:132)
UMA.UMAGeneratorBuiltin:Update() (at Assets/UMA/Core/StandardAssets/UMA/Scripts/UMAGeneratorBuiltin.cs:97)

Any advice on how to fix? Thanks in advance!

 

@UnLogick When does it go out of beta?

 

Ah, yeah - this is a great error. Basically, it's saying "Something is wrong".

You should have another error or warning nearby that has more information - for example, the textures might be missing on the overlays, or the material might be missing in the UMAMaterial.

 

not sure what is happening with your computer freaking out. Need more information on what that means (using up all cpu, grinding the HD, etc)

When the SlotBuilder creates multiple slots, it does so because of the number of submeshes that unity creates, which (as far as I know) is due to the usage of materials. As to the order, it's the order in which Unity created them - I would have assumed the order they were defined in the source mesh, but your guess is as good as mine.

 

I am using ColorDNAConverters to change the normal map of the character's wrinkles.
I succeeded in changing the wrinkle depth by setting the ColorModifier alpha channel.
However, wrinkles can not be completely eliminated because the setting of the Dodifying DNA value or the ColorModifier value is incorrect.
Also, I want to manipulate the value by moving the slider to both ends, but I can not manipulate the value of the normal map only from the center to one end.
Is there a document on how to set up ColorDNAConverters?
I checked the wiki and the tutorial video, but I could not find the description of ColorDNAConverters.

 

The ExampleDnaConverterController contains DNA that morphs the normal map from the smooth<->muscle normals via the alpha channel.

The first one below affects Channel 0 (the albedo). The second affects Channel1 (the normal). Note the two different types of combining (adjust/Blend Factor):

 

Why is ExampleDnaConverterController affecting Channel 0 (the albedo)?
I tried changing the Multiplier value or changing the Evaluator but I did not know how it affected.

 

It is fading the smooth body albedo texture over the muscular body albedo texture. Right now, the only documentation is the sample code in that example scene. I'll try to put some together before we release 2.8.1

 

Do you perhaps have the debug inspector turned on, or maybe using an earlier version of UMA?
There's a lot of data in the SlotDataAsset - and it can cause a ton of drawing if the mesh data is open. The latest version has a specific editor so that doesn't happen, unless you're in the debug inspector and you have the mesh open.

 

Spitballing here, but are there any plans to improve the core overlay compositing tools? Getting into using UMA to build an avatar engine for an RPG and I think there's a huge missed opportunity to use things like procedural texturing/custom overlay composite shaders to simplify a lot of the code specializations that currently exist in UMA. While it also requires some technical know-how on the part of the user, I think there are also opportunities for performance improvement by combining several overlay operations into a single draw call (which seems impossible with the current system, but I'm admittedly only a few days into reading the documentation and playing around) instead of issuing a bunch of independent texture blends. I can also see this being super-powerful when combined with the shader graph in newer Unity versions.

 

UMA actually combines all the overlays into a per character texture atlas already, it's one of the core features along with the mesh building (unless you're referring to the actual compositing code itself? I don't recall whether that's using individual draw calls or building a geometry list, but it's a small piece of the UMA generation overhead). Doing more procedural overlay content and "smarter" texture sharing are on the feature list, but there's no sort of real timeframe in place as far as I know. I had started to experiment with using Substance content for the overlays right before they cut built-in Substance support so part of it has been waiting to see where Unity was going in terms of their texture / shader plans.

 

Yes, I'm aware, which is why I qualified with 'overlay compositing tools'. Substance is actually a great analogy here and example of the utility of the approach. Expanding a bit, artists expressed interest in/responded positively to the workflow Epic used for texturing/skin generation on Paragon involving material mask textures and wear maps. On the art side, adding new surfaces would mostly consist of creating new tile-able material swatches and then having UMA patch that all together into a simple, black-box texture set via some basic planar-/triplanar- texturing shaders. I can create something approximating that workflow together, but assigning shader properties in the current system is cumbersome/impossible w/o possibly-destructive roundtrips through colors. Since most of the existing texture blend operations can be re-created with some tweaks to the built-in shaders, I think there's a decent opportunity here to make the existing system both more powerful and very likely simpler to understand/use for people with shader development or tech art experience.

 

Hi i need help. I want make uma + assetbundles, i made 2 models, and generate fiels (screen). if a want add new file i need rebuild assetbundles for all 3 items? 2 old and 1 new??

 

@jvidziunas
Hey, we're all for making improvements and simplifying workflow, but I'm having trouble understanding or envisioning what you're proposing, so let's try to break it down.

Can you explain what you mean by this? do you mean tileable overlays? not sure what black-box texture set via basic planar/triplanar texturing shader would be for. Can you give an example?

The shader properties are click to select in a UMA Material. Do you have a suggestion to improve them? What do you mean by destructive roundtrip through colors?

Do you mean the game shader? The overlays are merged in a separate shader per texture rebuild, not every frame. This allows things like per overlay color adjustment that, if done in the game/model shader, would require custom color variables per overlay, for example.

 

The next version of power tools will be released when UMA 2.8.1 is released. Neither the beta nor the latest released version of power tools works with the version currently on the asset store. It only works with uma 2.8.1 rc2 and rc3.

 

Sorry, I'm moving at whiplash pace here, I should slow down I think there are two big observations/suggestions that I'm smushing together--

First, I'm observing that there are a lot of things that overlays do via inspector twiddling that duplicate operations that custom shaders could accomplish more neatly or combine with other functionality. RGB color tints, as used in a lot of the example overlays, are very easy to do in a shader-- it's a one-node/intrinsic wonder. However, doing an adjustment in HSL color space instead (and having this be controllable by DNA/recipes/whatever) would require you guys to add in a bunch of extra inspector flags and make modifications to all the built-in shaders and assets to accommodate that new toggle. The core approach of 'composite a bunch of layers to a single texture with some notion of blending' is still totally workable, but there's an extra configuration layer (i.e. most of the inspector stuff!) that becomes redundant if you move to a completely shader-driven approach. There's a big implementation hurdle right now in how UMA thinks about (or rather, doesn't think about) shader properties, so bear with me as I go on a minor detour/get into my second observation and spell out more of my use case.

So, while it's true you can use custom materials for overlays, it seems that setting custom material/shader properties is limited or impossible with the current system. Say I want to bind a property I've created in my custom shader to some aspect of UMA character DNA. Shared colors are *kind of* what I want, or are at least the closest analogy we have. However, I can't find much information about how to actually get access to these in my custom overlay material/shader-- I suspect this isn't actually possible right now! If this is accessible, though, there are also things that aren't really colors (such as HSL adjustments or UV scales) that one would either need to cram into a color and try to work around all the range/precision problems that ensue or make some complicated workaround with shared texture reads and other questionably-fast tricks. Since colors are for most intents and purposes a 4-wide vector parameter, I think it makes sense to generalize and think in terms of shader parameters rather than just colors. Hence, there's a sort of design smell in UMA right now that moving to 'all shaders all the time + DNA is just shader property manipulation' solves very effectively.

The examples I was giving before about material woes are mostly symptoms of issue #2; I was attempting to create a sort of batch/bulk tint shader that took advantage of specific art characteristics and mask textures but ran into a pretty big wall trying to bind everything to DNA. While it's certainly true that the actual UMA texture combine happens way less often than just rendering a character, I'm not going to say no to quartering the amount of memory bandwidth required to put a character model together and the gameplay means character asset rebuild is still frequent enough where some forethought here will result in fewer/less obvious stalls.

 

I'm not sure if this is helpful or not, but my next plan is to allow shared colors to plug directly into materials - so in addition to affecting the colorizing (modulating/adding), they can also set material parameters. I need this myself for skin shaders.

 

Can anyone please point me to a guide or tutorial for using asset bundles instead of the global library? We need to dynamically download new clothes for a model in runtime from our asset server. We would handle the loading/unloading of the asset at runtime but can't include the clothes in the build. We have a persistent world.

 

In the UMA folder, the "UMA Documentation.pdf" file has a full section on setting up and using asset bundles and the dynamic asset loader.

 

Thanks that's what I needed. Is it possible to require credentials when connecting to the external URL?

 

Yeah, I think that's the biggest bang-for-buck addition right now. Feature suggestion #1 is based around the idea that having access to parameters makes a lot of inspector tweaking redundant. Retaining the 'color' name might be a little misleading, though, since one might want to store something like a texture index, hue adjustment scalar, etc.

 

Yes, but you would need to modify the AssetBundleManager to allow authentication on the UnityWebRequest. I'm not an expert, but there's a discussion here that might be helpful:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions...ssword-data-for-http-basic-authentication-not

 

Yeah. Depending on how much time I have, it may make it into a 2.8.2 release. 2.8.1 is too close to release now, and people are waiting for PowerTools compatibility.

 

I was able to set the normal map well.
Thank you.

 

Hello,

I'm trying to integrate a personalized head into uma. For this i try to create a new slot, using the slot builder.
But when i try to create it i'm getting a NullReferenceException and i can't figure out why. I upload a file with my console error.
Maybe there is a more simple way to add a personalized head into uma? (not using dna)

 

Hey! Does UMA support the Light Weight Render Pipeline? If not, will the feature be considered? It just came out of Preview in 2019.1. Thanks!

 

UMA needs imported skinned meshes to make a slot with the slotbuilder. This looks like the mesh you set didn't have a parent, and didn't come from an imported fbx or blend. To make a mesh work with the current UMA example races, you'll need to take it into a modelling app (like Blender), rig it to the UMA skeleton (that's available in the content pack), and then export it to fbx.

 

The current point release - 2.8.X does not (that includes 2.8.1 which is uploading soon). Kenamis did put in the code to support the SRP, which is available in a test branch, but it won't make production code until 2.9. If you want to use UMA and LWRP, I recommend to wait until that version.

 

Any idea when 2.9 might be available? I am working a VR project that is already set up to use the LWRP.

 

guys help please. When i add new item to assetbundle. I need generate assetbundles for all items or only last added?

 

Not for a while, but once 2.8.1 is released (any day now) then the SRP support will be merged into the development branch, so you'll be able to use it then.

 

What are some good hair packs that work right away with the base avatar and dont need a bunch of setup?

 

There are two hair packs that I'm aware of - one from Arteria3d, and one from WillbGameArt (they both have their own stores and sell on the Asset Store also). Secret Anorak has a free hair also.

There are other options if you want more variety. You can basically convert any of the FBX hair on the store in a few minutes, by loading it into Blender, rigging it to the models from the content pack, and building slots and wardrobe recipes.
In addition, there is a fantastic hair tool for blender available on GumRoad that lets you generate and "comb" hair into place.

And finally, last but certainly not least, Kalagaan is finishing up his hair designer for UMA:
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/modeling/hair-designer-71471

I tested the latest build just a few days ago, and it looked great:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/hair-designer-dynamic-hair-fur-tool.431393/page-15#post-4406083