UMA - Unity Multipurpose Avatar on the Asset Store!

I'll hop onto Skype tonight. I'm getting issues with all of them. I've reassigned the bones in the Avatar to be Hips, Spine, Spine 1. I can get the character above the ground but he's not on the ground and his feet slide all over.

 

If you're not already doing it, the first thing to do would be to ensure that you are not including parts that are not visible.

 

I tried processing all the slot meshes through Simple LOD and power tools bone baking and got quite good results.

All the seams and stuff just vanishes at a distance.

I'm planning on making a pack with uma content tools to automate stuff like this.

 

If I apply a localScale to the root object which contains my UMA character, whenever I change a slot and tell uma the shape is Dirty my character is getting offset far up into the air... anyone know whats going on?

 

Having been partly responsible for starting this whole ideas about using Blendshapes, (excuse me if I am not) I am interested in the results of this, but I am not quite sure how blendshapes would or could make things better, from a content creation POV...

I suppose what is being proposed is that rather than using the lowerbackbelly bone we would instead have a lowerbackbelly blendshape and that to create that you would probably use the lowerbackbelly bone in Blender and scale that up, but then exactly tweak the mesh to be how you want it by changing the geometry rather than by finessing how the model's weighting works...

Having just spent TWO WEEKS re-weighting all my characters and outfits, having discovered that I can only have a max 4 bones I am well aware of 'weight painting hell'- weight painting is a curiously addictive, but painstakingly loooooong process, I look forward to seeing friends again...- but I am not sure that the blendshape workflow would be any quicker would it- is it?

I guess it can be more exact, well it can be completely exact, but when trying to make things compatible with an existing race, would it be quicker do people think?

 

My initial reason for asking about blendshapes btw is that stuff you get from mixamo comes with facial blendshapes that apparently you can use with your web cam to animate the face of your characters- I never tried it, but at some point I do want to animate the faces of my chars.... so now I have gone down the UMA bone route- but it'd be good to know whether I should bother keeping the mixamo blendshapes now that Unity has the API for them in the latest version and its feasible that we might use that at some point...

 

While what Jaimi is saying is true here, I don't think we should be thinking about an 'either/or' situation...

So What Jaimi is saying would be true if the size of the head was controlled solely by blenshapes- i.e. you had a 'bighead' blendshape that scaled the head on its own.

But I think what we (or maybe just I) am talking about is something like a 'muscular' blendshape that works in tandem with bone deformation, so you have the bones scale up in a rudimentary fashion but the blendshapes deal with the detail... so for example we can scale the armadjust in x-y-z but none of that actually gives us a bicep or tricep

So while the bone deformation actually deals with the overall scale of the arm, the blendshape would deal with the details...

And this would be would be particularly important with facial animation....

But according to @bgolus in this thread all the AAA games are doing all this with bones now anyway- what he describes is exactly what UMA does and would kind of suggest we should have a 'bicep' bone and a 'tricep' in the arm of the UMA armature....

I dont know, its all very confusing to me, there does no seem to be a 'right' way to do this stuff, I spent months now making my stuff work the UMA way- just kind of on the assumption I knew nothing and they knew 'the way' but now I am here and I discover its not that easy... The 'right way' is a hotly and fiercely contested and debated thing... There is no concensus....

So with this issue its a gamble, are blendshapes going to be a big part of the way things happen moving forwards or not...

 

To be honest I think the only flaw of the bones approach is that none of the serious 3d tools supports it... it is stronger and better, the uma facial morph has proven powerful enough to play facial animations even if that was never the intention... the stuff you're talking about with blendshapes for details, you could easily add a bone for detail and then you could align it as a child of your parent and extrude a six pack if you wanted. What is missing is the ability to sculpt the flat belly and the six pack and a tool to skin the difference onto a six pack bone that can then be manipulated independently.

And the reason I wanted a performance test between a full featured uma model and a full featured humanoid model with blendshapes on top is that people keep saying that it's faster, but there is no way blending 50 blends on the face for facial animation is faster. Yet facial animation is based on the concept of having 50 curves that you blend into the face. The amount of data is high and the processing cost must be significant. So I can only assume they mean it's faster as long as you only animate 2-3 curves at a time, like raise_right_outer_eyebrow... and for the past many years we've seen just realistic that looks in games. (sarcasm)

I'm not saying that blendshapes cannot blend 50 curves and look amazingly organic, I'm just saying that when it does you pay the cost. So what we're really down to is blendshapes being an established technology have better tooling. And bones beeing just as powerful but less "ready" in terms of tooling.

 

Generating content based on blendShapes instead of bone based deformations would be a nightmare, an automatic pipeline would be required. Imagine you would like to include a new blendshape for body to adjust belly size, and it didn't previewsly existed, in this case, all existing meshes would need to be adjusted to include this deformation. Handling that manually would be really complex, and require a lot of work.

Bone driven deformation obviously isn't simple as well, but provides a lot of flexibility. Until now I would say no one really used this at full potential. People have been asking if we could do something like The sims character customization with no sliders, and it would be not only possible but would work really well. I've already done this for some projects and it feels really nice . As Joen said, we could have even more complex customization, that includes even dynamic muscle flexing based on bone angle.

 

We're excited to announce the public release of our UMA 2 workflow for SALSA. This is a brand new workflow, so we look forward to your feedback.

Check the link to read the details of our implementation or to download the helper package.
http://crazyminnowstudio.com/posts/uma-lipsync-using-salsa-with-randomeyes/

A quick video tutorial with annotations to reflect changes since the first private beta.

 

What makes UMA avatars different from standard mecanim humanoids? I'm wondering if you can take any standard mecanim humanoid avatar and use UMA to modify them. Is that possible? Or some method to convert a standard hmanoid rig so it's UMA compatible without going through a 3D modeling program?

 

Hi there!
This video is very old, but explain the concept used for avatar body customization:

 

Please dont think I am some 'Blendshape' flag waver... I am not at all, I am just learning and trying to understand how things are done, should be done, will be done...

Regards all this BS stuff, I initially discovered it because I found that I could blendshape my Mixamo male model to my Mixamo female model because they had the same number of vertices which were numbered the same. This has proved to be pretty useful...

Since then, yes I have learned the power of Bone driven deformation, but then I learned that Unity only supports 4 bones, and dealing with that has taken me yet more weeks of weight painting.

Getting bones to deform things perfectly *and* then animate properly seems to be sheer hell. Take the shoulder for example, if you have a bone that makes a shoulder muscle bigger (so it maybe expands into what was just the arm) that can look great in a T-Pose and great until the bone actually makes it bigger... But when it does make it bigger, if the character raises its arm up the shoulder bone makes a massive dent in the raised arm... I appreciate this is only an issue with low poly models, but it doesn't happen if you use a blendshape...

So from what I can see from learning and experimenting, bone deformation and blendshapes are not two ways of achieving the same thing- they seem to be two different things that should maybe be used in two different ways?

 

Are there any weighting enhancemnts planned for base mesh? There are some situations, when mesh is not deformed properly...

 

Hi there!
probably not for those base meshes. If I manage to estabilish a new standard with the modular base meshes (the ones I'll include on asset store for free) I might be able to handle the skinning problems, because they handle considerably better the combination with content. With the existing base meshes separation, if I correct the skin, existing content would not match the volume.

 

Hey @FernandoRibeiro Did you ever get anywhere with this? As per my original post on the topic it seems that when you deform the belly, for example, the way light is reflected does not change- i.e. if the character starts with a flat belly and you deform it to give it a big fat one, there should be extra light on the top and shadow underneath, but this doesn't happen... I have tried all manner of export options from Blender and MAX and nothing sorts it, so I dont think its a software/export issue.

It looks like RecalculateNormals maybe the only solution, but I'd super appreciate your help as to why my code (and associated enhanced RecalculateNormals function) doesn't work right... I think its just that the mesh that it recalculates the normals on is not orientated the same way as the UMA combined mesh is, so I was hoping there was some already existing UMA function I could add to my code that would apply the correct orientation to the baked mesh used to recalculate the normals... Any ideas?

 

I'm still pondering on this one... Problem with recalculate normals is that it only supports smooth normals. I'm thinking that perhaps we can use the normal/tangent direction to find two points to calculate a normal from and then store a rotation offset that needs to be applied on top. This should have the benefit of working across the seams where we cut up the body parts.

 

As an aside, it does seem to just be an issue with scale deformation, like we use to make the belly bigger. Rotation/Location gets updated fine...

 

Great to hear you are still pondering, I really do think this will add alot to the fidelity of the UMA models... pardon my ignorance though, but what do you mean by 'smooth normals'? I'd really like to understand/help solve this one if I can...

 

The core of the problem is that there is no rotation in the deformation... the curve comes from different amounts of pushing/scaling, more or less in the direction of the existing normal... however since the amounts differ the results does not have the same normals anymore. Purely recalculating normals could be done and is a fine temporary fix, but is both expensive and suboptimal.

 

I am confused about UMA PBR- it seems to be massively slower than normal UMA...

All I want really is to be able to use the Unity standard shader in my slots- mainly I just want to be able to use my 'normal' blue normal maps rather than having to do loads more work to do whatever you have to do to create the green ones... I just want one single workflow for all my objects basically, I just want to create textures for the *Standard* shader. So I dont really care about PBR effects (right now) I just want an to be able to create UMA materials that can use the *Standard* shader, rather than having to do things completely differently just for UMA...

Do you guys have any intention of making UMA compatible with the Unity 5 *Standard* shader?

 

That's UMA PBR, it's using Unity 5 standard shader and it's slower because of that. Using Standard shader also requires 50% more video memory for each generated avatar, as there's an aditional atlas.
Cheers

 

I'm guessing it's slower because of the extra memory usage... if you run out of gpu memory you will go from 60fps to 3fps without warning. So reduce the number of characters or reduce the atlasResolutionScale and as soon as you have enough memory everything will be rosy.

 

Actually, you guys will be happy to know I'll have a solution for that. I'll be initially announcing that at Unite Brazil in two weeks

 

Hello, is there any tutorial where it explain how to create, with blender/3DMax/Whatever, a new male or female body that UMA can read?

I want to create a much simpler body (less polygons), but I need to know how to create it to work with UMA.

 

Unfortunately, this approach doesn't scale. Because of the way Unity aggressively keeps all references in memory, the Overlay Manager will keep all the textures loaded. You have no choice in the matter - every texture is loaded, all the time.

Perhaps, the overlay manager would hold weak references to the overlays, and only load them when required, reference counted, and could unload the overlays based on some heuristic (reference count of 0, not used in X amount of time, something like that). Hmm, aren't these textures just used to generate the atlas, and then not needed?

I should add, that there are two problems here I guess. The atlased textures (and dealing with their size), and the overlay textures, which are a static cost up front that cannot be reduced right now.

 

New recipe UI bug:

New recipe UI with shared colors options bugs:

You need to add 4 in order for the metallic to show ;however, it is effected by texture 2 multiplier. I'm guessing that Albedo Color is 0, then texture 1 normal, and texture 2 metallic. Texture 3 effects nothing but is needed for the metallic.

Adjusting texture 1 color (normals) and then putting back to it's original color causes the normals to stay modified.

Unity 5.1

 

If everything work as planned, we will be able to solve both of those. I'll be able to share more information on the following weeks.

 

Does anyone know if it's possible to setup an UMADynamicAvatar Character Created inspector event in code? From what I can tell, this can only be done for non-persistent events with AddListener(), but I have an editor script that does some design-time setup and would love to be able to add and configure an event through it.

Thanks!

 

Just set the atlas scale based on distance... like I do in the power tools lod... once character textures are down to 128x128 then you can have loads... And you get the added bonus you don't need mipmaps, because this is rendered mipmaps...

 

Yeah, the atlased textures I'm not too worried about. There are solutions to that problem I could implement, at least naively, fairly fast. The overlays, however, are another issue though.

For the client, i dunno, maybe have 100 overlays right now mainly for testing. It is using conservatively, 14 bazillion terabytes of RAM, even with smaller sizes, for what? So it could generate an atlas for a character every once in a while? This is the same problem kind of inherent to Unity throughout its design. It maintains dependency graphs, and makes it very simple to do many things which is great for hobbyists, but when you want to tightly control what is loaded and unloaded, you have to throw all that out because it is too aggressive. At that point it is asset bundles or resources.loads - in my case I use asset bundles for almost anything that i need to tightly control..

And maybe Fernando's solution will mean I don't have to do anything. I don't care about the cost, I will happily pay money for something that saves me time and is well written. UMA is a rare commodity in the Unity world and frankly so awesome because of this.

 

Hi there everyone! =)
I´ll be doing a presentation about UMA at Unite Brazil 2015, this November 10th.
If you´re developing something using UMA, please share some images or link, I´m looking forward showing what has been done using UMA since it´s release.
Please spread the word with other developers, you can contact me at huikagamestudio@gmail.com
Cheers

 

Sounds cool! I'll certainly check out your talk when it's posted on youtube!

I am currently working on my master thesis using UMA 2.0. Its based in image analysis and in short I am trying to automate the creation of an avatar of yourself from two photos, possibly taken with webcam at runtime. I'll see if I can record a video of the procedure but there are some example images in this thread: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/wip-uma-master-thesis-player-avatar-creator.343331/#post-2238443

While I have your ear I'd just like to thank you so much for making UMA and releasing it open source, I doubt my thesis would ever have come to fruition otherwise!

 

Actually maybe an image says more than a 1000 words Here's an in-game self portratit. Note that this was generated by two photos taken at runtime by a pretty crappy webcam with lousy light conditions. Still the result feels good enough to play with I think.

 

Thanks a lot @Mikael H =)

 

Hi,
I'm trying to create an armor slot for my character, i followed the tutorial on UMA wiki for slot creation in blender. The armor mesh is scaled to fit the male body, i have weight painted it, i have applied rot, loc and scale. But when i try to use it in game both the character and the mesh deforms terribly..

I tried the Verify slot meshes scene and get an error : The skeleton hierarchy seems off, check the log for more info." and in the console log there are 54 errors saying that the various bones differ in position or differ in rotation.

Does anyone know what causes this and how to fix it? what have i done wrong

 

When use the slider to change some values of the character, the animation(idle in the crows scene for example) seems to stutter or plays backwards a few frames. Is there a way to fix this?

 

Hello,

I don't know if it's been mentioned before or it's by design (I can't seem to find anything about it) but, when I added expressions, head size, mandible size and eye size stops working. They are updated but won't change the respected part of the body. When I coment out the expression code it goes back to normal.

I checked the expression example scenes in UMA and UMA PBR and they show the same behaviour.

This line looks like what causes the mentioned dna changes to stop working.

Code (CSharp):

1. expressionPlayer.expressionSet = expressionSet;

My character created callback to enable expressions:

Code (CSharp):

1. void CharacterCreatedCallback(UMAData umaData)
2.     {
3.         UMAExpressionSet expressionSet = umaData.umaRecipe.raceData.expressionSet;
4.         expressionPlayer = umaData.gameObject.AddComponent<UMAExpressionPlayer>();
5.         expressionPlayer.expressionSet = expressionSet;
6.         expressionPlayer.umaData = umaData;
7.         expressionPlayer.Initialize();
8.         expressionPlayer.enableBlinking = true;
9.         expressionPlayer.enableSaccades = true;
10.     }

(Thanks for this great open source tool by the way.)

 

I had a similar case where I animated the wrong bones and they weren't editable animore. In my case, the animation data has overwritten the editable settings cuz they moved the bones on every frame. Btw. for changes on the character that doesn't affect the armor, for example your eye blinking, you could use blend shapes. But I don't know how this affects uma's system, since it's still too complex for me.

 

How can I preserve/access the Texture 2multiplier and Texture2 additive settings when using PBR textures in a recipe and when creating shared color slots for that recipe?

I noticed when using UMA PBR that UMA correctly generates two extra Texture multiplier/additive color bars for the Metallic property on overlays that use PBR textures. This allows you to make a 'gold' for example, but you do seem to need to tweak both the multiplier and additive values in Texture 2.

However when I save a Character recipe and adjust the overlay data in the recipe, while all the sliders are present in the overlay settings, if I set 'Texture2 additive' this value does not seem to get saved- Texture 2 multiplier does though...

Also if I add a shared color to the recipe I only get given the standard number of slots - there are no Texture 2 color bars... If I generate the recipe in a scene the extra color bars for a shared color are generated in the inspector, but again if I set those and re-save the recipe, only the Texture2 multiplier gets saved, the additive is lost.

So somehow, the Texture 2 additive values are not getting saved either in the section for the overlay, or when you create a shared color- but you need them to make a metallic material.So I am wondering how to fix this?

Basically I think what needs to happen is:-
When a generated character is saved as an asset all the values for Texture 2 need to be saved
When you edit a recipe that uses PBR textures and set the Texture 2 values for an overlay, all those values need to be saved
And when you create a shared color and are using UMA PBR that shared color needs to be generated with three sets of color bars and again they all need to be saved...

So what files should I be looking for to try and implement a fix?

 

Ok so I downloaded ContentPack_1.1.0.1 from https://github.com/huika/UMA-Extrafiles and opened UMA_Blender.blend file. I followed the video tutorial from

created the shirt mesh and exported as explained.

I used Slot Builder in UMA menu to create the new shirt slot and tried to use new slot with existing MaleBody02 overlay. Console is spammed with following error and UMA won't show up.

Code (CSharp):

1. Quaternion To Matrix conversion failed because input Quaternion is invalid {-1.#IND00, -1.#IND00, -1.#IND00, -1.#IND00} l=-1.#IND00
2. Quaternion To Matrix conversion failed because input Quaternion is invalid {1.#QNAN0, 1.#QNAN0, 1.#QNAN0, 1.#QNAN0} l=1.#QNAN0
3. Invalid AABB aabb
4. Invalid AABB result
5. Invalid AABB a
6. IsFinite(d)
7. IsFinite(outDistanceForSort)
8.  

(It's not the full error text I tried to copy different messages, it's quite lengthy)

Apparently I am doing something wrong, being a newbie to all unity, blender and UMA I can't figure out what is. Can anyone point me to the right direction?

 

Does the content pack work for uma 2 and is there a real tutorial on how to create slots?

 

I realized that I exported the fbx file as binary last time. I exported fbx as ASCII and this time errors I mentioned before went away. But when I added the slot to my UMA it deforms the model. (newly added slot is not visible in the scene, deformed visible part is other slots. When I exlude the new slot model is perfectly normal)

 

There's a scene to help debug slot issues, did you try running that? My first guess would be the global scale on the import, I think ASCII may need a scale of 100.

 

You are right ecurtz, I exported the model with scale of 1.0 but somehow file scale shows 0.01 I used a scale factor of 100 and it worked.

@Heffalus yes it seems content pack works. The tutorial videos and info on Unity wiki seems to be outdated and/or not "step by step" level detailed though. It was a trial error workflow for me getting it to work.

 

Hey guys, in the scene charCreator how can i make the skin change in real time as i slide the "skin" bar?
i'd also like to know how to chose a hair type ..

 

Still having issues with 'Texture2 additive' getting outputted correctly in a saved asset.

If i open the saved asset in Notepad I can see it is saved as 'version 2' and the colors string for the 'shared color' in question does appear to contain all the necessary colors, but when I edit the asset directly in the inspector 'Texture2 additive' is still getting set to be black or is being ignored. When I use the asset in the 'Crowd recipe' scene its also just ignoring the 'Texture2 additive' setting...

As I mentioned before its important to be able to have this third set of values in a PBR scenario because it enables you to make the color metallic, like a gold or a steel...

 

I think the issue could be something to do with UMAPackedRecipeBase.cs But I cannot quite work out where I need to change things to get it to store/retrieve the Texture2 additive setting...

(Or maybe its OverlayColorData.cs ?)

 

Ok so I found something that may help... In 'OverlayColorData.cs' I found that in the function 'EnsureChannels', in the 'else' statement there is the line

Code (CSharp):

1. channelAdditiveMask = new Color[channels];

that seems to make the 'additive channel black whatever the settings are and if I comment it out Texture2 additive seems to get saved and outputted correctly, but I dont know if that would be the correct change to make...
Why have you made it so that additive channel is always getting set to black?

 

Does any one know roughly what the process is to generate the required files for the expressions for a new race?

I have an FBX imported which has the same rig as my race and the same animations at the same frames as the UMA standard race.

I am looking to create files for my race that match those in the UMA Expressions folders (so a 'MyRace Expressions Set' like the one in UMA/Expressions/Expression Sets' and all the associated 'UMA BonePose assets' like the ones found in 'UMA/Expressions/Female Poses')

I have tried using the 'Pose Builder' where I have dropped the FBX imported as the UNIFIED model as the Rig Prefab, and I have tried that same rig in the PoseRig > Rig Source as well as trying the rig from the FBX that I imported that actually contains my expressions animation. I have tried importing that model as both generic and legacy.

Then in the next section I use the animation file from the imported expressions model.

Either way when I click 'Build Poses' I get all the right 'UMA Bone Pose' files generated but they are all empty. I mean in the UMA ones when you view them in the inspector they all have various 'Poses' that each have settings, for example 'BrowIn' has Left Eye, Left Eyebrow Low etc but mine do not have any of that data.

Any idea where I am going wrong?