UMA - Unity Multipurpose Avatar on the Asset Store!

Um, hi, not been using UMA for ages but wanted to recommend it to some peeps and noticed the Wiki link seems broken (from Asset Store). See it mentioned above. (in case different) I'm getting uma.unity3d.com fail with:

What's the status on this? Raised with UT? (sorry if I didn't skim back far enough.)

Thx

p.s. (EDIT) Amused/confused to see searching still finds all the results!?! e.g. https://unity3d.com/search?gq=UMA

 

Yeah, its been broken for quite some time and Unity does not seem to care one bit. So we are in a process of finding/creating a replacement at the moment. Will probably take a while though.

 

Is it possibile to optimize UMA to render minimum 200 UMAs at once, or ideally 1000? I'm getting 30fps just with crowd scene and was wondering what makes it so slow.

 

This depends on a lot of things. There are several ways to get better performance. To start with, you can decrease texture sizes. You can change the number of Blend Weights in the quality settings. You can introduce LOD's into the system and bake out the unneeded bones (like with the UMA power tools). If you need even more speed, you can create your own models and textures that have less polygons and bones. Etc. But for 1000 Avatars? That's a lot. You may need to pursue even more drastic measures, regardless of what you want. What could you possibly need 1000 avatars on the screen at the same time for?

 

Realtime battles like in mount&blade

 

Good idea for UMA devs would be saving finished UMA as a prefab while getting rid of all the bones that are used for customization.

It is unlikely you will need to modify UMA when you have finished its look already.

 

I did that, it's called uma power tools and it's a third party package on the asset store. It took a lot of hours to make that, the math and optimizations was hardly trivial.

But even power tools can't give you thousands without lod meshes. I think the highest I've tested on my dev (non-gamer) machine is 700 uma chars, and then I was taking a serious framerate hit. Both on the gpu but also on the skinning/animation side. This was with lod but still at so high ql that it looked damn near perfect.

 

what wiki? Its down...


Also I want to update from uma 1.x to uma 2.x, but the wiki is down and I don't know how to correctly do it.

 

We are working on it. Might take a while though.

 

Too pricey for me... In fact i cant afford anything atm...

 

Then i guess you just have to make your own solution.
Even if you have LOD and all that, you would still run into issues because you need to animate all those chars which is costly.

 

How do games like total war do their multitude of characters?

 

They dont use Unity and Mecanim : ) You need some simple and high performance animation system to pull that off. Something like this: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/26009

 

Is it possible to make prefab for UMA character ? I need to add ragdoll, a lot of scripts to player object, adjust tags etc.

 

Yeah, sorry about that. We are discussing what to do about it. Any suggestions?

 

Not sure if even Mesh Animator will push 1000+ comfortably. Might need to look into something like this: 3D Sprites or SS2d.

 

The only way of making a prefab from a UMA character is also to breaks the uma connection of that character, so afterwards you can't customize it again.

We're slowly moving towards a world where it will be possible to have a uma character at design time, and have it be customizable still.

 

If you use a DynamicAvatar, or a DynamicCharacterAvatar (which derives from DynamicAvatar), then you don't need to have a prefab to add scripts. You can do several things - You can create recipes that contain scripts that update your avatar - In scene02, look at the Troll dynamicAvatar (under UMA in the hierarchy). in the "UMA Additional Recipes" property, it adds two special recipes that modify the character. Or you could add code a script to the avatar itself, and have the "CharacterCreated" event call a function on the script when your character is ready, and have it programmatically update it.

 

It looks like very very painfull process actually (if you have enormous properties to set up).

 

What you can do, is to create an empty GO that you put a UMA spawner script on. This GO will then become your character and you can put whatever scripts and whatnot on it.

 

New UMA Wiki is up!
http://www.umawiki.secretanorak.com/Main_Page

Now we need YOU to help us fill it with information, everything from tips and trick, tutorials and 3rd party integrations.

 

Thanks for your reply Unlogick,

will do, but you can have a look at the steam page, too . http://store.steampowered.com/app/288860

I tried the latest Version, but it had VERY bad effects. Using humans, I got completely reflective PBR characters (I think metalness and 1 and Smoothness 1), anyways, they were almost completely black. Moreover, I have some custom races, and one of them was just a big pile of triangles, nothing even closely resembling a character. Others weren't so bad, but still, PBR overlays didn't really work. Is there an "upgrade guide" somewhere from "Assetstore UMA 2" to "UMA unity53"?

I experimented there and for some reason I still don't understand, the PBR-shaded stuff is completely unaffected by my "color" ambient light. Everything "oldstyle" shaded is affected normally while the PBR characters (and Speedtrees) remain dark, only lit by the single directional light (sun). This might be because I turned off Precomputed Realtime GI and Baked GI, but even with PRGI on, the characters remained rather dark. Maybe I needed light probes, I don't know, I'm still getting the hang of the new lighting system. I turned out using Legacy Deferred camera, because it finally got the characters affected by ambient.

I already own your Power Tools (love the prefab export), but wasn't able to use the LOD system yet .

 

Where can I get a link for a high poly uma model (both genders) to use as a base to make clothes? I want to use it in Marvelous Designer but the model is so small. Also if I model clothes in MD will I have to model for every morph size or can it adjust with the model?

 

You can find the source meshes in
https://github.com/huika/UMA-Extrafiles

We do not use morphs, so you don't have to make multiple scales. Just rig the clothes to the base mesh rig and you're done, due to the wonders of skinning your clothes will be resized together with the base mesh.

 

Thanks so much! That is great news! I was hoping to find the Build Volume and Arrangement point files used in Fernando's tutorial for Marvelous Designer. I did add some myself but if there is a better one I would like to use it. Anyway, I am so excited to get started making my own clothes.

 

Fernando's tutorials are rather old but they will get you started. There are no other tutorials for making clothes although, you can use the ones from Secret Anorak's videos to show you how to rig and skin the clothes to the UMA rig. Search for his YouTube videos. Good luck! I hope you will show us your results. I am planning to do the same thing eventually.

 

Are you a maker? I need help to make uma on VR. how to spawn player and make him moove then you move in VR? i think i need to make uma generated prefab a child of VR prefab. i use htc vive.

 

I know very little about VR. Sorry. I suggest you join the UMA Slac channel if you need help.

 

@Lapius You want to have full body awareness in your game?
If thats the case, it wont work well, and not because of UMA. You just dont have enough tracked points to make it look good. Only have tracked hands and/or arms can work really well though. I would recommend FinalIK, but there are other IK solutions out there as well that are cheaper but quite as good.
I also suggest that you join the Slack channel, pm me if you want to join.

 

I'm having trouble with all of my UMA characters having their mouths open (jaws open). Does anyone have any information on this, or a possible fix.

I think I'm using a slightly older version of UMA, but I'm not sure?


***Edit: Nevermind, I think the UMA Dna setting of "mandibleSize" actually fixes this for me. Perhaps my "mandibleSize" was too large lol.

 

Does it possible to generate a character with some separated mesh for different slot ?
My goal is to apply different layers for some slot, however the character is always generated with only one mesh.

 

You'll need to use different UMAMaterials for the slots/overlays that you want to be separate.

 

As noted in many areas across the forums, the default setting in mecanim for jaw is "open." It's not an UMA thing, but a mecanim thing.

 

Just tried it but it do not separate mesh. It just apply two materials to the same skinned mesh renderer.

 

It creates two meshes that are managed by the Mesh object attached to the SkinnedMeshRenderer. What are you looking to do that requires two different SkinnedMeshRenderers?

 

Hello guys, it looks like UMA 2 is not working properly with Unity 5.5 beta, here is a forum link to a thread about that :
https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/skeletonbone-transformmodified-is-obsolete.437505/

UMA 2.1 is ready about those errors, but it is not available at the assetstore.

 

We are working hard on getting it out : )

 

the UMA manager DK UMA 2 is already working with UMA 2.1, so a version will be available at the release of the UMA 2.1 package. For now the users of UMA 2.1 have to modify the DK scripts to make it compatible, but an information is available.

Keep going the good work guys

 

At some point someone (UnLogick, I think) mentioned that UMA might get an automatic masking system to protect against poke-through. Is this in development yet, or is it just a good intention?

 

The masking system is complete in uma 2.1, however it is not automatic, you need to draw a mask and create a mask overlay and add that to the recipe.

 

So ... no actual magic involved?

Looking forward to all the new stuff!

 

We are preparing an asset for large crowds, specially army crowds. It's possible to have more 3000 animated characters in a scene at the same time, with only a small fps loss. We are using a mix of techniques to optimize the draw calls, and random animation for natural smooth look. If you can wait three weeks, we are waiting for the asset store review. Our studio is called Captoonz.

 

Do you have a UMA sample that ships with the asset?

 

Hello,

since Unity 5.5 is not beta anymore I just downloaded it.

Now I cannot compile anymoer, I get around 200 Errors because of deprecated methods in uma it seems.

Is there a uma 2 Version for unity 5.5 somewhere now?
I just visited Jaimi's github but it Looks older. And the wiki seems to be off...

Thanks a lot!

 

Hey Firlefanz, you need to get the Unity53 branch to get the latest code. Also, it's not actually my Github, I think it's Joens and Fernandos!

 

https://github.com/huika/UMA

 

Great!

Downloaded the 53 and compiled with Unity 5.5. All samples work perfect, no Problems!
Copied the scripts to my game. No Compiler Errors. Seems to work perfect.

Thanks a lot guys, great Job

 

I've downloaded Unity 5.5 and updated to UMA 53 but am getting some compile errors because I think my UMA Power Tools is not up-to-date. Does anyone know where I can get the latest version? I'm getting a lot of "The type of namespace 'UMALODConversionEntry' could not be found...". Thanks!

 

5.5 was just released and the asset developers will need time to make any changes needed and find any bugs caused by the new release.

I recommend you send an email to the developer, which you can find on the asset store. He may or may not send you a copy of the update when he has it done after you send the invoice number.

Or, you could give him a couple of weeks to update and submit to the store, which is really what you should do. Developers do not get the release before you do so need time to update the assets.

 

Thank you - I tried emailing the Dev but there was no response so not sure if the email was wrong or he's just busy. There was another thread that said he had a new version available that works with uma 2.1 but I can't reach him to get it so was hoping someone might know. I guess I will just wait a few weeks - thanks

EDIT: The developer got in touch with me and has been great - thanks!