Where to find a good replacement for an Morph3D (MCS) character?

I'm working with a research lab working on human-avatar interaction. We are currently using a Morph3D character, and it looks great:



Unfortunately, we're starting to run into MCS bugs (including ones that crash Unity), and MCS has been abandoned by its creators; the code is open-source but doesn't seem to be getting any updates, and we're not super thrilled about getting into the business of fixing the MCS code.

I tried ripping out the MCS code and working with the model directly, but it turns out that MCS models don't actually contain the blend shapes; those are added via code. And the blend shapes are important to us, mainly because we need facial expressions and lip syncing.

So I'm looking into alternatives. I know UMA is popular and supports blendshapes now, but I haven't yet been able to find a good UMA character similar to the above, i.e. a realistic modern woman. And we're definitely not artists. We don't have the skills on our team to create a custom character from scratch, nor the budget to hire a good artist to create one for us.

I'm installing Adobe Fuse right now, though it seems like that's also been pretty well abandoned; maybe it will work well enough to get us a character we can work with. All we really want is:

1. A model rigged for Mecanim humanoid animations.
2. Facial blend shapes allowing us to display emotions (surprise, confusion, etc.) and lip-syncing.
3. A quality level in shape and texturing at least as good as the above.

I found a handful of rigged models (that aren't ninjas/amazons/etc.) on the asset store, but none with the quality level we're looking for. I also looked at the couple dozen stock models available on mixamo.com, but none of them were appropriate either.

Anybody know of good UMA assets for creating this sort of character? Are there any other alternatives we should be considering?

 

I use Fuse. Some people have issues with the launcher, but I don't have any problems.

Skin texture in Fuse is made with a Substance, so you can make much better skin than Morph3D's 1 skin.

I have some additional base figures for Fuse on my itch.io store.

Fuse being "abandoned" is relative… compared to Morph3D.
Do you want a figure system that is consistent and stable or one that is chasing customers and then yanking products?

Adobe won't go out of business, and Fuse is free.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Also, I think you will appreciate the facial blendshapes in Fuse over having a werebat-antelope-morph that is half broken.

 

I think that's good advice. I played around with Fuse today, and quickly made a very acceptable character.



It works fine with our existing Mecanim animations, and the facial blendshapes seem to be just the right level of granularity. I'm pretty pleased!

Thanks for your advice. I'll check out your itch.io store, too!

 

I have created some good looking characters in Fuse. I have not tested them in a game yet.

 

Did you ever find a good alternative to MCS, JoeStrout?

 

We ended up using the Fuse character.

 

https://forum.unity.com/threads/whence-morph3d-mcs.817938/#post-7441154