Character customization + Clothing customization

Polymeddy

Hi,

I'm trying to get a single character rig to morph into different bodies, and toggle through different clothing pieces (like dark souls)
Unlike dark souls though, I also like to include height/proportion customization, (short spine, tall arms, etc)

What's my best bet?
Much appreciated

Eric Chadwick

What research have you done so far? The first thing I would do is search "character customization unity". 

http://polycount.com/discussion/63361/information-about-polycount-new-member-introductions/p1#asking

Polymeddy

Sorry about that. I thought it's best I be brief and straight to the point at first.
I've been working on a team project for 3 months, the programmer and I (artist) have been looking into the technicalities for a while now.

Without flooding the thread with 3 months worth of links, here's what we've learned so far

A base model is created, separated into 2; body and head.
We have a morph slider set in Unity
morph targets are created for the body to toggle characters.
morph targets are created for the head as well
However, we export each character head separately, as they contain their own facial morph targets
We are using Mega-fiers wrap for the clothes (http://www.west-racing.com/mf/?page_id=3709)
That way we model the clothes once to the base character, and let the megafiers wrap the mesh to the character morphs
The character designs contain extreme body dimensions (tall, short, slim, wide)
This holds an issue with sharing animations.
We then fixed IK constraints for dealing with props in unity. 
Facial and body animations are meant to be motion captured.
The bip001 may need to be fixed for each character's height, not sure how yet.
Height may also be affected by certain footwear.
As of now, I'm re-scaling bones in Unity to match each character's dimensions, and running into child scaling and rotation issues.
I know scaling bones is ill-advised, but it's all I can find to match the character designs now.

Tutorials I found are usually for fixed dimension characters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ch1aJljEYp4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33CggHkSH-Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-Q0cu39jis

UMA seems like the closest thing to what I'm looking for, but I don't think I can use my own original models/character designs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0cyN7k1zww&list=PLdZIOhsqZ1j7Q3nHM_7WUxnt7fur0kQbp&index=1

When I searched the forum, I found this
http://polycount.com/discussion/173067/unity3d-character-customization-with-clothing-parts-in-different-fbxs-sharing-the-same-skeleton
One link that doesn't help, the other dead, and no activity. Topic seems to be using same character dimensions too, so a bit off point in my case.

I'm currently fixing body dimensions issues in Unity for design and animation purposes, but I can't help but feel there may be a better way we're missing.

I hoped to find some opinions and suggestions, stories, etc. I'm not a programmer, but I'm trying to understand the standards of character customization and what usually goes into it. Tutorials I find tend to have a very simplistic approach, of clothing one character, or clothing a constant body dimension. 
Thank you.

Monteiro

From what i know, Unity doesn't handle well vertex animation, thats why people use pluggins (and mega-fiers is an awesome one) to allow vertex animation on unity. Once you have vertex animation you can start thinking about morphing. And i'm more like an artist, this is as far as i can help you. After this you will need to code the "state" your character is set in your "dressing room" them make it you main character.

not an easy task bro.

Polymeddy

Thanks Monteiro; I'm with a programmer, I'm sure he'll take care of the coding. I'm just having second thoughts about the work pipeline.
Hopefully a good software comes up one day.

Eric Chadwick

Yeah, scaling bones is tricky. Child bones have to do their transforms inside the inherited space from their parents, leading to distortions.

I worked with a custom engine once that allowed morphing between differetly-proportioned skeletons. The way they did it was to blend positional transforms only... bones were not length-constrained.

Not sure if a similar thing can be achieved in Unity or not.

You might look into control rigs... abstracting the scaling away from the weighted bones might help solve it.

Polymeddy

Thanks, will look into it.

Polymeddy

Found this as well, for anyone interested
https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/which-is-the-best-most-efficient-method-of-rigging-in-3ds-max-to-use-in-unity.299492/