Moving/scaling modes (fully ajustable - for every bone you can adjust translation/scaling limits, scaling mode - uniform or not, cursor speed to reach max/min values)
Can be used for absolutely different kinds of models(from weapon to aliens)for example
Hi! I just add another video to first post, wich shows more features of my system. I’m absolutely agree with you about tutorial - from scratch to finish - I’ll publish it as soon, as possible. Since whole model uses only bones deformations- so any cloth parts will be supported. Bikini is separated model - but it moves simultaneously, as you can see… In future plans - make hairs pack with shape/color customization features. Male model may be…
As for eta - stuff already done, I am going to send it to Epics in several days for testing.
How does much it cost (how much you ready to pay for it) - question for potential customers?
Honestly with the value you are getting with this pack, $150 is absolutely fantastic, I wouldn’t drop that. We get a lot of requests for us to give our packs away for $10 or less, because $2000+ worth of content for $24.99 - $34.99 isn’t good enough, and we have to stand our ground because the worst thing for the Unreal Market and for us is for everyone to race to the bottom. At that point we were the Unity marketplace, flooded with low quality **** and no one makes anymore, which means no one is investing money to produce new high quality content.
I agree 100%.
Sorry if $150 is too much, they have places that pay you money every week! Its crazy. Supporting your own product by investing in it maybe a crazy idea, but, if you wont, no one else will.
Anyways - like Ryan said, stand your ground. Who cares if you sell 100 or 10 million copies? They aint got shizz to say about it. Dont lower your worth because someone cant afford $150 for DAYS of time saving work
It is just a simple math, but without any other opinions, I can’t calculate mine… For me it doesn’t matter , sell one copy for 1000, or 100 for 10 (more supporting questions only)… But there is a happy medium, I think
I also dont think that 150$ is a lot. And I am interested in this, but the current system is not yet at the quality that I would be willing to buy.
No matter how great your customizations are, your base mesh isnt something I would put into my project. And since you dont seem to want to create qualitative skeletal meshes, I must ask you: How easy would it be to use my own skeletal mesh? Is it as easy as: buy a character from the marketplace and plug-in-and-play? Or do I have to set it up in a 3D modelling tool prior to use with your plugin?
Because if I have to touch any external software at all to get your plugin to produce some good quality stuff, then its a failed product from my point of view. I dont know how other people see it, but if I would have to set up morph targets or whatever for a skeletal mesh in order to customize it with your system, your plugin is nothing more than a customization interface. And in that case, 150$ would be too much for me.
And on another note: Is it possible to save a character created by your tool to hard disk and theoretically even load it at editor-time?
But this asset looks very promising, so I hope you will shape it up some more. A male mesh would be welcome as well, since its customization would be a little different than the one for female characters (since males dont have breasts for example)
So, what do you mean under qualitative skeletal meshes - meshes with 60k tris or meshes with 8k textures size? It depends… Say, you making game for mobile platforms, or for top gamers configs, how many characters can be placed at one time on the map, how complex they are, what kind of cloth/hairs they are have (classic bones, APEX, nVidia hair for example)… Weapon/armor complexity - and is only for characters, without particles, sounds etc. First idea of my stuff - fast prototyping, if you have three members in your team for example - one can work with GUI, other with code, last with modeling. System itself contains all three parts - GUI, code and model ready to use. It is not just customization interface, only two games, as I know have such system for now, and both are AAA as they say. Without third party tools it is very hard to make even tattoo to use in my stuff, but with them it takes several seconds. All body/head parts have their own models and physics assets to provide collision with mouse, but ultimate user don’t want to know, how it works… Adding options to change characters params(color, paintings etc) is as simplier as I can imagine - so, it is more develepmont stuff, than ready to go complete set to make game in seconds. There is some other products of such kind - iClone, Daz, Mixamo(free for now) at all… As for saving - I use gameinstance for that, but it is not a big deal to save data to disc like in single player game, or to server, like MMO games do
If you want to sell characters on Marketplace and have no angry buyers hunting you, you pretty much have to ship a 8 LOD rig to have everyone happy; that is like making 8 characters for each Character you actually sell + add now customization on top of that.
Bofere you notice people are also demanding specific changes and more and more free additions which take a lot of time to implement.
This is why I make character for myself and I don’t sell them…
I would only think about selling Characters if I had like 2 months free to dedicate for that single character only, maybe not even in that case as well; and then after you put 2 months of hard work on it people will tell you “$150 cost too much, no thanks!”
It highly depends of rational thinking… The character itself - is only the tip of iceberg. This stuff is not about character itself - more programming thing, pipeline, say so. In present time there are many solutions to make characters (I forgot about MakeHuman in previous post), but you must spend some time to make it working with UE. As for model - it has lightly less tris then Skyrim’s models for example, but Skyrim is pretty popular game even now.
As for price - say you take 15$ everyday, but it is very doubtful to make such thing in ten days…
It’s is an advise for some guys here only! It’s not about your excellent character customization system, @ OK!
The advise! it`s not mine!!! Several professionals have told me it in the past.
Does not sound very cool to reuse heroic characters models developed for other projects in an authoring project, even though these characters are free to be reused. If are character with heroic and peculiar appearance they will always compromise the overall works quality. Reason why is very important the Concept Art stage, so that a job can be considered a finished product when it is released. Not another mixed or patched work. By reusing things not authored by you, and the same things seems in different projects used by different authors, no matter how good is your work at all, The great public does not forgive, and has a good perception about it, and Will consider your work amateur, again, no matter how good is your work.
In this way I am more interested in logic, i.e, In logic, a customizable playable character for testing, good logical solution for skeletal controls in the animation blueprint, good UMG integration example, and one generic not heroic model template compatible with Unreal skeleton as one plug-and-play example for including authoring characters.
At this point lies the great question. Which will be the focus of the final product: The character customization system will be a ART product or blueprint programming?
I think to arrive at a fair value is interesting to think of the following way:
Let’s suppose if you were hired by one indie company as freelance artist or programmer, how much it costs in money the hour of your work and how many hours were spent programming and developing it? What is your sales expectation (how many units do you expect to sell). The marketplace’s percentage… Does not needs to answering it, it’s not a question.OK.
Is the expected sales number, which will tell you the final fair value, which should be similar with how much you think is worth your work in the hypothetical indie company. But more one advise, Sorry, expected sales is like a game, you can achieve your goals, and depends on interesting price and demand. What is the expected demand, you have a pool on your thread? Do you think you will sell 10, 100 or Thousand! The sum of all sales will be equal to how much your work worth, or will it be much more than your expectations?
[MENTION=434]BrUnO XaVIeR[/MENTION]
LODs are not problems, it are easily extracted from the original high poly skeletal mesh. And does not are distinct characters.
If you auto generate LODs for a Character then I wouldn’t buy a Character from you
Auto generated LOD for Characters doesn’t work; must be made manually to preserve poly loops.
In specific conditions where automatic decimation does not works, is really very easy creating LOD for skeletal mesh in Maya, it only costs some time, applying some target welds, deleting loops preserving the UV seams, manually rebuilding the geometry. About this fact is very important the author supply the non-triangulated model.
Poly loops are in place, don’t you think?
Say, it takes one minute at all… Copying skin weights, transferring maps - several more minutes, and all will works pretty good… The same goes for high poly meshes - even simplier - texture maps are just ready to use. As I say earlier - that is more prototyping tool… Nobody knows for which game you are working for - Syberia 4, I am Setsuna 2 or something else - but if you have character with customization options - imo that is better then standard UE’s mannequin - that is all
When I produce LOD for my characters, I always try to preserve the initial topology from my original high poly mesh, avoiding the maximum use of re-topology techniques. But usually Simplygon integration works very well. It’s almost instantaneous in Unreal.
About LODs in character customization systems for PC and console, I think, LOD for textures is more important than geometry LOD. Nowadays players characters are consisting of more than 39,000 or 60,000 polygons, it’s the average.
But, probably the customization system uses transform bone nodes. Since all LOD meshes use the same skeleton asset, when the player customizes his own character, transform bone system could be applied simultaneously in all other skeletal meshes used in each LODs slots. Or any customized characters could have each LOD version updated at run-time automatically after customization using the build-in Unreal decimation solution.
