I concur and highly recommend UE4 Skeleton compatibility. Multiplayer compatibility is also crucial. Replicating the Character Pawn and replicating morph parameters, attaching accessories, apply material parameters per Player Character needs to be considered upfront. Retro-fitting Networking is extremely painful. Take heed to my recommendations and I guarantee your Character Customization System will sale like hotcakes. I will be the first in line.
I just got it.
Hi there!
Small update… Good news - after cruel refactoring, software part is 80-90% ready, bad news - it takes more time as I think, but I try to produce quaility stuff anyway…
Some showcase:
Still ready to collaboration offers and customers wishes…
By the way, how much it may be? )
P.S. Please, don’t ask about ears…
Just letting you know… In case you didn’t see this;
These are the ones you are about to compete against for sales: http://www.3lateral.com/
Apparently they have a big database of scanned people, and a system where these scanned models can share blendshapes between eachother.
Pretty neat stuff! Looks like they gonna sell those characters on Marketplace or something like that…
It won’t be competition if one is has licence restrictions and not the other one, the price, integration and usability will make the difference in case both products don’t have license restriction.
Not to mention it looks like they’ll mainly be focused on faces, and not on a system as flexible as Black Desert… That is assuming this can come close to Black Desert as far as shaping is concerned with short or tall characters, etc. I’m not worried about swapping colors around. It is an interesting thought, if 3lateral focuses on only realistic faces based on scan data, what about custom hand made shapes? Would be neat if both systems could complement each other.
Hi,
As for 3Lateral - they are produce absolutely different kind of things (there is much difference in polycount, as I can see for example - more cinema stuff than games IMO), and there are many of such competitors for me in this way(DAZ, iClone, Adobe Fuse, even MakeHuman…), but I’m going to run for one’s money after all.
As for shaping features - my system will be even robust as in games aforementioned. Cosmetics features were pretty boring stuff for me, but without them whole system will looks uncompleted, I think. I’ll try to show shaping features in next video as soon as possible.
Since when is it possible to place decals on skeletal mesh. How does it work with the tatoos? Are multimaterials?
No, at all… If you need to change some material params in runtime - first of all you must create material instance dynamic, next - make parameters you want to change, that’s all… For my head I use only one material with only ‘lerp’ and ‘multiply’ nodes - there is is no some street magic special… )
Up)
At last, I did it…
As you can se Epic’s skeleton fully supported.
So, there is practically nothing to complete… I think about dynamic parts of mesh( buttocks, belly, breast) - but it is really needed by customers?
I liked very much what I saw in
I think project is a good run-time character customization system for Marketplace. Beginning with something like this is a good example that allows us to expand and make more “original” works. The 3lateral system shown by [mention]BruNo XavieR[/mention] looks like something like MakeHuman (open source) widely used to generate base meshes for original characters created by Artists in software like ZBrush, especially when the artist needs enough human physiognomy accuracy as starting point for characters and creatures. And in the worst situation is like services like Mixamo Online that basically does it all and is more suitable for non-artists and programmers who do not have artistic vein and need to test his codes using a good thing.
I believe that many (Artists, non-programmers mainly) Seeks more for OOTB that can be expanded easily and contains very good and self-explained logic with functionality that allows in a very simple and intuitive way add authored characters, accessories, armors, clothes, body parts, animations. Needs basically a lightweight system (without a huge online library containing TBs in 3d scanned assets), compatible with other Marketplace assets, pug-and-play, expandable and easily install-able or migrated over any original game project.
- Unreal’s mannequin support could be great. Something achievable with the Animation Rigging Toolkit, compatible with Unreal skeleton is very handy.
Thanks, you got me tight…
Hey @ why the expression: you got me tight... : /
I don’t want tighten 
Hahaha
I just think your character customization system seems to me to be going for something I would like to buy in the Marketplace.
Kinda of joke)
Awesome work and ideas.
Some wishes and rant from my side.
I agree that in most cases every game has its own style and environment, therefore there is no need to get fancy with accessories, clothes, props etc.
But, at the same time, there are many games and also simulations which could benefit from customizable clothes & accessories.
In my case, I am a programmer working on a hobby networked simulation of modern world & society and I struggle to find an out-of-the-box solution for a UE4 ready pipeline or even a complete guide or tutorial to create or use a rig and at the end to get an in-game customizable and scriptable character. Currently the best affordable option seems to be Daz3D, but it is still far from being integrated with UE4 and you still have to create the customization system. There are even no any paid courses (Linda, DigitalTutor, Pluralsight) which go through the entire process of creating a character and pushing UE4 to the edge to get the best possible looking face out of it. It seems, only UE4 devs themselves know how to create awesome characters for their engine, but majority of other developers are left with something cartoonish or “proof-of-concept” level “it works!” results.
I cannot afford fancy tools (such as iClone, which seems to be the closest thing to out-of-the-box system) but at the same time I don’t need that much - I need just a generic but high quality male & female models with ability to customize them straight in the UE4 itself without messing with other external 3D applications. Think about Sims 3 level of customization. While they use just a few base models, they offer in-game tool to customize shapes and colors of almost every detail, so you can create unique characters and clothing colors, and they use the same system to generate random NPCs for the game.
Now imagine Sims character editor raised up to UE4 level - better textures (as realistic, as possible on UE4 in real-time), facial animations (possibly with lipsync), LOD levels (so you could run entire street simulation with randomly generated characters with randomly generated clothing), tutorials for creating your own items compatible with your customization logic (e.g. I want to create a hat which could be then updated inside your plugin with any texture and coloring on the fly). And, of course, the plugin should be well maintained and compatible with the upcoming 4.16 and future animation options.
Can you create such a plugin? If you could, I guarantee - you would get rich soon 
and soon you would have entire ecosystem designing basic models, textures and other kinds of “body parts” for your UE4 plugin. Yes, you might have to compete with iClone and Daz, but their solutions are much more generic and far from UE4-ready. You might achieve much better results than iClone and Daz, if you are an UE4 expert and can push it to the edge for the best quality and compatibility.
Hi! Work is still in hard progress… It was not along time ago, when I find final solution for code design… So it will be very frindly for customers with any kind of characters - from robots for werewolfs. As for cloth customization - it only depends of your fantasy, and art/modeling skills, I’m going to include some example of this stuff…
About cloth - I meant, for example, ability to change a color of texture parts; that would require textures with color-coded regions and matching blueprints, which might be cumbersome to create for a beginner. Therefore it would be great to have a collection of generic clothes but with dynamically colorable textures. They are using the same approach in Sims, I guess; and also Mixamo Fuse is using it:
https://community.mixamo.com/hc/en-us/articles/203791536-Tutorial-Creating-Custom-Fuse-Clothing
scroll to Color Mask. This would provide infinite coloring abilities - you can have one shirt with multiple color zones and thus users of your plugin and basic clothes would not have to go to Photoshop and recolor a texture if they want just a different shirt; and also this could be good randomization option for spawning NPCs to make them look different although all are using the same set of base textures.
For the head of my character I use only one material:
Pretty simple…
It produces skin color, lips color, makeup, tattoos changes, so such things can be used in cloth customization, without any restrictions
Yes, this might work also for clothing.
Still, you should collaborate with some skilled character designer who can push the engine and your plugin to the limits and also create some high quality assets, at least just a few to have some starting point for everyone who would want to purchase your plugin.
Having a good character customization system without any actual characters and assets to customize is like having a golden spoon without any food to eat. Also, there is a risk that some food might not be compatible with the spoon - that is, some character rigs and assets might not work well together with your system leaving you with annoyed customers who will regularly bombard you with questions like “but how do I use a character exported from X software with your plugin?” or “why your default character does not work well with facial animations, LOD levels, wrinkle maps, subsurface scattering etc. etc.”. To avoid dealing with such customers, the best way would be to create a high quality asset package to demonstrate the best capabilities of your system. This also might be a separate package for a separate price, but it should exist for those who can afford and want to have something as close to out-of-the-box product as possible.