What are some options for adding customized characters for someone new to it?

Development Rendering
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TL;DR: How’s a solo developer supposed to add characters in UE4 without spending years learning to make them?

EDIT:
*Don’t demand that I devote several months to learn how to model, rig and animate professional-quality animations. I’m NOT talking about Last of Us or Detroit: Become Human type stuff here with masterful IK rigging. I’m talking basic humans with different faces and builds and a way to fit them onto the UE4 skeleton.
*Don’t assume I want to completely outsource a character design job to a program. I would love to hire a professional to make good characters and animations worth being proud of. Right now I don’t have the resources to do so. I make 3k a month in an unrelated job and I have around 2 1/2 hours a day to devote to development.

I’m a solo developer, and I’ve been making games for a while. Now I want to start adding basic, decent characters. Thing is, I haven’t made enough money from games to hire a character modeler or animator, and I’m not looking to get a bachelor’s degree to learn basic modeling and animation.

I’ve been using the Mixamo creator because it worked well for making unique and specific character models and faces. But, it never worked with the UE4 rig; the in-box clothing, hair and animations are limited; and it no longer has support, so it’ll be obsolete soon.

How have you guys been able to import unique characters with the Unreal skeleton without a massive time investment to learn it from scratch? I’m interested to know if there’s a way I haven’t found, since I’ve seen it happen. Answering either of these questions will help:

1: What are some character creator programs or plugins that work with the UE4 Mannequin skeleton?
Can be a standalone program or a plugin/addon for UE4 or Blender
Must work with the UE4 rig for Marketplace animations. If it needs some tweaking, I can learn.
No fancy features necessary. Just customizable height, build, and facial features.
Not prohibitively expensive

2: How can I find resources to learn to make clothing that fits and moves with a character?
I’m willing learn how to model and rig clothing, I just need to find a good tutorial to do so.
Method must work with the UE4 skeleton
If there’s somehow a program/plugin that does this, that’s fine too.

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@UnrealEnterprise
First, bartering is a bad idea all around. I’ve tried it multiple times and it never worked out well. Most often it comes down to “favors” and promises of royalties being weak motivators and much more risky for both sides. Money in well-defined amounts is an actual motivator, but a resource I don’t have enough to give out to a freelancer regularly.
Second, we’ve all seen character creators with easy to use sliders for player characters in hundreds of games at runtime. That alone is a “shortcut” for basic character design. If it’s impossible for a program to do something similar, I’d like to know why.

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That’s what I’m looking for. You don’t understand that I’m not trying to pretend I’m a AAA studio. I’m not looking for AAA-level Last of Us-quality characters. I’m ok with sub-characters to start out with. Once I make a basic game with basic characters and get some reliable income coming in, then I’ll happily hire someone for high-quality character design.

Let me show you what I’ve been able to make without any real character design or animation skill:
https://gamejolt.com/games/StuporYoutubeFighter/331924

That was with the Mixamo program; a freeware character creator with in-box animations. I want to know if something similar exists that plays well with UE4 marketplace animations.

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Thank you for finally giving a straightforward response. I’ve tried Make Human before, but it was worse than Mixamo and also didn’t work well with UE4. However, I just looked it up and it seems like they’ve been updating the program. I’ll give it a second look.

Update: It still doesn’t have compatibility with the UE4 rig.

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You can trial Character Creator and iClone. You’ll also need their 3D exchange program as well to do anything in Unreal.
They support LiveLink as well.

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Doing it yourself at high quality is pretty snappy. You just need about two to three months to learn how, and higher understanding of trigonometry, materials, and armatures.

There’s plenty of free entry stuff you can use to copy/simplify the tedious bits like weight paint onto your models.

Basically even exporting a paragong character and transferring weights by distance from it will do, but using a make human generated base will probably do it better.

And make human had compatibility with the ue4 rig 10 versions and a year ago, so I have no idea what you are on about. Surely They didn’t remove a feature that existed.

I hate to break it to you, but “once I make reliable income with my game” = never.
Don’t count on it, games don’t offer steady income to begin with, let alone for an indy dev/studio.

Animations:
Ureal marketplace animations- the free ones - are trash. They rely on skeletal retargeting and often have bad animation tracks for several bones. So saying “my custom character doesn’t work with retargeting to these animations” doesn’t mean jack. You can make it work with the proper skeletal settings just like the mannequin works with it.

Make your own / learn how.
That’s an important skill to have since you will always be making new ones for stupid little actions as you make a game (opening doors, driving cars, picking up flowers, etc) that you just won’t find form the marketplace.
once you know how, it takes about 2 hours to make a good animation from nothing at all.
Also, you can now make them in-engine with Control Rig. Never used it so not sure how good that actually is. I prefer using blender so I have copies and backups.
The theory is the same. The difference is that the tracks made in unreal will always look the same as you made them. Those you import may change slightly depending on settings.

Last thing.
As with Everything, you have evolving tools and changes to the engine.
Hair grooms for example. Or the now supported morph target adaptation to joint bending. Chaos physics, including cloth. And a bunch more things that will always be in Flux, so unless you start getting your hands dirty with some character guts yourself you’ll never actually manage it.
even expensive marketplace assets can be obsolete in less than a minute with all the changes.

If you put the work in, high definition final results at home are completely possible.
they probably won’t be as good as the unreal professional captures seen here Digital Humans | Unreal Engine Documentation
unless you do have several $10,000 to dump into gear for captures. But the methods listed On that link, are a very viable starting place to understand what goes where.

As far as “do it at home” I recommend a good camera and MeshRoom for getting a photogrammetry start - not of the model mind you, but of the skin textures. Skins are hard.
You can pop the good model with the good UVs into mushroom and have its photogrammetry algorhitms pop out the skin/roughness/normal for you. Compared to painting it by hand when making realistic stuff at home its a godsend.

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@ScottUnreal
I think you hit the right program I need. It’ll give me enough to work with until I can pay someone to help me.

@MostHost
I don’t know where your pessimism or vendetta against solo devs comes from, but I’m doing what I can with what I have to get to a point where I can afford to do what you’re asking. I have about 3 hours of free time a day to work on a game. It would take more time than I have just to learn how to make, rig and animate characters with the UE4 rig the way you want them to.

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maybe you don’t realize, but this is a profession. Its rather normal to take several years to learn a craft.

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And maybe you don’t realize you don’t have to have character models that would impress Naughty Dog just to have characters in a game. I’ve been trying to learn every other side of development including marketing for several years already and I haven’t found any character designer to join any projects. I’ve looked. I don’t need photorealism. I need quest givers. Whats the point of the Marketplace if everyone thought you have to make everything from scratch like you guys think?

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You are asking us how we manage. We answer you that we put time and effort into learning.
That’s not good enough.
We tell you we delegate to others and pay professionals for professional work, and that’s not good enough.
We give you specific program names and how-to and thats not good enough.

going out on a limb here, maybe if you were to put the time you are spending by writing “its not good enough” into learning the things people pointed out you’d eventually manage to add custom characters in without too much trouble…

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Hello @Menelin

I created this thread for these questions. This is a subject that i devoted my UE4 Learning and Development too. I’ve focused not only on humanoid character customization, but customization of weapons, vehicles/machines, structures, props, and other types of entities. I’m developing a In-game Customization System to customize many types of entities at design-time and in real-time with multiplayer support Whole books could be written about the subject (one in the works) as there are many way to approach it using:

  • Modular Skeletal/Static Mesh Parts Swapping
  • Skeletal and Static Mesh Attachments
  • Mesh Morph Targets (Blendshape) Deformation
  • Skeletal Mesh Bone Scaling
  • Material Swapping
  • Parameterized Materials

One of the Character Customization Solutions in the Marketplace would be a great start for a Single Player game. To date, I haven’t found one that supports Multiplayer. Another challenge with pre-made Customization System is Clothing options. Due to Marketplace restrictions on dependencies, Publishers cannot not produce new supplemental packs for their Character systems. Thus, if you need multiplayer support and a vast number of clothing options you’ll find your self needing to perform massive code modifications and authoring clothing. With the amount of work involved, developing your own Character Customization system from scratch is reasonable.

The first step in pursuing Character Customization System is to determine what kind of Character customization you desire. By doing this you will get an idea of what features the Base Character Model will need and workflow needed to customize it. I referenced many games with character customization: Fortnite (Epics Character), Destiny (Armor), Black Desert(Humanoid), Armor Core (Mechanical), and Spore Creature Creator (Non-humanoid).

For Humanoid Characters in our game, I’ve elected to use DAZ3D Genesis for Humanoid Base because it makes pretty characters and to take advantage of its Morphs. I’m applying Bone Scaling for additional customization. I acquired a Marvelous Designer license to generate Clothing. In my opinion, Clothing is the greatest challenge with Character Customization. I’m hoping MD will make it a little easier to deal with. At minimum, provide patterns for use with UnrealEngines Apex Cloth / Clothing Tool. Character Armor will be static mesh pieces attached to base body.

I know there is a lot to think about, so your take time to research. I’m always available on discord for deeper discussions about this topic. Good Luck to you on your game dev journey.

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Not that its an easy task, mind you, but its totally possible to make clothing in blender, on the fly.

Very similar to MD - and free mostly, though you should probably donate to the modeling cloth developer if you actually make a profit using his addon, but my opinion is unpopular :stuck_out_tongue:

MD is great for some stuff. Definitely a faster solver.
however in both cases, with chaos coming in, things have changed somewhat.
The baseline workflow is still the same, the paint is also still mostly the same - and thats a shame. I was really looking forward to changes to that pipeline since the way nvcloth was implemented into the engine was anything but right, with backstop not working at all, and the distance of the vertex not being anywhere near the correct radius.

For OP - yes, you definitely are fighting against engine changes like donchichotte fought windmills about 90% of the time you make characters.
In conjunction to bad marketplace asset rules - forced epic skeleton compatibility is just wrong - this is the reason you don’t see very many modular character in the marketplace.

@TechLord
ARK did the replicated character bone scaling mess 4 years ago (or more?) - they used that. Because its easy to replicate.
I’M positive I recently saw a plugin that did this with replication on anything - you just can’t expect it to look any good at all. After all you are literally deforming a mesh.

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Wouldn’t it be great if there was some kind of standard for character clothing/parts, similar to the Unreal Skeleton? So I could buy a chain mail, or flak vest, or maid apron, or whatever, and it would fit?
Most of the “customizable” systems on the marketplace have too few parts that work with them – there’s no way to mix-and-match with additional content. And most of the characters are hyper-stylized custom rigs that may work well for a level boss or a “single character game” but doesn’t work for item-based RPGs, sandboxes, and such.
Similarly, painting in skin tight clothing in known UV locations, and knocking out hidden skin segments when covered by bulkier clothing (not just for performance, but to avoid clipping-through) would be helpful.
Something like the Daz3D Genesis series, except for Unreal, and focus on game based characters, would be pretty great!
Make the base mesh source files public, so it’s easy to build new parts that fit, and see if we can’t get a marketplace of separately provided, pluggable items, going…

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You know you can export and modify any asset you buy on the marketplace right?
if all you need to do is match an apron you don’t need anything. Delete or do not export LODs, load up in Blender. Load the model under it for sizing. Go to the sculpt tool and deform away to fit.
So long as you do not alter the verts at all - by removing or adding any - weight paint, morphs, and whatever else will still work.

Preventing clipping is more of a challenge. You would have to remove parts of your character that are under the clothing to prevent it.
in a pinch you can get the shader to move the vertex inward based on a texture and negative normal ws.
so when clothing A gets put on, Texture A is used by you skin shader, and you solved clipping.
Making the texture can be problematic- because everything is unwrapped differently. But its also just a texture. You could even generare it in engine with a RT system and save it - think Bruks impostors system, but for 1 character and 1 cloth item to produce an occluded geometry texture…
id make this, its just that like 2 people would buy it, and the rest would just paint textures…

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Back in the UDK days I attempted to develop a Standardized Customization system called Universal Modular Entity Construction Hierarchical Sets (UMECHS).I believe Epic intended to build a standard with the UE4 Mannequin, however, retargeting negates it. I believe that a group of Marketplace Publisher could collaborate to build a standard character and parts catalog.

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Things are never that modular.

To prevent clipping entierly, you need to remove geometry however you see fit.
you can’t expect the maker of a t-shirt asset to modify the mesh you made your self to remove the correct amount of mesh from under the shirt.

Likewise, you can’t expect the shirt maker to be limited in sleeve length by a standard without majorly compromising any and all originality.

Thats why what you want is something you must learn and actively DO rather than a script you can run.

Just buy an asset that’s rigged to the epic skeleton, delete the part of the mesh from under it that is not needed. And export out as a new skeletal mesh - a dressed asset.
(You’ll also have to correct the UVs. Possibly unify the material into one if you need mobile compatibility, and maybe set up a lightmass compatible no-overlap UV.)

Now, the assets can have bad weight paint, so in that case the maker of the t-shirt would be the one responsible for bad work.
same for bad vector paint/cloth paint.
Again. If you want to keep the existing stuff, you need to keep the vertex order untouched.
so you delete under the character skin, export it out separate as “skin for t-shirt x” and you add the shirt on top with master pose component.

either approach is maybe 10m of work. If even. Save for when you have to mess with UVs i guess.

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Yes, but I’m not an artist :slight_smile:

It’s also not a matter of making one character with a different look; it’s a matter of building mix-and-match “paper doll” or “avatar” characters, that can change their clothes and equipment at runtime. Having built this kind of system from scratch and worked on similar systems at other companies, including for UGC driven companies, I’ve found that many artists would rather build something custom and eye candy, than sweat to match a bunch of “arbitrary” technical specifications, but if you can actually make it all match up, it can be great, and very powerful for those who go that route! And if you have the right templates and easy-to-use verification tools available for artists, you can get communities of artists who build particular things they’re good at (shoes, or party dresses, or hairstyles, or whatever) and sell them in the marketplace, and then mix-and-match for your character builder.

But it doesn’t! Re-targeting may make it possible for me to buy the Elf Swordswoman With Improbably Skimpy Armor and re-use some animations I already have, but it does pretty poorly with “make fingers match up to grips” and it doesn’t let me take the hauberk from that Well Protected Orc character and cover the most vulnerable parts of the Elf without significant custom surgery – and it doesn’t help any at all at runtime. Consider any avatar-based game you can think of – MMOs, open world, sandbox, 3D chats – that’s the kind of “runtime mix and match” that’s missing.

There are a few “character customization systems” on the marketplace (I think I may own all of them?) but they don’t come with any real variety of clothing (or any at all, in some cases – what does “customization” even mean there?) and there’s no extra parts to buy for them. The “advanced” ones seem to go overboard on morph targets – sure, that’s fun to build and also fun to use, but misses the real need for “mix and match humans.” Honestly, some of the better ones are the Daemon3d girl/boy sets, but even those are only a part of the way there. (And then they’re a bit cartoonish, rather than “default realism-ish” – there’s a certain question about art styles not matching between parts, too … but they’re still among the most varied!)

Death by aiming too high, perhaps? :slight_smile: I would be super happy if I could get five each of “low fantasy” male hairstyles, underwear, upper body clothing, lower body clothing, and shoes, to all match up, and then the six or seven major skin tone textures to go with it. Even better if there were well defined body shape morphs going off “normal” towards “heavy,” “muscled,” and “thin.” Even better better if there were texture set morphs to match those additional shapes, too (muscle tone, especially!) If I could get the same for females, that’d be even better. If there were about six major morph targets for the face with well-defined semantics and names, that’d also be swell (maybe some well-defined morphs to go with the well-defined skin tones …) Add expansion packs for modern-street, and sci-fi, with similar assets for the upper/lower/shoes parts, and it would probably do very well on the marketplace. I mean, I doubt the marketplace is a major income source for most sellers anyway, but the “my open world needs customizable characters” and “my RPG needs different kinds of armor” and “my virtual changing room needs wardrobes” needs would be met.

I have worked on, led, and in one case built from scratch, three major shipping avatar systems that support this level of modularity, starting in 2001 and ending in 2017. It can absolutely be done. It can even be done with user-generated-content as the driver. It needs strong standards, it needs good support assets and tools, and it needs a big enough foundation of assets to give it critical mass. And some artists would not want to build to this spec – that’s totally OK, as long as some would!

Building just the foundational assets from scratch would cost several hundred thousand dollars, at least, assuming off-shore outsourcing rates. Again, depending on the level of sophistication required. (I’m thinking 500k vertices high-res, baked to 35k vertices in-game, perhaps?) Meshes built for this system would be slightly higher-poly than “optimized” because you’d have cuts along well-defined paths for “when wearing shorts, these skin bits go away” and “when wearing short boots, these skin bits go away” and so on. If I were independently wealthy, I’d totally throw money and time at this! Someone would build the runtime system for all of this once, to make it easy to get going (I’d be happy to) and push it all out, and hopefully there will be enough critical mass to actually establish something for the rest of the community to build off of.

It’s really that, though – critical mass. I don’t think creators, on their own, would achieve that. I would love to be proven wrong, though :smiley:

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They won’t simply because - as artists - they’ll never agree to a standard made up by person X of nowhere at all.

For the most part, they can’t even be bothered to follow data sheets and studies that are presented to everyone by Game Gems, so there is little to no point in even suggesting this.

Besides, Without someone on a team who is capable of making adjustments (which take barely a week to learn from 0 knowledge) even with standards you’ll still have issues.

Not everything will work flawlessly.
Not every weight paint will be the same between assets (And you really cannot standardize the paint. It either works for your use case or does not).
Not every mesh will be free of clipping.
not everry mesh will have the correct morphs assigned for your case.
etc.

Again, things are never that modular. You always have that 1 off item that doesn’t fit into the rules.
the fact you have rules at all, will threfore discourage progress, innovation, etc. Making it a constant hassle to find a workaround that let’s you do what you need. (Kinda like engine changes? Hurray!)

There’s also the fact that imposing any rule on art is just wrong…
But we aren’t talking philosophically here. Making humanoid characters for use in a videogame or movie or3d render is something that follows some rules already.

What you are talking about however is tantamount to censorship.
Epic and the Marketplace curators would never go for adopting such rules.

Something like daz may - perhaps even successfully.
(Its their biz model currently isn’t it?).

PS: for finger retargeting to look a little better you need to set the root of the finger bone to follow scaled animation rather than skeleton. The rest of the chain should then be free to wrap up/curl as needed.
if not, you can use corrective poses on the hands that alter the base animation for the specific pose. (And now a days you can make those in engine with control rig).

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It has been their business model for a long time! Give you the base figure, and then build clothing and accessories that work with the base models and sell for monies. A lot of their users prefer the adult type content, though, so going from there to meat-and-potatoes gaming is a stylistic challenge :smiley: Also, those assets don’t come with redistribution rights, even for baked-in assets in games.

Some things they’ve done are pretty smart! Certain kinds of clothing or morphs are expressed as deltas off of the base mesh. You don’t build a camisole by adding new geometry; you build a morph target that shifts the appropriate vertices a little bit. Then, if someone else applies a “chubby” body modifier, that’s OK; the deltas will largely still work out alright.
Same thing for facial structure: you don’t build a new topology for the “Thai face” versus “Han face” versus “Basque face,” instead you move the existing vertices around to match.
The draw-back with this is that you need sufficient vertices in the underlying mesh to actually allow this, but with modern game characters being in the 30k+ vert range, that’s starting to become reasonable.
(I did this with 2k vertex avatars back in the early 2000s, and it was a bit more of a challenge there :slight_smile: )

What I’m talking about is a standard for making mix-and-match paper doll assets. You can choose to follow it, and users of the paper doll system will prefer your assets, or you can choose not to, in which case nothing is different from what it is right now.

The discussion of “Art” vs “art” vs “entertainment” vs “product” is of course age old. That being said, if someone expects a pay check (or a marketplace purchase) then they should probably produce what those with the money (customers, project funders, etc) need. Or, you know, move to Humboldt county and join a hippie commune; that works, too!

Anyway – I’m not quite proposing the All Points Bulletin character builder, here, but any game with a large and composable set of assets have built those assets to a standard. Any RPG that changes your character when you put on different armor, has these kinds of rules. Any online 3D space (be it Mees or IMVU.com or Roblox or whatever) will have these rules, although only some of them support user-generated content. Plenty of artists exist who have experience building things like this, so clearly it can be done, and that “one item that doesn’t quite work” is TOTALLY FINE.

Currently, it’s not possible for me to buy, on the marketplace, a tunic, a leather jacket, an overcoat, a chain mail, and a plate mail, and swap them out on a character. There are plenty of individual characters that have one of those items, but there’s no standard set of guidelines or validation tools, so it’s not even POSSIBLE to build interchangeable content, even if you wanted to.

Having a standard is necessary for “paper dolls” to be possible. Having that standard strike the right balance between “it actually works for many real-life cases” versus “it’s an absolute pain in the ■■■ to develop for even for the best meaning artist” is hard, and can make or break the idea. Having enough initial pieces available to bootstrap the demand among creators is probably crucial – there are plenty of “character builders” on the marketplace, but most of them have way too little geometry, and none of them actually come with a design bible for how to actually build more content to match.
And I think that critical mass is the important bit. If someone provided a base character, and sufficient additional pieces to make for a minimal cohesive whole, and the design files, bible, and validation tools (!) to build more, it wouldn’t be a “set of rules published by a nobody,” but an actual, working, foundation. Some creators might find that of interest, and certainly a number of customer on the Marketplace, would!

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Again, this all comes out to- easy to do out of the engine in a 3d program.
not really possible in engine only.

If you work outside the engine, you rarely have any interest in making accommodations for one of the smallest market shares out there (ue4). You target the ones people actually download a lot (unity).

Thats basically the same with Make Human anyway.
they target all platforms rather than just unreal.
probably the same for daz and definitely the same of mixamo

also, you probably won’t pass marketplace validation unless you sell a full working character. So you can’t do something like buy this to add a coat on this character series which essentially only contains a coat.

You as an artist could maybe setup up a digital shop, Which isn’t the marketplace, where people could buy garments and the character template. Pre rigged to UE4.
But like you mentioned its not cheap and super fast to develop either a system that works, and you’d be hard pressed to find clients because people looking for modular characters pay a team to make them.