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

[TechLord]

@jwatte

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!

@jwatte, I appreciate your insight on the topic and I agree and would be in the market for a product like that. I’m thinking DAZ3D is positioning themselves to fill in this role with Characters and Accessories for UnrealEngine.DAZ Bridge is the first step. What remains is an embeddable module/plugin to assemble and save/load Customized Entities that can be integrated into any game product developed with the engine. This is an area we intend to fill by developing a Universal Constructor to be used in the assembly of multiple entity types in multiple game products.

I call it the HyperBasher, as it inspired on the *Kitbash *approach to assembly. I hope to build a large and composable set of assets and provide templates for others to use to create assets for use in customizing entities. I’m no longer pursuing a single standard in favor of building a online library and catalog of various base meshes and compatible parts/accessories. The HyperBasher works with unrealengine most basic yet powerful feature: Actor hierarchal attachment scene components. Using this feature for arbitrary attachment provides the most flexibility to meet most Entity requirements.

The HyperBasher is modular in design and embeddable into ue4 applications a blueprint package. If one doesn’t need the assembler, the external save/load functions of System can be implemented as an independent module that can be embedded into applications for just importing assemblies. I am proposing the APB Customization, but I think its going to take more than just a standard to pull it off

• Master Base Models
• Supplemental Asset Packs with Compatible Parts
• Online Catalog of Compatible Parts
• License that allows existing models to be used only as reference.
• Embeddable Assembler Module
• Embeddable Load/Save Module
• Decoupled GUI (for custom GUI wireup)
• A Foundation of Developers to produce and maintain all of the above