Hi All, As you know model importing work will never be over, but as we charge towards ever more impressive visuals in games and other interactive works, we want to be able to keep up in GameGuru land and import things we find out there. Now that Fuse is pretty much going behind a paywall, I have lost my free character maker, so I switched to MakeHuman and was quite surprised just how far along it has come.



This will be my free character maker recommendation of choice until something else free comes along that's better. The characters are higher poly that the usual game assets, with over 26K polygons naked and well over 30K with some clothes on, they use upwards of 163 bones and need up to 8 bones per vertex to animate. This would have been nuts back in the day, but Shader Model 5.0 and newer graphics engine made it possible to now support and recommend. The tricky part was getting it all rendering, which is now done, so the next step is grafting the stock GameGuru animation to the bones so the characters can walk about and do things. My intent is for these characters to be used for story-based scenarios where you don't need lots of them.

While I am posting, I wanted to pose a question. Having played with MakeHuman for a while now, it seems it would take me a few years to create what they have done inside GameGuru. Brutally speaking, it makes the current built-in Character Creator look like a bag of washing. I have checked the license to MakeHuman, and it looks like I can use the exported models inside GameGuru (even ship them as part of the product). My suggestion, and please feedback on this, is whether it makes sense to essentially delete the Character Creator, and replace it with a smoothed out import process for getting MakeHuman characters straight into GameGuru (almost drag and drop style). It would mean learning another piece of software to make your characters, but it's about 7000% more powerful, completely free, nicely maintained, has its own dedicated community and did I mention free For now, a simple YAY, if you thnk dropping the current Character Creator and opting for the above solution, is a good idea. I don't see the Character Creator evolving much past its current state without a complete rewrite, and it has had its fair share of negative reviews over the last few years (anything short of the character creator in GTA5 is going to get slammed on Steam).

Yay


There is also an add-on for Blender that is also free and open source called ManuelBastioniLAB

http://www.manuelbastioni.com/

Seems like a fair long term strategy, once you can handle all the nuances of Makehuman you should be able to handle most models. I would try for a bit of over kill on number of bones , polys etc to future proof it as much as possible.

Also can you PLEASE make sure you publish the maximums, bone structure naming, handedness, scale, format versions tested and the like all in one place. So content makers can more easily leverage their own stuff in to fit with out having to search high and low.
Currently the info is all over the place often missing small but vital details. Failure to find the correct details can lead to frustration, high blood pressure, depression and broken keyboards.

If practical I would keep the current Character Creator around until this new approach is stable then a while longer as a depreciated feature no need to rile the natives upset people who are using it.


FYI.
There is a makehuman base character in Poser. And as I understand it all characters included as standard with Poser can be used in games just not sold as separate entities** . Not ones bought separately or included as free bonuses as they have their own licenses .

** I believe this was an unintended loophole up until around 2014 when they rewrote the EULA and made it official (I think it was a case of handling the fact that the horse all ready having bolted)
Also most figures are morphable like make human so it better more than it seems.

If I remember right you can change the skeleton in make human to a game rig with less bones ,also use a lower poly base mesh
you can get clothes here
http://www.makehumancommunity.org/clothes.html
Other parts
http://www.makehumancommunity.org/bodyparts.html

Dave

Yay, sounds like a good idea! I got iClone and all the bells and whistles that came extra, and the only use I see for all that is in a different engine, lol. Mostly a waste of money. Mostly. I think Makehuman with GG would also benefit the Makehuman community if some artists were motivated to create assets for the program.

I personally think the current character creator needs its focus readjusted to be more about specifying behaviours and stats than models and textures. At the moment, its limited options mean it doesn't do either particularly well. But if it were to allow us to specify weapon, what frames pertain to what animation, what animation to play when walking/running/tracking/attacking/ducking etc., that would be much more useful. Also, the Makehuman support would also help users importing humanoid enemies; I think there should still be some basic provision for users importing non-humans, even more so infact, given that an animated T-rex will have totally different animation keyframes to the base uber soldier.

AE

I think that character creator is better suited for GG. While make human is very cool, the poly count is just way to high.

As a priority increase the current bone limit , previous to the DX11update you could overcome the GG limit by using dummies, used this method for cloth and added limbs, but had to completely redo a couple of characters. Ripping out several dummies to get things working again. Not ideal as it means less fluid animations.
GG didn't seem to recognise dummies as bones previously but now adds these to the bone count for some reason keeping characters real basic and pretty much generic human. It seems a little limiting also to think inside the box about creating or converting rigs to graft stock GameGuru animations onto characters created for it when you should be thinking of adding/replacing individual .fbx animations to them in editor. Sounds like the intention is to continue with the old method of thousands of frames in one file most of which are never used and isn't clean or efficient in my mind.
You really need to try actually using the animators in other engines to get a proper idea of how it all works nowadays.

In MakeHuman, if you choose 'geometries' and then 'topologies' you can choose a lower poly proxy mesh. I can't remember if there were any low-poly proxies by default, but you can download them here - http://www.makehumancommunity.org/proxies.html

Yay.

yes, cool

@Gtox
Exactly as posted above

Dave

Yes an no ..

Confusing aye? Let me explain.

Instead of completely getting rid of character creator, rewrite it as a dedicated character importer, where you can import an unrigged character in say obj x and fbx format and apply a gg specific rig and animation to it, similar what mixamo does.

That way you can use programs like make human, or any modelling studio, and bring it into gameguru with the correct riggong and a library of animation to chose from.

Whatever you do dont tie us to just one free third party program, if thst program goes away or becomes locked behind a pay wall well be screwed.

There are lower proxy meshes and skeletal rigs, but the very few clothes that are available don't work well with them. You would have to have experienced artists make clothes in all different styles. Not as easy as you think.

Speaking as a novice, and a writer, rather than a coder, this sounds like a wonderful idea with a lot of flexibility.

@rolfy : I looked for free animators, and in the case of MakeHuman they simply recommended the user go to Blender and add the animations there. Do you have other recommendations for free software that can add animations to the rigged model? I completely agree that the user should have total freedom to add their own animations instead of relying on the bloated GG animation set, it would just be there as an option if the user did not want or could not find an animation they need such as idle, walking, attacking, e.t.c.

@Lee
In makehuman you can
Select between different rigs when it comes to Export, you should pick the Game Rig.
Regarding the polycount, makehuman comes with so called Proxy models that can be used instead of the highpoly ones, the proxys are fairly lowpoly and would be the way to go.

Now with that Info u should be able to eliminate some of the issues/limits... hope it helps.

I am not talking about creating animations but dropping ready made ones onto a character. There are a lot of free animations out there and even mixamo still provides a fair sized library of .fbx animations to use. The Carnegie-Mellon University mocap library has been converted to both bvh and fbx formats here's a link to one of the fbx conversion downloads available.
https://mega.nz/#F!KZtDwSZK!NgMHgEcKM14DAQ6f2Wj28g

These mocaps can be used commercial/non-commercial.

http://mocap.cs.cmu.edu/

In simplest terms you should be ale to change out walk animation with your own etc, currently all animations are held in a single file with frame numbers referenced in the fpe, it isn't easy to change individual animations this way unless your prepared to get your hands dirty with animation apps. Easiest way for now is to add frames to the end of an already bloated animation list and most users aren't going to find that 'easy' at all.

Here's a screenshot from Unity's animator showing how easy it is to swap out animations. Even using a stock GG character (I still have the source files for these so it was easy to split the anims into separate fbx files)

I don't expect GameGuru to reach the complexity of blend anims etc available in other top engines but it would surely be easier to use if basic anims were changeable this way. Even if it were a fixed set of referenced default frames such as walk/run/crouch etc, all the basic movement sets, which could be swapped out it would be a huge time saver all round.
If this isn't feasible I can understand and only throwing this out there but the more I use 'another' engine the more I see that some things are in fact 'easier' outside of GG.

I don't understand why you would delete the Character Creator though?
To be honest I use the Character Creator a lot. It's not amazing but for my horror game I'm working on, it works perfect. Being able to apply your own face and to mix and match body parts then change the color is really nice to make semi-custom models and its very easy. Sure the character creator is rough around the edges and could use some more fine tuning but the ease of use and how fast you can do it is why I use Game-Guru.

There are a ton of people who make models and such on this forum. I'm sure having an awesome importer would be really amazing for them, but for the average user that lacks time or doesn't know much about modeling, getting rid of the character creator kinda sucks.

Here is what is scary to me as someone that doesn't know anything about making models. Because we all know it won't be a "smoothed out process." Here is what will happen because it always does with this software.
There will an unforeseen problem with Game-Guru and the model I try to import.
There won't be any documentation on the the issue I am having. Look at the current documentation on importing models, its basically non existent, and really old as it shows the main ai having default.fpi instead .lua.
These forums aren't exactly the most happening place to ask questions, many threads where the user has a problem simply don't get answered and disappear.
If you do find an answer its from a regular user who may or may not be correct. And the answer could easily be years old.

To give some insight as to why I don't like this idea here is an example of the last issue I had.
I see all this stuff about how PBR is in game-guru now. Awesome! I already have a ton of PBR textures, so I take my time and make them all correct with GameGuru suffixes. Like _color, _gloss and what not. Then I open a map and go to work making a house with the EBE. But now I'm having an issue it looks like the normal maps or something is wrong. I don't know it should be working fine? I search the forums, I search google. Nothing comes up. Dunno still don't know. PBR works with everything else, maybe its just EBE? Does that even make sense? Guess it doesn't work?

I don't have time to learn another software such as MakeHuman. I work on another project in Unity (I'm the sound guy) and from the perspective of someone who isn't a modeler, the whole thing bums me out. Look at this thread and you can see the headache it would become for the average user. And maybe I'm just a filthy casual, or just being close-minded.
But why make a character in MakeHuman and then import into game-guru. If one is going to take the time to learn other software wouldn't it make more sense to make the character and then import it into Unity instead?
Unless this is all just aimed at people who make and sell models on every platform. That would make more sense.
Sorry for the rant, I just think the current character creator isnt that bad, with a little work it could be super cool. And I use it so it would suck to see it go.

Nay!

@rolphy you can do that to a basic level already, but you have to do it manually, Lee added a feature recently where you can have a base model and a model for each animation, then with some commands in the fpe gameguru on first load of the entity will pack them together in one dbo file. Its not pretty, and seriously needs a decent gui rather than manually messing with fpe's, but it does work.

If you take a look at the dragon entity you should get an idea of how it works.

@insane6

Firstly the premise that people get ignored on here is very wrong, almost every post requesting help gets answered as best the community can, there are even certain users on here that are so rude and demanding that most sane people would normally ignore them, but they still get helped by the community. This is hsnds doen one of the best communities for helping eachother i have ever seen.

Secondly, learning makehunan is hardly learning a complicated piece of software, its literally slide some sliders, choose some clothes, export the model then import it into gameguru and job done.

The character creation part is not much different in use than our character creator but with more options to choose from. The hard part wil be the importing and animating part , which is what lee is asking us for our opinion of here.

Whatever lee does though, he does need to make sure that getting a character into gg and animating it are just as simple and easy to do as the current character creator is to use, none of this messing with fpe's and such.

Agreed … Pretty much all are answered ?

Yay on the subject of the model importer. This is a great idea, as you say it would take years to develop anything like it.

I agree with Belidos and the yes and no answer. I've used make human and although it's a good program and makes quality models, most people will not be able to use it effectively. For one as far as I know there is not much default clothing in it, if any and most people will not want naked npc's walking around. The high poly count is also an issue, at least for Windows users, I believe the Mac version has lower poly count models or allows them out the box. I imagine that even clothed models, still have all the characters poly count hiding beneath them, which obviously adds unneeded polys and textures, unless you are trying some sort of strip poker game

It's an interesting option though and worth thinking about, but not ideal for most users. I don't think animation is part of the package, so knowledge will be needed in another app for that and that's where it starts to get messy. I can't remember if any bones transferred over to Blender in my make human tests years ago, I think I had to make some (which took a bit of doing from scratch and no real prior experience of Blender bones) and even then the anims didn't transfer over to GG (probably the bone names at a guess).

A workflow for artists who already do this sort of thing is a good idea, as it may start actual characters being put on the store we can use. At the moment the NPC side of GG is a little all over the place. We have the default soldiers and CC characters which use one set of scripts, then all the others which use different scripts entirely. I can understand why some people can get confused about this, although it was probably caused by the difficulty replicating the stock npc's in the first place.

I also wouldn't remove CC entirely. At least not unless a system is in place which is better than it and as easy to use. Perhaps as suggested, make it a separate program. That way you make the GG engine a little smaller in size (unless it is already calling a separate program when you load up CC in editor) and users can simply load the characters in GG after making them beforehand.

I'm all for making better characters for GG and making it easier for qualified artists to do so, it can only make it better. Just don't forget the people out there who can't use the programs needed to get them actually in, clothed and animated into GG.

So I would say yes, but don't remove the CC option entirely.

I thought Lee was Overhauling the Importer …
Could it not be integrated there and leave the CC ?

That's cool, that's first time I've heard of that feature's existence...which sadly only goes to prove Insane6's point that these new features are never properly documented and you have to ask forum goers for help.

I also share Insane6's scepticism for this alleged 'smoothed out' pipeline. Game Guru doesn't exactly have the best track record when it comes to implementing new features and furnishing them to a high enough standard that the average, non-coding, non-artist user can use. EBE: limit assets and texture problems. Character Creator: Limited assets unless you can model and animate your own. PBR: Compatibility issues with certain texture formats, problems with alpha channels and illum maps, shader could be improved, framerate spikes, lightmapping issues. Even the FBX animation compiling aforementioned: great idea, but no GUI or documentation to support it. All these features were started with the best of intentions, but they usually always make it into GG in an unfinished or evaluation state and are then forgotten about and never improved. At least, that's what it feels like from a user perspective.

On reflection, I think existing features should be optimised and fixed before we start tinkering with new workflows and pipelines. Because what's really needed in the character department is a massive overhaul of how Game Guru handles character animation. The merging of FBX files is fantastic news but only one part of it, we should get facial animation back in, even if only to FPSC's Dark Voices level. I'm guessing that means some form of animation blending support?

AE

I agree with DVader and Belidos... Please keep CC, improve it, and make an importer so other NPC's can get imported and rigged so they can be used in GG also.

I personally think the Character Creator was a decent implementation but one that felt unfinished. The ability to swap in and out parts is really cool. I was considering testing out to see if i could make my own custom parts for them. Like hats and such.

I dont really have an opinion on going with MakeHuman or not or removing CC to replace it. I just concern over memory. As with all aspects of GG, I just want whatever is added to GG to work in the end when we make multi-level standalone games. So if we do go with it, we will need to look at the game ready meshes and bones, that they may provide.

For the 'Keep Character Creator' camp, are you recommending we continue improving it, and if so, for how long and to what degree of additional features? As I mentioned, it would literally take me YEARS to match what you get in modern AAA games, MakeHuman, iClone, and Fuse. Those guys have TEAMS working on this one thing, I have me and a few tireless freelancers who give their time mostly for free. If we are aiming for 'perfectly complete', what does that mean for Character Creator. Should we make a list here which satisfied this condition, just so we can see exactly what is missing, preventing it from being 'complete'? For example, how do we implement limitless assets in Character Creator? Is it just a case of adding more bodies, heads and hats, or are talking massive rewrite?

This is wildly optimistic but...

Step 1: Commission an artist to make additional character parts for Game Guru (that sentence sounded weird). 10 new head meshes, 10-20 new bodies meshes with the standard GG animation list, 10-15 new hat meshes. Add 2-3 texture variations with each mesh, bringing your total to between 60 and 100 new assets. Sell this as a DLC pack to help users wanting to continue using CC and fund more development work.

Step 2: Add the following functionalities to CC:
- Import / Merge FBX animation data
- Play animations
- Specify animations (have this write the keyframe numbers directly into the fpe as anim 1, anim 2 etc...)
- OPTIONAL: Add a saturation component to the colour slider so users can accurately tint hair, head and shoe colours (I barely used this because all the tint available always seemed 100% saturated).

Step 3: Experiment with animating MakeHuman characters and importing them into Game Guru. Get Game Guru recognising more bones, capable of blending animation, and capable of facial animation.

Step 4: (This is the bit I don't know anything about) Create a new skeleton that can be exported directly from MakeHuman that Game Guru supports natively. If this is not already possible in MakeHuman, consider forming a technical partnership with the folks at MakeHuman to make it a reality. Offer them a bit of financial support in return for implementing this new 'GG-skeleton' as a starting option for new characters.

Step 5: Create a library of animations for that skeleton that can be downloaded in character creator and applied to newly imported models. You could either make this entirely free, a DLC pack, or a semi-paid option where only 10 basic animations are available free of charge and all the good stuff is locked behind a pay wall (and by pay wall, I mean cheap-as-chips-$0.50-an-animation-but-at-least-its-income pay wall).

That's an ridiculous amount of work for one man and his band of merry volunteers, but if you wanted to do it properly, that'd be how you might go about it.

...but maybe right now time would be better spent fixing the current features of Game Guru, rather than embarking on another protracted development cycle.

AE

I actually commented on the thread title which is improving the 'model importer' if you want to drop that and go work on the character creator, which to me is an entirely different thing and as stated "it seems it would take me a few years to create what they have done inside GameGuru. Brutally speaking, it makes the current built-in Character Creator look like a bag of washing."
Some may consider a character creator as 'custom' but not to me personally, I have no interest in swapping clothing etc for generic human characters which makes your game look like everyone else's, no matter how many hats you put in it. Pretty sure a lot of users want same for their games if they want to stand out.
Let's face it I have around three characters in the store and already removed one full pack due to issues with recent updates and no plans of creating any more, just not worth the effort getting anything other than basic rigs into GameGuru.

Fair enough though....I will save any input for a different time

@Lee,some of us were talking about this earlier.can you integrate M Human into gg somehow and keep character creator

Dave

Is there any advantage in removing the CC … Does it do any harm being there as it is ?
I personally wouldn't expect you to spend any more time on developing it as it would need a complete overhaul for starters but as a basic tool its ok and handy for beginners … I would rather your time was spent on the Make Human and other importation features ..
So I guess my answer is just leave it as is and continue on the path your on.

I reckon you get the importer at least to usable state it won't matter if importing MakeHuman rigs, or any rig when it comes to it, providing they are .fbx format, concentrating on one 'free' character creating program doesn't make a lot of sense to me if we are supposedly discussing 'model import'..it is all the same thing and discussion doesn't need to be limited to export from a single program.

My view is also 'leave the character creator as it is' because many might not able to create their own characters.
I do wonder why makehuman has so little usable assets, one would think that software like this for free to all would have a huge userbase and hence have so much more clothes options.
Going through the communitybase assets, there is a lot of lingerie and only few really good and usable items it seems.

In my humble opinion it would be wiser to save the CC and add more diversity to it and little more customization.
Or can be gradually add something like what Avenging Eagle mentioned in Step 1 and Step 2.
Everything else would be good to develop with the help of fbx-import (gradually expanding capabilities)...

As this is a discussion about model importing can I ask a Quick question reguarding the current importer .
Do you find the import function spending a extreme amount of time running Fbx2X. I've taken to monitoring the import in task manager and at times it can spend an hour+ in Fbx2X before finishing sometimes successfully , sometimes not the nots have the annoying habit of freezing GG.

Is this normal or do I have a problem?


AS for improving the current character creator vs improving the importer. If it comes down to one or the other I'd vote for the importer. As it potentually provides the best bang for bucks. And if there is going to be asystem of converting bones/ anim for bipeds that renames bones could that be made configerable via some sort of file or gui so we can create are own conversion sets. And I hope the import changes bipedal npcs do not stop the importation of non-bipedal animated models.

as @Granada mentioned MakeHuman is opensource and is on GitHub, we have a lot of clever people here on the forums would it not be possible to either intergrate MH into GG or make MH GG friendly i.e add an export option to MH just for GG direct to .DBO and in the export process delete hidden faces which will give a massive drop in polycount.

I have spent a couple of days messing around with MakeHuman while its not perfect it seems an ideal fit to GameGuru if it were refined a little more.

Also keep in mind there are thousands that do not come here and have no idea what's going on
If in the next update their CC was missing there could be fireworks

They may not appreciate the fact its there but when its gone you can bet they will notice ..

As GG covers a lot of users and ranges of experience (game making for everyone) then leave the CC as is with perhaps more explanation as to how to create heads clothes etc for those who want to increase this range for themselves or others. This covers off users who have no intention to buy or make characters to use in GG.

Then concentrate on improving import capability whether from make human or fuse or created in blender or wherever with an agreed format. Issues I’ve faced have all centred around the number of bones handled and constraints over weighting per bone or number of overall polys - this assumes character is rigged already on import - not an unreasonable assumption for an importer. Animations (for the rig in question) can already be added individually within fpe - a bit clunky but works. This will enable users who want to add their own or purchased characters an easy method to do so. Then of course it is scripting to make the custom characters perform in the way the game is needed - another subject if animations are not GG stock.

Think we’re trying to find a silver bullet here for everyone’s needs and that is not likely to happen so instead get a smooth underlying import done for those with custom ambition and keep the CC and stock characters for those who don’t have time or inclination for unique assets or animations.

Cheers.

@synchromesh, you're right in this sense.

To all: May be it is worth saving CC with a little improvement?
Perhaps it is better to preserve (and improve) what we already have, than to do something contradictory ?
imho
(and sorry for my English, i'm texting from the pad, without Google Translate)

@cybernescence, I am ready to subscribe to every your word.
You said something that I couldn’t say...

I agree with DVader and Belidos...and I believe as well as cybernescence if I understand him correctly.

What I am doing for now is creating another instance of GG to make sure I have CC still intact. I don't want to lose it or I won't be able to have any new character. I'm not a AAA game maker and I don't expect to create AAA games . . . just fun games.

Get rid of the Character Creator from GameGuru completely and make it it's own stand-alone companion program.

There... i've said it...

Wonderful all power to this option, apart from removing CC. Leave it, or make it a separate program that you can run from within GG's main folder. I'm happy with either myself. The only real issue I have with CC is the obvious neck joint - clearly visible in some animations, I'm sure it would be easy to hide without too much fuss. A slightly longer neck for example, so it doesn't show the end of the neck in certain positions as it does currently.

I wouldn't just support makehuman though, I'd continue FBX support for Pro's as well.

I think many people would buy a DLC of CC additions as well. There's just not enough options to make more than a few characters. The colouring as Avenging Eagle said is also not great, hair and clothing colour seems limited unless you want super blonde etc.

Perhaps the best answer would be to separate CC. Make it open source and possibly get improved in a similar way that GG is now benefiting from. If this is viable of course. Certainly a larger selection of parts would make it a lot better as well.

Just make it easier to edit the textures in CC. A person could make one shirt mesh look like 20 different shirts. Iclone used to offer 5 different cloth meshes and people would retexture the heck out of them.

That’s cool but we also need different animations ,that’s when it gets complicated you cant just pick s animation and set it to any skeleton

Dave

Yep that would work … Unless there are users that have CC characters in their game already as it may break them .. Lets not forget that. But I like the idea ..


Again wise words … I don't think Lee intended to stop improving the FBX import … Just adding better Make Human compatibility ..

Looks like the win-win solution is to keep the Character Creator, but slightly to one side for users who don't want to make their own from scratch. How about a wizard that first pops up and offer the users (A) Easy Character Creator and (B) Import Your Own Character, with a brief outline of the features of each. This way the user is given a heads-up that the CC is a simple one and if they want something more complex, they can do that too, using the import option?

As to the focus on MakeHuman, it's just the starting point. It offers about 5 different bone rigs, can export the animation and use up to 163 bones with 8 bones per vertex influences, including fingers and facial bones (for future lipsyncing). Once that imports smoothly, iClone characters should come in easily, and of course we already have good Fuse importing. Are there other Character Creators I should be aware of and test for support?