Hi All,

As you know GameGuru MAX will have a new character creator, and we are working on the designs now to add things like animation control and choice of weapon, but we wanted to cast the net wider to find out what Character Creator tools you prefer, and how you prefer to animate them if you wanted to create/import your own. From our own limited researches, we have our eye on a few:

SKETCHFAB = Source of many 3D model types, including some rigged and animated characters
MIXAMO = Currently seems to be a free source of around 120 characters and many animations you can assign to them
CHARACTER CREATOR 3 = A new Pipeline Edition allows the export of excellent characters to FBX for use in games but it costs $199

And on a related note, once you have your chosen character, how do you prefer to animate the character, use a selection of animations from MIXAMO, or create them yourself, and if so, in what tool. If you follow some of the CC3 tutorials, you will see how they can create a character, them map it to the animations in say Unity and Unreal, but the process is serious rocket scientist stuff to remap the limbs and animations over. Perhaps the answer goes without saying that you think it would be a nice idea if this process was completely automated so you just select your character, import it, and the rig remap 'just works'.

Feel free to discuss here, and I may feature the responses in my upcoming Live Broadcast this Wednesday at 4 PM GMT

making sure you fully support blender animations seems like a really good idea considering it is the main (free) tool most people will be using
+1 for mixamo support too

I never used it... but it looks amazing, the character editor from the game "Black Desert Online".
Maybe an inspiration for the GGmax character ed.
DAZ 3D and the old poser 3D versions... thats what I've used long time ago.

Blender support might be a good choice, although I have not idea about it, it may be a good choice and free cost.
Anyway maybe you will end giving support for several 3d soft, so you will be close to cover almost anything, if so, don't forget 3ds max, they have some CHARACTER CREATOR too.

About mixamo animations, are amazing, any way you have to take care of the fineprint about using their animations.

What's about makehuman?

Maybe CC in GGMax having a collection of some sort of bip files, with different animations to apply to the chars, might help.

When it comes to Maximo how long will that actually be around .. How long before Adobe just simply remove it or start to charge extortionate prices for it. Have to agree with 3com that maybe MakeHuman could be a good option thinking ahead. ?

Yeah, avoid Adobe - simply can't be trusted!
MakeHuman would perhaps be a better option...

OldFlak....

Well to start with, while you can get characters from sketchfab, it's not really a character creator, it's a hosting site for showing if your models, those characters could be made in any 3d software and in any version of any if the supported export types, so there's not really any compatability to aim for, it's like saying you'll make it compatable with the game creator store.

I would suggest aiming for matching compatability with the export types and quirks of 3ds max, makehuman, and blender as they would be the main three used . Mixamo is another common one, but as synchro said, how long it will be around is anyone's guess because it was a product bought out by Adobe, and we all know Adobe loves to buy companies out specifically to shut down their products and kill competition, and now that fuse is shut down mixamo is probably on its way too.

Personally I create everything with blender, using a standard bone rig with IK control bones, painting weights to the vertices, and animating multiple animations on a single timeline.

Hmmm, donut.

leave out Blender...
"It's going places."
Personally, all those buttons makes my head swim, but I personally
know people who use it who would work with me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7M1UaDe0qsk

Myself i almost fainted when I saw the interface in 3dsmax, so much clutter compared to blender, and so many things you can do in blender with the click of a button or a single shortcut in blender need multiple operations menus and button clicks in 3DS Max. I pop into 3DS every now and again to try and learn it but it just feels so clunky and slow I give up quickly.

For Unity Games I use CC3 and Unity to rig. It is a really fast process because of the integrated unity human rigger.

For GG Classic I used Fuse and the animation scripts of other GG Characters. I never get how to import own animations as fbx in GG. Unity easy let's use mixamo or many other animation assets, free in the store.

Im a 3DSMAX user here, however so far have not had any problems with making models in and exporting as .X with a plug-in. Animations also work as expected.

I come into problems when I look across the web for character models and get a FBX saying its supported in Unity and Unreal and try to get that into GG and that process can be quite unpredictable. Have to usually use programs like fragmotion, but even that software fails sometimes to open some FBX's out there on the market right now.

I've recently purchased high quality character models and they are FBX however I am unable to import into GG Classic. I've not tried Max yet.

When it comes to Blender, I think now it no longer supports .X exporting so converting is required with 3rd party software. If there was a way to improve that process, I think that might make the Blender users happy. A lot of good tutorials out there on how to make models and rigged in Blender. The real plus is its free. I think a lot of people might be coming to Max expecting their blender models to work in Max. So that will be a requirement for sure, to ensure those imports work.

For character generator softwares, I dont have much experience with using any of them so whatever direction you guys take with that I will support. Sounds like MakeHuman is the most prominent mention.

Very hard to not come across Blender in the current live development space. It's the main hobbyist+pro tool I see doing so much heavy lifting on its own.

My wish is the following : In the latest versions of Game Guru Classic I was able to import my animated avatars created with Daz Studio or with this workflow "MakeHuman -> Blender + BVH motion". Those animated avatars were successfully imported in FBX format.
It would be nice if their import in GG Max could also work correctly.

It is good to know that since a short time, the price of each interactive license for the 3D models found on the online store of Daz Studio is reduced to 5 usd. See this link for the explanation of the interactive license : https://www.daz3d.com/interactive-license

Here is the link (limited in time : 30 days) to a short video (8 seconds = 25 MBytes) uploaded on Movavi Cloud : http://cloud.movavi.com/show/poHeDR9qvYA5VhIjQsCaJUf72cXNWKzb
Nothing serious there. It is a simple performance test made in GG Classic with the instanciation of an animated figure created with this process "MakeHuman -> Blender + BVH motion". UV mapping with a funny texture created with Paint.Net.

By the way, for the creation of static mesh with an external 3D modeler, I found this nice free tool in my archives : DeleD Community Edition ( https://sourceforge.net/projects/deled/ ). I tested successfully its .DBO exporter with Game Guru Max while having applied PBR textures created with ShaderMap Pro.

In the current state game guru max is in I would like to request the adding of the following changed/added:

particle based hair
higher polygon feet
better applied skin

I most likely will use fuse to create and/or animate my characters because I'm not good at making humans as well as animating them.