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Unity Auto Setup Plans for 2021

Posted By Peter (RL) 3 Years Ago
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Peter (RL)
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Dear Character Creator Users,

Firstly we would like to apologise for the delay in providing you with an updated version of the Unity Auto Setup Tool, and also for the lack of clear information and communication to the community. 

We do understand that the current incompatibility of the Auto Setup Tool makes it difficult for you to keep up with your game development, and not supporting the CC Digital Human shader mapping makes it impossible to deliver high quality characters without visual inconsistencies. Because of this we have been urgently looking to provide the team resources required to make up for this shortcoming, but unfortunately this hasn't been possible. 

Therefore, we have decided to make some development changes this time around. The following is the current plan which we’d like to share with you all.

  1. We won’t be dropping the support of Unity Auto Setup, instead, we still expect Character Creator to become one of the best character solutions available for Unity developers. To achieve this we will seek to outsource future updates, and to reach this goal we are already in contact with some professional programmers.  
  2. If the outsourcing plans do not come to fruition as expected, we will update the Auto Setup Tool ourselves to be compatible with Unity 2020.3 LTS, and also share the open source of Auto Setup to the public in late June. Meanwhile, we will keep looking for programmers from the community to maintain and develop this tool going forward. Someone who is capable of working with shader graph will be highly welcomed. If you are experienced in this field and interested in this position, please contact us.

Again, we do apologise for not responding to your concerns earlier. If you have any ideas or suggestions on how we can make this tool better fit your needs, please feel free to share your comments in this thread. 

Thank you for your understanding.

Reallusion Team

UPDATE: The source code has now been released. Please find it in the post below.


                                                                

Peter
Forum Administrator

www.reallusion.com


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3 Years Ago by Peter (RL)
Rowlan09
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Peter (RL) (5/13/2021)
Again, we do apologise for not responding to your concerns earlier. If you have any ideas or suggestions on how we can make this tool better fit your needs, please feel free to share your comments in this thread.


Thank you very much for addressing this. For one I have to say that I personally as a customer don't see any reason why you make this tool locked source. I don't see the secret with it. It is totally understandable that nobody can catch up with the mess the Unity Pipelines are. If you'd make it open source, we could address the problems at least ourselves in a timely manner.

What's really bothering - after you fought through setting up the materials and the open mouth - is the shoulders. They are just wrong and sticking out in Unity. It's the first what people say is just plain wrong and make the character look ugly when you show them an imported character.

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3 Years Ago by Rowlan09
jerome.dipietro
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I'm a bit worried that you're just looking to hire "Someone who is capable of working with shader graph"... I'm no shader expert but aren't shader graph authored materials more likely to be less performant than something built from scratch, and more low level, like Jason Booth would do? 

I don't see the point of having great looking mats with complex SSS if they can't run in a game. I know HDRP is shiny and new but in a real game (especially VR which is my bread and butter) loading full fat CC3+ characters with all those highpoly submeshes and tons of materials just won't cut it.

I'm personally less fussed about materials (I think many people use their shaders of choice to replace the standard ones, so for example Robert Ramsay's HumanShaderPack) but would much rather you spent your time and money fixing things like 
- adding the new ARKit blendshapes to the GameBase meshes, and 
- improving the texture maps of those game ready exports (i.e. better normals, added SSSMap, etc). 
- Not to mention better support for Unity-ready LOD export. You're using InstaLOD tech, after all, which has a great plug-in for that (in their stupidly priced enterprise-only standalone package).
* that's where MetaHumans really shines - not just the mats and facial rigging (which CC3 can now do more or less on a par) but in the auto lodding which actually makes their characters game ready.

Re. the shoulder issue @Rowlan09 mentions, the problem lies in the avatar definition. It's totally possible to fix it by rotating down the clavicle and then raising the upper arm bone back up to compensate. But why should I have to do that? I find that CC3 avatars are never properly in T-pose when importing into Unity. Now the question is whether that's a Reallusion issue or a Unity one, and I just don't know. Again, spending time on that would be way better than fixating on shiny high end rendering and surface level detail.

Has anyone at Reallusion tried to import a scene from iClone into Unity (characters and fbx animations)? It's not a one-to-one import. Far from it. But it should be. Otherwise why should I spend my time working in iClone rather than another tool?

imho Reallusion's always had this tension between CC3-to-iClone customers who render straight to video, and game developers who use the tech for character creation (because they don't have the time or budget to model and rig bespoke NPCs). There's also perhaps been some bias in the past towards Unreal users, but with MetaHumans there's now strong competition in that space. I'd love to see more focus on CC3 and iClone integrating more effortlessly into a Unity game development pipeline. If you really want "Character Creator to become one of the best character solutions available for Unity developers" that means not just a better Auto Setup (and better exporters), but also more functional and stable tools in the application itself (mesh edit tools that don't mess up vertex order, ability to flip element normals, ability to actually delete geometry, not just hide it). Currently I have to make a round trip to Blender just to fix things before I even get to Unity.


                                    
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Edited
3 Years Ago by jerome.dipietro
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Despite all the "we are not dropping support" it smells a lot like preparing us about dropping support for Unity.

Epic dropped the big ball with their Meta Human software and there is nothing comparable for Unity, you have the chance to take on some market shares here by making the only proper Character Creator for Unity with whatever tools and custom shaders required.
But here we'll get an outside company/individual support which is definitely not on-par with the scale and scope of your tools.

Also, reading about shader graph is quite frustrating. 
HDRP is clearly a niche solution at the moment
URP is far from being ready
I'm pretty 75% of actual Unity dev are sticking to Built-In render pipeline, if you drop the support on that, it's a huge blow.

Making the Auto setup open source is a good thing though, I hope some skilled programmer will take on that. I already created a tool for myself to clean up the textures folders (renaming/organizing) but that could be built-in a more advanced AutoSetup tool with customization upfront.

My biggest frustration at the moment is clearly not having proper Eyes and Hairs shaders. I never found any shader to re-create the nice eye-occlusion. And as for the hairs well I've been through around 12 hair shaders from the Store and from the community (git-hub etc.) and it's almost like each hair type needs a different shader.

What you need is  someone to create Hair and Eyes shaders for Unity that have similar functionalities as the Reallusion ones.
This needs to be compatible with the built-in render pipeline as well as URP/HDRP if you want to cover all bases. Many asset store creators are providing support across all three render pipeline, I hope you'll do the same.
jerome.dipietro
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That's a great point about shader graph only being URP/HDRP compatible. 100% agree that many devs (myself included) are sticking to built-in for a number of projects. *Please take this onboard and feedback to the relevant people @Peter

                                    
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I have been waiting for this! Any ETA's I purchased too many Reallusion product's and I am a little disappointed with how you deal with unity.
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Some of the reported problems impacting Unity look like they're not necessarily in the Auto Setup Tool part (import hooks when bringing into Unity) but with the mesh/materials/blendshapes setup that comes out of the InstaLOD bake and export.

Will you still be looking to update and correct issues relating to that, or does this new effort / direction aim to include some of that process too?
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Yes, please do not forget the support for the built-in render pipeline, because most of us are using it right now. And we really would love to have hair shaders that look at least ok. And better support for Unity-ready LOD export would be great, too. Thank you!
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3 Years Ago by Artcue
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Artcue (5/18/2021)
Yes, please do not forget the support for the built-in render pipeline, because most of us are using it right now. And we really would love to have hair shaders that look at least ok. And better support for Unity-ready LOD export would be great, too. Thank you!

Can i ask what is the built-in render pipeline that you mention? Thank you
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https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/render-pipelines.html
Traditionally Unity only had a single way of rendering to the screen but they then introduced the Universal Render Pipeline (URP) and the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) each of which have characteristics aimed at targeting different platforms. HDRP is for high end desktops and approximates light in a more realistic way. URP is intended for low end hardware such as mobile. You can also script your own render pipeline if you so wish (and have the expertise. Very few people do this). The render pipelines have been in a constant state of flux since they were originally released as betas and many would argue that neither URP nor HDRP are quite ready for production (despite Unity's assurances) Because of this, or because we have long-term projects which we don't want to port, many of us stick with the so-called 'Built-In' render pipeline, meaning not using URP or HDRP, because of their limitations, buggyness, etc.

                                    
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