Hi @Victor.Soupday
Not sure if I'm missing something but I can't seem to be able to bake the same character model twice - once with basic materials and then again with high quality materials, and keep both. I'm wanting to use LODs which switch to cheaper shaders at a distance.

Would it be possible to add an option to bake multiple quality levels?

Thanks, as always.

ps. related to that, I'm also trying to work out where the custom shaders are being saved to. Again, ideally I'd like to be able to have an option to use both the built-in and/or custom shaders for the same model, within the same project.

                                    

Unity Virtual Reality Developer

Not sure I understand what you mean.

The basic materials can't be baked, because there is nothing to bake as all the materials are using the default/standard shaders. Or do you mean the "Build Materials" prefab result?

The Build Basic Material option is really just there for characters that do not use the digital human shaders. e.g. some cartoon characters, actor core characters etc. More complex characters should be baked into the default or custom basic materials.

There is the Bake button, which bakes the High Quality materials prefab into either the default shaders or more basic, stripped down custom versions of the high quality shaders.

The difference in performance between the Default baked materials and the Custom baked materials is very small, if any. The option to bake to default or custom baked materials is largely one of compatibility rather than performance. If the custom baked material shaders cause problems, there's always a fall back to the default shaders.

In terms of render performance and texture load:

Basic Materials = Baked Default Materials ≈> Baked Custom Materials > High Quality Materials

In terms of visual quality:

High Quality Materials = Baked Custom Materials > Baked Default Materials > Basic Materials

For practical purposes I envisaged that the Baked Custom Materials prefab would be the preferred LOD 0 model, being the best trade off between performance, texture load and quality.


Edit: The shaders (and material templates) are all kept inside the packages folder "CC3 Unity Tools" named 3D, URP or HDRP respectively.

Thanks, that clarifies quite a bit. For understanding, are you saying that High Quality Materials have the same visual quality as Baked Custom Materials, but worse performance? So would the only reason to use HQ mats over Baked Custom mats be to avoid the baking time?

HI,

I have a pb, or some bad project configuration  -URP- :

my characters imported on unity, using the plugin, seems to have some kind of "metallic aura"
very visible in the hair, some clothes, and if the character is far




Should i manually change most materials post import to fix this ? or is it some misconfiguration ?

thanks for help & advice

Thanks @Victor.Soupday
Sorry, yes, I did indeed mean 'Build Materials'.

Apologies but I'm still a little confused, and still wondering how I get multiple versions of the prefab for different LODs. Each time I try a subsequent 'Build materials' (for example switching from Basic to High Quality and building materials again) I'm still getting a single prefab. And even if I try duplicating the Material folder and duplicating the prefab (and unpacking it and renaming it) I find I can't rename the material folder - I get a 'Moving file failed; pop-up error. I guess because the assets are being referenced by the CC3 Import Tool.  It's like I'd want an option to build both Basic and High Quality, and have the materials with a suffix, rather than each 'Build' over-writing the previous Material Build.

hopefully that makes more sense

I also don't quite understand this:

In terms of render performance and texture load:

Basic Materials = Baked Default Materials ≈> Baked Custom Materials > High Quality Materials

In terms of visual quality:

High Quality Materials = Baked Custom Materials > Baked Default Materials > Basic Materials

Can you explain what you meant?

                                    

Unity Virtual Reality Developer

The high quality materials use all the extra texture masks and colour blend maps like Photoshop layers to produce the full detail of the Character Creator source. But this comes at a cost of using much more texture memory and more shader calculations to blend it all together,

The basic materials throw away all those extra textures and just uses the base textures with the default shaders. More performance, less shader work but all the details are lost.

But just like Photoshop, all those layers in the high quality materials can be merged down into single textures. Once you are happy with the material parameters & settings, you can bake (i.e. merge down) the texture layers down into minimal texture sets compatible with the default shaders (or custom versions thereof). This is the texture baking. These give you the the same quality and appearance as the high quality materials but without all the extra calculation and texture memory, and so gives the same performance as the basic materials.


The idea being, unless you have good reason the need the high quality materials (i.e. you wanted to change the texture details at run time), you should be using the baked prefabs.

There is no point using the basic materials over the baked materials in any situation as the baked materials have the same performance as the basic but are much better quality. I only put the basic materials in as a hold over to how the old auto-setup used to generate the materials and as a fall back in case the baking fails for some reason.

In short, the basic materials are junk and you shouldn't use them.

Have you built the materials in the import tool window? They look kind of unprocessed. Also how does it look in the preview scene? The lighting in a new scene that hasn't been set up yet is quite horrible.

Thanks for your patience @Victor.Soupday
What threw me was the change in UI from the older version. I'd totally missed the baking process and was confusing it with the initial build materials stage.
All makes sense now Cheers

                                    

Unity Virtual Reality Developer

This is a quick note to say thank you for this Auto Import script. I've been using it in Unity HDRP and the quality is incredible! Thanks again!

Hello,

For me it's not working, dose anyone know what i am missing?

Thanks