Character Customization Release and Updates

Here's what I've been working on, hope you have fun with it! 

Download Links

Windows Mega Link 

MacOS (untested) 

This is the first revision of two standalone releases, after that I'll be integrating it into the ENF Sandbox.

In this first release there's:

• body customization (head, torso, breasts, hips, legs, feet)
• custom colors (hair, eyes, skin, underwear, bra)
• a few clothing options (panties, swimsuit, bra, school skirt, school shirt)
• a few poses to choose from and manual posing (see gif below)

In the second release I'll be adding:

• selectable facial expressions
• exporting and importing character customizations
• improved dynamic hair
• possibly adding base clothing from vrstudio - requires some more research but it should allow importing a large chunk of new clothes that were created with vrstudio

One last thing to mention, you will not be able to load the characters created in ENF Sandbox v0.0.2, I'll be leaving that for v0.0.3. 

The road to ENF Sandbox v0.0.2:

Character Customizer v01 -> Character Customizer v02 -> ENF Sandbox v0.0,2

Once the second release of the character customizer is complete, I'll start integration with the ENF Sandbox project for the v0.0.2 release. Not sure how long this will take but not to worry, progress is being made :)

Dev Talk:

This has mostly been an exercise in taking the UMA (unity multipurpose avatar) system, integration it with my character model, setting up custom DNA ranges, and standardizing the clothing to fit the system. Creating this Character Customizer has been immensely helpful in finding and solving problems early on.

For the second revision of the Character Customizer, the base model itself needs to be reworked to separate the body and the head. Currently I have them as the same mesh, and UMA combines every mesh to reduce draw calls, this means every time we change clothing, it needs to re-combine the mesh. Typically this isn't a problem but we run into 1-3 seconds of computation on the main thread, requiring very poor stuttering when we have blendshapes enabled. Since there's quite a few blendshapes that control the face, changing clothing requires them to be copied over to the new mesh because the blendshapes are also part of the body mesh. Separating out the head and body should resolve this poor performance.

In terms of integrating the UMA characters with the existing ENF Sandbox build, I expect some challenges. Scaling needs to be conformed to the UMA way, which will require changes in the pathfinding setup, possibly the lighting too. The clothing animations likely require some changes so they can be animated. There's also the problem of creating a system to allow importing characters - this compliments other functionality to add/edit characters, and getting the AI to start behaving autonomously once spawned, so any number of characters can be spawned - this is why I think it's a good idea to leave importing custom character creators for ENF Sandbox v0.0.3