@@Wojtek_1777 He may be going through something significant right now, maybe he got completely burnout or maybe he realised he just doesn't enjoy RU-vid. Not to speculate or anything
For customizable clothing, the short explanation is that the charcter's overall model is subdivided per article of clothing / region of the body, and each piece of clothing gets attached directly to the character's underlying animation rig. Note this means the character's default body is just another article of clothing internally (in the same way that "bald" is its own hair option).
@@evanandrews8858 Uhhh ... maybe? I am guessing blind here, but if you apply the concept of interpolating between blend shapes to the animation rig then no. Otherwise yes, you do have to define the extents to which _that model's_ geometry may be adjusted, otherwise it is assumed to be a rigid frame that can only be used as-is.
@@Stratelier Looked into last night. You can do the blend shapes once on your default body and then select which you want to transfer to the different articles of clothing.
Cyberpunk 2077 has a surprisingly complicated and robust system for it's clothing customization, seemingly using some kind of mesh shrink wrap to get things to layer properly. Even though the base game limits it's functionality a lot there's a mod to unlock it and let you layer any clothing item on top of any other clothing item (or a stack of like 7 t-shirts) nearly seamlessly.
I think you'll be shocked, but CS 1.6 has a sort of customization. It can be seen when you either pick up a bomb as T, or a defuse kit as CT. I think it can be seen as a customization since it's a model + attached part. Even if you can't consider this as a customization, there are plugins that further expand this possibility in different ways. At the end, I wanna say that Valve handled this submodel system kinda bad back then, cuz for example, to create another hat which is the same as the previous one, just with other color, you have to like, add a whole other model, which is again, exactly same, just with other color. And of course, these annoying GoldSrc artificial limits are getting on my nerves, but that's my problem I guess, because I'm practically working with a hella old game engine, lol.
a similar thing has been done later for the sourcemod "firearms: source" where the base character model will have a multitude of bodygroups applied to it depending on one's gear and perk selection, eg light armor giving you a basic kevlar vest and medic perk attaching a first aid kit pouch to that vest
insurgency 2014 also does this but to a lesser extent than firearms: source. in ins2014 you get an entirely different playermodel depending on your armor class (none, light or heavy) onto which ammo pouches are attached depending on your carrier choice (no carrier gives you one pouch, chest rig gives you two pouches and chest carrier gives you three pouches plus a backpack)
if im not mistaken the entire system for wounds and body-damage for L4D and L4D2 are done with hundreds of submodels/model-part switching. It is kinda old. I recall doing submodel thing for a cactus model in Source 1, so I could get many different looking branches in different places around the main body just by setting a different submodel value.
I'll be honest: I hope you do a little follow along tutorial from blender to Godot eventually. This customization thing keeps me going since at least two years and I wasn't able to figure it out. Good explaination and video as always 🤘🤘🤘
Saints row 1-4 have had great customization especially with face sculpting. 1-2 had good clothing with multiple layers of clothing you can customize and mix together.
i swear everyone seems to forget how absolutely bonkers the customization in SR1 and SR2 was it's been so long and at the time i thought that was supposed to be the next standard moving forward, so disappointed nobody picked that up, not even SR3 onwards
This is actually a really interesting video. As someone with interest in game design and who's been practicing my 3D modeling skills lately, I have always wondered exactly how customizable characters and things worked on the backend. I knew it had something to do with blend shapes, at least partly, but I've always wondered what sort of workload went into making a fully customizable model complete with accessories, clothing, and body modification options.
For me, nothing still tops the ease of use and variety of results found in fallout 4 (and 76)'s character creation. Being able to drag muscles and body parts instead of using sliders was really incredible
Meanwhile, I found that system a lot more awkward to use, and much prefer sliders. Sliders let you know what parts you can modify, and the range of how much, and tend to have markers so you can more easily remember what something was set to if you want to undo a change.
I also explored the way of scaling a bone or moving it's anchor point. This seems to be the way of Kenshi. Usually, the animation only records rotation of the bones, so you can blend it with transpose + scale transformation and it works seemlesly. However, it's hard to do nice, and you have a lot of weird anatomy like in Kenshi. It's hard for a player/artist to get a nice result with this approach. But if all the clothes are attached to the same bones, these transformation work on them as well.
The most in-depth character customization I’ve seen in a game is in Phantasy Star Online 2. It’s one of the core focuses of the game alongside the action rpg stuff. I’d definitely love to see a part 2 on clothing as you mentioned.
You can heavily customize you character in Ark Survival. Me and my friend would spend a lot of time messing around with all the settings and make the characters look funny.
I feel like you probably should have also mentioned setting up joints for certain regions of the body and translating/scaling joints up, blendshapes are great when there is a small amount of clothing that works with the character but if there are hundreds of clothing, each blendshape you create for the character would then also need to be created for each piece of clothing. Customising with joints on the other hand is alot more scalable as if each clothing copies the same sort of paint weights to the character, they should work with any body shape.
As someone who partially had a peek into how character clothing works because of a GTA 5 roleplay serves, Its a facinating system. Mad props to roleplay server devs who work on editing models.
the body shape slider/grid in exanima is a pretty cool example of body customization, it stretches into all extremes while remaining believable and armor and clothing adapt very well to it. my personal favorite for character creation is dragon's dogma, the body and face customization have just the right amount of depth to allow for immense variety while retaining ease of use. additionally, the hairstyle selection is very varied and unisex which gives some very interesting options. and mainly the game allows me to play as my own custom little witch, which no other game does afaik.
Saints row and Code Vein are probably a couple of my favorite character creators ever, along with BG3 and some others. I specifically want to highlight Code vein because it allows you to add accessories like hats or horns and pouches and little ornaments anywhere, in that it let's you adjust the XYZ and rotation of the accessory you have selected, which makes for an immense amount of customization i think. Another game i'd like to mention, which might be a complete surprise, is Terraria. Despite the fact you only have about 400 pixels to work with, the surprisingly robust level of layering and dye application allows for a damn near infinite amount of genuinely unique looking characters.
As someone who uploads and edits avatars for VRChat and other UGC games, I see this stuff a lot. I commonly see 3 ways people enable/disable clothes and prevent clipping. Either blendshapes on body parts (most common in my experience), separate meshes that are enabled/disabled, or using shaders (imo the worst way). Adding different clothes on models is a pain to do. Yea some of them are easy, but like you said, shirts and pants are super hard without clipping. Especially if that clothing model was not originally made for that model. I'd love to see a video expanding on that.
Black Desert Online blew me away with it's character creator when it first came out. Still holds up well visually when compared to other MMOs. APB Reloaded was another one that was ahead of its time in respect to character creation. Haven't looked at too many recent games' character creators. Would love to see how far we've come.
Ahh APB reloaded, what memories! A fun side-effect of being able to make tall or short characters meant being able to hide behind cover, or look over enemy cover easier.
Mass effect does all their face customization as well as animations through armature. No blend shapes involved. I was surprised. Also explains why all characters have their head mesh separate from body, even when they have no custom appearances. Probably bone count limit.
Black Desert Online comes to mind with very detailed character customization, (you can spend almost as much time in the character creator as in the first main story quest of the game (10 hours or so) and that is before you unlock even more edits
A list with games with the most powerful player customizable assets has to include APB: Reloaded. While not really able to customize the base mesh of the models, they've created a really cool system for players to create their own textures for their clothes and cars. They've even got a literal audio tracker so you can make your own theme song that blasts whenever you defeat your enemies. It's actually a pretty simple system, and honestly probably a pretty cost effective way of storing such data as well, as they don't store the actual textures, just the layers of shapes and colors that make up the texture. But it can be used so incredible extensively that you can create almost anything with it. Another game that took character creation to extremes was City of Heroes/Villains - an MMO with superheroes. Their community often took it upon themselves to have impromptu "Costume Contests" to see who could create the coolest/funniest/best looking character.
I always played with the character customisation in WWF/WWE games way more than the game itself, especially as they got more and more in-depth with time.
2:57 Final Fantasy XIV. With all the different races with wildly different bodies (from baby sized to Hagrid) and especially ears, jobs with thousands of gear options... that game is pure madness. So much that the Viera race has almost every hat set as invisible until Square decides that it's not too bad if you let them clip around their bunny ears.
WWE SmackDown on PS1 and WWE RAW on PC have a great character editor (also a combat move editor). It was possible to create absolutely unrealistic proportions, and cartoon characters (as in "Jerma Rumble" series, for example). But each new game makes it worse.
You're talking about the blendshapes to modify certain shapes in a character but you're not talking about another method also linked to the first one. Using blendshape will not work for some type of scaling, (like scaling the head or making the shoulders broader), or it will work but will cause a lot of headache, there's a much simpler solution. Scaling bones and moving bones : You can use individual bones that will scale up and it will also scale the part of the mesh that are rigged with it. This is most likely what kenshin uses for many of its customization options. The head is clearly the bone scaled, so all the bone following this hierarchy are scaled thus the head can be bigger. Doing this with blend shape would be almost impossible. Same for doing clothes deformation. With blend shape you would have to do the modification on ALL THE CLOTHES one per one to have the correct scaling. With bone scaling the clothes will adapt to it. If you know what specific part of your mesh will be scaled you can create separate bones liked to your hierarchy that will only be used for scaling specific parts. While it's technically harder to set up right (especially in the weight painting process) I think it's less prone to animation error since it's still a bone that did the deformation.
black desert mmo has an insane freedom to change so much about ur character but it limits it to where even the weirdest combinations wont make ur character look too much like a glitchy mess
I really hope that you do a follow up video, there are really few resources that explain this topic of how to handle character different clothing and so forth. Great video!
I played an MMO about a decade ago called APB: Reloaded (which itself was the F2P version of an originally P2P MMO that kinda flopped). It definitely has issues, but one thing I haven't seen any other game do better is character customization. Body shape, tattoos, clothes, custom design and art ON your clothes that you can make yourself or buy from other people -- it's legitimately very impressive, especially by the standards of when it was made.
In Black Desert you could go as far as modifying hair strands, to a certain degree. And there is a App called Vroid meant to quickly create 3d characters that allows you to paint hair strands directly onto the model's head and also rig them individually. It's not a full 3D editor, but as close as it can get, based on presets and sliders which are basically morphs/shapekeys.
Pretty cool. This is one of those videos I'd search for for years, thinking it has to exist but I simply had to wait for it to exist. I mean that's not actually the case here, but it's definitely true for someone else right now and I hope they found it
Great video! Good simple explanation that was to the point! I'd love to get a follow-up on how games implement different clothing that needs to conform to body movements!
Famously CD Projekt RED when developing the first witcher game had planned to have Geralt's swords sheathed but could not resolve the swords clipping through in the walk animation so that's why they appear as they do sans-sheath in the game.
Funny enough, this mesh deformation technology is extremely prevalent in a very infamous and recently defunct Japanese eroge developer's games, where you can completely modify the ENTIRE shape of the body within the game itself via a dedicated character maker that uses metadata to share the parameters of the character's specific modifications, and with certain mods can go beyond the limits of the base game character maker itself by manipulating the size, offset, and rotation of the bones themselves. Blew my mind when I first saw it. I'm aware this technology goes back WAYYYYY more than their more popular titles; one of the earliest games I've played that had this kind of tech was Saint's Row, but I've never seen it so refined compared to other, less graphically mature games.
Elite Dangerous is definitely up there for the most in-depth customisation of faces. Actually the only game I ever achieved to make an almost 1:1 copy of myself.
The game that comes to mind for me is The Movies because It has and external tool for customizing characters as they are the stars of the game. - although I haven't played that game in a long time. This video is neat! - I've been looking into character creation systems from my own games, and it expanded my insight into the subject. - have you heard of a tool called Make Human? - they re also a few tools like it, I think there are also some plugins for blender for making clothing items. - seen videos on it but haven't deep-dived further.
I was thinking about it all day long wondering how this works and you post this the same day. You saved me from a sleepless night thanks you so much. You are the best.
Very cool, can't wait to see the next part. Would love to learn making a Blender based generator. :D Would love to someday make PS2 style games as well. Hope things are going good for you, and take care. XD
Sims 2. All copies of the game shipped with body shop which allowed you to modify and customize sims faces easily without going in-game. They then seamlessly imported into the game after they were saved by the body shop application. It worked in tandem with mods and custom content so custom modded sliders could be added to body shop to fully increase control of the sims appearance. It was an excellent supplement tool for the main game. But it never returned for the future entry’s. Sims 4 made it redundant since sliders were removed in favor of a face sculpting system.
Something I've realized is that for some customization options, such as lengthening the limbs or neck, you need to also update the underlying armature so the point of rotation is moved to the correct location as well. So instead of doing it in a shapekey, just literally move the bones its not too complicated. If you have a slider that controls how longa character's neck is, its better to just have it move the head bone up instead of doing it in a shapekey however something like changing the neck thickness should be a shapekey
Mordhaus facial customization is nothing to write home about. but the myraid of different armor pieces you can mix and match is just so dam good and the fact that they largely don't affect defensive stats besides just what weight class they're in makes it so you pretty much never have to make an "ass-kicking outfit" as my partner calls it, where your armor choice is soley for optimization and not for looks. I've spent like 15% of my over 1000 hours in that game just with the armor customization alone. I really wish more games had that level of freedom when it came to how your armor looks.
Skinned mesh vs mesh. Skinned mesh can move complex parts like clothes along with the player. But it costs more on performance. I use a asset for unity that bakes the skinned mesh animations and gpu instances them for better performance.
I'm pretty sure Street Fighter 6 has the most... expressive character customization of any game I know of. The amount of cursed abominations posted online can attest to that.
For customizing body shapes, it's worth nothing that this can also be accomplished via armatures, by scaling the bones in the two axes that aren't their length. This also allows you to have multiple sets of clothes without having to recreate the blendshapes for each new item mesh, but it's less precise about what you can edit (because it's based on the bone weights, not specific shapes you create). The only real caveat here is that it requires a special setup for your mesh, where rather than having all the bones connected+parented (the leg bone's connected to the hip bone, etc), they all have to be free-floating/unparented, in order to prevent issues that get introduced via scaling propagation. That's a major inconvenience, however there's ways to create your meshes in the typical parented setup, and then later down the line, you do a final export/conversion to a floating type mesh that contains your animations/etc for you to use in the final product, which then allows for bone-based scaling (which you would apply alongside the character animations).
I love how you explained in detail why chromas are more common than skins that change the model entirely. I’m sure gamers kinda knew this generally, but seeing it explained like this will make sense to a lot of people why that extra effort isn’t always made.
First of all, really good video. That's exactly what I'm looking for. Do you have, or will you perhaps create a video series in which you show how to build a character creator. I could really use this for a project I want to start in August. - It's going to be the character creator for a small RPG. This project will be the final project for my graphics and design degree.- I have an idea for the basic concept, but somehow I don't know enough about the mechanics to be used for the realisation.
Hey nice video, there is a way that allow you could talk about that is similar things to blend shape and that blew my mind and it is to use custom adjustment bone, usually we think move bones to move the mesh but we can also scale them and by using adjustments bones parented to the moving bone we can scale them independently and make our character more muscular or thin, and do any kind of adjustments. The amazing thing about that it that it will scale properly any piece of clothing just by having a weight painting that works for animation. Just wanted to share this because it really blew my mind, I used UMA for my game with a custom rig and it does an amazing job for character customization 😊
I would love to see you make a video on Geosets and how some video games (mostly older RPGs and MMOs) made bulky armor when it was just an alteration of the mesh and a texture overlay. World of Warcraft is probably the best known game that employs this, but there are obviously others. I am interested in how a developer streamlines armor wearing and such across multiple races like that.
So, when a character creator lets you set extreme values for specific properties, does that mean they had to create new blendshapes to represent those extreme values?
What about when there are seemingly different models for different body parts? Like different noses or similar? Is that just done with textures, shape keys, or something else?
Its just preset to whatever the devs have already modelled, then the values(shape, vertices, xyz etc) r changed when a different nose or eye or whatever is selected. So the same thing but everything is predetermined most of the time
