Unity‘s skinned mesh renderer applies linear-based bending, which can result in collapsed volumes and “candy wrapper” twisting in the limbs.
Dual-quaternion skinning is an alternative method that helps preserve the mesh volume. It’s slower than linear-based, and has its own minor artifacts such as a bulging around the joints, but is a big improvement on the collapsed joints.
Constantine Rudenko has created a compute shader and scripts to convert Unity’s skinned meshes to dual quaternion at runtime. Blendshapes are supported.
Adobe has announced the sign-off date for Mixamo’s figure creation software Fuse. It will be pulled from their Creative Cloud service at the end of summer, 2020.
in an official Adobe blog post, Mixamo’s own Jeanette Mathews announced:
“We have tried to keep Fuse available as long as possible, but, unfortunately, it will soon stop working on the newest Mac OS (10.15), once it releases later this year, due to incompatible technology components. You will continue to be able to use Fuse on older Mac operating systems or on Windows for the next year. Fuse will be removed from Creative Cloud and will no longer be available for download starting on September 13, 2020.”
Adobe acquired Mixamo in 2015, but were cagey about their 3D ambitions. At the time they announced that Fuse would be worked into a Photoshop plugin, but later revealed they wanted the Mixamo team for software that would become AdobeDimension, a user-friendly 3D program for graphic designers. Fans of Mixamo were devastated as Adobe slowly unvealed changes to the online Auto-rigger that ended support for Unreal Engine and cut off older versions of Fuse from easy rigging and blendshapes.
Adobe recently acquired Allegorithmic creators of Substance, and have announced plans for an AR art tool. It’s interesting to note, the announcement suggests the Mixamo Auto-rigger will still be available, possibly in connection with their online marketplace.
Fuse will work without being connected to the Creative Cloud – as defiant users of Mixamo Fuse already know. The figures can be morphed and textured within the program and exported as OBJ, serving as a base mesh for workflows outside of Mixamo.
Unity Multipurpose Avatar System, or UMA for short, is a free character creation and runtime modification system. UMA was designed with flexibility in mind, so although it’s primary purpose is for working with humanoid characters, its systems can be adapted to work with any model.
triplegangers® provide cutting edge 3D Scans, character models, 3D and 2D Reference materials to aid the creation of virtual avatars for film and computer games studios as well as freelance artists. Their store features 315 photogrammetry faces.
