Setting up a character without using Character Manager

[Imp079]

I am in the process of upgrading a project from Unity 5.6 to 2020 LTS. It originally used a legacy version of the Third Person Controller for the enemies that is no longer compatible with Unity, so we have around 50 enemy prefabs that need to be updated to the new system. From what I've read, setting up a character via the Ultimate Character Controller's Character Manager requires you to start with an empty model, which means we'd have to reattach all of the colliders, particle effects, health bars, etc. to each enemy. I'm wondering if it's possible to bypass the Character Manager and just add and configure the required script components by hand so that we can start with our existing enemy prefabs. The UCC documentation has this list of minimum required components that looks helpful:

Minimum Component Setup - Opsive

The Ultimate Character Controller is designed to be extremely modular so if you don’t want to use a certain piece of functionality then you can . . .

opsive.com

Does the Character Manager do anything else that we need to be aware of?

 

[Andrew]

As far as I know, the approach you're describing should be fine. I would obviously recommend testing with one or two separate prefabs first. But I'll also refer this to @Justin to confirm, in case there's something I'm missing.

 

[Justin]

That approach will work, but I would also take a look at the UMA integration. The CharacterBuilder class can set up a lot of the classes for you at runtime and this is what UMA uses to build its character. The UMA integration is useful to look at even if you are not using UMA.

 

[Imp079]

Thanks, that's good news. I'll take a look at the UMA integration as well.