UMA 2 - Howto

Yeah, Yolan is the man, had to tweak the names of the "Items" objects so the skeleton loader wouldn't get mad, but otherwise everything worked exactly as described.
 
Does anyone have any thoughts on how to tackle this for first person functionality? Setting up the UMA character in both first and third works already, but because the UMA has only one mesh we can't set any third person objects for transparency, but without adding any head slots there's no clipping with head and the hands look fine because I don't have first person arms.

However, item setup is not going smoothly for me yet. I'm trying to do the Item creation setup like the tutorials describe, but using my UMA as the model rather than Nolan, and the UMA's arms as first person arms. I'm getting errors which are no doubt a result of this not being the intended setup for the system. As far as I can see, there are two challenges we're facing here:

  • Making arms to match UMA avatars: it should be possible to create "arms" races as needed and align slot recipes for them, but scripting will be needed to keep everything in sync if the DNA changes.
  • Making parts of the Third Person Model transparent: It should be possible to create transparencies by applying a transparent texture to the body parts through the slot system, but I don't think this will be fast enough to turn on/off whenever the player presses the perspective change key.
I know it's possible to add items to the UMA avatars as slots, but I'd rather keep the item creation out of the UMA process, and focus on getting the avatar setup to match the demos as closely as possible. the less these systems have to mix the easier it will be to get them working together.
 
The "simple" solution I have is to change wardrobe recipes to a custom one without a head. Then swap animators on view change.

I'm not going to be working on this until I have other aspects completed. It should be fairly simple though, the hardest part is over thinking what the fix is. Justin's code is quite readable you need to figure out the flow of the controller before attempting to modify it or you'll end up wasting a lot of time. The items probably going to require some hacking, my plan is to eliminate the FPS object separation in the code.

Definitely possible though, perhaps once I get multiplayer just right I'll come back to this.
 
My intention is still to modify both sets of code as little as possible so I get the full benefit of the editor options. I haven't read through all of the new code base yet, but I spent three years working with TPC 1 and this has been very similar so far. I already lost a lot of time figuring out how the flow of the controller works by modifying it before:LOL:.

I think you're on to something with the recipe swapping, I'll try that for the transparencies. I'm looking into making an arms race in UMA, I've worked with the UMA base mesh in Blender so I should be able to cut the arm meshes without much difficulty. I'll have to brush up on the UMA 2 race creation process, then it's just a matter of choosing these arms in the item setup and seeing what happens. I'll let you know how it goes
 
If you want just arms you can make a recipe with just arms. No need to make a race.

Best of all you can swap them at runtime very easily and fast.
 
Yeah, I'm much less familiar with UMA 2 than UCC, just scratching the surface on that stuff, that's going to save me a bunch of time. Thanks again for all your help!
 
bschumacher said:
Network is going to be pretty basic, I'm using TNet 3 which syncs the input from the players across the network and sets the rigidbody position once per second. I'll probably end up extending TNet's channel system to auto connect to multiple servers as the characters change zones eventually and host dedicated instances that provide authority, as I understand it the host of the channel is authoritative.
Click to expand...

Did you have any problems with weapon mapping/equipping? I seem to ALMOST be able to get things to work, but I'm seeing some oddities with IK that I think are leading to some subsequent failures to equip. I can spawn with the controller, run around...aim zooms properly, UMA seems to work. But the weapons may as well not exist.
 
Item setup is a challenge. Items do not come by default you have to setup each one manually.

IK is a little wonky, feet don't touch the ground by they do adjust to angle, I'm sure there is a setting for it somewhere.

There's a lot of configuration that goes into item setup.
 
bschumacher said:
Item setup is a challenge. Items do not come by default you have to setup each one manually.

IK is a little wonky, feet don't touch the ground by they do adjust to angle, I'm sure there is a setting for it somewhere.

There's a lot of configuration that goes into item setup.
Click to expand...

When you say that they don't come by default, do you mean that default loadouts aren't working for you, and you're initializing the items at runtime? Seems like I could just extend Yolan's script if that's the case.
 
When you make a character and add items there are some things that the wizard doesn't do for you. I wouldn't initialize them at runtime, the character is but the prefab has the items on it already.
 
So, for anyone else who may hit this issue...if your character is consistently disabling the items and losing the inventory, but the model appears in the hierarchy appropriately, simply make sure Yolan's script is at the bottom of the execution order. (There's probably a more clever way to handle this bit, since relying on Unity execution order is kinda bad, but it resolved the issue for me.)
 
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