During my Twitch session this afternoon I decided to show off the customization aspects of the UMA character system. This time, I remembered to record the session and you can find it on our YouTube station, below or if you prefer to check out the raw version before I cleaned up the video, you can find it at our Twitch Channel at https://www.twitch.tv/watregames.
While I did want to show off how one could customize a character, I also wanted to show developers who might want to use UMA how to create a base character recipe and a wardrobe recipe.
Those of you following Ryan’s ICE videos will soon see a Twitch on ICE where he shows the AI working with the UMA characters as well as how he put the character into the game. So stay tuned!
Hope you enjoy the video!
Teila
Teila's Blog 
Thanks!
Great video, I’ll take a look at it again when I start working on equipment in my game.
One quick question, did I understand correctly that if I buy some clothes for UMA, I’ll need to set every piece of clothing up one by one?
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Hi mzr!
Most if not all of the UMA clothing will include the overlays and slots ready for you to use. You will have to make the recipes but as you see in the video, they are not hard to make. It can get tedious if you have a lot of clothing, but if you create them as you purchase them, it will be easier. We could encourage the developers who make the clothes to include recipes but sometimes, we may want them different. Some users may want the pants and tops all in one recipe and others may prefer to have the separate so they can mix and match. Just make sure any body parts, such as a forearm necessary for a shorter sleeved shirt is include in the recipe with the shirt.
Thanks for posting and feel free to ask questions if you have any more. 🙂
Teila
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Thanks!
I was thinking about one of the starter sets from Will B,
so there sure will be a lot of clothes.
But UMA is such a huge time saver then I can’t complain about having to do a little setup before using it.
As for more questions – do you happen to know if UMA is ok to use in mobile games?
I’m sure it’ll be fine for my first idea, as I’ll use UMA only for the main character in it.
But if I wanted to use it for all characters (let’s say 20 on the screen at the same time) would it hurt the performance?
Cool blog btw ;]
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MZR,
I don’t make mobile games but the UMA guys assure me that it will work. You can’t have as many as on a PC. You might consider Power Tools on the asset store. It will allow you to back away some of the necessary bones and set up LOD’s (which you will have to make using Simple LOD or some other tool.). I was able to get 70 with decent fps on my PC although I do have a nice graphics card. I might have been able to get more if I had tried. 🙂 If you set up your scenes correctly, it should work fine. I think 20 would be okay, depending on the phone.
The starter sets are nice! Remember that the clothing will add polys, but you can find ways to optimize such as atlasing the textures, using lower resolution textures, etc. I am sure as a mobile developer you understand all that. 🙂
Thanks!! I appreciate the visit and the questions.
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Thank you for your insight. I’ll take a look at Power Tools.
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Thanks so much for taking some time to share your knowledge. I spent a little while digging through UMA 2.5 before I really understood it very well. If only I had found your video first!!! :). It would have saved me some time. In any case, it helped me gain confidence that I did indeed figure out the basics of UMA DCS, and for that I am thankful. Information on high level usage of DCS is kind of difficult to find at the moment.
Looking forward to more vids! 🙂
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Thank you, RossDP! I am glad the video helped and and sorry you did not see it before you had to dig through it all. 🙂 There are some differences with 2.5 but they should be relatively minor. Information is difficult to find unfortunately, but more is coming out every day. I will have to do another blog with some links. Also, there is a slack channel too for UMA which might help. Let me know if you need more information about that.
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