CharMorph - character creation tool (MB-Lab based)

Coding Released Scripts and Themes
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#1

MB-Lab is a great add-on for creating characters, but it lacks some features we needed for our projects.
I started to figure out how to improve it, but soon I realized that it will be easier to rewrite everything from scratch than to implement these features directly in MB-Lab.
So me and my cousin sister started a project to create a new add-on and we called it CharMorph. I’m doing coding part and she’s doing artistic part (rigging, textures, hairstyles).
Here is first public alpha of CharMorph. In many things it’s similar to MB-Lab, but there’re some differences:

  • Full Rigify support with fully functional face rig

    It actually supports only Rigify now and requires it to rig characters.

  • Realtime clothing fitting

    In MB-Lab you need to finalize character before using “proxy fit” feature that allows you to make clothing match the morphed character. In CharMorph clothing is morphed in real time together with the character. Also in MB-Lab every fitted proxy creates it’s own mask modifier. CharMorph supports combining masks from multiple clothing items.
    Here is demo:

  • Direct setting of skin and eyes color

    You can even have fun with Shrek girl or Avatar girl, but in this case some artifacts may occur so it’s recommended to choose realistic skin colors.

skin-colors
skin-colors920×210 28.8 KB

  • Material displacement instead of displacement modifier allows to update bumps in realtime too

  • Hairstyles

    It’s very annoying to do hair grooming every time after creating a character so we want to offer some default hairstyles.

    Hair can be morphed with almost the same algorithm used for morphing clothing, but it works only with default hairstyles, not with hand-made ones. All changes made by hand will be discarded if you use “Refit hair” function.

hairstyles

  • Characters are created at 3D cursor location, not always at world origin

Downsides:

  • Rig is added only at finalization, because it takes quite a long time for Rigify to generate a rig and I have no idea if it’s possible to morph such rig in real time.
  • Still lacking some features (Automodelling, measures) just because we don’t use them in our projects. Maybe they’ll come later.
  • Currently only female character is available. Before starting to make a face rig for male character we want to hear some critics or reviews about our current face rig.
  • It’s still in alpha stage. Some bugs may occur and some breaking changes can be made so future versions of CharMorph won’t be able to morph characters from this version. Alpha testers are wanted!

So here it is:

Please report any bugs to GitHub issues tracker.

15 Likes
MB-Lab Release for Blender 2.80
#2

Super. thank you

1 Like
#3

:+1: :+1:

:+1: :+1: :+1:

:+1::+1: :+1:

:+1: :+1:

a wide variety of hairstyles
:+1: :+1: :+1:
520 Mb file size :roll_eyes:

#4

Not so wide, just 3 now. It’s rather just a proof-of-concept that particle hair presets can be used with morphed characters.

Yeah, I definitely need to solve this problem before adding more character types…

#5

Looks promising. I’ll test out the alpha and give some feedback.

1 Like
#6

I know,
it will be perfect if you can add a wide variety of hairstyles and outfits.

#7

Now it’s just 176MB (213MiB uncompressed), most of which are bundled clothing assets.
Also performance is improved.

2 Likes
#8

I have a base mesh that i planned for use in mb-lab 1.8 you can try and implement it, i usually update it every 2-3 week or so since uploading them is quite large even though the mesh is quite optimized the male mesh usually doesn’t change but the female one is going through the development stages


substance34
substance344096×4096 1.52 MB
2 Likes
#9

Yes, Hope I already noticed your work, it’s really interesting and I definitely plan to include your characters to CharMorph.

1 Like
#10

thanks, will definitely be interested in how it looks like, will improve the bases as time goes on, that render was from yesterday so the current update i have uploaded doesn’t have it yet.

#11

Great, i will test it. :slightly_smiling_face:

#12

I’d also suggest making sure your materials are PBR based, also request that shapekeys for facial expressions match those of the iphone AR blend-shapes so that FaceCap can be easily used for mocap. :smiley:

I suggested this for MB-Lab but doesn’t seem like they see the value for it.

#13

Well, just to clarify: I’m not an artist at all, I’m a coder. My sister doesn’t have much experience too. Maybe you can suggest us something to read/watch about PBR materials?

At the moment we don’t use shape keys for facial expressions, we use Rigify face rig.
Also we don’t use IPhones so we need some examples or references to make new shape keys.

#14

On PBR Materials:

On Facecap and the Iphone AR Blendshapes
https://www.bannaflak.com/face-cap/
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/arkit/arfaceanchor/blendshapelocation

1 Like
#15

It’s just basics. Current MB-Lab skin shader which we taken as a base is already far more complex than this…

#16

i’ll handle the PBR Skin texturing as i already have with the new base meshes, the shader is much more basic than the preexisting one but i plan to add more controls to it.

1 Like
#17

Okay here it is updated, Scroll Down to latest entry to download it

2 Likes
#18

estou amando esse addon, é simplesmente incrível!
esperando ansiosamente por uma atualização.

#19

What do you expect in next version?

#20

bom, seria legal ter um modelo de homem, talvez mais formas de alterar o rosto.

1 Like