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