Unreal Engine | Character Editor (REVIEW)

hello guys welcome back to another video today we'll be checking out this character editor from polymorphia on the unreal engine marketplace so i actually reached out to them and they sent me their marketplace asset to review now i get a lot of questions and my comments from you guys asking where can you basically get a wide range of custom characters so characters that are old or young with tons of different morph targets and customization and well this character editor from polymorphia aims to solve that problem now this character editor is probably one of the most advanced and comprehensive currently on the marketplace and so there's a lot to obviously dig into so without further ado let's go ahead and jump right into the video alright so first off i kind of want to start by listing off some of the main points that make this character editor different from the rest so basically what this is is a character customization creator or editor you could basically use this as a character customization system inside your game or you could use this even as a character editor to say create a bunch of npcs that you'll need for your game now what does character editor have to offer you might ask well you can create your own custom characters that look old using a wide range of morph targets and you can even create characters that look young as well as child characters so there is just a wide range of morph targets and customization options from clothing outfits to hairstyles per each character type now you might also ask why not just use you know metahumans instead well actually you can already use custom metahumans with this character editor in fact it already comes with one metahuman included and you can use all the morph targets and clothing from the character editor with the metahuman so those are basically kind of the main points i think make this particular character editor stand out from all the rest on the marketplace and yeah let's go ahead and check it out so here are the base maps here there are a couple different levels that we can check out but first we're just going to check out the base character editor here so over here you have your main viewport where you can rotate the character you can zoom in and you can pan in and out so you have your basic controls that you normally have in a custom in a character creator or customization menu then over here on the left if you click this down arrow we have the load profiles so basically we have all the different presets so this right here is the metahuman that comes included with the pack we have jackson which is a kid character and then we have just a couple other different presets here that you can basically further customize and then over here at the top you have human so this is basically uh their base human character that comes included and you can click on this metahuman to switch it back over to the metahuman base character and like i said you can always add your own custom metahuman to the character editor now you can also switch the characters gender here so male and female and then adult versus child and then the name of the character so now we're going to go over some of the customization options because there is quite a bit so right off the bat here you can see we have the shapes so we can change the character's weight so we can increase the weight of the character um increase the size like height and the age when we increase the age it adds kind of like this slouch in the back and the character's posture as well as the wrinkles in the skin and now i'm just going to go ahead and kind of reset this back to what we had it now you can also change the skin tone here so you can see the different variants and if you double click on any of these materials here or these presets you can actually go in and change the hue the saturation and you can find actually a lot of control over the various colors so over here we have the different hair options so these are all the hair presets that come included with this particular character and of course you can always change things like the color of the hair and the tint and all that good stuff now we do have some facial hair so it's a beard and a mustache here animated beard or no hairstyle now for the face we have a couple different presets here so you can see we have a couple different options to pick from that change the overall uh shape of the face so we'll go with this look for now and for each different region and customize for example the eyes we can hit this down arrow and you can see the different sliders that we have so we can adjust the eyes height things like the depth of the eyes the size and whatnot and you also have down here on the nose are on each of these options you can click randomize so you could randomize per each control as well as you can randomize the entire character if you wanted to which i'll show you here in a second so right now we can just randomize the nose maybe something like that looks good okay now under the mouth here we have height size and we also have the jaw we can adjust the height of the jaw you can see it like that and the underbite and then we have the chin here so like i said there's just so many different uh sliders here and different morph targets that not only can you carry over for the different characters but also if you're going to add say your own custom metahuman that you've created in the metahuman creator and you import into this project so we can change the eye color here and pupil scale then we have makeup here so you can change things like the lip color i'm just going to leave it as it is we can customize this on the female character and then under the apparel here we have quite a bit of different clothing options so i can just randomize an outfit for example and you can see we have the top the bottom as well as shoes and then accessories like the hat and glasses there so we can randomize apparel again so you can see you get quite a bit of different options variations with all of the different apparel that comes included in the pack and of course you can always add your own more clothing meshes and and accessories to this editor uh through the data tables they make it actually really easy to to do so so yeah once we have our character here i'm what i'm gonna do is actually make our character a little bit older maybe we'll randomize the outfit again something like this alright so once you're done with editing your character if we actually hit tab here you can see all the different controls but basically you can hit c and that will exit out of the character creator and you can run around and play as your character so these animations are obviously the default epic skeleton animations so they actually have a tutorial on how to set this up with als the advanced locomotion system but yeah you can actually toggle back and forth from the character editor to play mode of course you can you can always configure you know whether or not you want your character to be able to do that but you can actually do this in runtime now this is also set up for multiplayer so it's fully replicated and i'll show you that demo here in a second but yeah that is the basics of the character editor now we can dive into some of the other character presets here so for example this kit here you have the different haircuts and actually we might want to get rid of the hat so you can see the different haircuts here and the different face presets and of course you have all the different morph targets over the nose the mouth jaw the chin eyes as well as some of the different apparel such as the hats and sunglasses things like that so we can randomize some of the outfits here now once you have actually a character that you've created you can also say this so i could do test character you click save and you can see it automatically saves here your different custom profiles that you've created and so on my test character here now if you go ahead and actually exit the editor and replay it you're going to have your saved character profile there so you won't lose it by any means now you do have a couple of different light settings here that i didn't cover so we can change the lighting to daylight dark presentation here warm cinematic so we have a couple different lighting options and if i go back to we will do the female character here under the beta features we have basically uh some of some different facial animations again this is the beta features so don't expect it to be anything final but we have some of the facial expressions here more targets and you can also change the directions of where the eyes are looking for i'm assuming facial motion capture and things like that and also you can toggle visibility of all of the widgets using some of these controls here now the randomize apparel button i've been meaning to show this off so if you click r you can basically randomize the entire character's outfit as well as like their hair you can actually get a lot of cool different combos here now i haven't really shown off uh some of the female character presets and options here so i'll go ahead and show that off right now so here we have the different hairstyles so you can see the different hair options that we get and of course you have all the same uh color controls as well as ability to change you know the weight of the character the age and also muscles and size so we have variants on the skin and then we also have the different face preset variants so you can see the different options that we have here and again we have the finer control over the different uh over the regions like the nose mouth jaw and chin and then we have the different apparel so you can see the hat options and then of course if you want to randomize just the outfit you can just hit this randomize button and switch between some of the different accessories and so here are actually some of the different clothing pieces here so various sweaters now i believe the uh swimsuits here are actually a different marketplace asset that they included at least for me to review in this video so i'm not sure if this comes pre-included with the character editor then we can hit play here and run around as our custom character that we created now i want to go ahead and show uh the replicated demo or some of these other maps here and so if i go ahead and play this as two clients and new editor windows i can go ahead and show you guys so here we have two different windows now we can go ahead and click r to randomize outfit and what you'll see here is on both screens you can actually see this is the particular character that they get to customize and our character is on this screen is off to the side so you can see it updating in real time there while we're editing our character here so i'll just get to a random outfit maybe like so and then i can press c to pop out of the character editor and run around as our custom character and back over here maybe we'll switch this to mail character and we'll just randomize the outfit here real quick something like this let me press c and we can run around as our character so you can see the outfits here are all replicated and all of the edits that you make happen in real time now you can obviously go ahead and customize where the characters spawn in so that you don't have characters spawning in right in front of the character editor location they're blocking like the camera so obviously you can set up like a different player spawn point uh custom to your game but yeah that is basically the replication demo so the last demo level here is his character editor thumbnail now from my understanding this is basically just a level where you can slap down a custom clothing asset or accessory on this mannequin character and basically just take a screenshot of of the outfit and use it as actual thumbnail for the your character editor now behind the scenes here i can actually dive into some of the different components that make the editor that you can customize now the back end is actually quite complex and they do mention on their [Music] marketplace page that um that as a beginner it might be very hard to grasp some of the backend systems and details of how this character editor is set up for the most part if you're going to add you know custom clothing and accessories uh as far as i know you just go into your data assets accessories and you can see here some of the different hairstyles here basically accessories clothing and hairstyles so if i open up one of these up you can see basically they're just a skeletal mesh reference to like the actual hair asset the name of the of the hair type as well as like the thumbnail of the actual hair and so you can go in and create your own data assets here and import and add your own custom hair and accessories and once you've added those in and you've created those thumbnails you can go into your base data tables you can see all of those presetted characters that we had so we had matthew which was the metahuman jackson which was the kid you can add in your different data assets here that include like all of the different preset options so stuff like the hairstyles the apparel and even the morph targets now they do have documentation on this if you want to check it out in fact you can access it from the marketplace page and there's about 80 pages of documentation detailing all the various sliders and controls that this character editor features and they also in fact have some links to some tutorials on how you can integrate character editor with some of their other products so they have other clothing packs that from my understanding integrate pretty seamlessly since they're all rigged to the same epic skeleton now they also have the advanced locomotion tutorial and they also have a tutorial on how to add your own custom metahuman into the editor now i feel like that was a lot to cover in one particular video but basically if i left anything out make sure to leave any questions thoughts or any questions that you guys have on this product down in the comments down below and maybe if there's something that you want me to check out further about this product you can also ask me that in the comments down below and yeah that's pretty much it i'll see you guys in the next one

Channel: Smart Poly

Views: 91,249

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Id: QzHJsyaZrC0

Length: 18min 57sec (1137 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 17 2022