¶ Description
The Character Editor is a ready-to-use character customization system. Different options like anatomy, muscularity, obesity, aging, and size help you to customize your characters.
The faces come with ~80 Morph Targets - ready for facial animations with ARKit and AllrightRig support.
Multiple Data Assets are used to create unique characters: Besides hairstyles, there are several skeletal mesh apparel parts stripped down to predefined main groups like: hats, upper body, lower body, shoes, and others. This product gives you a solid foundation to customize your Characters from different types.
Each asset uses one or another master material, which allow you to tweak their visual appearance in detail.
[V7] Since the Customer Update, you have to enable the Hair Rendering features in your project settings to support Groom. See Known Issue: Adding Character Editor to my project throws Groom errors for details.
[V6] Since Replication Update, please prefer using events and functions with
(Replicable)in their names over their similar events and functions without that name extension to use network replication, correctly, unless you build some very custom logic.
¶ Introduction
In this documentation we will mostly describe Blueprints, widgets, and their functionality. For detailed information about what events, functions, macros, and variables are used exactly – or which must be adjusted – please head over to the desired Blueprints and follow the graphs. We commented the most important functionalities, while the rest should be self-explanatory for an intermediate level of Blueprint experience.
¶ Core Component Overview
The Character Editor consists of various main pieces as described below as an overview. For technical details click their respective links or read further into the documentation as the next chapters cover their topics.
- BP_Character
This Character Blueprint shows you how to use the following components of the pack and shows you, with intermediate Blueprint knowledge, how to implement all relevant logic into your own character. - BP_CharacterCustomization component
This component contains the core logic of your characters visual appearance and handles different things. It is built around the Anatomy Profiles data table and the Customization Profile structure. - BP_CharacterEditor component
In addition to the previous component, this optional component acts as a manager for the WBP_CharacterEditor widget and enables that in-game character editor. - WBP_CharacterEditor widget
The in-game character editor is the visual core part of the product and exposes mostly all functionality of the BP_CharacterCustomization component as a vast ready-to-use and extensible showcase. - Customization Profile
The customization profiles hold all the information how your character customizations are set up. They are stored in an array of profiles and saved to and loaded from a save game file. - Customization Data Assets
In short “CDA”, they are content browser assets that can be placed onto the character (hairstyles, apparels, and attachments). They define various info and optionally some asset-specific logic. - Anatomy Profiles [V2]
Anatomies define the look of your character’s body. The profiles hold all information about anatomies that are possibly selectable by the BP_CharacterCustomization component and the in-game editor. - Collections [V2]
They are a part of Customization Data Assets and a small concept of their own. They are used to group CDAs together and make them visually distinguishable in the character editor. - BP_LightStudio [V3]
The Light Studio makes it possible to set up different light settings in the editor viewport and apply them in editor or in-game afterwards to show see how the character looks in these scenarios. - Replication [V6]
Since the Replication Update the Character Editor supports network replication which is explained in various chapters. In the tutorial section you learn how to package a Dedicated Server and client.
¶ Quick Info
With this documentation we would like to kick start you right into development with your new assets by providing the character blueprint mentioned above. It is set up with the two Blueprint components BP_CharacterCustomization and BP_CharacterEditor, they are described in their respective chapters.
Since we develop this project besides our full-time jobs and know the product by heart, it may lack on some documentation every now and then. Thus, we kindly request any suggestions for assistance to enlarge the docs and especially the tutorial section for topics that need more tutorship than raw technical explanation.
Of course, if there are any questions, simply drop us a line via mail or chat.