Unity Multipurpose Avatar

Unity Multipurpose Avatar, is an open avatar creation framework, it provides both base code and example content to create avatars. Using the UMA pack, it´s possible to customize the code and content for your own projects, and share or sell your creations through Unity Asset Store.

UMA is designed to support multiplayer games, so it provides code to pack all necessary UMA data to share the same avatar between clients and server. It may be necessary to implement a custom solution depending on your needs to optimize and reduce serialized data.

Performance and memory usage

UMA framework provides a set of high resolution content, flexible enough for generating a crowd with tons of random avatars or high quality customized avatars for cutscenes. Source textures are provided for generating final atlas resolution of up to 4096x4096. Depending on the amount of extra content being imported to the project, it might be necessary to handle memory management or reduce texture resolution.

Every UMA avatar created has it ´s own unique mesh and Atlas texture, requiring extra memory. The standard atlas resolution of 2048x2048 is recommended for creating a small number of avatars, for games creating on a huge amount of avatars, using lower atlas resolution or sharing mesh and atlas data will be necessary.

UMA was initially planned to provide 50 avatars on screen, but the latest version can easily handle a hundred of unique avatars.

How does it work?

Creating 3d characters is a time consuming process that requires a number of different knowledge areas. Usually, each character is created based on an unique mesh and rig and is individually skinned and textured.