Mastering Character Customization with Ready Player Me’s Next-Gen Unity SDK

Most modern video games have a specific art direction and aesthetic. This is often as important to a game as the gameplay mechanics or storyline. Your characters need to fit into your game world, your character creator needs to blend in seamlessly, and your players need to feel immersed in your world at all times.

A great example of this is GTA Online, which puts you in a police lineup while editing your character makes you feel at all times like you’re still in the world of GTA, stuck in a Los Santos police station whilst morphing your character based on parental lineage. These small mechanics and details are what make the game so immersive.

With the Ready Player Me next-gen Unity SDK, you can achieve this level of granular detail while benefiting from everything initially working out of the box. The rigid constraints of our original plug-and-play Avatar Creator no longer limit you. You now can get all of the benefits that an out-of-solution brings while retaining full control over how it looks aesthetically with the flexibility to change every little thing, all the way down to the low-level code.

How it works

For UI and level designers, the next generation SDK offers a simple open-source sample UI that you can use as a base, completely rip open to change, or customize in any way you can imagine. Even recreating the GTA style of character creator UI if you want to. All of the UI code is fully open-source. It uses simple wrapper functions around the Ready Player Me APIs, where a lot of the heavy lifting regarding asset position and placement is taken care of for you. You can just focus on the presentation layer.

For animators, you can use your existing rig and existing animations from your game, without making any changes. You don’t need to change your naming conventions, or your internal art team flows in any way. Simply add an extra step at the end of your current art pipeline to upload your character with your rig into your Ready Player Me Studio account. Your character with your custom rig will become compatible with all the wearable assets in the Ready Player Me library, and our assets will be automatically skinned to your character’s rig. Any engine level configuration can stay exactly the same because by uploading your custom rig, the output of the character into the scene from our SDK will match exactly the rig you upload to Studio.

For game programmers, the entire SDK is open-source for those cases when you need or want to submit a change request. Out of the box, the SDK gives you access to the lowest-level function calls that you could possibly want to make. If you want to, you can skip all of our samples and build a custom UI experience on top of the same API functions that our plug-and-play editor experience uses to list, render, and equip assets. Everything is open for you to create whatever experiences and game mechanics you want. You could build an inventory system with your Ready Player Me assets, build a version of a character customization UI, or even go as simple as just building some asset pick-up and equip mechanics with Ready Player Me. All of this is possible.

Summary

The next-gen SDK was built with the primary goal of simplicity. It strives to give you all the power of the Ready Player Me platform without limiting the experience of your game in any way.

You get all the benefits of Ready Player Me, with real-time content delivery at run-time, access to our ever-expanding content library, and access to next-gen content creation tools. The difference is that thanks to our new SDK, you now get all this in a way that doesn’t limit you to a customization experience or a character style that is dictated by Ready Player Me. Furthermore, you now have access to offline support and asset caching, meaning that if Ready Player Me APIs ever go offline, you can be protected and ensure your game runs smoothly.

Our next-generation tools are already being used by a few selected studios whose games are launching later this year. To apply for early access and learn more about the next generation tools, click here.

We opened a new thread on the Developer Forums where you can discuss the next-gen tools and get more insights from our team.