Is there a roadmap for improved quality?

[dxmachina1]

Hi Guys,

I purchased the subscription for Character Generator and am left a little (maybe a lot) disappointed by the quality. The technology concept is very strong and the tools are well thought out (though extremely slow to work with online - I'm guessing because the server has to send back live image renders). The system can't at least cache the images necessary to rotate? Ugh.

But the major issues I see from a quality perspective:

1. The skin textures seem to be nicely detailed, but the clothing textures are awful. It seems like the majority of the texture map is used for the skin, which is fine for the skin- but everything else suffers a lot for it.

2. It's also rather problematic to bake the clothing textures into the same texture as the skin. It's difficult to find a single shader that will work across both and look convincing. In addition, it becomes impossible to simply apply a different cloth texture to the clothing. These should be mapped separately with more resolution available for higher details.

3. Alpha hair options would be nice.

4. The normal maps seem to be rather subtle and aren't helping the already low clothing textures. If the clothing maps were completely separate it would make for better normal maps as well.

5. Doesn't seem to be any way to generate children or adjust character age... the latter is especially difficult to work with.

6. Textures are all in JPG format? That seems to be an odd default choice. PNG please.

Finally, I do think the subscription+credit system is needlessly confusing.

My main question is... what is the roadmap here? Are any these items going to be addressed in the near-future, or is this tool roughly as-is? If so how can I pursue a refund?

Thanks for your time.

[CharacterGenerator_Team]

We do have a dedicated team working on enhancements to Character Generator and they are working to improve the user experience, increase character quality, and add new features/capabilities.

We have taken note of the things you identified and will review them internally to see when and how we can potentially address them.

We very much appreciate feedback such as yours to help us ensure we are providing a service that is valuable to our customers.

[brianisbrilliant]

I second the request for optional higher resolution/pixel texture maps. Thank you for this fantastic tool! 

[Parmenides]

I totally agree with all of your points. Especially 1& 5. It's been almost 2 years since AD responded about having a dedicated team, has there been any updates?

[josefhiggins]

I remember reading this thread in 2014! Sadly, as we approach 2017, not a single change or enhancement has been implemented in the Character Generator app. 

Looks like a dead project. 

[hzhou3]

I hope the "dedicated team" of Character Generator still exists so that my problem can be fixed within this century

(1) Eye does not render properly in Maya 2017 using Arnold renderer

(2) There are a few pixels in the rendered images that are white, like those bugs commonly seen in infant stage of image processing -- values greater than 256 are clipped and in turn are represented as 0 in 8 bits.

Today is Dec. 5, 2016. I will keep waiting until they are finally solved by elites of the dedicated team in Autodesk.