Ica Skinned Mesh

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⭐ Ica Skinned Mesh ⭐

Ica Skinned Mesh is a compute shader based skinner that focused on skinning high quality digital humans.

Its a replacement for the built in "Skinned Mesh Renderer" component, that enables state of the art skinning techniques that used by many AAA games.

💼 When To Use

- You are working realistic character for games or cinematic projects.

- Your character model have a lot of blendshapes and reducing performance (10-300+).

- You want dynamic, physics-driven elements for secondary motion.

⭐ Dual Quaternion Skinning (DQS) with Scale

Say goodbye to volume loss with DQS, the gold standard for realistic deformation. DQS solve the volume loss issue on skinned meshes, mostly seen at joints. You probably already familiar with DQS since it standard in 3D Modelling applications(called "Preserve Volume" in Blender).

⭐ Optimized Blend Shape Processing

Process all blend shapes in a single compute shader dispatch, improving performance by up to 4x compared to Unity's built-in Skinned Mesh Renderer, when a lot of blendshapes is active at same time.

Perfect for character models that have high amount of blend shapes.

⭐ Accurate Normal & Tangent Recalculation

Fix inaccurate lighting caused by multiple blend shapes affecting the same vertex.

Utilizes a compute shader pipeline for runtime recalculation of normals and tangents, ensuring correct results at every frame.

⭐ (Experimental) Verlet Simulation for Realistic Secondary Motion

Bring life to characters with physics-driven secondary motion for mesh parts.

Based on Verlet integration, providing natural, dynamic movement while maintaining performance.

Easily configurable via vertex colors and stiffness, damping levels to suit your character’s design.

⭐ Runs Editor time

All Ica Skinned Mesh components works on edit time too, what you see in edit time is what you get in runtime 😎 Also fast play mode options are supported.

⭐ Attachment Skinner

Attachment Skinner is alternative way of skinning for meshes that meant to follow a base mesh, for example clothing, 3d decals.

It does not use bone or blend shape information, instead an attachment follows their base shape whenever it deforms.

This results much faster computation, for applicable meshes. Also reduces both vram and disk consumption.

Also since it does not required to transfer weight painting and blend shapes from base mesh, it simplifies asset creation pipeline significantly.

🚀 Why Choose This Asset?

- Built for Performance: Ica Skinned Mesh built for high performance from very first iteration, based on experience of author previous DOTS based normal recalculation asset. Its prioritize use of compute shaders whenever algorithms allows, and using DOTS on CPU side.

- Ongoing Support: Used and supported by author continuously.

- Non-Disruptive Integration: Ica Skinned Mesh read bone transforms and handles the skinning part, it does not not interfere with other plugins that work on IK, Animation, Shader etc.

📦 Package Includes

Three Components:

- Ica Skinner System: Process all other Ica Renderers in the scene on ever frame.

- Ica Skinner: Main component of the asset and a replacement for built in SMR

- Ica Attachment Skinner Attachment skinner deform meshes to follow a base Ica Skinner.

⚡Requirements

- Unity 22 LTS or higher

- Compute Shader Support

⚠ Current Caveats

- Normal recompute is equivalent of "legacy with split tangents" and not "mikktspace"

- Ica Skinner has higher Vram usage than SMR **

- Nothing is cached in pre built, this results higher startup initialization time **

- Ica Skinner has different performance characteristics (could be better or worse) **

- API is not stable *

- 4 Bones per Vertex Only *

- Not all SMR api methods provided in Ica Skinner *

- Verlet Physics still in experimental state *

- Tension compute still in experimental state *

(*) Planned to be fixed or improved.

(**) These may be fixed if I can convince Unity to make some improvements in the engine.