Animesh characters wanted.

[animats]

I want to set up some more NPCs. I have a good scripting system for that, but need more models.

I'm looking for generic background characters useful for making a place look busy. Like this.

Generic child NPC. Suitable as a background character for fantasy roleplay sims, etc. 22 LI.

• Generic human background street characters.
• At least as good a model as the above.
• Less than 30 LI dressed.
• Mod or full perm. No scripts needed; I'll do that.
• Usable LODs, so they don't disappear at distance.
• Fully rigged and ready to animate. Prefer Bento.
• Not ripped off from some Disney/Marvel franchise, Game of Thrones, etc. (This excludes a sizable fraction of what's on Marketplace.)

[Extrude Ragu]

I had a look myself and honestly I couldn't find much. I think the trouble is it's a search for a golden unicorn, the amount of people who need animesh human npc's is minuscule compared to the number of people who need an avatar, the market doesn't really have much to offer 'off the shelf'.

At Kokoro we also wanted to add human (or well, anime) NPC characters to our sim, but we went a different route, which was to use scripted avatars.

• It is practical and cost effective to make a wide variety of characters, since you can use off the shelf avatar components. Animesh NPC's on the other hand need basically a bespoke solution for every customization.
• Likewise, off the shelf AO's just work.
• When they do walk around, unlike an animesh character it is not jarring, as they follow the same server side motion rules that governs any other avatar, whereas an animesh will always look jarring when it walks as it does not follow the same motion rules like an avatar - It's similar, but different enough to make it uncanny.
• Most off the shelf interactable objects are scripted for avatars (think, touch events, temporary attachments), scripted agents can interact with them with relative ease, but animesh NPC's cannot.

With the time saved by not punishing myself and making bespoke scripted agents and re-scripting half the sim I instead spent the time developing a chat system using a locally installed LLM system on my computer, something that adds a lot of Roleplay/immersion value to the sim and has been attracting visitors who enjoy the novelty/roleplay practice they offer.

On that point, When a scripted agent chats, the text color is distracting, and of course it gets the cube icon if the user uses modern chat UI, whereas regular agent is not penalized this way.

Obviously, they push more triangles. Although in my case it's not as terrible as human bodies as Kemono and its clothes are already more optimised comparatively. Optimized game characters would be better, but in the end that commands a premium both in terms of time and money since it is not off the shelf. Not something I personally have the time for, being a hobbyist who might spend a few hours on a weekend working on these things.

Having to host the characters means you need to pay for hosting, but personally, since I wanted to use a local LLM anyway, I actually just used this as an oppotunity to take a bunch of my existing web services off Amazon and just use my personal computer as a personal server. Perversely, it ended up saving me money.

We do use animesh around Kokoro, but not for what I'd consider a hero asset like a walking talking npc. Some applications we used Animesh for include hoppy rabbits, stage curtains and trampolines.

Edited September 8, 2023 by Extrude Ragu

[Lucia Nightfire]

On 9/7/2023 at 6:08 PM, animats said:

Not ripped off from some Disney/Marvel franchise, Game of Thrones, etc. (This excludes a sizable fraction of what's on Marketplace.)

Your character looks like it is from a Telltale franchise. 🤔