Releases: umasteeringgroup/UMA
UMA 3.0 Beta
What's New in UMA 3
The UMA 3 branch includes a large editor and workflow refresh aimed at making UMA easier to author, debug, and ship in modern Unity projects.
URP and UNITY 6.3 Required for this release. (Built-in and HDRP should work with minor changes - you'll need to change the skin overlay to the less nice one that was used before). We will have support for HDRP on release.
Highlights
- UMAGenerator is now generated and added to scenes at runtime as needed. This simplifies setup and improves error handling when generators are missing or misconfigured.
- Overlay Positioning tools are now built into the recipe editor, with new alignment dialogs to make overlay rect placement easier.
- Placeholder wildcard slots allow recipes to carry overlays on placeholder entries and apply them to matching tagged slots at build time, improving wardrobe flexibility.
- Jobified Mesh Combiner and Texture Merge systems provide better performance when building characters, with support for multiple RenderTexture formats.
- Updated Mesh Modifiers system.
- Completely rewritten DNA System with modular support for modifiers, blendshapes, bone adjustments, bone poses, color changes, and more — all in a unified system with live editing in the editor.
- New UMA Model with blendshapes and race-generation support — create many races from one model. The unified model improves asset sharing and simplifies authoring.
- UDIM support in the slot builder — splits meshes into multiple UDIM tiles based on material assignment, supporting both UDIM and non‑UDIM workflows.
- Race‑based baked blendshapes for improved performance and flexibility.
- Slot level LOD generator - with fast runtime updates (no mesh rebuild).
Editor Workflow Upgrades
- New overlay positioning tools and alignment dialogs make overlay rect placement and refinement easier.
- Updated icon creator and improved recipe/slot tooling streamline daily content‑authoring workflows.
- Shared Color Table, dialog, and builder updates continue the push toward a cleaner editor experience.
- Face editor, vertex editor, and related editor stages received ongoing fixes and polish.
Wildcard and Placeholder Slot Support
- Placeholder slots that are not asset‑backed were added for overlay wildcard workflows.
- Recipes can now carry overlays on placeholder entries and apply them to matching tagged slots at build time.
- Related editor improvements were added around slot inspection, matching criteria, and overlay editing.
Materials, Shaders, and Rendering
- ShaderGraph support and shader package updates were added across the branch.
- UMA materials, color lookup tables, and render‑pipeline compatibility received broad updates.
- Support for multiple RenderTexture formats was added, along with scene‑consolidation improvements.
Mesh, Decals, and Avatar Systems
- Mesh Hide workflows received substantial updates, including compression improvements, raycast fixes, and editor refinements.
- Mesh Modifier fixes and ongoing DNA tuning improve avatar authoring and deformation control.
- Decal placement and utilities were updated, including improved behavior when matching by slot group.
- Pose assets, updated slots, rebuilt blendshape content, and recipe updates were included across the beta work.
Project Cleanup and Migration Toward UMA 3
- Legacy UMA 2, temporary, and test content was removed or relocated as the branch converged on the new beta structure.
- Validators and utilities were added to help keep wearable and project assets in the expected folder layout.
- Default settings and package organization were updated to better fit the new branch layout.
Highlights from Recent UMA 3 Changesets
- Added overlay positioning and alignment tooling.
- Added placeholder wildcard slots.
- Updated icon creator, slots, recipes, dialogs, and builders.
- Improved Mesh Hide, Mesh Modifier, decal, and vertex‑editing workflows.
- Refreshed shader packages, ShaderGraphs, shared color tooling, and supporting utilities.
- Removed older UMA 2 example and temporary content as part of the UMA 3 cleanup.
If you are updating from an earlier beta snapshot, rebuild the UMA library after importing changes so the asset index reflects the latest folder layout and tooling updates.
UMA 2.14f6
Bug fix release, update to 2.14f5
UMA 2.14F5
This is a Bugfix release mainly created to address the Global LIbrary losing references. Some additional new items and fixes were added along with this.
New:
Can now mark assets with "No Auto Add" - so if you have some assets you DON"T want automatically added to the system, and for some reason you can't use the filters to manage that, then you can individually exclude them.
Cached addressable groups so it doesn't take forever to scan them on large project.
Added some dummy files for deleted coroutine files to aid in upgrading from 2.13
Fixed:
Refactored global library. No longer loses its mind when compiling sometimes.
Fixed updating slots from submeshes > 0
Fixed some wrong warnings in the project scanner.
Auto build avatars will now wait in editor for compilation to stop before build.
Slotbuilder will no longer go crazy when object name and mesh name are the same.
When no context exists, an extra context would be created. This would happen over and over. Fixed.
Includes all previous 2.14 items.
UMA 2.14
Welcome page with helpful utilities
- Scene analysis
- Project Analysis
- Sample scenes
- Add UMA button to add to existing scene quickly
- Recompile shaders for SRP change
- Rebuild library after adding content
Slot Creator:
- Slot creator smarter about splitting multi-material meshes
- Keep all bones option
Mesh Modifiers - Equipable mesh transformations
- Blendshape to Modifer
- Vertex normal updates
- Vertex movements
- Vertex scaling along normal
- Vertex colors (need shaders that use colors)
- UV Modifications
Updated all shaders to be compatible with latest HDRP, URP, BiRP
Updated documentation
Lots of fixes, updated scenes
UMA 2.14f3
Various bug fixes.
Default to disable readback
Fix for readback not matching texture formats
UMA 2.14f2
Fixed various scenes
Blendshape scene & example race
Timeline scene
Updated documentation to include MeshModifiers
Fix for random clearing of library requiring rebuild
Fixed cross-compatible races with customization
Added welcome page
pops up at start. But it's obvious how to turn that off if you never want to see it again.
Links to UMA resources
Tool to scan scene and detect problems and adjust for optimal settings
Tool to scan project and fix many common errors
Tool to recompile shaders if you change SRP after importing
Tool to Rebuild the library
Link to documentation
UMA 2.14f1
UMA 2.14 RC 1
Fixed:
Slot creator will now correctly split multi-material objects into multiple slots without duplicating vertexes again.
Many issues with opening a new inspector from inspector code (threw errors 2022+).
consolidated version information to settings
Extraneous using statements
Missing using statements when UMA_BURSTCOMPILE is enabled
Fixed when keeping ALL bones (warning: This can add a lot of bones)
Added normal/tangent to Vertex Reset modifiers
Fixed Burst option in project settings (wouldn't force recompile)
Changes:
New bone poses for girl/boy races
Changes from RC0:
Updated shaders to address compatibility issues with HDRP in Unity 6
Added Mesh Modifiers - these are modifiers you can add to recipes to modify a mesh.
Vertex Color modifier
Vertex Scaling (along normal) modifier
Vertex Normal (and tangent) rotation modifier
Blendshape extractor modifier (emulates a blendshape)
Vertex reset modifier - Stores a vertex position on creation, and resets it on build. This is used when you need to adjust external modifications (like from itseez).
Added transforms to shared colors. "UMAOverlayTransformProperty" to the property blocks. This allows you to assign overlay transforms to colors. (Resize, Move, Rotate overlays).
Fixed the shared color table editor
Fixed prefab editor
Async GPU texture downloader ("Max Queued Conversions per frame" on Generator).
UMA Preferences were moved to Project Settings
Added additional statistics to Generator
Various bug fixes
UMA 2.14f0
UMA 2.14
- Updated shaders to address compatibility issues with HDRP in Unity 6
- Added Mesh Modifiers - these are modifiers you can add to recipes to modify a mesh.
- Vertex Color modifier
- Vertex Scaling (along normal) modifier
- Vertex Normal (and tangent) rotation modifier
- Blendshape extractor modifier (emulates a blendshape)
- Vertex reset modifier - Stores a vertex position on creation, and resets it on build. This is used when you need to adjust external modifications (like from itseez).
- Added transforms to shared colors. "UMAOverlayTransformProperty" to the property blocks. This allows you to assign overlay transforms to colors. (Resize, Move, Rotate overlays).
- Fixed the shared color table editor
- Fixed prefab editor
- Async GPU texture downloader ("Max Queued Conversions per frame" on Generator).
- UMA Preferences were moved to Project Settings
- Added additional statistics to Generator
- Various bug fixes
UMA 2.13
Release 2.13 - Asset Store release
This update has 2 years of production usage. This includes numerous speed improvements, many bug fixes and stability improvements. There are way too many to list all, but here are the hightlights:
New features:
Updated Skins
Speed improvements switching to native arrays in various places
New Materials used
Compatibility across Built-in, URP and HDRP
New "Simple Setup" scene to customize as a base character editor
Many Blendshape fixes and changes
Reorganized inspectors, greatly enhanced Avatar inspector, including:
Ability to add multiple recipes, enable disable them, filter them.
Ability to add DNA in editor
Able to set "base" colors in color editor
Get directly to race, race recipe, DNA Converters, and Boneposes
New compositing textures to lower VRAM usage
Faster building
Greatly enhanced utilities in the global library
Dynamic compression for hair, based on clipping plane(s)
Filters to limit asset searches to ease library rebuild
Photoshop style blend modes for combining textures
Material animator
New HumanBoy/HumanGirl races (compatible with HumanMale, HumanFemale)
Favorites window
New attachment options to ease holding items.
Significantly smaller bundles when using Addressables (removes material references and slot references where not required)
Added Addressable Build sample to show how to build smallest bundles and rebuild/label items in build script to address various issues with larger art teams.
Ability to recalculate normals during build
Added Burst support
Fixed man multi-culture issues with strings
Fixed AvatarDefinition to save Shader Parameter blocks with colors
Lowered size of AvatarDefinition String
Enable/disable slots in recipe editor for testing
Added integrated tags editor into recipe editors
Ability to match/hide by tags, simplifying process drastically
Drag and drop recipe merging
Fixed photobooth to work with SRPs
New Tools:
Texture combiner - for combining texture channels
Normal Viewer - see where the normals are after combining
Convert slots to meshes
Welding - Tools to copy vertex normals, bone weights from slots to match pieces together, or update weighting on slots without changing vertex count or order.
For asset creators/developers
Multi-SRP compatiblity on materials.
Multi-SRP materials shipped with UMA.
Added "Second pass material" to UMAMaterial to emulate mult-pass shaders
Override textures, bones, and vertexes by character (helpful for 3rd party avatar tools).
New Material Types - to use existing textures, or use existing materials - these modes are useful for customizable characters without generating rendertextures (much faster, but less customizable).
Meshcombiner tracks where every slot is inside the generated mesh, so you can get to the vertexes directly if needed. Also tracks where textures are placed in the Atlas.
UMA 2.13 RC 10
Removed invalid races from recipes.
Removed a bunch of junk recipes.
Adjusted proportions on Human Boy recipe to look better.
Added more information when things go wrong.
Asmdef for UMA Core fixed (removed burst options)