Hello Creators,
Today, we’re releasing a Studio Beta of visualization tools to help you identify, understand, diagnose and fix UGC validation issues before you publish your assets to the Marketplace.
We’ve completely overhauled and modularized the validation system to support Validation as a Service (VaaS) capabilities. This is the first step towards moving the platform to a unified validation system that can serve products developed for Studio and in-game creation. Additionally, we’ve seamlessly integrated the Asset Quality system with validation. Now, you’ll receive information on validation errors for non-compliant assets and a quality assessment for the compliant ones, in case you want to improve them further.
Figure 1: A major pain point when debugging dynamic heads is to visualize where the cage eyes and mouth project onto the face. Now you can easily see the projections and fix animation issues. Note in this example that the dynamic head score is low at 60 since the projected landmarks don’t properly align with the head eyes and mouth.
Validating Your Avatar Assets
We’re releasing the validation system as its own Studio plugin. You need to enable it in Beta features before you can load it in Studio:
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Open Studio
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In the menu, select File->Beta Features
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Toggle ON “Visualizing UGC Validation”
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Restart Studio
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In the Studio toolbar, add a new tab (click on the plus sign next to the rightmost tab in the toolbar – see Figure 2)
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Select the newly created tab and click on Add Tool. This will open a window. Search for “UGC Validation” and add it to the toolbar.
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Click on it to initialize the validation plugin.
Figure 2: The plus sign next to the rightmost tab in Studio.
With the validation plugin running, you have the option to select in the Explorer window:
- An entire avatar
- Just the avatar head
- One clothing item
- One rigid accessory
After you click on “Run Validation”, you will be prompted to select the asset type corresponding to each of your selections (see Figure 3). The validation service will run in the background and report back results as a combination of errors and/or warnings depending on the state of your asset. You can browse the feedback messages and click on them to visualize the issues.
Figure 3: Validating a layered clothing item; you need to select the appropriate asset type before running validation.
Figure 4: Validation errors are marked in red; warnings are used to flag validation checks that passed but can be made better to achieve a higher quality score. In this example, the cage for the pants is not tight enough and covers body parts that are unrelated to the pants themselves.
Figure 5: Validate dynamic heads by selecting the body model in Explorer and dynamic heads as the asset type for validation.
Note that not all messages have a visual component. Please, refer to documentation for a complete list of validation categories and the checks that have a visual component available.
Your feedback is very important for us to continue developing our validation system in a direction that meets your needs, so please share your thoughts and suggestions below.
Thank you!
