Meta Avatars SDK (Feedback/Issues)

[mouse_bear]

Do you have any feedback and/or issues in regards to the Meta Avatars SDK? Use this place to discuss, as we'll have members of the engineering team reviewing this thread!

Read the blog on the Meta Avatars SDK here: https://developer.oculus.com/blog/meta-avatars-sdk-now-available/

Refer to the Meta Avatars SDK documentation here: https://developer.oculus.com/documentation/unity/meta-avatars-overview/

[james.briggs.7311]

Heya!

It seems like the meta avatar sdk package for unity is missing some assets that make it unusable. Following the official meta project config documentation and v 29 update guide on a fresh project leads to errors and a lot of the assets that the documentation talks about, like scenes or most importantly the avatar manager prefab that has the shaders on it, are completely missing from the packages so it's impossible to get working at all. Unless there's some third secret package containing this stuff, it's currently impossible to implement meta avatars. This is with meta avatar SDK unity package installed and the sample assets package as well 

[RiverExplorer]

If this guess helps:

I am at .2 and I found that for some random reason and clearly untested reason, they had moved some of the needed and documented assets into samples. I had to load many of the samples to get the assets that were required and described in the documentation. A  while back it included the OVRCamera.

In a couple of cases I found, by trial and error, that they seemed to have deprecated an asset, moved it into samples, and created a new one with a similar name. One was something like ..managerhorizen... to ...managermeta... , but I can't remember exactly the name. And I think both are now in a sample.

NOTE: The eye gaze sample broke more, so you might want to skip that one.

They clearly think that documentation is not important.

[OdontMast]

Is it possible to include an editor to create a new Meta Avatar in the app? We want the user to be able to make custom avatars for their NPCs.

[Cryostriker]

Genuine Feedback. Please don't take this as a joke or an insult. But honestly? I would scrap it and start again. It's woefully over complicated, looks like someone basically took an internal tech demo as samples and said "yep, ship it" like it's a ready product. It's structurally a complete mess, is a nightmare to work with in anything that's not just a clone of the sample project... in fact, you literally have to use a bunch of files that are IN the samples just to get it running. There isn't a redeeming factor. Which is a shame, we really really want to use Meta avatars in our game. But right now? just having it in the project is proving a complete liability. Scrap it. Plan it properly in a USER CENTRIC WAY. And do NOT under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES do any kind of forced asset copies to an assumed structure of a project. It's absolutely wild that this code exists in a publicly released SDK.

    [InitializeOnLoad]
    public class SampleAssetsStartupTrigger
    {
        static SampleAssetsStartupTrigger()
        {
            // defer until the scene has loaded
            EditorApplication.update += RunOnce;
        }

        static void RunOnce()
        {
            EditorApplication.update -= RunOnce;
            if (!SampleAssetsUPMMover.DoesFileVersionMatch())
            {
                SampleAssetsUPMMover.CopyFilesOver();
            }
        }
    }

So start again, DO NOT ATTEMPT TO JUST MODIFY WHAT'S THERE! It will just be enforcing the same bad structure that it already has. It really, really needs a redo from scratch. This will take LESS time than continuing to use what you have now, which I'd wager if VERY slow to develop for.