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Character customization is one of the most requested and most technically demanding features in modern game development. Players want to see themselves, or the character they imagine, on screen. Studios want to deliver that without building a bespoke customization pipeline from scratch for every title and every engine.
That’s exactly what we set out to solve with the Popul8 Character Editor (CE): a runtime, in-game character customization system that plugs directly into Popul8’s existing character pipeline and now runs live inside both Unity and Unreal Engine.
The Character Editor just crossed a key threshold: it's shipping inside a live game for the first time. Playable Worlds is integrating the Character Editor for Unity into their upcoming sandbox MMORPG, Stars Reach, and the in-game customization system will soon be available to test in pre-alpha.
Character customization in Stars Reach has expanded from basic preset templates into a detailed morphing and scaling system, giving players body shape sliders, facial feature sculpting, and species-specific attachments.
This is the kind of runtime depth the Popul8 Character Editor is built to support, and it’s just the start. Stars Reach is just the first stop: expect more customization options to land as the game moves through pre-alpha and toward launch.
Getting there meant solving real production problems, not just research prototypes: Unity Addressables support so assets load efficiently at runtime, a switch to Universal Render Pipeline for broader performance targets, a new GPU-based asset culling system so only the right geometry renders as players adjust sliders, and a character descriptor format light enough to move between server, client, and save file as a simple string.
Unity was first, but Unreal isn’t far behind. We shipped an alpha version of the Character Editor for Unreal Engine, including a new Unreal Bridge that imports character data straight from a Popul8 export into a UE project in a few clicks.
We’ve also been validating it with external partners, building internal integration demos with a couple of studios inside their own Unreal projects, confirming that a player can customize a character and see it move around a live Unreal scene in real time.
Unlike most runtime customization tools on the market, which are typically built for a single engine, the Character Editor already runs across both Unity and Unreal from one shared pipeline, and that’s already proven in a live game.
The Popul8 Character Editor is built around four ideas: automation (generate unique characters fast), customization (support everything from photoreal to stylized art), scalability (the same system works across platforms and engines), and versatility (fits into a studio’s existing pipeline instead of replacing it). Bringing real-time customization into a live game, and proving it works across two major engines in the same year, is the clearest proof yet that those aren't just goals on a slide: they're in players' hands.
We’ll keep sharing progress as the Character Editor rolls out to more titles and more engines. If you’re building a game and want in-game character customization without building it yourself, get in touch.
This work is being developed within the scope of Didimo's P8CE (Popul8 Character Editor) project (NORTE2030-FEDER-02192300), co-funded by Portugal 2030 and Norte 2030. For more information, please visit https://www.didimo.co/
