Reallusion Character Design - nestergal

nestergal

Hi, everyone.

I'm happy to participate in Reallusion Character Design contest.

My goal was not to create the best characters ever but to make  3d animated joke as fast as possible.

And I think that  Reallusion programs are the best solution  for such purposes.

Here is my final result.

I used Crasy Talk,  iClone, 3D Xchange, Character Creator, Marvelous Designer and Blender for this.

I'll try to show my work in progress later in this thread.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDY6jjUVoc4

nestergal

I wish to have 48 hours in a day! It is really difficult not just to make animations but to describe the work flow, especially in English which is not my mother tongue unfortunately.

But now I am almost ready - .

For my little joke I had to make 5 caricatures: Mr. Barak Obama  and  4 well-known beautiful Ukrainian female politicians.

Usually I don't like discuss politics. But this time my goal was to attract people who are not familiar with animations skills. 

I noticed that if you make animations with politicians, people expect provocations, and you have more chances of seeing your video.

Actually I was trying to say: People, stop thinking about politics, just study 3D, because it is much more interesting!

But now some words about my work in progress.

I've  told  already that my goal was not to create the best characters ever but to make characters for 3d animation as fast as possible.

At first I've made caricatures. The process was easy and it took me less than an hour to make all of them.

First I made 3D heads from photos in CrazyTalk and then after some tweaks in Character Creator and few textures tweaks in Photoshop I was pretty happy with the results.

Just for Mr. Barak Obama wavy ears  I exported my character using 3DXchange  to Blender. I made some tweaks in Blender in Sculpt mode.

The most important thing while Blender import and export  is to keep vertex order.

Here are some screen-shots with options that are  important if you use Blender with Reallusion software. 

The trickiest part for me was to make Ukrainian national cloth.

There is a little problem  with current version of Character Creator, if you make and weight paint cloth in Blender.

For example, last week I was working at a little Flower Character.

I made and weight painted cloth in Blender, but when I imported cloth to Character Creator, there was a problem in area of Character's left breast.

Here are the pictures.

The only way to solve this problem for me was to make skirt instead of dress and  to make Character's collar  much smaller.

For Character's upper body I used Corset from Professional outfit collections which I bought from Reallusion Content Store.


But for Ukranian national cloth it was not the case.

Actually I used Body Templates from Reallusion which I received while Character Creator 1.5  Beta testing.

It was not very convenient to  make cloth for standard characters first, especially because my characters are caricatures with huge heads, thin necks etc.

But this time it was a solution.

I hope, this import-export problem will be solved in the future. 

Thus, I made Ukrainian cloth for standard CC Characters in Marvelous designer, than I retopologized and weight painted all the cloth peaces in Blender.

The process was pretty straightforward. There are many explanations in the Internet for how to do this.  And I won't repeat all the steps especially because of my "brilliant" English. 

I just want to emphasize my mistakes and problems.

My fist  mistake was that I didn't noticed crotch width slider in Character Creator Modify panel, witch allows to make distance between legs much wider.

My Ukrainian trousers  are too narrow. They should be much wider. But I couldn't make wider cloth work well  with dancing movements just because I didn't noticed this crotch width slider.

When I noticed it, it was too late.

My second mistake was that I'm too lazy. I borrowed  wreaths for my female characters from DAZ Seasons collection which I purchased from DAZ 3D shop.

I just changed them a little bit in Blender and imported them through Character Creator as cloth pieces.

But in fact they were too dense.

It was almost impossible to make animations when character's wreaths were visible, even in Quick mode.

My Iclone projects were too big even thought all the shots were stored as different projects. It was even difficult to open them.

And that is just because I was lazy to do wreaths less dense. 

 

But it was a good experience for me.

I had also some problems with  with cummerbund.

At first it was something like this.

But I couldn't find the right settings to achieve good cloth movements while dancing.

That's why I decided  just to "use scissors" and to make cummerbund without cloth movements at all.

And in the end some words about character's motions.  I used Ipisoft markerless motion capture for this. I tweaked bvh from  Ipisoft in Blender and then I imported them through 3DXchange into iClone.

That's all.

I should say that it was really fun to play with iClone. As for me it was the fastest 3d animation ever. I understand that I should play more with my render settings. But in general it was great experience.

nestergal

And there is one more thing I want to say. I can't understand what is wrong with my video quality settings. It seems to me that my video looks totally different on my YouTube channel and on my Facebook page.

Here is  Facebook link - https://www.facebook.com/nestergalstudioschool/videos/1060014604075223/

Here is YouTube link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDY6jjUVoc4

It is the same video!

If someone could explain me what did I wrong, it would be great!