Adventurer Character (Non-Competition Character)
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Hello everyone. I am a freelance artist working with Reallusion for the Character Creator 1.5 launch. I'm not going to be competing, but I'm going to post alongside all the other artists here to give a demonstration on the custom clothing workflow that is new to Character Creator 1.5. Good luck everyone!
Here is the character that I'm working on:
Here is the character that I'm working on:
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I then exported an OBJ to edit in Zbrush. The great thing is, Character Creator now exports in quads so it's easy to sculpt it in Zbrush.
Then it's time to edit in Zbrush.
And here's the high-res sculpt. I only worked on her head since that's the only part of her that's exposed.
And now back to Character Creator by creating a custom morph slider.
Up next: clothes.
Edit: The body template files can be downloaded here:
http://www.reallusion.com/iclone/character-creator/custom-outfit.html
I then built the high-res clothes and the hair strips on top of it.
Once all the high-res models are done, it's time to start retopologizing.
douglassoares, I'm not competing because I'm working for Reallusion on this launch as a demo artist.
Now for the next few steps. I'm using Blender as my main DCC for this project, but most major 3D programs with the ability to export FBX files would work. Here is the low resolution topology.
At this point it would be prudent to check if the clothes you made look good with your custom morphs, so I'm going to do a test export to Character Creator. Character Creator needs a mesh with UVs, so you could do a temporary unwrap just so that Character Creator will accept your meshes.
To bring your clothes into Character Creator, you need to bind the clothes to one of the provided fbx body templates. In my case, it's the "Female.fbx" file. I bind the clothes to the armature and and do a basic skin weights transfer using Blender's transfer weights. To do this, first select the body then shift-select the clothes and the go into weight paint mode. You can access the transfer weights from there as shown below. It also shows the transfer weights settings that I used.
One more thing to note for Blender users is that you need to remove the vertex groups with "Nub" at the end or the import in Character Creator will fail. I just use a script I found online to remove vertex groups with zero weights.
Now to export the FBX. Reallusion recommends exporting to FBX 2012, but Blender users could use the default FBX 7.4 binary. I've had no problems with it. You just need to uncheck the "Add Leaf Bones" option in the Armatures portion of the options.
Once the FBX in exported, you can bring it into Character Creator through the Create>Cloth, Hair, Acc... menu button. Select your FBX file and in the next menu that pops up, select the fbxkey file of the body template that you used. In my case it's the Female.fbxkey file.
Then this window pops up. You just need to adjust the layer numbers that determine the collision order of the meshes.
If the import fails without warning, you could try exporting separate FBX files for your various clothes or hair meshes. If you do it this way, you just need to save out custom templates of the meshes you saved out separately. I had to export the hair and the bandana separately because they were both being read as hair meshes. If everything goes right, you'll end up with something like this:
You can then test out your clothes with the custom morph slider you created. For this example, I had to recreate the morph slider using the current morph as the source morph since I originally created it with the default morph. This is what she looks like at this stage. I turned off the textures again so that it isn't too distracting.
Once everything looks good, you could start working on your proper UV layouts, map baking, and texturing.
Why did you create your clothing using the default female mesh and then apply your custom character morph to everything, versus exporting your custom character and creating the clothes directly on that?
In some of the tutorials I've been looking at, the 3DXchange tool is used for import/export when going between iClone/CC and other tools. However, both iClone and CC seem to import/export both obj and fbx files. What is the purpose of using 3DXchange instead of just importing/exporting into and out of iClone/CC?
For this contest, I'd like to use CC to create a rigged base mesh for my character, sculpt and texture the character in Zbrush and Substance, adjust the skinning of my CC-rigged character in Maya, use iClone for it's animation abilities, and then render my animated character in Maya. Would 3DXchange be necessary for any of those steps? Will your examples here demonstrate some of this workflow? I would like to avoid doing any rigging or animation on my own, and I think iClone/CC will help with that but I am a little unsure of the overall iClone/CC workflow for something like this.
Is it possible to create a custom morph in Character Creator and then bring this morph slider with your character into iClone as an animatable slider?
Thanks, again, for your demos and thanks in advance for any information you can give me here. Sorry if this is the wrong place for these type of questions.
Cheers!
Here are some more updates.
The next thing I did was texture everything. I used Blender for UV mapping and Substance painter for texturing the clothes. I painted the custom skin textures in Blender because the Substance painter version I'm using can't paint across multiple texture sets (can it do that now?).
Back in Character Creator, this is what she looks like. I just loaded the diffuse and the normal maps since I still have to convert the PBR maps into something usable by Character Creator.
To bring textures into Character Creator, you simply have to click on your object and go the the Material tab.
http://www.reallusion.com/iclone/character-creator/custom-outfit.html
I'll edit my above post with this link.
If I export out separate fbx files, do the mesh need to be binded to something?
Or did you simply export out the hair, bandana as fbx meshes?
Please advise RL to make tutorials how to use CC with other appz besides maya.
I can't find docs how to do it specifically with c4d, modo, lightwave.
Some other common causes of the import failure are meshes with no UVs and the FBX exporter adding additional joints. I don't know how to use the programs that you mentioned, but check your export options to see if there is any option that adds a joint to the skeleton. Blender, for example, adds an additional joint to all end joints by default and this causes import errors.
http://forum.reallusion.com/Content-Developer/Developer-Center-Resource-and-How/Design-Your-Own-Character-Creator