CC4D Tools: Character Creator 4 to Cinema 4D - Face Setup Guide

the cc40 face rig is simply an extension of the fal profile set up in character creator for Cinema 4D it utilizes those post movs or plant shapes that get exported with the character and adds a more usable user interface than the raw posm sliders for posing or animating the face of a character coming from character creator inside Cinema 4D but before we go over the setup there let's take a quick look at what facial profiles actually are which profiles are supported by Character Creator and how do they work to find out what facial profile is assigned to your character in character creator just select it and open the facial profile editor by clicking the button in the modify panel under the motion post tab by clicking the edit Expressions button you can modify the facial profile you can see here that a character with the type cc3 plus has the cc4 extended profile assigned to it by default this profile consists of 140 morphs for different parts of the face and several Ys you can change the facial profile by clicking on it to the cc4 standard profile this profile contains only 65 morphs and is more comparable to ot's AR kit profile which is used by most of the facial motion capture apps on Apple devices but let's stick with the extended profile for now we will have a look at setting up the standard profile in a minute so what is a facial profile actually a facial profile is as already mentioned a collection of morphs for different parts of the face when used in combination those morphes build up the facial rig those those morphes can be mesh based which means the modified shape was either created by sculpting on the mesh or by modifying the position of certain vertices like you can see for example on the eye blink morphs they can also be bone based which means that the change in shape is handled by modifying the transformations of one or more facial bones that are skinned to the character's meeses they can also be a combination of both mesh and Bone morphs like you can see for example on the eye look morphes as well as on the morphs of the jaw it's important to note here that only mesh-based morphs will get exported as a postm teag when exporting the character as an fbx to Cinema 4D morphs that are only based on the transformation of certain facial bones will not be transferred over so if your character is set up with a profile like the cc4 extended or the cc4 standard where the rotation of the eyes and also the transformation of the jaw is handled by bones these Transformations will not be exported from character creator but the cc40 face R setup will make sure that these bones get connected to the face rig if you use a profile that is made out of morphs that are entirely mesh based and don't use any bone transformation whatsoever you should also have no problem setting up the cc40 face rig if you have a profile that has morphs in it which rely on the transformation of certain facial bones other than the eye look or the morphs then you will not get the expected result with the CC 4D face r as those Transformations will not be exported let's exit the facial profile editor and make sure our bind pose is restored go to export fpx and choose clo character choose Cinema 4D as your target tool preset and for the fbx options choose mesh under the default pose tab make sure the a pose is selected which is the cc3 plus bind pose when you open up the fbx and Cinema 4D you can see your root joint which holds the joint hierarchy and your character's geometry in the object manager each mesh that is influenced by the facial profile set up in character creator will have a POS Mo TCH on it which holds the morphs related to that profile and the respective mesh those morphs will also exist a separate morph Target geometry living in the scene as children of the mesh with the POs morph Tech they are linked to let's take the POS M tag of the CC based body mesh as an example if you click on it you can see that it holds all the facial movs we just saw on character creator it should be noted here that it's important to stick with the naming conventions of character creator otherwise the cc40 face rig may not work correctly as the facial moves will not get recognized by the setup as a last thing before finally setting up the cc40 face rig let's have a quick look at the eye look and the jaw poses which were handled by the transformation of certain facial joints in character creator you will notice that those transformation did not get exported the pH rig can only be applied to a character that has the control rig already attached to it so let's quickly run this character through the CC 4D control control rig setup select the root joint and click the CC Ford convert NS to joints icon select the root joint once again and click the CC Ford optimize joints icon to make sure all the joints are aligned correctly now let's clean up our facial pose mphs a bit by removing all the extra morph Target geometry while keeping the pose mphs itself intact with the CC Ford remove morph targets tool this will also make the scene a little bit more lightweight even though our character only consists of seven meshes there are actually 457 polygon objects in the scene deselect everything in the object manager and click the CC Ford remove morph targets icon you will get some information about the removal progress in a small popup window and once the process is done all the extra measures will be removed from the scene and the post M will still work as expected now we can add the cc40 control rig to the scene and run the cc40 control rig setup you can open up the console to get some additional information on the setup process for example if the character type was recognized correctly let's add the cc40 face rig to the scene by clicking the cc40 face rig icon and as you can see the cc40 face rig itself is nothing more than a collection of null and spline objects that will act as an extension to the facial morphs of the character as this is a cc3 plus character the setup will recognize the CC based body and will snap certain controls directly to certain vertices of the body mesh but this will only work on a character with the character type cc3 plus as the body mesh of a cc3 plus character is intended to always have the same vertex Index this will not work on characters with the type humanoid as the body mesh may be different than the one of a cc3 plus character therefore you would have to adjust the position of the controls manually but we will have a look at that in a minute now let's Des select everything in the object manager and finally run our cc40 pH R setup let's just take a quick look if the connection to the Joint of the jaw as well as to the joints of the eyes has been established if you move the jaw control you can see that the jaw is moving correctly and if you move the control of the eyes you can see that the eyeballs are rotating as they should now let's have a quick look at the cc4 standard profile for this I use again the neutral M character from the content browser and character creator but this time I'm going to change the facial profile to do this I open up the facial profile editor and click the edit expressions button on the top of it by default the character will have the cc4 extended profile on it but I can change it by simply clicking on it after you hit the apply button and the convert facial profile window that pops up you will get another message with the option to save the current facial profile this may be a good idea when you're working for example with a custom character because in the process of downgrading the facial profile some of the data will get lost but as this is a default character from Character Creator and I can easily restore the extended facial profile from the content browser there's no need to save it the difference between the cc4 extended and the standard profile is again the amount of morphs or blend shapes it holds so while in the cc4 extended profile for example the mou Paco and funeral morphs are split up into several different sub morphs uh for the upper and the lower lip left and right in the standard profile these deformations will will be handled by only two morphs and also the cc4 extended profile will have a few more morphs for the movement of the nose and its nostrils while in the standard profile you only have two sneer morphs go to file export fpx choose clu character choose Cinema 4D is your target tool preset and choose the option mesh under fpx options make sure the a post is selected under the default post Tab and click export when you open up the fpx and Cinema 4D you again see the bone hierarchy and the characters geometry in the object manager but before we can add the face rig we need to apply the CC Ford control rig to the character but first let's open up the console and dock it somewhere the first step is again to check the bone hierarchy for null objects and convert them back to joints by selecting the root bone and clicking the CC 4D convert nulls to joints icon now we can optimize our joint hierarchy by selecting the root bone and clicking the cc40 optimize joints icon now let's quickly clean up our character's facial pose morph AIT by removing all the extra morph Target geometry with the CC Ford remove Mor targets tool now we can add the control rig to the scene and run the CC Ford control rig setup once the control rig is in place we can add the cc40 face rig by clicking on the cc40 face R icon and run the cc40 face R setup a quick look at the console gives you some additional information about the character type and you can see that the facial profile was recognized correctly as well as the CC based body mesh so some of the controls did snap in place automatically on the first look it may not seem very different except that some of the controls of the nose are missing but those controls are not deleted they are just hidden as the posst morphes they should control do not exist in the standard profile when you open up the hierarchy and go down to the face controls you can still find them in there the Packa control will still drive the packo pose M and the funeral pose M when the control is scaled but it will not have any influence when dragged to the side or up and down as those sub POS morphes do not exist in the standard profile now let's have a quick look at setting up the cc40 face rig on a non-standard character which means a character with the type humanoid ector build or Ecto scan for this example I have again choosen the party M character from the content browser and character creator as this is also available through the actore library when we open up the facial profile editor we can see that this character has the traditional facial profile assigned to it this is the Legacy facial profile of Character Creator on iclone coming from older version of the software even though this facial profile is also supported by the cc40 face rig it's recommended to use the standard or the extended facial profile but we will stick with it for the sake of this tutorial let's make sure our bind pose is restored go to export fpx and choose clued character choose Cinema 4D as your target tool preset and as this is not a cc3 plus character we won't be able to export the character in its bind pose using the fbx option mesh so we have to go with the option mesh and motion with this we can export our character in its current pose under the include motion tab when we open up the fbx and Cinema 4D we can see our joint hierarchy and our characters geometry in the object manager and we will quickly run it through the control rig setup so we can apply the face rig to it select the root joint and click the CC Ford convert NS to joints icon select the root joint once again and click the CC 4D optimize joints icon as we use the MH and motion preset when exporting our character from character creator the exported joint hierarchy will have key frames on it in order to continue the setup we have to click okay in the small popup that is showing up to make sure all animation tracks on the joint hierarchy get removed and as a last step of preparation we will remove all the unnecessary morph Target geometry with the CC Ford remove morph targets tool now we can add the control rig to the scene and run the control rig setup before we will add in the face rig as well let's have a quick look at the console here we get the information that the character type humanoid was recognized correctly and the CC based body mesh has not been found now let's add the face rig to the scene and run the face rig setup in the console we can again see that the character type is humanoid and that the traditional facial profile was recognized correctly but as this character does not contain the CC based body mesh the controls could not be snapped to certain vertices of the phase during the setup process even though they are already working as expected and are connected to the characters facial POS mores their position might be a bit off but we can easily fix that manually by selecting the face UI group in the viewport or the object manager and checking the show face helpers checkbox under the setup tab in the attributes manager this will give us some help on N objects and the viewport to reposition our facial controls once we are happy with the position of our control objects we can uncheck the showface helpers checkbox again to hide the help n objects in the viewport and just to say a few things about the traditional facial profile as this is kind of the Legacy profile of character creator some of the control objects of the cc40 face rig may be hidden or may not have the full functionality they would have with the extended facial profile

Channel: CC4D Tools

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Id: dqfwfpBqppU

Length: 18min 13sec (1093 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 23 2023