Changing the game with iClone 8.1 and Unreal Engine 5

hey what's going on y'all Jay from JS films here today I'm going to be showing you all some of the newest updates to iclone 8 and Character Creator 4. first I'm going to show you how you can transfer multiple characters from iclone 8 to Unreal Engine 5 and record multiple animations using the new time code setting in live link second I'm going to show you how you can subdivide characters and character creator 4 to be exported to Unreal Engine 5. let's begin so the first order of business is to make sure that we have all the plugins we need installed in Unreal Engine 5. so what we'll do is go to illusion hub and make sure that we have unreal live link plugin for iclone 8 version 1.1 installed and additionally if I go to iclone I'm also going to go ahead and install the auto setup so I'll go to plugins character creator get tool for unreal this is now going to open the page and then it's going to make me download an exe file which I'm going to go ahead and install in my computer once you're finished installing both the iclone 8 live link plugin in Auto setup you're going to be able to find that in your program files illusion folder so for me that's local disk program files relusion we're going to see that we have a shared plugin folder and now we're going to see live link for unreal is here and as well as Auto setup right now the latest unreal Auto setup is set for 5.0 at 1.25 alright so what we'll do is actually copy and paste these folders into our Unreal Engine project so I'll double click the live link first click it again I will now copy this and then go to my project folder called relusion and I'll just paste this here what this is going to do is going to create a new plugins folder in our project let me go back to my shared plugins folder now because now we're going to drag and drop or copy and paste the unreal Auto setup I'm going to copy all three files right click copy and again go back to my religion project file and then just right click paste Perfect all right so the next thing I'm going to show you is where I'm going to be getting my characters from and animations from now what I usually do is just check this website every now and then just to see what they have going on and to be honest they're uploading a lot of stuff in here so first things first we're going to grab some actors so I'm going to click on actor and then what I ended up doing was actually getting some of these Street people casual people and then the party people scan assets they're pretty high quality and what's cool about this is you can get them all in a pack or if you just want to buy them individually you can do that as well in here pretty awesome stuff now the next thing we're going to need are animations and again One Stop Shop actor core has motions so I'll click on motion here and what we're going to be getting is The Nightlife bar night club and I think I also grabbed some dance moves in here as well again if you haven't done so go ahead and check this out they do have some free animations for you to try around and then lastly one of the cool things about this is that once you purchase everything here they're all pretty much connected in the smart Gallery in iclone so I actually don't have to download anything here individually which is pretty nice so if I go to iclone 8 right now and I go to content and if I go to recent downloads you're now going to see all of my downloaded character alright so the next thing we're going to do is go ahead and fire up our Unreal Engine 5 project go to illusion and I'll just double click this okay so here's the project file that we're going to be working with I just got this from the marketplace and have this character here what I'm gonna do and what I'll do is kind of just walk around and see where we want the scene to kind of happen I see some chairs over here raise a bar and we have the dance floor right here so I think what I'm going to do is go ahead and set everything up around this area right here because this place is pretty massive so I'll go ahead and press escape and I'll move these chairs out of the way so we have some room a little bit we can always just bring that back later now one of the cool things about the new live link is that you can now bring items from Unreal Engine to iclone 8 and vice versa so what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this chair right here and let's go ahead and move some of these chairs as well and I'm going to go ahead and press Ctrl tilde key that's going to change our Gizmo I'll move these out so what I'm going to do now is go to Windows Virtual production live link looks like it's already turned on and that's going to be right here so I have it right here and what I'll do is go to Source live link iclone press ok that's gonna be receiving and then we'll go to my icloneade project and we're going to go to plugins unreal live link unreal live link let's kind of yeah put it right here and then what I'll do is I'll click on this link we'll turn everything off right now because I don't want to send to unreal I want to receive so I'll go ahead and activate link right here let's go back to Unreal Engine and I'm going to click on this chair this table maybe one chair and I am going to go ahead and transfer let me see let me go to unlit real quick because I just want to see what this is made of it looks like the floor okay so the dance floor is one piece so that's good I'm gonna go ahead and take that as well so I'm going to take the Dance Floor I'm going to take this red couch bar and this chair and all we have to do is right click transfer to iclone right and what that's going to do is just what it says it's going to transfer that to iclone8 and now if I go to the scene and I go to this UE scene Unreal Engine scene twirl that down I'll click on this actor and press f and now you're going to see everything that we transferred from Unreal Engine so I'll go ahead and scroll down and let's go to the bar press F so we can focus that bar and scroll out by using my mouse so we have this couch the bar and what we'll do next is really just import the characters that we got from actor core so I'll start with party people I'll drag the first one in okay perfect well I'll make this a little bit bigger and then we have transform Gizmo right here I'll press w and I'll kind of take her to the bar area to just kind of get the scale right because yeah this does not look right as far as scaling goes but that's okay and it looks like our feet and I think what I'm going to do is actually try to grab the floor as well from unreal so again I'm going to click on this I'm just going to send this as well to iclone so transfer transfer it iclone so we can kind of see that floor right there you go much better and yeah she's still a little bit too small so what I'll do is I'll just go ahead and change your proportion press ok and maybe we can do 120. now click her press e to rotate all right that's looking a lot better okay and what I'm going to do now is just pretty much drag and drop all of our characters into the scene and then scale them just to make sure that their proportions are correct all right so I went ahead and dragged around some more actors in our scene so you can see right here and the next thing we're going to do is go ahead and apply some animations that we downloaded from actor core so all I'll do is I'll click on this character and press F so we can focus on that character now let's kind of zoom out here and I'll press w and just move her this way and if I go now to my content folder and then press back go to the animation tab if I scroll down you're going to see we have the social hangout nightlife that I showed y'all from actor core all right so I'm going to go ahead and drag and drop this animation into this character and again that's looking pretty good like so and we can always just scale up this object here in unreal because it doesn't look like it's called properly what we're going to do now is transfer all of these characters and their animations into Unreal Engine and to do that I'm going to go back to my live link and then I'll go ahead and click on this character right here that's going to include all of our characters I don't want to do any props what I don't want to do is export these props back to Unreal so make sure that this is checked off because if you have this checked this is going to be replacing the floor in a real project and we do not want that at all so we sort of make sure that we just have the character selected and then I'm going to my transfer right here I'm going to transfer the scene and again we just got to make sure that all of our character are selected here and that's it turn off the props camera and Light and then I'm going to go ahead and click on transfer file and just make sure that you're Unreal Engine 5 project is still open and then I'll go ahead and click this and then wait okay so it looks like our export is finished uh it roughly took about five to ten minutes and what we're gonna do now is check and reel to see if our characters and animations made it in and yeah sure enough all of our characters and looks like their animations made it in so what's crazy about this is before this update I would have had to pretty much export all these characters out of character creator or iclone and then import it to Unreal and then import their animations but now all it takes is one click of a button and waiting about 10 minutes to get all these characters in here all animated that is pretty game changing in my opinion as you can see here we are kind of floating in there but it's okay we're gonna go ahead and fix that right now so I'm gonna go back to iclone and yeah you can kind of see that they are floating because of that ground right there that floor so what I'll do is I'll click the character I'll turn off foot contact and hot hand contact and I'll just kind of slide them down and make sure that I'm going to go ahead and go to the very first frame so we're not animating down so as you can see right there that's good I'll click on everybody and pretty much just move everybody down all right so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and loop these animations so they last a little bit longer so I'm going to go open up the timeline and press F3 all right so what I'm going to do is click on this motion and click on the loop button right here and then what I'll do is I'll extend this now so that it is looping all right I'm going to go ahead and press save press rewind and then go ahead and press play we'll change it to LIT mode I'll press play right here now we have our character moving around press f11 to make it bigger and now we're having a party everyone's having a good time looks like pretty pretty darn cool so now that we've transferred all the characters in animation into Unreal Engine we are now going to use the take recorder and unreal to record all of these animations all at once so let's go back to the project and go to edit plugins and then we'll type in Media framework right we're going to click on the utilities and the i o framework and then click restart all right so I'll close this here and I'm just going to reconnect our live link now press OK all right and what's going to happen is everybody's going to go back to their positions all right so let's go back to iclone and go to edit project settings and then we're going to change the time mode to by frame and then we're going to change the time unit to time press X and that's going to change this right here to time and then I'll go ahead and open up our timeline once again press F3 and I'll rewind it all the way back now and then real we have that plugin that we just enabled and that's going to show up right here so I'm going to go ahead and click this and new empty meter profile and I'll just say meter profile then select and I'll just save it whatever just like so and then I'm going to change the time code provider change this to live link time code click down down and we're just going to select one of our characters for the evaluation we're going to say latest I'm going to go ahead and save that minimize it all right and then what we're going to do is go to edit plugins and then take a look and see if take recorder is already enabled it looks like it already is so that's good go ahead and press X here I'll go to Windows cinematics take recorder that's going to open it up right here to make sure that this is set to 60 frames per second and then for the source I'm going to go ahead and add all of our actors in there six in this place again all right so we added all of our characters in there and then for the take recorder if this is on twirl going and troll it down change the recording clock source to time code and now all we have to do is press record here it's going to do a countdown and then press play in iclone my time thank you okay I'm gonna go ahead and go back to unreal and I'm just gonna say stop right and after that what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn off my live link so I'm going to delete this for now and if I go to my content browser content cinematics takes and we open this up and press play you're gonna see that we just recorded all of that animation all at once and there are no drop frames whatsoever because we are using time code recording this method is pretty darn insane it's going to speed up your workflow if you have a similar workflow like I do because this is pretty incredible and if we look back here obviously we didn't really we didn't actually Loop them but but you can see that we still recorded their animations back here that's pretty crazy and that is pretty powerful being able to import all of the characters into unreal animating them and then recording all of them all at once okay so that's pretty much it for this demonstration but what we're going to be talking about next is the new subdivision export from iclone so the next thing we're going to be taking a look at is character creator 4.1's subdivision export so here I am in Character Creator and I'm just going to go ahead and open up the cc4 project and then I'm just going to select this Camellia facial demo before we get started though I'm going to go ahead and change the skin of our character here to 4K because it actually comes with that so if I go to pack right now and I'm going to press back and I'm going to go to skin and if I type in 4k right here and press enter you're going to see that we have skin and makeup and we have a couple of options here for Camellia so for this one I'm just going to say cc4 Camellia 4K skin and I'll just say apply so now that we have 4K textures on our character let's go ahead and take a look at this smooth mesh or subdivision if I click on Camellia right now and if I go to scene if I troll down right here I'm going to go ahead and change your body to wireframe shaded and in a modify window I'm gonna scroll down until I see smooth mesh so as you can see right now smooth mesh is off or subdivision is off so let's go ahead and turn it on so there are two options for you in the subdivision panel we have level for Real Time preview or level for final render as you can see here for level for real time you already applied one so if you go to zero right now you're going to see the before and if we apply one you're going to see that our character is a lot smoother again we can turn this up to two and then three that's pretty incredible so let me go ahead and turn this wireframe off real quick because I want to show you what it looks like now so I'm gonna go ahead and go to zero again or off and what we're going to do is go ahead and get a close-up here we're going to start with the ear right here right now the subdivision for level real time is set to zero I'm going to set it to 1. and you can automatically see what's going on there it is actually smoothing out her ears then again if you go to two even better and then three even more so now this is pretty important because if you're creating animations and cinematics you might have to do a lot of close-ups and subdivision really adds that realism to it a little bit again I'm going to turn it off you can see at her eye right here looks a little bit weird without that subdivision and if I switch it on it just smoothens everything out with that being said what if we want to go ahead and Export this to Unreal Engine or Nvidia Omniverse well the second option right here will let you do just that so for the sake of this comparison I'm going to go ahead and set everything to zero first because what we're going to do is actually export a non-subdivided character kind of like what you see in right now but first let's go ahead and change her outfit and I'm gonna press back here I really do like this jacket here let's go ahead and go to clothing I love this jacket right here and we're going to go with high quality right here so now she has this jacket but we're gonna go ahead and take off her older clothes so I'm gonna go say crop t-shirt delete and I'm gonna take the denim shirt as well some of these clothes are starting to really look good here okay so here's our character and she actually has animations both body and facial and we're going to go ahead and Export those as well so I'm going to go ahead and click on Camilla here file export fbx cloth character and I'm going to set this to Unreal mesh and motion we're going to go ahead and go with current animation and let's make sure everything else is good we have a post for unreal texture preset for unreal so that's good and this is pretty much everything by default now if I scroll all the way down we're going to see this new setting that says use subdivided mesh but like I said we're not going to use that for now because this is going to be our Baseline so I'm going to go ahead and Export press ok and I created a folder here called No sub so I'm going to say Camilla no sub and then press save okay so what we're going to do next is go ahead and turn on subdivision during export so again I'm going to click on Camilla scroll down enables smooth mesh and we're going to go with three okay same thing and we're going to file export fbx clove character unreal mesh in motion current animation set to all and now what we'll do is scroll down now we're going to go and click on use subdivided mesh export okay I'm going to go ahead and change the folder to width sub I'm going to say Camilla what's up save all right so I'm gonna go ahead and close character creator 4. here we are in the religion project file that we had earlier and what I'm going to do is just go to another room there's actually a hidden room right here and I'm just gonna go drag our characters here so in our project I created two folders no sub and width sub so let's go ahead and start with the width sub first all right so what I'll do is I'll go to this folder and drag and drop with sub here now since we already installed the character Auto setup in here we don't have to install any other plugins it's already good to go I'll minimize this for now and we're going to go with high quality Shader press ok so what we'll do is we'll leave the skeleton as blank and if this is not Untold for you go ahead and twirl it uh use Time Zero as reference pose Additionally you want to go ahead and import some morph targets because we do have some facial animation um and then we'll make sure that we have animations checked if I go to Advanced here and I'm going to go ahead and change the sample rate to 60 so we're not waiting forever just make sure everything is good and I should be it I'm going to click on import all and then what I'll do is just to save some time I'm going to go ahead and import the no sub as well so depending on your eyes to me I can already see the difference between the two and let's go ahead and start I guess with the first thing that I noticed right off the bat and that's going to be the nose as you can see here on the left this is the none subdivided character and we have the subdivided character here on the right so if I go here and look at the nose you're gonna see that the edges of this nose is a little bit more jagged but if I look on the right side you're going to see that that's much much smoother and it pretty much confirms what we saw in character creator 4.1 additionally if we look at the ears once again you're going to see that the edges of this earlobe is pretty darn Jagged right but again if we look at this one which is the subdivided one it's a lot smoother now there are a lot more examples of this obviously all throughout the body but if you want the most photorealistic looking character those little details really start to matter especially when you're doing a lot of close-ups and again we'll take a look at the eye right here you can see there's a lot of jaggedness around this area but if you look at the subdivided mesh it's a lot smoother and also the chin you look at this chin right here there's a lot of zigzag down here but if you look at the subdivided mesh you see that that's just a smooth chin what I'm going to do now is you know light this scene here I'll go ahead and hide this no sub for now because what I'm going to do is I'm actually light this like we're you know lighting a character alright so the first thing we're going to do is go ahead and create a post process and I'm going to go ahead and set this to infinite bounds so that it's affecting our entire scene I'll press G here to kind of just hide that icon and what I'm going to do is go ahead and turn down the exposure value of this to manual and again I'm just going to go ahead and manually adjust this to maybe say seven or eight let me go ahead and just go with eight now you're gonna see that we have a lot of lights around that are turned on but that's okay I'm gonna go ahead and change our layout to two and I'll change this to perspective so I can go ahead and move around here I'll start looking at this right here press G and what I'll do is I'll go ahead and create a new level sequence and I'll just name that whatever I'll go ahead and bring the character in our sequence actor level sequence and then I'll just create a camera right here all right so here's our character now and we're going to fix that issue that you're seeing right there I'm going to click our camera and we're just gonna go ahead and auto focus this a focus setting draw a debug plane and just get her in focus okay perfect now to get rid of that black thing on our eyes I'm just going to go ahead and click on the character and if I go to the materials right here and I'll double click on the tear line I'm gonna go ahead and turn off the depth offset I'm going to go ahead and increase the depth offset to 80 maybe 70 that's 70 is good and let's go ahead and do it on the other eye as well so 70. I'll get rid of that for now and again I'm just going to create some basic lights here so I'll create a Rec light and yeah this is not a lighting tutorial but I just kind of want to see how this looks in a lit environment I mean at the end of the day that's all we're trying to go for is for realism right so I have just the light kind of like on the side right here maybe we sit up some now if you're using subdivision three I mean that's looking pretty darn good so I'm going to change this lighting to movable and I'll just duplicate it by holding Alt I'll just do a simple you know three-point lighting here now I've been using iclone for a couple of years but I truly believe these new characters that they're putting out are really starting to look really good they have come a long way in my opinion now I'm just gonna say I'm just gonna mimic this pink light right here I'm just going to select our lights and I'll just change this to you know pinkish press ok and this is what I usually adjust my Exposure One More Time maybe it's like to seven and as you can see that's starting to look pretty darn good and I can go ahead and turn this up a little bit more it's like neon all neon pink so we just have that little light there that kind of mimics that backlight there just give a little bit more color if you want to actually move it in so she can have some other there you go shoulder area and I'll go ahead and turn this down to maybe half get a little bit of contrast in there and man I'm gonna go ahead and save this real quick uh let me go get a texture here I downloaded some softbox usually like doing this as well just to play around with it some um go ahead and use this one I'm gonna have to turn up the uh the settings on these obviously love the Highlight right there and uh I'll go ahead and mess around with contrast again just to give a little bit of shadow on the other sides so it doesn't look too flat wow I mean this is a small screen I'm looking at right now but this is looking pretty good so again I'm gonna go to change my layout to one so we can kind of see this now we do have some static lights in here so what I'll do is build the reflections for now just so that error message will go away okay pretty good and this is real time too which is pretty crazy and this this character is pretty much animating at one point something million triangles which is pretty insane and let's just take a look and see if how it looks at 200 percent because that's how you roll and again overall to me the subdivided mesh just looks a lot more pleasing it's not rough around the edges pun intended well that's pretty much it folks that is how you can export a subdivided mesh out of character creator 4.1 well that's all I got for you all today the new iclone 8.1 live link 1.1 and character creator 4.1 for Unreal Engine 5 can change things for creators as now you can quickly create edit blend and assemble previously complex animation sequences along with modifying any characters for use in Unreal Engine be sure to check out the religion website for more information since I only talked about a couple of new features in this video with that being said like always thanks for watching and I'll see y'all later peace out

Channel: JSFILMZ

Views: 16,296

Keywords: Iclone 8.1 Livelink 1.1 to Unreal Engine 5 Tutorial, Changing the game with iClone 8.1 and Unreal Engine 5, iclone8 to unreal engine 5, iclone 8 to unreal engine 5, ic8 to ue5, iclone 8 unreal engine 5 live link tutorial, reallusion actor core with unreal engine 5, reallusion actore core tutorial, reallusion character creator 4 subdivision tutorial, cc4 subdivision tutorial, character creator 4 subvidision export, cc4 subdivision export to unreal engine 5, jsfilmz, iclone8.1

Id: SwWSU7HNGrI

Length: 33min 26sec (2006 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 10 2022