Character Creator 3 & Blender Roundtrip Character Workflow! Elevate Your Characters with Reallusion!

hi guys so today i'm going to be going over how you can really elevate your 3d characters by incorporating character creator an absolutely amazing piece of software developed by the wonderful team over at re-illusion into your blender workflow i'll be using a character creator slash blender round trip workflow for this one starting with a model generated in character creator exporting to blender to make some customizations and then importing back into character creator once your model is back in character creator you can then apply skin weights and transfer over to character creators companion software iclone to animate i'll be making use of character creator 3 in this particular video but stay tuned because a big update is coming in the next few months with the launch of character creator 4. check out rio illusion's channel for more information on what's to come link is below reolusion is really excited to reach out and connect with the blender community they've taken several steps in the past year or so to develop plug-in support such as the blender auto setup add-on and cc3 python plug-in which i'll talk a little bit about today as well as and this is a big one officially joining the blender development fund just this past week and becoming a corporate silver partner on this front there are plenty to make further strides in 2022 to expand the blender character pipeline iclone blender data link and integration with blender's built-in meta rig rigafy so stay tuned for more in the coming months for anyone that may not be familiar character creator is a very powerful program that enables you to quickly create and customize your own realistic or stylized 3d characters for games and animations has a ton of features built in that allow you to create characters of all shapes and sizes as well as additional content which you can purchase through their marketplace in their recent lip sync animation contest which i did a video on just a few months ago i was able to make this animation in just a few days with absolutely no prior experience in animation or lip syncing at all check it out the man kept walking the man kept fighting numerous victories unforgettable defeats the man turned every battle into his strength before long the man was called king what is it you see in the ring okay so not the best i know but given i know next to nothing about proper animation or lip syncing i was pretty pleased with the result anyways let's jump in and explore how you can use character creator with blender to create your own custom characters quickly and seamlessly so here i'm starting out in character creator 3 and this is just the default character that loads up when you open the program here as i mentioned you can begin creating your own character by playing with any of the options here on the sides you can pick female obviously as we have here male 1 baby gorilla and even a stylized goblin-like creature there are also preset characters such as a huntress or a soldier for example or you can just build your own character using both the morph sliders over on the right side here to change the size shape and rotation of pretty much every part of the body and the content panels over on the left side to add hair clothing and accessories like you can see here so there we go i have a pretty cool looking character right now now what we can do is we can export out of cc3 by using an fbx file super easy just go up to the file menu here export and then select fbx clothed character now you'll see a menu pop up with a number of different options here i'm going to select the blender preset since that's where i plan to import this model and changing this menu to just mesh as we don't have any animation or poses tied to this particular model now an important matter to note make sure you untick the embed textures option embedding textures will make your fbx incompatible with re-importing back into cc3 as the textures are hidden in the original fbx and are not accessible to the file system also make sure to untick the baking option as well once that is done click export and save it in your desired location now we can hop over to blender to further customize our character's shape and textures by tapping into blender's sculpting modeling and texturing functionality to import an fbx file into blender it's quite easy just go to the file menu here import select fbx and navigate to where you saved your fbx file earlier so there you have it our cc3 character in blender it looks pretty good but you may notice that some of the materials don't look the best and that's because of the way blender reads or interprets some of the cc3 texture files by default in response re-illusion partnered up with a talented programmer by the name of victor soup day to create a special add-on called blender auto setup that you can use to improve the material compilation in blender you can download the add-on on victor's github page by clicking here link is below to install the add-on just go up to the edit menu then preferences then the add-on section then click on the install button here navigate to and select the zip file no need to unzip it and you will see the add-on pop up here like this then click the little check mark button here and click save preferences now in the 3d viewport you can press n on your keyboard for the side toolbar and you will now see a tab called cc3 open it up and you can click the import character button here and navigate to your fbx file as we did before and there we have it a cc3 character in blender but this time you'll notice the materials look a little bit better the hair and clothing in particular look much better to me and as you can see with the side-by-side comparison here using the blender auto setup add-on gives a much better result so with the cc3 character in blender now we can start to customize things even further the blender auto setup add-on also has some sliders here where you can adjust many different material parameters such as color roughness ambient occlusion and normals of each object so here i'm making some changes to these parameters for the hair eyes body and clothing to make the model a little bit more unique then i thought i would make use of blender's sculpting tools to exaggerate some of the musculature and bone structure of the character to make it a little bit more stylized and unique to my own art style once i was happy with that i then adjusted the clothing to match using a mix of the sculpting and box modeling tools i also made use of the existing topology of the clothing and armor to make my own custom armor by duplicating select portions like this and moving them around this is a quick and easy approach to making your own custom characters with blender and cc3 together using an approach like this could allow you to make several different iterations of a soldier very quickly for a large battle scene for example cc3 uses a hair card system which means that in blender i can shape my own beard and hairstyles by duplicating and transforming the hair cards proportional editing is particularly helpful in this case again this allows me to further customize my cc3 character in blender quickly and easily without the need to recreate the wheel so to speak and sculpt rate apologize uv unwrap bake and texture paint my own hair clothing or armor it's all here to be tapped into so you can just move on to developing your game or animation and then finally here i'm using blender's texture painting functionality to add in custom designs like this on the skin and armor with all of that done i'm ready to export back out to fbx again it's super easy with the auto setup add-on just select all of the components of your model and go over to your blender auto setup tab on the right and click export to cc3 and to complete our round trip we are now back in cc3 the default method to import an fbx into cc3 is by going up to the file menu and selecting import here you can see the result when we use this default method however which is that the materials don't really load at all you'll have to manually adjust the materials here which can be a little bit time consuming but again re-illusion and victor soup day come to the rescue with their cc3 python plug-in which fixes all the materials automatically you can download the plugin on victor's github page by clicking here and downloading the zip file link is below to install it you need to create a new folder called open plugin in this folder here then unzip the zip file from github and paste the folder into this new open plugin folder like this now in cc3 under plugins you'll have a new option called blender auto setup select import from blender and choose your fbx file now you can see the material compilation all happens automatically and your character looks just as you had it in blender without any further work which is a huge time saver as you can see here with a side by side comparison using the plugin gives a much better result just a side note as well if you have changed the body of your character quite a bit like i have here you can adjust the bones in cc3 to match the body better by going up to the modify menu here adjust bones and auto position this makes applying skin weights to your customized model more accurate which in turn makes animation and posing much easier now you're ready to either pose your character and render a final image or you can transfer to cc3's companion software iclone for animation that's it for this one guys i hope that shed some light on a potential new workflow that you can incorporate into your character development let me know down below if you have any questions thanks for watching i hope it helped and we'll see in the next one uh

Channel: Russell Midfield

Views: 54,473

Keywords: blender, blender 2.8, blender tutorial, blender 2.8 tutorial, blender sculpting, blender sculpting timelapse, blender sculpt, blender character, blender character modeling, blender retopology, blender character design, blender stylized, blender stylized character, stylized character, blender 2.9, blender 2.9 tutorial, blender 2.9 character, blender UV unwrap, blender texture paint, blender hand paint, blender rigging, blender unity, reallusion, iclone, cc3

Id: cZKiAjWMV2A

Length: 10min 12sec (612 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 12 2022