Character Creator 3 Tutorial - Export with InstaLOD - Optimizing Characters for Animation

hey everybody in this tutorial I'm gonna take a look at optimizing characters for animation using character creator 3 a couple of techniques there to reduce the amount of resources each of your characters is using on the screen this is particularly useful to take a look at when you have seams of lots of lots of characters like Lord of the Rings were seeing with tons of soldiers on the screen and stuff like that you really want to reduce the resources each one of them is taking up in order to increase performance of your animation okay and get the solid 60 frames per second alright so just for your reference here we are using characters from this content pack game character outfits from our developers Serge 3d I'll put a link in the description for this pack you can check it out on your own time let's take a look at a project here that's kind of gonna demonstrate the issues that we might come across when we have too many characters on the screen or the characters are too high resource so you can take a look we have 5 Roman soldier characters on the screen the project triangles is at three hundred twenty three thousand okay you know fairly high amount here and if we select you know one of the characters sixty five thousand Polly's for each character angles for each character here you know fairly high and there's only five characters on the screen here and if I play back take a look what happens to our frames per second it goes down to about forty so it's struggling to maintain even with only five characters on the screen it's struggling to maintain even 40 frames per second here and we're using 5.6 gigabytes of our 8.1 gigabytes card here just for these five characters on the screen who are animated so the thing that we want to do here is we want to reduce the resources these characters are using on the screen and I'm going to explain to you a couple of ways that you can do that let's go ahead and load up the same character here in character creator 3 again you can see the same project triangle and the first thing we're going to do is convert use the convert to game based option here okay so this is the number one way to kind of reduce the poly count and the resources used by your character a quick and easy way to do it so if we take a look at our character's face for example let's just go to our character and select wireframe on shaded here you can see either face you know fairly high poly fairly dense poly count here and you can see the eyes especially and if we open up our characters mouth you can see particularly the teeth we don't need details like this on a character especially if they're just convenient in the background is an extra you know fighting or something like that you know not too much detail on the arms but it is fairly detailed and converting to game base will further reduce this as well okay so what I'm going to do here is that without further ado I'll just go overhead and select convert to game base and this is the first step that we're going to take we're gonna all the Eevee's into a single material okay this is going to be helpful for using that resource taking up resources as well I'm just gonna leave the max texture size at 2048 and just go ahead and select convert alright once that conversion is finished you can see the project triangles is are all the way down to 40 8935 and if we go back to wireframe on shaded mode you can see the the face there the mesh is quite a bit simpler and the arms especially you know a lot less detail on those so again these characters in the background nobody's really gonna notice that in general so you don't need to worry about it okay let's look at further reducing the eyes and the teeth here okay so again the teeth taking up a lot of resources there and necessarily the first thing I'm going to do is replace the eyes though okay it's me to go to the content manager here I'm going to go to the base section and in the base section we will find the eyeballs and under eyes in the main folder you'll find a game eyes 1uv okay so this is the simplest idea you can apply to your character you can see boom right there let's just go and select our character's eyes and wireframe on shaded you can see now the account there is a lot simpler we've taken it down by a little bit more and the project triangles there so let's do the same thing for the teeth again I'm just gonna open up the characters mouth there so we can see it and we'll go to the teeth section here and just replace those teeth again in the main folder you will find a game teeth 1uv let's go ahead and replace those they're gonna look a bit uglier but again from like a 50 metres away no one's gonna take a look at his teeth okay so again this is just saving a lot of resources there you can see now or down at 43,000 or as we were at 46 or 48 thousand before okay I'm just gonna change everything back to abnormal shading mode here and now let's take a look at the characters clothing by reducing the poly cow of our characters clothing and this is gonna be a big one because if I take if I select all the clothing items on my character here you can see if I just select them all like this it's like this one too and I go into why from initiated you can see while it's a fairly dense mesh and we can easily reduce this quite significantly so the way I'm going to do that is I'm going to go into my instant LOD tool and again be aware that you need to have the pipeline version of character creator 3 to do this and we're going to go to polygon reduction to wearables okay and there's a few options here for optimization you can choose the recommended settings I generally try and do my percentage because I find that works you know fairly well you can also specify a specific face count okay you can see we've selected 31,000 faces here triangles here you can reduce that to a specific number what we want and I'm just going to use a 50% reduction here and fake the texture we're gonna bake it back at 220 2048 there the regular one we had before and we'll just go ahead and apply this okay so once that's all export you can see now the project triangle is significantly less so we've reduced it by a lot already we can even take another step here we'll do a one one more thing we're gonna reduce by elements okay so for that I'm going to select my character's helmet here called the Galea plane and you can see here as well that there's going to be two meshes in each individual section are part of your characters eye clothing here you're gonna have the the l which is a the regular or this one here which is the regular mesh and they're also going to have a match that has suffix of percentage 50 on it which indicates this is the mesh that is has been reduced by fifty percent okay so what we're going to do is we're going to select this helmet right here and we're going to go up to insta LOD and project reduction element okay now for this one if we reduce it even further you can choose different elements okay so I'm gonna choose selected elements by percentage again fifty percent I'm just gonna hold shift and select a couple areas here like these uh sideburn kind of things like your protectors whatever you want to call them this one as well okay so we'll do this all separately so I'm gonna just go ahead and selectively elements by percentage and we'll go and the players it's going to reduce our project triangles by a little bit more as well okay so you can see the slightly reduced poly count on each of those individual elements on the characters helmet there and we're also gonna find in our seam manager here we're gonna have one item it's called percentage 50 percentage 50 that means it's been reduced twice by a percentage of 50 all right so let's go ahead and first take a look at the the whole character wearable stuff in a different mode your shading mode let's go to wireframe on shaded so we can see the reduction okay you know fairly significant reduction on our characters mesh and of course we can reduce you even further really depending on the amount of resources that we want to save here but what I need to do here is then go into expand all of these and I need to delete all of the original meshes okay so I'm just gonna go ahead and select all of them and for the helmet I want to delete the both these two okay so the percentage 50 because we're gonna keep the double reduction one for the helmet there okay just make sure you select all the items here that do not have the percentage 50 on them okay down here to Munich again make sure you don't delete the percentage 50 you're going to just control selecting everything here so make sure we have everything taken care of I believe that's it and go ahead and press Delete and there you go okay so 28,000 around 28,000 project or project triangles on our character here let's close down the polygon reduction and let's just take everything back to a regular shaded mode here there we go and back to normal okay so let's go back to our iclone project really quickly here and what I'm going to do is I'm going to replace this front character okay so the soldier this near soldier right here and again pay attention to the selected triangle 64,000 we're going to replace him with our current character and that's going to reduce the amount of polygon counts on that character in the iclone project okay now what I'm gonna do first is go to file and export and I avatar you can also go up here on your toolbar to or is it here export I have't are this button here and I'm not going to use the in Deary measured right now I always go to export like this and I've already exported it as game-based okay so this is the file that we're going to be importing into our icon project now so to do that what I can do is I can simply make sure I have my soldier selected there and go to send character directly to I clone so what's going to happen now is it's going to replace that character on the front it's going to replace him with our new character okay so now you can see selected triangle at twenty seven thousand as opposed to the sixty-four thousand we had before and Roman soldier B has now been replaced in there okay and if we play back now you can see we're maintaining a little bit a bit higher of a frames per second about 51 here between 45 and 51 and again the video memory has been slightly reduced and that's only using the the game based character now what we can do is to make it even further reduced is use the remastered tool as part of the export process for the eye avatar okay so let's go back into character creator 3 here and we're going to go to the export I avatar here and this time I'm going to use insta elodi re-measured now I'm going to use a couple of settings here the first one we're going to choose normal fuzzy target okay you can determine the amount that you want to reduce the mesh by I'm just gonna choose normal for this one here and mesh detail normal as well for this one and we're going to change the big texture size to 1024 so it's going to reduce the texture size you know slightly and I'll just go ahead and export now I've already done this I've already done this for normal level and I've already done this for the lowest level okay so let's take a look first at this video here that kind of shows a comparison between all the different levels of remesh Inge you can see here a very very vast difference between the the file size and the polygon reduction on the characters you know the appearance obviously slightly different but again all I'm going to do is replace those characters in my iclone project with these remesh characters and that's going to basically reduce our file our video memory here that we need to use for our project so let's go to our project here into the arch rather into the explore folder here and you can see I have the different files right here and the different levels of reduction in the mesh so there's a remaster using normal and read you're using lowest okay down to six megabytes okay so pretty crazy 6.8 megabytes so what I'm going to do is we're going to basically load these characters into our icon project what I'm going to do is let me use the front guy for the game base okay since he's you know reduced the least amount and I'm gonna change my remastered on normal I'm gonna apply that to these two guys here okay so you can see you know a very very slight difference not even noticeable from that distance okay so we can replace this guy as well and they're all gonna be down to like you know eleven thousand count triangles here and the guys in the far back there we can take them down to the lowest level okay so just replace these guys like that lowest and you can see you'll notice a little bit of a difference but again with a lot of characters on the screen you're not going to really be paying attention to those dudes in the back they're just kind of movie extras they're just there for a little bit okay so there we have the characters and what I'll do is I'll just go ahead and apply a couple of animations to these characters now okay it will just uh try some different ones here let's try this the guys in the back let's have them use this kind of different attack animation right here okay just like that and do the same thing for the other dude these guys can use this one okay and these guys in the front can use this attack motion okay and we'll have the front guy doing the same attack motion as well okay so now if we play back what's gonna happen you can see we're at steady 60 frames per second okay really cool and we can even you know multiply these guys by quite a few time let's go to our preview camera here let's change the preview camera and I'm just gonna rotate my camera slightly upwards so we can get a better more holistic view here and I'm gonna hold ctrl and select these two characters that whoops control there we go and press the W hotkey for movement and I'm just gonna hold ctrl and if I hold ctrl and click and drag in any direction it's just going to multiply those characters okay by the amount that whatever amount I choose okay so I can take these two characters and do the same thing again control click and drag just like this and now we have you know we originally had five and now we have nine characters let's take these two guys and copy them one more time paste them on the back right here okay and then let's go to our camera view here and we can maybe zoom a little bit since our front dude is gonna be kind of in the wrong position here okay so now it looks like we have a whole army of dudes and if we play back again still I sold 60 frames a second okay our project triangle has been reduced by a significant amount and that's really the process that we want to go through you want to follow this process here to really just get a smooth frame rate see resources on our project and you know have a kind of a faster production time for everyone involved all right so that's really all I want to show you in this tutorial thanks so much for watching and hopefully you learned a lot make sure you check out our forums as always over at forum religion comm and I hope to see you in the next video

Channel: Reallusion

Views: 20,483

Keywords: remesher, iavatar, optimization, character creation, tutorial, cc3, iclone, material merge, polygon reduction, InstaLOD, animation, crowd animation, DisplaySettings-cc:InstaLOD(102)

Id: _H1igAfmlns

Length: 14min 24sec (864 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 05 2019