Character Creator 3 Tutorial - Setting Up LOD for CC3 Characters in Unity 3D

hey everybody in this tutorial we're gonna take a look at setting up the level of detail effect for your character creator characters when you import them into the unity 3d game engine so of course level of detail or LOD being level of detail the further away your game camera is from your character less requirements there are to have high resolution mesh and high resolution materials a high-definition match high resolution materials so as your camera gets further away from the character what you get what LOD will do is it'll automatically swap out that characters match for less detailed mesh just to save system resources as you as your camera gets further away from the character object whatever what have you okay so let's take a look at how to do that first let's take a look at the characters mesh so with my character selected I'm gonna go to wireframe on shaded mode here you can see that we have a fairly optimized this is our game base character mesh okay so fairly game optimized and if we go ahead and select our wearables instead of our character so all of these items are here ships select and just put them into wireframe mode you can see that the face count the polygons are much higher okay so all I do is want to go ahead and reduce these before you move on alright so let's go ahead and do that by using the insta LOD tool alright so click on insta LOD of course you have to have the pipeline version of a character creator in order to access the instead you tool alright so let's go ahead and select polygon reduction variables so wearables will be your accessories and your clothing on your character both okay and the shoes included so we have a few options here recommended settings we can reduce it by percentage so in this case I've chosen 50% and by face count you see we can enter in a number of faces if we want right there I'm just gonna go ahead and choose by percentage right to 50% you can see selected triangles currently at 22,000 116 so we're going to take it down to approximately 11,000 there now we don't need too big the texture let's go ahead and select apply and what's going to happen here is the instant LOD to will automatically reduce the poly count on my character and you can see in just a moment here that all those polygons have been dramatically reduced okay so our characters much lower resource and you can see as well over here in the seam manager we have a couple different items here under all the different meshes so for the boots for example there's a boots underscore percentage fifty okay so the suffix percentage fifty indicates the basically the method that we use to reduce the polygon counts okay so if we if we took the percentage to sixty it would be a percentage sixty instead and if we took it change the face count instead you'll be like face count like ten thousand or five thousand or what have you okay the suffix basically contains the information on how you reduce those polygons so let's go take a look at the boots here first okay so there's a couple items here like I mentioned and the item that we have selected right now as shown is percentage fifty so this is the reduced version that we have selected if we take these Centuri and boots and make those visible you can see that boom suddenly we have the original version left okay so if you want you have the option to delete the original version or keep it there but I'm gonna go ahead and show this one you could see the poly count as well selected triangle 2479 if we activate the original 4958 okay so what you wanna do here is just make all the percentage ones visible and you want to delete the original meshes so essentially I'm boots here this is different that whatever spirit is there can't read that properly so we're gonna just ctrl and select all the items that we don't want all the original meshes and the ones that are currently invisible okay you can see a little eye is closed which means they're hidden or invisible alright so let's go ahead and delete all this and then we don't have to worry about them anymore and our character is simplified and we have everything taken care of let's go ahead and just make those all normal shading mode here as well and take off the polygon our wearables reduction tool there now one thing you may encounter is if I select you know for example this shoulder armor and I go to the materials here there's a displacement map on that now it's up to you in a lot of cases you may want delete the displacement map just go ahead select it and trash it down here that may be causing you know some little you saw a little modification there little change so I'm going to take the synturion boots no skirt doesn't have it this armor doesn't have it shoulder armor had it katana helmet doesn't have it okay but it's in some cases you know the displacement map that's put on there me kind of alter the mesh a little bit in a way that you don't want to so you may want to consider deleting that okay so that we reduce the polygon count by about ten thousand polygons from 57,000 to what it used to be to forty six thousand okay so our character right now is pretty much fully optimized now we need to do a couple more things before we export the character and that is to apply the game eyes and the game teeth right character so if we select our characters mesh and go over here to materials you'll notice that we have a number of different teeth meshes right here and I materials and meshes and whatnot what we can do is we can actually go to our character right here the base tab and go to your eyes okay and in the lower body or this bottom section of the eye folder here you'll find game eyes with one UV let's zoom in on the eye so you can guys just see here and you can adjust the color on this right now but we won't bother with that right now I'm just going to go ahead and apply those to our character and you can see now we have the selected triangles a lot lower okay so the lower poly count on the eyes and you can see we only have the one material and if we select our character mesh all those eyes have been replaced with this single eye material so it's been simplified okay and there's generally what you want to do okay and for the teeth let's go ahead and go to the teeth section here and I'm gonna just select my character and open his mouth first by going over here and selecting this mouth thing right here a little mouth icon I guess you can call it and you can see there's our characters regular teeth right and the materials okay we have two separate materials for standard upper and lower we can just replace those with these single UV game teeth okay so let's go ahead and do that just double click on the single UV game teeth and we'll have the single material right there the poly count will be lower and if we go ahead and open up the characters mouth one more time there you go okay however you may want to adjust the you know position of this of these teeth here maybe they're a little bit too high and the mouth and you can see here that we take a closer look not like anyone's really going to take a closer look but you can see the tongue is kind of poking through there so let's make sure we edit the mesh on these teeth okay so I'm gonna go ahead and edit mesh first I'm going to do is select element and we're gonna select the lower teeth okay separate element from the upper teeth press the W hotkey and just move it down like that okay and maybe move it it will look forward here as well the communiques is just like this okay and we can do the same thing for the upper teeth okay so like the upper teeth and then move them down like this and there you go okay so that's maybe a bit more accurate and of course natural if you want to go into more detail you can edit the vertex you know of all the individual different teeth for example we can bring these molars or whatever they are a little bit closer to the side there so you can show some more show some more tongue or whatnot if we want to okay and you can you know hold shift to select additional vertices okay let's just select it this way here yeah W yeah all right and I mean you know obviously not no one's gonna be really good looking into the mouth of the character so unless they're strange they want to look into the mouth of the NPC then you know they can by all means go ahead and do that alright but generally you know just want to get to show you how you can modify the different you know parts of your characters teeth and whatnot and their mouth okay so we'll go ahead and work with that and we'll close our characters mouth back up there and the next item of business is to export with different LOD level of details okay now there's a couple of ways you can do that you can go to file export and FBX from here or you can go to your hands to LOD tool and you can just go to remeasure okay so what this will do we need to make sure we choose the target tool preset to unity 3d since we're exporting into unity we do not want to embed the textures okay so we're just gonna deselect that I do want to include a few motions here okay I'm just gonna go to the custom motions here and add a couple and we just select the correct folder here cc3 we have this folder right here there we go okay so just like these files it'll load those in case we're gonna have one motion for the character that was very important here that you make sure that your tipos starts with a zero underscore and then tipos okay you want to make sure you export that along with your character and make sure it's number one on the list okay because it's gonna use this as a reference pose I want its imported into unity okay and you don't need to worry about deleting hidden mesh right now you can if you want we're gonna focus on insta LOD here okay so instead of D we're gonna be of course use the re measure we can keep the original avatar we're gonna choose three different level of details okay so we've exported separate meshes each with their own separate level of detail okay so for level one we're gonna choose a we're going to choose a maximum face count we're gonna set a maximum face count of 11,000 here okay so 11,000 we're gonna choose a high mesh detail and we're going to choose a max based textures are baked rather texture size of 2048 okay we're number two we're going to choose a maximum face count of 5500 okay the mesh detail we're going to select change to normal and the base texture size or baked exercise will be 1024 and number 3 the maximum face will do 2700 again this is gonna be so far away from the Kami you won't be able to notice anything and just choose a low mesh detail and 1024 okay and then I'm gonna go ahead and export off stuff so go to export and obviously you're not gonna be able to import those meshes in because we've changed the UVs quite significantly and go ahead and press ok so let's just go ahead and export this that same folder there did it do here we go and we'll just create a new folder here called warrior exports ok and go into there and we'll need them warrior ok we're lack of a better name and that'll take a couple minutes to export ok so what we should have once that export is finished as we should have separate fbm folders for all of the different FBX is right here so we have the level of detail zero which is the original file and then the three different levels of detail following that it's indicated by the face count right here you can see eleven thousand fifty five hundred and twenty seven hundred okay so we have that all in a folder called or your export so this is going to be very important a little bit later on so now let's go into unity and in unity the first thing we need to do is import in that script again the script is available in the description of this video you can download for free so to do that just right-click and select import package I'm gonna import a custom package I need to find all files right here and you'll find this bad boy and this is the one that you want to import in and this will basically set up everything for your character import into unity 3d okay so again this is going to import in this CC assets folder an editor folder let's go ahead and import that and once that's finished again you'll have a scenes folder or rather you have an editor folder right here which contains the editor script this one right here okay and you'll also have the CC assets folder if you click on the readme and you can see it says here put all your character after DX files into this folder please so what we're gonna do is we're going to go to Explorer and we're going to import in that entire folder that contains all of our different ello DS okay so the script is actually super useful because what it does is when you import in your characters now it's going to apply all the all the materials on your character to their correct places not only is it going to do that but it's also going to set up all the motions you exported with your FBX into an animation controller so you can use it right off the bat so basically you don't really have to do anything here your characters all set up for materials and the animation controllers already set up as well for your characters that integrates all the motions of course obviously you want to probably modify that and enhance it later on for more complex games but here I'm just showing a demo and I'll show you the animation controller in just a moment alright so once it's done importing and all of those assets you can go into your warrior export folder here and you can see that we have the prefabs we have the warrior zero or zero warrior prefab here okay so I created one prefab and if we click and drag that into our seem our hierarchy there you can see that in LOD zero appears on the screen and all the LEDs have already been loaded in okay so this is another advantage of using that script it basically sets up all your LEDs already okay so we can just go ahead and take a look at our character okay this is the same character all the materials are perfect just the way we left it in character creator three and that's the way we want it okay so what we can do now is if we select the prefab here in the hierarchy we have this LOD section right here okay so LOD group what we can do is we can click and drag this camera and you can see that it will actually automatically adjust the LOD s according to how far your camera is from the character okay so there's LOD once so from here to here we're switching over to LOD one okay and you can adjust this level as well so if I wanted to you know for it to switch a little bit earlier say like this for example almost right away I wanted it to switch to LOD one then I can click and drag here and from there to there it's actually switching to the LOD one mesh okay and you can see right here the renderer is the LOD one mesh over here let's see LOD two rematch okay and so on and so forth here over here this is the log3 alright so again you probably just want to keep this in a fairly reasonable level I think maybe I'll load up to here from this point on you probably can't tell any difference in the character so you know again it's all really up to you depending on your character and the particular scene you can adjust this accordingly so one issue you may encounter is if we go really and really close here on our character and we move over to the hands here a little bit let's just zoom in a real close there and pan up you can see that the normals on the hands might be a little bit off okay so you can see it's kind of like a little bit bent out of shape there so what you want to do in this case is you want to make sure that you select your character's original mesh not the prefab so go into the warrior export folder one more time here and select this character right here and you'll see that normal in tangent so you can see normals are calculated right here what you want to do is you want to go ahead and go to window first and select Auto processing for cc character so this is what the plug-in are this is what the yes script does okay it creates this window and you want to deselect Auto processing and then you want to go change your normals from calculate to import and once you do that just go ahead and select apply one more time okay and that'll adjust them to the way they're supposed to be and we'll in close that down for now and there you go okay so if you ever encountered that sort of issue then that's how you fix it all right so let's take a quick look at the animation controller here okay so here's the animation control you can see it's already been set up alright so we just put the lod motion and this lod motion if we double click on it you can see this is the motion right here if we play it back it's kind of like a cool chopping motion alright just like this haha alright so what we want to do is want to select loop time for this motion all right and then just go down and select the plot so we have that motion continually looping over and over and over again alright and we can go to the animator going to a scene mode here and we can play back you can see me to bring our camera up to the to the front of the character there so let's just go ahead and get over there and zoom out take the little camera doodad over here and we'll bring it where's our there we go blue access radio I'm just bring it over to here nothing too far away and we need to rotate this camera custom the iake to rotate it and we'll rotate it negative 180 degrees how's that sound or maybe just 180 degrees oh and a bunch of weird numbers and let's just make sure you select everything in pull of 180 there we go alright now we're facing the character we can press of W hockey move it a little bit further away perhaps and let's just take our light as well and select the light and if you use the hotkey to rotate that a little bit so you can see the characters face a little bit better there we go something like that and then we give her a play and we should be able to get a nice view of the character oh you should add main camera for some reason like behind the character again oh yeah we need to get a little bit further okay further in front of the character let's take it over here alright that should be good maybe a little further down okay so that should that should do the trick all right there we go all right and maybe even a little bit higher for that camera all right and the game window here you can see that we have the tries sixty seven point eight and you know very very very very light project for a single character and a very good-looking character and of course if we move the camera away from the character and scene view with the character selected you can see that level of details will change zero one two three and four the further away we get from our character it could be playing at the same time as well with the character selected I'm just go into the scene mode here and okay yeah switching from one to two to three and so on and so forth all right so that's really about all there is to it that's how easy it is to really just import your character the everything will already be set up okay so all of the materials will all be already be set up the LEDs will already be put in place the animation the animation controller will already be set up everything will basically be set up so all you got to do is just import in that script make sure you run it and then import all your assets into the CC assets folder and pretty much everything from that point is done for you alright so that's about all there is to it guys thanks so much for watching hopefully check out our other tutorials on our YouTube channel and make sure you check make sure you check out our forums at forum religion comm and I hope to see you in the next video

Channel: Reallusion

Views: 10,764

Keywords: unity 3d, LOD, CC3, tutorial, import, CC3 to Unity, character optimization, iClone, game characters, DisplaySettings-cc:Unity(102)

Id: L8BoqdFyVS4

Length: 19min 29sec (1169 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 12 2018