Character Creator 4 Tutorial - Auto Import Standard Character Rigs

Hey everyone, in this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can import industry standard character rigs, such as Mixamo, Blender Meta Rig, Maya Human IK, 3DS Max Biped, as well as Daz and Unreal. You’ll learn how you can easily auto-rig these character models so that they can be animated using all of the Reallusion motion tools, including motion capture. Reallusion provides bone mapping profiles for these major formats to make the conversion quick and easy. In this first example, I’m going to demonstrate using a character from Mixamo. The first thing you want to do is go up and hit the big Create Character button at the top toolbar and select your FBX model. Here you have 3 options. The first is for importing CC character models, the second is for importing humanoid biped models, and the third is for manual bone mapping, which we cover in another tutorial. In this case we’re dealing with a standard Mixamo biped model, so we’ll just choose Humanoid. Character Creator 4 will automatically detect the Mixamo rig type here. You can see that there are dozens of other compatible profiles in the list below as well. Let’s just select OK, and our character’s bones will be auto-mapped according to the profile we chose. We can test things out using any number of the calibration profiles in the Animation Player. In this case, I’m using the full-body test. Things are looking good, so let’s go into Characterization mode next, where we can see all the character’s bones have been mapped. There are 15 major bones as well as additional bones such as those for fingers and more detailed spine and neck structure that aren’t utilized here. If your character is using the default Blender, Maya, or 3DS Max bone structure, please ensure that the naming convention is consistent with the respective standard as auto-mapping in CC4 will use the naming hierarchy as the source. If the bone names are changed outside of the standard naming conventions, the mapping will not be successful in CC4. Let’s do another example by importing in this Blender Meta Rig character. You can simply follow the same process by going up to Create Character, and then selecting the FBX model and Humanoid import setting. This time it will auto-detect the Blender Meta Rig, and mapping is done automatically. You can see it is now a fully-rigged humanoid character and can be tested the same way as previously. Successful mapping again means that it can also utilize iClone’s entire arsenal of motion tools, including motion capture. If the character model you import is not in a default T-pose, you will see some incorrect movement results when you apply the test motions. In this case, our character was imported in an A-pose, and you can see the issue. What we need to do is get our character in a proper T-pose, so what I’ll do first is remove all the animation using the Remove button at the bottom. I can then proceed to use the Set HIK T-pose button in the Animation tab to the left, which is where I want to set my character into a proper T-pose by rotating the proper shoulder bones. Once I’m done that, I’ll apply the same calibration motion, and you’ll see that there is still a bit of an issue with the hand mesh poking through the legs due to our character’s gargantuan hands. So what I’ll do is go back into the HIK T-pose mode and adjust the shoulders up further, with the forearms slightly bent to a 90 degree angle from the torso. I can also use an overhead view to adjust the upper arms back slightly. Each character may have a slightly different T-pose based on their unique physiology. You may still experience mesh issues with certain animations, in which case you can tweak them using the various motion editing tools available in iClone. That’s really all there is to this relatively simple process. It’s super easy to bring in any of your industry standard character rigs into Character Creator and iClone for editing and animation. Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you in the next video!

Channel: Reallusion

Views: 27,268

Keywords: 3D character creator, create your own character, game character, LOD, level of detail, Character Base, rigged 3D character, InstaLOD, Bake Mesh Details to Texture Maps, Remesher, Merge Materials, Merge Materials for Game Performance, Game Character LOD, Distant Low-Poly Crowd, non-player character, NPC, Talking Game Character, character generator, AR, VR, game, video game development, augmented reality, virtual reality, character maker, video game characters, custom character, daz3d

Id: mFEXLAv7gxs

Length: 3min 57sec (237 seconds)

Published: Fri May 20 2022