Hey everyone, in this tutorial we’re going to take a look at how you can characterize a non-humanoid type character in Character Creator 4, by mapping the character rig to work with Reallusion’s animation tools. Reallusion already offers rig auto-conversion for industry standards like Mixamo, Human IK, 3DSMax Biped, Blender Meta Rig, and more. However this tutorial is focused on bone remapping for a completely custom rig without the automatic conversion. For example, if a character is from a 3D platform like Sketchfab, it may have it’s own unique rig setup. You can do bone animation by keyframing, but if you want to use Reallusion’s arsenal of powerful motion tools, you’ll need to convert your rig by following the steps laid out in this video. We’re going to be converting this coyote character from Sketchfab in this video. Let’s start by setting the character’s T-pose in Character Creator. The first thing we want to do is use the Create Character button on the toolbar and import in our FBX file. There are no textures applied at first, so let’s import them by going to the Materials tab and loading in the Base Color and Bump maps manually. If we go back to the Attributes tab, you’ll see that our character is currently defined as a Creature type. What we want to do is convert it to a Humanoid type, so let’s enter into the Characterization panel where we’ll find our retargeting dummy. You can use the A S D F, and G hotkeys to quickly switch the camera perspective of your character. Our first step is to get our character into a T pose for proper bone mapping. In the front view, I’m going to ensure that I have Orthogonal mode selected to avoid perspective distortion. From there, I want to use the rotate gizmo to adjust the arm bones to the correct positions. It’s important to view your character’s limbs from every angle to ensure that they are aligned correctly. Here I’m switching between front, top and side views with orthogonal mode enabled to get the most accurate positioning for my T pose. Once we’re satisfied with the T-pose, it’s on to mapping the bones. The workflow is basically just selecting a bone on the dummy to the right, and then clicking on the respective bone on your character model to assign the mapping. I’m going to start with the hip bone by selecting it on the dummy image, then clicking the relevant bone on my model You’ll see it will change color to indicate that it has been assigned. I’ll continue with the lower spine bone and the head bone for now. There’s no particular order required here, but I generally start from the hip bone. If your character is like most models and has the same amount of bones on left and right, we can use a quick mirror shortcut to get things done faster. If I open up the Bone Manager, you’ll be able to see that there is a consistent naming convention to the bones on either side of the character, which is the _L and _R indicators. If we open up our Mirror configuration, we can add an additional item in our list specifically with our character’s bone naming convention defining L Coyote as the left side, and R Coyote as the right side. This will enable us to auto-assign the respective bones to the opposite side of the body. You need to enable the Auto-assign option here first. After that’s all set, I’ll proceed to do the bone mapping for the arms and legs. You’ll see that when I assign the left side, the equivalent bone on the right side will now automatically be assigned as well. If you still see a red indicator on the top left of your dummy window, it means you haven’t completed sufficient mapping yet. You will require a minimum of 15 mapped bones for basic characterization. Once I do the feet, it will turn green. There are tons more bones available for mapping, particularly on the spine and neck, as well as the hands. For the spine and neck, always assign bones starting at the bottom of the dummy and proceed upwards The same goes with the hands and feet, as your character may well have less defined bones than are available on the dummy. In the hand bone remapping, you have an option to auto-assign child bones based on your character’s bone hierarchy. With this enabled, I only need to assign a single bone on each finger, and the rest will automatically be assigned using your character’s hand bone hierarchy as a reference. You’ll also want to ensure that you start from the thumb and go down towards the pinky. If your character only has 4 fingers like our Coyote, then the pinky will remain unassigned. Once we’re done mapping, we can save our Human IK profile for future use. This can be useful if you have multiple models that share the same structure that may be from the same artist, workshop, or platform. The profile will save both the bone mapping and T-pose data To test it out, we can use the garbage bin icon to clear all of our currently assigned data, and then load up the Human IK profile that we just saved. As you can see, there are a ton of other commonly used profiles that are available from the drop-down menu as well. When we load up our custom one, it will prompt us to apply T-pose and/or bone mapping information. In this case our character is still in the T-pose, so we only need to select the bone mapping information. Alright, now that we’re done with the bone mapping, let’s activate the Human IK for this character and exit Characterization mode. You’ll see that our character is now defined as a humanoid, which means wen can now utilize all Reallusion animation tools along with the massive motion library. From there, we can go into our Animation Player and load up a full-body test motion to see the results. Looks pretty good so far. Note that this character model has ears and a tail that we can add spring bones to in order for them to flop around. This is covered in our Spring Bone tutorial. If we want to test out the character with more motions in iClone, we can simply use the Export to iClone button at the top toolbar. In iClone, you can utilize a ton of animation tools including motion matching and various types of editing. We also have another tutorial that explains how to define blend shapes for humanoid type characters as well, so be sure to check that one out as well. Thanks for watching guys. Be sure to check out our YouTube channel and Learning Center for more training materials for your iClone journey. I’ll see you in the next video.
