Character Creator 4 Tutorial - Character Conversion Levels

hey everyone in this tutorial we're going to take a look at how to use the optimize and decimate features in order to optimize our character specifications and file size to different levels as needed you can see the file sizes and complexity of different types of available character exports here ranging from a heavier cc3 plus base character to an LOD level 2 character generally the further away your character is from the camera the less detail you need in geometry and material these are the recommended settings based on the distance your character will be from the camera ranging from 2.8 meters to 42 meters okay let's start with the cc3 plus standard character which is the most detailed version that can be equipped with nearly unlimited options for outfits and accessories this character uses a digital human Shader and 4K texture Maps while the UV is split according to individual parts of the body including head torso arms legs Etc in the bone manager we can see all 101 bones included with the cc3 plus based skeleton in addition cc3 plus characters also contain a full facial expression system for the most detailed facial animation you can test out the facial muscles in groups or individually along with expression templates and morph Sliders in different tabs of the edit facial tool in wireframe mode you can see that the character has a quad mesh which provides more detailed and flexible performance when animating in the preferences you can toggle the basic information for your character which will show up in the upper left of your viewport we can save the character in the content manager and when I use the find file to view the properties we can see that the file size is 249 megabytes this is fine for detailed scenes with close-ups of only a few characters but if we want to include this character in a large crowd we definitely need to optimize this size for better performance let's look at the various settings we have available to do that if we click on the optimize and decimate button in the attributes tab will be presented with some LOD presets the actor build preset will optimize the mesh to around 17 000 while LOD level 1 will take it to 7000 and lod2 will go even lighter to 800 polys let's take a look at the actor build specs first which are the default model specification for actor core characters these characters have a simpler body and facial setup and are designed for higher quality crowd animations there are a ton of examples you can check out on the actor core page here I'm going to use the optimize and decimate feature to convert our cc3 plus character to the actor build specification once conversion is finished you'll see that the character is now classified as an actor build type in the attributes the character structure in the scene manager has also changed as the character's eyebrows and hair have been converted to accessories and the clothing has been converted to body mesh type the body mesh and materials have also been converted to game-based specs actor build characters will retain the standard 101 body bones in order to accommodate animation in other 3D platforms such as Omniverse and Unreal Engine actor-build characters will also retain a full facial expression system you can see a quick comparison of the two standards here note that only the character's body mesh itself will be optimized with actor build while the character's clothing and accessories will remain the same if you're not familiar with the Character Creator game-based specifications please visit the reillusion website to learn more about this game optimized standard if we want to further optimize this character we can manually reduce the outfit resolution by using the polygon reduction tool remove unwanted or hidden meshes and also merge our textures into a single mesh material we will have more detailed tutorials in the future about after build creation specifically once we go through those steps you can see that our resulting character size is only 16.4 megabytes which is great for a lightweight character that still retains a facial expression system okay now let's look at lod1 which can be used for larger crowds this will convert our character to a 7K mesh with 1K texture resolution and only 54 bones upon conversion you'll see that our character type is now defined as humanoid and in the scene manager the characters clothing and accessories have been converted to a triangular poly mesh all the materials have also been merged into a single 1024 resolution PBR material and only basic human ik and finger bones remain face bones shared bones and wrist bones will all be removed meaning that there is no facial expression system okay let's look at the LOD level 2 which is the lightest template in cc4 with an 800 poly mesh 512k resolution and only 22 bones this character only contains basic human ik bones upon conversion an option will pop up to prompt you to bake the hand gesture you can also import custom gestures here if you like upon conversion you can see that we have a very simplified mesh for our model along with a simple 512 by 512 material resolution and only 22 ohms the size for this lod2 character model is only 1.41 megabytes which is very manageable again we recommend that you base your model conversion settings on the requirements of the character in your scene and distance from the camera okay finally let's look at a couple of the custom settings you can use there are four main sections if you choose the custom option including skeleton mesh texture and facial in this particular scenario I want to ensure that the character's index finger is placed correctly on the trigger first I'll place it in the way I want using the edit pose tool and then in the skeleton section of the custom option I'll uncheck all the fingers except for the index finger and then in the mesh section use the current option this will ensure that even when I use the edit pose tool to move all of the fingers that only the trigger finger will move as the bones in the other fingers have now been removed you may want to use an option like this for a character that is meant to be consistently holding an object like a sword bicycle handle or anything else the way that you optimize your character depends on your individual scenario so hopefully this tutorial helped you out with the basics of the different optimization settings we'll have other tutorials that delve into other related topics so be sure to check back on our YouTube channel regularly thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Reallusion

Views: 10,318

Keywords: 3D character creator, create your own character, rigged character, digital human, realistic avatar creator, remesher, face maker, game development, character maker, game character creator, create a character, make your own character, mocap, facial expression, avatar maker, character builder, ai face generator, 3D face, Maya, 3ds max, create character, character creator, animated character, 3d props models, 3d model maker, auto rig, accurig, subdivision, lod, bone reduction

Id: 1DEx3iwFjbk

Length: 7min 22sec (442 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 17 2022