Hey everyone, in this tutorial we’re going to take a look at how you can take clothing and accessories from external sources, separate them into various clothing items, and save them into CC4 format. In this case, we’re going to take a look at some assets from Sketchfab, where you can either buy or download content for free. In this example, we’re going to use this stylized Sultan character to demonstrate. Once you download the FBX, you’ll find your typical FBX folder structure with the file and a texture folder. In CC4, we can start with any CC3+ base character, then go up to the Create menu and choose Accessory to start. You’ll see the entire outfit import in, complete with textures already assigned. If we press the S hotkey to switch the camera view, we can see that the Sketchfab character isn’t reaching the ground, so the first thing we want to do is bring it down to the level of our reference character. What we want to do next is ensure that the import character’s posture fits that of our reference character. In this case, that means using the Edit Pose tool to adjust the bones one by one. I’m switching to FK mode here to make it a bit easier to match the imported accessory pose. You want to make them as close as possible to ensure the best skinning results later. You’ll want to make sure that this is accurate from all angles, including the top view. Let’s take a look at how you can separate the mesh next. I’m going to start by hiding our CC3+ reference character, selecting the Sketchfab character, and then going into Edit Mesh Mode. From there, I’m going to select Element mode and select the hat mesh. To ensure all of the hat mesh is selected, you may want to use the move tool. From there, I’m going to select the Extract Mesh button to separate the mesh. You’ll notice that it will become a sub-mesh in the Scene Manager, and we recommend that you name it appropriately. You can repeat the same process for all of the other mesh elements on your character, just be sure to select the entire mesh that you want to separate, and give it a recognizable name to keep things organized. Once you’re done, you should have a result like this, where all the meshes are separate. Let’s look at how to convert these separate meshes into clothing now. The first step is to hide the unwanted mesh and show our CC3+ character. I’ll start by selecting the shirt, and going over to Transfer Skin Weights. In this panel there are a number of presets, each with different weight. For general clothing and pants, you’ll normally want to choose Default. Once I apply, you’ll notice that the icon in the Scene Manager now changes to a shirt, which indicates it’s a clothing item. Again, simply repeat this process to convert all of the appropriate parts of your mesh to clothing. For shoes, you’ll want to make sure that you use the Shoe preset. After that’s done, let’s select the pants and select Cloth Layer Settings under Modify. Here I want to ensure that all of the clothing layers are in the logical order, and select Run Collision. You’ll see the meshes will be layered correctly, however if you see mesh breakage you can simply run collision again to improve the results. OK now that we’ve taken care of clothing, let’s look at how to convert parts of your mesh to accessories. In this case, I’m going to start with the hat. Really all you need to do here is select the item that you want to convert to an accessory, and then go over to the Convert to Accessory button. Bake the current shape, and you’re good to go! You’ll see the hat in the Scene Manager will now be labeled with an accessory icon. Once that’s done, you’ll want to ensure that your accessory is attached to the correct part of your character’s mesh as well. To check that, simply go into the Attach section in the Modify panel, open up the sub-node panel, and ensure that you select the head bone. We can follow the same procedure with our mask, again ensuring that it’s attached to the head bone. For our bib item however, since it’s placed around the character’s shoulders and upper spine, we’re going to attach this one to the second spine bone which is just below the neck for best results. OK next we want to ensure that we have the ideal pivot position for our meshes. You can see currently when we select an accessory to move that the pivot point will still be at the character root. In order to get the best movement results, we want to go into the Pivot section under Attributes and click the Edit pivot button. From here, I can simply move the pivot point manually, and then disable Edit Pivot mode when I’m done. The same thing goes for all of the other accessories as well. Just repeat the process to get each of the individual pivot points where you want them to go. If I want to convert a mesh to a beard item, the process is slightly different. Instead of converting to an accessory, you can choose the Create Hair, Brows, or Beard button. In this panel, we can simply choose the preset that we want to use, in this case we’re using accessory as this is a little bit exaggerated for an actual mustache. It will also obtain it’s own special beard icon in the Scene Manager, and as with the other items you’ll want to refine the pivot point and position of the actual mesh. This is one we’re going to want to attach to the head bone as well. Once every mesh is defined, we can go ahead and delete any unwanted remaining parts. OK, it’s time to test out the animation results, so let’s open up the Animation Player and test it out. A walk cycle is always a good place to start, and in this case you can see the results are actually quite good. Again, be sure to orbit the character from all different angles to ensure there’s no hidden mesh breakage. OK, finally let’s look at how we can save clothing and accessories as Character Creator content. Let’s start with the shirt. I’ll hide everything else, and with the shirt selected, just go into the Custom tab of the Content Manager and hit Save at the bottom. It will recognize it as clothing, but we can further define it as a shirt in the Asset Type drop-down menu. We can repeat the same process with the shoes, which will automatically be detected, and it’s just up to us to name it. Accessories have their own category as well, and you’ll want to define what part of the body the accessory is meant to be attached to. Once everything is saved as CC content, then you can apply it all to any other CC character as well. There are all sorts of tweaks you can make to the mesh which we’ll discuss in other tutorials, but as you can see, the weighting of the clothing works perfectly. Thanks for watching everyone, hopefully you find this video useful, and please be sure to check back on our YouTube channel regularly for more. I’ll see you in the next video!
