Character Creator 4 Tutorial - Separating Prop Elements

hey everyone in this tutorial we're going to take a look at how you can separate or merge prop meshes in character creator 4. some props are made from a single object mesh which in some cases can be pretty restrictive in cases like this old car if your prop contains multiple meshes however you will have a lot more freedom to animate the various parts separately and the results will be a lot better and more dynamic in the end let's take a look at how we can extract separate objects from the same mesh first if we take a look at this car in the scene manager you can see that it is just a single mesh in order to separate it into different parts we need to go to the attributes tab in the modify panel and enter edit mesh mode for this example we're going to go into the element section so we can select an entire section of the mesh with a single click and click on one of the tires from there i'll simply click the extract face button in order to extract the tire to a separate mesh after that's finished you'll be able to see the tire as a separate mesh in the scene manager called car underscore extract i'll make sure to rename the mesh in order to keep things organized we can repeat the same process for the other wheels as well and once we do we'll be able to animate them separate of the car body if you look at the scene manager now you'll see that i've separated the original car mesh into a number of smaller separate meshes this allows us to modify each mesh in various ways including adjusting the color if i select this left door and go over to the materials tab i can click on the diffuse color swatch and adjust the overall color of the prop that way we can then do the same for a couple of the other meshes to get a more interesting look next let's take a look at how you can merge separate accessories into your main model in this case let's replace the headlight with another object from the content manager in order to do so we'll need to remove the original headlight mesh first to do that i'm going to start by going into face selection mode in our edit mesh tool and select one of the faces near the center of the headlight you can use the expand or shrink selection features to grow or shrink your selection once we have the area we want selected we can then proceed to go down and click on delete face to get rid of that part of the mesh from there we can go to the content manager and find another headlight type to add to the scene and get it into the right position by using the transform gizmo once we repeat the process to get another headlight in you'll notice that they're initially not part of the car hierarchy therefore we need to merge them it's super easy to do this all you need to do is multi-select the car and the two headlights together then head over to the modify panel and click on merge props once this is done you'll notice that the first prop in the list that you selected will be assigned as the parent mesh and the two headlights will now be sub-meshes let's try another example this time by merging multiple submeshes into a prop as you can see this door is actually made up of a few separate meshes including the handle rear view mirror and window i'm going to do the same thing and multi-select all of the meshes together and use the merge mesh feature again you'll see that another window will pop up prompting you to choose which mesh will be the target mesh in this case i'm going to choose the door frame and once i do you'll see that everything will then be merged and adopt the name of that mesh in the scene manager let's take a quick look at how we can convert certain meshes to sub-items sub-items are meshes that have been separately defined within your main model mesh and can be animated separately as well in order for a part of a model to be animatable at iclone it must be converted to a sub-item notice that the left door of my car in the scene manager has an icon beside it that indicates it's a separate mesh meaning we can't animate it yet in order to animate it separately we can go over and select convert to sub item once we do that you'll see that it will appear in the mesh list as its own separate hierarchy with the mesh as a child of the sub item we can repeat the same process for the other items on the car that we want to be able to animate separately as well before you animate the sub items you want to make sure to define their pivot points according to the functionality you want to achieve in this case we want the car door to rotate along the hinges if we try to rotate it currently you'll notice that the rotation gizmo will appear in the center of the door which is not the rotation result that we want in order to set the pivot point correctly what we'll want to do is have the door selected and go to the pivot section under attributes here you can manually set the pivot point by inputting values in the fields or using the transform gizmo to define the position which is what i'm doing here once we do that you can see that the door will now rotate based on the pivot position that we just defined okay finally let's take a look at how to export to iclone and other 3d tools iclone is a super simple one-click solution just make sure you have your entire model selected and then use the export to iclone toolbar button to send it right over here you can see the prop hierarchy with all the sub meshes and sub items ready to animate in order to export to other 3d software we'll need to export to fbx format from the file menu in the panel that pops up next you'll want to choose the target tool preset of the software that you want to export to for the most optimized and easy import in this case i'm just choosing blender once in blender you can see that the prop hierarchy will import in just the way we saw an iclone and character creator from there you can animate and change materials in your destination software the ability to reorganize and separate your mesh into different sub meshes and items provides a lot more detailed control over animating smaller sections of your props separately to create a much more interesting look thanks for watching everyone be sure to check out our forums at forum.reillusion.com and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Reallusion

Views: 13,654

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: v2A-TR5h_xs

Length: 6min 19sec (379 seconds)

Published: Thu May 12 2022