Character Creator 4 Tutorial - Smoothing Mesh Shape with Delta Mush

hey everyone in this tutorial we're going to talk about the new delta mush feature in character creator 4 that is used to help smooth uneven meshes optimize topology is one of the most important aspects of your model for both appearance and animation results you can see when we use this one particular morph slider that the mesh of the character distorts in a strange way that not only looks poor but will cause a lot of animation issues later messy meshes will also cause issues with clothing where once you apply it the body mesh may break through in certain areas a problem that gets even worse once the character is animated most importantly if your character has exaggerated expression blend shapes on the face they can often cause strange mesh results with a dense facial topology let's take a look at how we can use the delta mush tool to get rid of some of these issues i'm going to start by applying a few exaggerated body morphs in combination to this character since the source of these marks may be from different generations of characters or different artists the morphs may not be consistently optimized for the type of character that you're modifying which will lead to uneven distribution of the mesh first let's take a look at how you can smooth out the entire body mesh quickly and easily let's start off by opening the edit mesh tool which can be found in the modify panel in the attributes tab you'll find the delta mush tool we'll start by using it for the face section which modifies the faces of the mesh in this first example i'm going to keep the strength and iteration values alone as we'll talk about those a bit later for range let's select all since we want to apply to the whole body in our first example selection here will only smooth faces you have selected on the model the delta mush tool requires a standard topology to use as a reference target for smoothing here we're going to choose the default reference in the reference mesh section as our original character is a standard cc3 plus model you can preview the results before you apply and if you're satisfied just go ahead and click on apply you'll immediately notice a much smoother overall mess on your character however some areas may need additional tweaking so let's take a look at how to refine specific areas of the mesh if we go back to the original mesh before we smooth it out you'll notice that the chest of the character has some jagged mesh results when selecting specific areas of your mesh it's always a good idea to use the soft selection option this creates a gradual selection gradient that you can tweak using the radius and bias parameters radius will increase the overall radius of the selection area while bias will focus or spread out the strength of the selected area this time when we apply the delta mush tool we'll use all of the same parameters only this time we'll use selection instead of all when we apply it you'll notice that the wireframe of the chest becomes a lot more optimized we can quickly select and repeat the process on other areas of the mesh like the back or the feet although it may be difficult to see at first in some cases more evenly smooth results here will not only look better but will provide better results when you apply clothing or shoes okay now let's take a look at using the same technique for character clothing i'll throw the same outfit onto this character that we used before and you'll immediately notice already that the mesh results are a lot better however there are a couple of areas that can still be improved like around the collar or the joints let's look at the collar of our character shirt first now remember how i mentioned before that we need to have a source mesh to use as a reference for our delta mush we can't choose default here since we're not dealing with a character in order to create a reference mesh you need to exit delta mush and create a source obj file you'll also need to do this for non-standard characters that you wish to edit in character creator 4. let's exit edit mesh mode then make sure our shirt is selected and go ahead and save it as an accessory from there you'll see it will show up in its original state and we can proceed to export it as an obj from the file menu it's always a good idea to keep consistent naming when doing this once we've exported the obj we can undo our previous conversion to return the clothing item to its original shape and skin values once that's done then we can repeat the process from earlier to return to the delta mush tool and load up the obj we just saved as our reference once we apply that then we'll end up with a much smoother result for the caller you can repeat the process on the other parts of the clothing meshes that you'd like to smooth out you can also apply multiple times and adjust the other parameters as well depending on the scenario finally let's take a look at how we can utilize the delta mush tool in order to smooth out extreme expressions on our character's face in this example i'm using the facial profile editor to demonstrate a facial blend shape that i've created if i maximize the value of that particular blend shape you'll notice a jagged mesh result at the edge of the mouth as well as the eye area this is common when trying to apply standard strong expressions to characters that have exaggerated facial features let's go into edit mesh mode once again and select the corner of the character's mouth first i'll repeat the same process by opening up the delta mush tool and hitting apply you'll see that the problem is essentially solved with a single application but you can try multiple times to see if it improves smoothing blend shapes for expressions is quite important as they often combine various morphs in unexpected ways if you're creating your own morph sliders it's good practice to use delta mush first to clean up and smooth out the base expression to avoid these issues once you've cleaned up the expression you might consider creating a new custom expression slider to do this go to your facial profile editor and simply click the new slider button with the custom category selected this will allow you to quickly save that fixed blend shape for later use there are other tutorials that go into more detail on the facial profile editor but that's it for this tutorial optimized topology is super important for your character especially to get the best animation results so be sure to make use of this great new tool thanks for watching and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Reallusion

Views: 19,462

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: WRH5YVtWrwE

Length: 6min 27sec (387 seconds)

Published: Thu May 12 2022