Fastest Turnaround from Static Mesh to Fully Animated Character | Blender-Character Creator Pipeline

greetings my name is peter alexander i'm a 3d generalist and character artist who specializes in real illusion related workflows in this video i'm going to demonstrate how to take a 3d character model rig it in blender and import it into character creator 4 to apply compatibility with real illusions 3d facial animation standards for this demonstration i'm going to be using a 3d model purchase from the character artist makar maliki whose assets can be seen on art station i'm going to start by opening a blender file which i previously set up by separating the mesh into sections this may not be necessary for you but it helps me in the weight mapping process also keeping the body separate from the hair eyes teeth and accessories also helps to apply a degree of symmetry when doing facial expression editing for rigging i use the human meta rig located in the armature section under add after adding the metal rig i scale it down and align the bones to the model as best i can i delete most of the facial bones as blend shapes will control much of the expression system technically you can leave the bones or weight map them to assist in the facial setup process in character creator iv but my preferred method is to leverage blend shapes [Music] it can be difficult to align bones in a three-dimensional space so i turn on the snap volume center option for some of the bones especially the finger while your face setup can be different try to keep the rest of the bones consistent with the human meta-rig the names will be used in a script within character crater 4 that will automatically identify the meta rig setup [Music] [Music] i add a bone for the jaw three bones for the tongue and i give the top and bottom teeth a bone each your setup doesn't have to follow this precisely although you'll probably want at least a jawbone as well as bones for both the eyes [Music] once the bones are aligned select the meshes and bind them to the armature weight mapping will almost always require manual adjusting the trickiest parts tend to be the jaw for me although getting bulkier clothing to deform properly can be problematic as well you'll want to thoroughly test your weight maps before moving to the next stage character creator 4 does have a system that allows you to edit weight maps though it's not as robust as blenders using blender's pose functions will allow you to see which aspects of your character need to be touched up [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] with the rig finished export the fbx with add leaf bones unchecked then import into character creator 4. you can do this by dragging the fbx into character creator 4 or opening the import dialog and selecting the file unless you change the bone names the script should detect blender's meta rig if you use that rigging for your character if not you'll have to manually assign the bones using the bone assignment menu real illusions motion library will be mostly compatible with your imported character although due to proportion differences of stylized characters you'll notice that some of the poses and animations need to be adjusted if your rigging is not auto detected by character creator you will have to manually allocate bones using the skeletal definition dialogue fortunately this only takes a few minutes as the dialogue can detect symmetry and bone chains you can set up the job presets easily if you've rigged a jawbone once your jaw presets match the thumbnail you can bake the transformations into the slider character crater has limited sculpting tools to assist in smoothing out the mesh as well as a delta mush tool which is covered in another real illusion video so once you're ready to do major expression editing you can use the tools available to this pipeline if you have zbrush you can use the go z function or if you use blender or another 3d application you can export the mesh using the export presets make sure you export with mesh with expression sequence checked which will populate the blend shape slots with names even if they're empty [Music] once in your 3d application in this case blender you'll be able to access the blend shapes with the appropriate naming even if they are empty this makes editing the blend shapes very convenient you may want to have a reference for it for your intended changes when editing the blend shape such as a screenshot of the thumbnails from character creator do blender has a number of tools to assist in editing expressions from sculpting to proportional mesh editing which are generally more robust than what character creator currently has you see me using the blend from shape function quite a bit this is an edit mode command which allows you to blend changes to vertices from your current shape key with another blend shape reference [Music] so i've been editing expressions quite a bit and after a while you kind of memorize what the intended blood shape should be however i made several mistakes in editing blend shapes here which i had to fix later again you should have a reference when doing this so [Music] once you're comfortable with the expression edits you can export the character for use in character creator these are the export options i used which should serve you regardless of the updates to character creator in the expression dialog you can import the fbx you've exported using the fbx with frame sequence option character creator will recognize the expression set used as well as the decrypter key which accompanies the fbx now i'm checking the expression slider update from blender to see that the changes were imported properly [Music] you can check your expressions by going through the edit facial menu this is a good place to see if your blend shapes are not set up properly if the expression you select roughly matches the thumbnail you're in pretty good shape use the edit facial modify menu to check your expression sliders you created using your 3d application these expressions can be used later in iclone timeline editing blended with mocap or using the face puppet feature over in iclone 8 you can see that your custom character now has full compatibility with the face puppet so [Music] with the character mostly set up i'm just importing some animation from mixamo and combining it with actor core clips to generate a quick action sequence animation that recognizes certain animation standards such as that of miximo can be dragged onto your character and iclone 8 will automatically convert it it's very easy to blend motions together in iclone 8 with auto clip alignment and smooth bi-directional blending [Music] let's see a test render in iclone in addition once set up in character creator 4 your character will be compatible with the motion live plug-in for iclone [Music] you can see the different facial animation styles once i apply the exaggerated blend shapes it really helps me to define nancy's unique personality and with that i'll wrap up this demonstration thank you for watching i hope this video has been beneficial you

Channel: Reallusion

Views: 54,324

Keywords: 3D character creator, game character, Character Base, rigged 3D character, Talking Game Character, video game development, character maker, video game characters, custom character, facial expressions, BLENDER, avatar maker, realistic cartoon character, animated character, blender character creation, b3d, rigged character, character builder, realistic avatar creator, create a character, make your own character, fbx, make a character, character design generator, blender 3d

Id: qSa6Orz6QO0

Length: 20min 59sec (1259 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 25 2022