How to Bring iClone 8/CC4 Characters and Animations into Unreal Engine 5

hello everybody my name is benjamin tuttle and in this tutorial i will show you how to bring in a character from character creator and iclone into the unreal engine the recent update made things a lot easier so let's begin first you're going to need the auto setup it could be found here in the plugins and make sure you get the tool for unreal it'll take you directly to the realusion website where you can get it for free there you can just download and install the files so now we're going to need those files into the unreal project so go to character creator and iclone auto setup browse files and go down to unreal make sure it's the right version click on that then we're going to pull up our project copy and paste those folders into the unreal folder [Music] if it's installed right you should see the icon right at the top i'm going to click on it and i'm going to select hq shader apply and we should be ready to go so before we do that i like to create folders just to organize all the characters it's really useful especially for larger projects i update my characters to 4k also before exporting [Music] from personal experience i've seen characters render in just 2k so if you want high resolution just update the 4k okay so the character is ready to go let's just export as an fbx file export fbx cloth character and now our target tool preset must be set to unreal [Music] and i like to do the max texture size to 4k calibration is fine and i like to select delete hidden faces otherwise the skin pokes through [Music] be sure to separate your characters by folders just for organization's sake [Music] okay so i'm going to take the fbx file and i'm going to drag it into the unreal project make sure hq shader is selected hit ok okay so this is very important so follow along make sure for the skeleton the advanced section is expanded make sure t0 as ref pose is checked if it isn't you're going to have spaghetti arms as seen in the picture below import morph targets must be selected that's for your facial animation make sure you click on import animations and then go to advanced and then go all the way down to used default sample rate make sure that is clicked okay so i'm going to go through and make sure everything is good all right and now we're going to review use t 0 as ref post is checked import morph targets is checked import animations is checked and use default sample rate is checked and import all so our character is now in unreal and he looks ready but i don't think so we're gonna have to bring up a camera and i'll show you and we're gonna bring the character out of focus and you can notice the translucency dof issue right in the eyes so i'm going to show you how to fix that it's pretty simple so you want to select your character and then we're going to scroll all the way down here to i occlusion so right over there select on that and then we're going to scroll all the way down to parent so keep scrolling and then finally rl underscore i occlusion click on that and then we're going to type in dof and look for translucency pass and select before and save and do the same thing for the tiers rl underscore tier line click on that type in dof in the details translucency pass before dof and save so now we're going to pull this character out of focus and the eyes are much better actually but there is one more problem and it's in the scalp and that's going to take one more additional step [Music] let's select our character scroll all the way down to scalp [Music] scroll all the way down to the parent shader click on standard opacity but we're going to do one more additional step go to blend mode and then change it to translucent type in dof translucency pass must be before dof exit out and going back to blend mode turn it back to mask and save now our character is ready for animation all right so we're here in iclone and we have kevin animated but we need him to have a motion plus file a motion plus file is incredibly important because it bakes the animation and the facial expressions so we're going to highlight on collect clip right click add motion plus to library make sure everything's all selected so i'm going to remove his object animation and bring in the motion plus file can i set up a marker i have his eyes moving just a little bit and now it's time to export as an fbx and this is actually kind of important there's a bug so you want to keep it to 30 fps everything else will not import the animation so just set the range export like i said keep everything organized [Music] all right so here we are just go into the animation folder and i like to make one separate folder just to put the animation file in hq shader just drag it in now this next up is very important so make sure for the skeleton you want to bring it to the character you want to bring the animation to and let's go through the steps one more time use t 0 as ref pose must be selected import morph targets must be selected import animations must be selected and use default sample rate must be selected and import all [Music] okay we just want one simple file and it's this one so i'm going to rename it and my naming convention is usually like a c number and then the character in the animation [Music] and i'm just going to drag that animation file to a different folder and then i'm going to delete the folder with all those other files in it i just want the animation file [Music] with that the animation file should be in the sequencer some of you are wondering why don't use live link i've had too many latency issues and this is a really good alternative for anybody who's kind of struggling with livelink however i would definitely plan out your animations before bringing it into the unreal program i like to use collision and have characters like interact with certain scenes that way um i could build a set use the dummies in iclone have the characters block and animate with it and bring it back to the unreal engine it's a lot better for me and i think the results speak for themselves real engine is a great alternative if anyone wants better rendering power and only that but a lot more better filmmaking tools itself so those are my final words on it if you want to give it a shot feel free if you have any questions let me know and i'll see if i can answer them so thank you for watching if you like this video feel free to comment and subscribe i'll have a lot more live streams and tutorials perhaps a lot more filmmaking stuff too so see you around you

Channel: 4413 Media

Views: 21,230

Keywords: unreal engine, 3d animation, character creator, animation creation, animated character, character creator 4, body animation, unreal engine 5, iclone 8, 3d animation tutorial, character creator animation, animation creation for beginners, iclone tutorial, iclone 8 tutorial, iclone to ue5, character creator 4 to unreal engine 5, iclone 8 to unreal engine 5, character creator 4 tutorial, unreal engine tutorial, unreal engine 5 tutorial, unreal engine 5 animation, iclone

Id: V4CiQJ-8wU4

Length: 11min 1sec (661 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 05 2022