How to Import Character Creator Files into BLENDER! (Step by Step Tutorial)

what's up guys Justin here with the character essentials.com so in today's video we're going to talk about how we can take our character creator models and Export them to blender let's go ahead and just jump into it all right so if you want to give character creator a try you can do that by visiting the character essentials.com character creator note that that is an affiliate link meaning that I would receive commission if you do end up purchasing through that link but let's go ahead and just jump into this all right so in this case I've got a version of the Camila character that I want export from character creator to blender and so we can do that using two things we can use the export function in character creator as well as um the add-on for blender that's been developed by character creator to bring these models in so first off let's talk about the export so what we want to do is we want to take this model and we want to do a file export and in this case I'm going to export this to an fbx file and specifically I want to export all and at the moment I don't really have have any like crazy animations applied to this or anything like that so we're not going to worry too much about that for right now we can talk about things like that in a future video but what I want to do is I just want to do a file export I want to export an fbx file and I want to select the option for all and so when I do that what that's going to do is that's going to give me a number of different options in here and so specifically we want to start by clicking on this drop- down and picking the option for blender so we want to bring this into blender and there's different options in here you can export just the mesh you can export the mesh and motion or you can export just the motion in this case we're going to pick mesh in motion um we don't really have any motions applied here um but that is going to include those motion animations if you have them and so a couple other things in your settings right first off you want to uncheck the box for embed textures um we don't want to do that when we are exporting and then I'm also in this case I'm just going to ort the current pose um you can also export different poses um in the custom option right here we can dive into that in a future video so let's go ahead and let's just get a model over into blender for right now the other thing you want to do is you want to make sure that you merge beard and browse into one object down below like this and then once you're done what you can do is you can click on the option for export and when you do that and so you can't import it back into character creator if you change some of these options right here so just be aware of that um we're not bringing it back in right now so no big deal but what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on okay and then you just want to um name your model in this case I've named it Camila test and already exported but then you want to click on Save and what that's going to do is that's going to save the model as an fbx file that you can then bring into blender okay and so the next step is you need to install the blender add-on so you can click on this option right here for download Auto setup and that's just going to bring you down here um to an option where you can download the file and so that's going to take you to this post right here um which is basically going to link you to a page on GitHub where you can download the plugin so I'm clicking on the Character Creator 4 blender tools plug-in if you want to see more about that you can click on it right here but in this case I've tried the exe file and it actually didn't work on my computer I think it's because I don't have blender installed on my main hard drive I have it installed on an external hard drive um so what I did is I just downloaded this source code file right here and so when you download the source code file that's basically an add-on that you can install directly in blender so what you could do is then jump over into blender and under edit preferences you want to install that zip file don't unzip it just um find the ZIP file and link to it so click on install and install that and what that's going to do is that's going to basically give you this menu right here that does the automatic import and material setup of the Character Creator and iclone characters now there's some things in here that you can kind of mess around with right like the target renderer um the different kinds of materials that are in here we're not going to worry too much about this right now um it pretty much it works pretty well um without you having to mess with any of this stuff but there are options in here if you want them um but when when you do that what that's going to do is that's going to add this as a little menu on the right hand side you can tap the in letter on your keyboard in order to pop that up and so specifically you want to click on the cc/ I pipeline the Character Creator and iclone pipeline notice what that's going to do is that's going to give you the option to import different things right so you can import wrinkles lighting physics and then you can also automatically rigify the character which we can talk about in a future video but for now let's just just bring in the lighting of our character and our character so to do that what I can do is I can just click on the option to import character and then you want to go find your fbx file so in this case right I've got a Camila test file if I double click on that that's going to import this character and automatically set it up in blender and so notice how I'm in blender 3.6 this is currently working in version 3.6 right now there we go and you can see that it did exactly what it sounded like it was going to do it imported my character it automatically set up my materials so notice how those actually look really good um they look a lot better than like when you bring in mixim files or something like that that look like they're made of uh they look like they're like soaking wet or something like that this actually does a pretty good job of bringing in these materials now one thing that you might do in order to see your character is just go up into your viewport overlay as it just toggle off Bones the other thing is it brings in these dummy files I'm not sure sure what these are for they just kind of get in the way so I'm going to go ahead and delete them out they might be in here for a reason that I don't know about but for right now we're going to delete them out but now if we zoom in and take a look at this character you can see how it brought her in with the different skin settings setup um the clothes setup other things like that and so it did a really good job of setting this up and notice how it also brought in the lighting settings and so if I toggle over into Eevee and I look at this this actually looks really good with the lighting that's in this scene so I'm pretty happy with the way that it did that and so notice how when you bring this in you can set this so that it builds your materials either for Ev or for Cycles using these buttons right here um but notice how when it creates these and we're going to jump over into our Shader editor really quick but notice how it creates either simple or Advanced node setups in here so if I tap the end key up here and I'm just going to scroll down notice how you can actually actually use this to rebuild the nodes depending on if you want them to be basic if I click here notice how it'll rebuild those materials into the basic PBR setup or the advanced setup right here now one thing that's interesting to me and this is probably because I changed the diffuse material of the model over in character creator but notice how when I have the basic materials I actually lose those colors in here that's probably having to do with the way that I set those materials up but notice how this comes through and it'll automatically rebuild the Advanced Materials inside a blender like this um depending on which one of those you select so you can also come in here and adjust the parameters of the materials down below so if you don't want to get into the shaders right you can just kind of scroll down into your material parameters and you can make adjustments to things like the metallic um the specularity of the material the roughness um other things like that so you can make changes to your materials in here just by using your sliders right so you can see I can make this material more shiny if I decide I want to do that there's just ton of stuff that we can do in here and so there are other things in here as well so there's things like the ability to open and close the eyes using this slider right here which is actually pretty cool um I'm not sure exactly how that's rigged up but you do have that ability now currently with the way that I have the model set up the open mouth function does not work um but that something we can definitely take a look at in the future we're not going to worry too much about the rigging for right now and then down below there's options for the different scene lighting which is actually really cool so I'm going to jump over into Eevee really quick this actually brings in um several different lighting setups and notice what this is doing this is kind of swapping between them now I'm not sure if this is something where you can add additional lighting setups over in Character Creator and bring those in um but just having the ability to jump between these um if you want to render out your your character is actually really cool as well and so say that you wanted to bring in a character that had an animation applied to it or um a motion applied to it so what we're going to do is we're going to take this Caleb character and we'll bring him in and we'll go ahead we'll go ahead and we'll throw a hairstyle on him real quick but let's say that we wanted him to have an animation so we'll go with motion right here and we'll just add this relaxed walk to this character so now if I animate this like this right notice how he has a walk associated with him so he has a movement associated with his walk well let's say that we were to export that we're going to go to export fbx all and we'll go ahead and we'll just export this with the current animation um we're going to go ahead and leave all the other settings kind of the same we're going to click on export we're going to click on okay and I can't remember his name so we're going to call him Steve and so we'll jump over into blender and for whatever reason oh probably because I didn't save my preferences this isn't in here so we want to make sure that we've enabled character creator tools and in this case we want the pipeline we want to import character and we'll bring steveen like this we'll go ahead and we'll toggle these bones off and it's going to take a minute to compile the shaders and we didn't bring the lighting in or anything like that which is fine um but notice how this character if we were to click on play actually came in with that walk animation associated with them like this so he's actually going to walk in 3D and you can adjust the speed and other things like that but you can see how bringing that animation in was actually really easy all right so that's where I'm read in this video we can get more in depth on some other things um when you bring these into blender but in general this is how you can get started bringing in character creator files to start working with them leave a comment below let me know what other kinds of tutorials you'd like to see on this workflow I just love having that conversation with you guys if you do want to check out character creator I will link to it on this page as well but as always thank you so much for taking the time to watch this I'll catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: The Character Essentials

Views: 4,392

Keywords: reallusion, iclone, character creator, character creator to blender, character creator 4, character creator export

Id: veT--rhpbbM

Length: 11min 14sec (674 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 01 2023