Hello everyone,
I have a problem with my hair. Although I have activated the physics, the hairs are still moving through the mesh
I have adopted the weighting from CC4. I have already tried to increase the rigid collision, but that didn’t work either. Does anyone have a solution?
Thank you very much
Peter
I think that the collision detection in iClone is not precise enough to prevent mesh intersection completely, due to it being “real time”. (I don’t know if Blender has better hair collision detection; but I do know that for example the one in Cinema 4D also has problems with mesh intersection, especially if the character is moving (as opposed to a character standing still with only wind effects applied to the hair)).
If I use iClone hair, I try to use hair styles with shorter hair (i.e. not reaching the shoulders), hairdos with a bun, or pinned-up styles. Ponytails and other styles that have the longer hair away from the character’s mesh may also work quite well.
Dynamic hair simulation falls into catagories.
(as you said) the character is mostly idle with maybe a slight breeze.
and the character actually performing major body/head movement with longer hair.
The latter is where Most 3DCC hair systems start to fail.
Even Maya’s Xgen hair system requires a complex process involving curves and baking to an Alembic cache etc ,a real pain to get a film quality hair sim animation TBH.
And Blenders dynamic hair is no better than C4D IMHO And not really a priority for the devs as the Blender user base is not really Character animation focused but more hard surface modeling enthusiasts.
The impressive stuff you see in the animated movies is always some proprietary system built in house
Frankly at this point even Daz studio’s “Dforce” hair is better than Iclone’s with those cumbersome collision capsules.
Thank you for your answers. In C4D I solved the problem by reducing the weight of the hair. Then I made the mesh a little thicker. Then it worked well.
I had also considered placing another body around the torso. It would then be 1% bigger, for example, and would serve as a collision object.
Best regards
Peter
Unless hair has extremely dense mesh, hair collision in iClone/CC works just fine.
But it has to be properly set with weight map and collision shapes.
Key note: Part of the hair which interacts with collision shapes must have pure white color on weight map relevant to UV. And obviously collision shapes have to be set to be above body/cloth surface where hair interaction is expected.
Making hair weight map in Blender:
https://forum.reallusion.com/FindPost554418.aspx
Ich verwende die Teile von Hair 1 - 3. Die Gewichtung nehme ich ebenfalls von den Vorgaben - also alles so wie es sein sollte.
How does the collision detection actually work if you export it from Iclone to Unreal or Omniverse? Is the query then used by the respective program or still by Iclone?
Are you using iClone (i.e. card-based) hair or C4D hair?
Hello,
in Iclone I use the hair from Iclone and in C4D I use the hair generator from C4D.
Best regards
Peter
That’s what I thought and why I was a little confused when you wrote that you made the mesh thicker (I was assuming you were talking about the hair mesh, but apparently not).
BTW: I thought of using card-based hair from iClone in the C4D cloth sim, but so far I haven’t been able to make it work and I was wondering if you had perhaps hit on an idea to make (dynamic) iClone hair work in C4D without having to export it as an Alembic from iClone.
Sorry to have confused you. I make the mesh that serves as the collision object thicker. Then the hair no longer penetrates the mesh.
I haven’t tried importing dynamic hair from Iclone into C4D yet, as I actually wanted to use C4D’s hair generator. But importing the characters and especially the motions is very time-consuming. Therefore, as long as there is no direct pipeline from Iclone to C4D, I will probably have to make do with the products from Reallusion.
I am currently testing the rendering from Omnivers. And I like it very much. It is very fast for the size of the file, both maps are used and I like the result. I have been offered tutorials on Omniverse by Nvidia. I will have a look at them. Maybe there is also a possibility.
Best regards
Peter
I see.
It’s been a while since I did something with C4D hair (except for a quick test a little while back) so I will need to experiment whether using an “invisible” collision body that is slightly larger than the “real” character mesh improves things with regard to collision detection.
For the look, I also prefer C4D hair, but it takes longer to set up/simulate and to render. And re-creating some of the fancier hairdos that are available for iClone/CC in C4D hair is beyond my skill level in hair design, in particular those that incorporate braids, buns, or bows and other non-hair items.
I also keep hoping that Maxon will re-work the C4D hair system and make it compatible with the unified simulation system because that should improve things a lot for me. Right now, combining hair and cloth simulations has problems.
As far as I’m concerned, Omniverse is not an alternative because I still need all the other stuff that C4D brings to the table, for example the cloth, particle, fire & smoke simulations.
And exporting scenes from C4D to Omniverse makes less sense to me than exporting from iClone to Omniverse would, because with Redshift, I already have a capable GPU render engine in C4D that (a) is natively supported (i.e. requires not export to and/or modification in a third-party application) and (b) I’m already pretty familiar with.
Omniverse, on the other hand, would require an export workflow and (probably) more work/modifications in Omniverse as well as time to learn a new program.
As far as I can tell, Reallusion has little interest in supporting C4D via a direct pipeline from iClone, so I’m not holding my breath on that one, although I would appreciate having such a pipeline.
Yes, exporting characters and motions (actually, I always export characters with motions and not motions separately) is a bit time-consuming but, in general, it works for me fairly well (at least for the projects I have done so far). Things might be different if I tried to export entire scenes from iClone to C4D.
I think Reallusion looks at the user bases and costs of the various external apps in making its determinations about which app to support with feature rich pipeline tools.
The game engines like UE5 are “free” and obviously use animated Characters.
looking at “support” for the 3DCCs
we only have basic FBX export from CC3/4 to Maya and profile preset to convert the rig to the default Maya human IK control rig
No material conversion support for the Arnold render engine, although we have an internal “convert to Arnold” option in Maya that is hit or miss (mostly misses)
The Blender pipeline tool was developed by Victor Soupday and later officially co-opted by Reallusion which is why it is so feature rich and of course Blender is free like the game engines.
From what I can see the recent Autodesk Max Pipeline tool is well featured, but again, originally developed by a single individual and later co-opted by Reallusion.
I had sort of assumed that CC4D tools that was developed & showcased by single individual last year, would eventually get the same support from Reallusion as did Blender and Max. but it seems Reallusion has shifted its priorities to its motion libraries and internal animation tools with omniverse becoming the defacto external path tracing RTX powered engine.
Hello everyone,
I have to say that I am not a professional. I do it all as a hobby to take my mind off the stress of everyday life.
I actually wanted to realize my project in C4D, as the possibilities are much greater here than in Iclone. But after Reallusion discontinued support for C4D in my opinion, I was faced with problems. Transferring the files as FBX files does work, but considerable reworking is necessary. With static objects, everything still works. But for scenes with different actors, it becomes very time-consuming. In addition, you have to reassign the material files almost every time you update C4D or at least search for them using the Asset Inspector.
That’s why I need an alternative. This could be Omniverse, as my first impression is that the operation is very similar to that of C4D. But I’m still testing it out. I have also made a few renderings for testing. The results are impressive. However, I will write about this in the thread with the render engine. It fits better there.
Best regards from Germany
Peter
I agree, with the exception being the character animation tools in iClone which beat those in C4D with both hands tied behind their backs. 
Well, Reallusion did not so much discontinue support for C4D (the FBX export for C4D still works), but RL did not improve support of C4D the same way they did for example for Blender, UE, etc.
With very rare exceptions, I only export animated characters from iClone to C4D. The vast majority of my non-character 3D assets were not made for iClone (some could be imported into iClone via FBX), so I put my scenes together in C4D and just add the character(s) from iClone. Putting entire projects together in iClone would not work for me.
Now, in case I need to animate a character using a static asset (e.g. someone sitting on a chair), I might import a proxy object into iClone to help me adjust the animation.
Well, I don’t know whether that tool is still under development; haven’t heard anything in a while. Also, I don’t know/remember whether the developer reached out to RL for support; I’m pretty sure that RL are not going to reach out to him on their own initiative.
I remember when Victor Soupday made his first post about his new CC3 to Blender addon. It was his personal “in house”project to make importing CC3 characters into blender with correct materials etc more automated.
for the months that followed his thread was very active with us Blender/Iclone users giving feed back some even offering to support him financially with donations
to keep the development going.
support which he humbly refused as he rapidly improved the addon based on our feeed back/requests
and posted the updates on github
(He is a great guy IMHO)
At some point Reallusion began posting youtube videos about “their” new Blender pipeline tool.
(Victor’s Plugins obviously)
I highly doubt Victor had to reach out to Reallusion for any help and it seems more likely they reached out and offered official support to him.
Now if I had to speculate I would guess that Reallusion does not see alot of Character driven animated films and certainly not game dev animation being done with C4D.
And Maya animated filmmakers and game devs have both Maya and the mighty Autodesk Motionbuilder and finally both C4D and Maya are relatively expensive subscriptions.
so honestly its not hard to see why Reallusion would not devote alot of resources to a feature rich pipeline tools for those Apps compared to Blender and the free game engines
I think that is precisely part of the problem: there are not enough active C4D and iClone users here (that make their views known in this forum); I’m only aware of 3 or 4 current C4D users (myself included) and a couple of former C4D users.
Agreed. Like I said, I’m not holding my breath anyway. I can live with the current situation and my current iClone-to-C4D workflow. (BTW: apart from C4D and Maya, 3d max is not exactly cheap either, is it?)
I think that is precisely part of the problem: there are not enough active C4D and iClone users here (that make their views known in this forum); I’m only aware of 3 or 4 current C4D users (myself included) and a couple of former C4D users.
That is what puzzles me about Reallusion’s market position.
Of course this is just my own unscientific
anecdotal observation.
If you spend any time in any of the the major 3DCC online communities Blender, Maya, Max C4D
and the subject of Character animation solutions comes up
you never hear Reallusion mentioned organically
and if you mention them you hit a wall of indifference/silence.
Could be pricing
($900 USD for IC8/CC4 when not on sale)
Or it could be just entrenched habits and the
ecosystem comfort bubble and restrictive licensing as well
But, outside of this forum, I can’t find anyone using these pipeline tools with the major 3DCC’s
or the free game engines for that matter.
(BTW: apart from C4D and Maya, 3d max is not exactly cheap either, is it?)
Indeed Autodesk Max is $1945 annually and has well established legacy Character animation tools.
I’ll chime in as one of the aforementioned few C4D users: for the most part, exporting from iClone to C4D via FBX does require a bit of fiddling around, but once you get used to it, it’s not too hard. For a recurring character with the same textures in many scenes, you can pretty much copy & paste the adjusted textures from an existing character in C4D to a newly-imported FBX that needs the textures–I’ve been doing this for quite some time. An alternative to this–and I used it for the dwarf character in the attached video (a sneak peek for those familiar with this series–audio isn’t final) because I didn’t want to remake the beard each time, is to use the Retarget tag for the skeleton and then copy and paste the morphs for the face and tongue movements. I can explain this in more detail if you want. But that said, I also learned that as long as the mesh is exactly the same from the existing character in C4D to the new one, transferring the hair is as easy as copy and pasting the mesh selection from the old character to the new one–the hair just pops onto the new character.
PS: to be clear, the dwarf character has C4D hair, the other characters have card hair.
