almost 2 years ago I discovered Character Creator and the creative flexibility and freedom it offers and integrated it into my workflow. But as I still wanted to work in my prefered DCC, which is Cinema4D, I started developing some tools to enhance the experience when working with CC4, ActorCore or AccuRig characters in Cinema 4D. The toolkit consists of a full body and facial rig as well as some tools to quickly import and retarget animations from different sources.
And as I released a bigger update recently, which added a first version of a auto material setup for Redshift Render in Cinema 4D, I thought its a good time to create a ‘CC4 → C4D’ topic here on the forum for feedback, questions, suggestions and discussions about the Character Creator / Cinema 4D pipeline.
My ultimate goal is to create a full ‘roundtrip’ pipeline for Cinema 4D as there is for blender and unreal, but its still some way to go
The next big topics on my roadmap are:
support of ‘non-standard’ skeletons (right now only CC skeleton is supported)
wrinkle support
adding export options (C4D → CC4)
refining the existing tools based on user feedback
Maybe I missed it, but the one feature I’m still looking for is getting wrinkles to export properly for use with RS materials inside C4D. According to the video, the last update for CC4D Tools includes an Auto Material Setup, but does not seem to support wrinkles yet, correct?
just to keep this thread updated a bit more regularly here is little preview on what I’m currently working on and planing to integrate to the CC4D Tools with one of the next updates.
First one is a better OBJ exchange workflow between C4D and CC. As it is not possible to use a OBJ file from C4D as morph target in CC out of the box because C4D either keeps the OBJ groups or the vertex index when importing a OBJ exported from CC. But both is necessary to reimport the file in CC.
And the second one is the integration of the facial wrinkels, of which I have a first working prototype.
Nice to see you are working on this. Now, this is important to me.
Why is an OBJ exchange workflow desirable? So far, all I have needed was FBX to get stuff from iClone into C4D. Am I missing something? Why would I re-import an OBJ from C4D back into CC4? After sculpting in C4D?
I usually model or sculpt my characters from scratch in C4D. To get this shape then onto the CC_Base_Body mesh I take the exported OBJ of the neutral base from CC and ‘shrink’ wrap it onto my model (sometimes in combination with the headshot 2 plugin).
The advantage is when I import this as a morph slider in CC it will adjust the bone positions automatically. also I can reuse the body/face shape for future characters because it is now a morph. And if I’m correct this can only be done with OBJ files.
But of course: I could also create a full body morph from a character that has been imported as FBX.
Well, I usually just use characters that I purchased (occasionally with minor tweak in CC) so I’m primarily interested in the iClone-to-C4D pipeline and not in the other direction.
I may add hair in C4D to a character exported from iClone and sometimes clothing (either also exported from iClone or sourced from other 3D sites), but I never create characters from scratch. Frankly, I don’t really see a point in doing so for the kind of content I make.
So, yes, support for wrinkles is a lot more important to me that an OBJ workflow, although, of course, I realize that you—being the developer of the plugin—make the decision how and where to apply development resources; especially, if the OBJ workflow is important to how you use the pipeline.
Well it is probably best to make the pipeline tool with two way capabilities as I can see why some users of external 3DCC’s may want to use their modeling tools in C4D to create/modify and send items back to CC4/Iclone.
There were a quite few scene prop items
(sci-fi consoles, hallways, weapons etc) that I modified in Blender and used the Blender pipeline tool to send them over to CC3/Iclone for use in my cartoon shaded Film I rendered in Iclone
