CC4 - Blender Round Trip after using DataLink Rigify

Pipeline Blender
1

Hi all,

I’m currently working on a character using CC4 and Blender.
After using DataLink and the Rigify option to get the rig controls, I found some issues with weight painting. After some manual weight painting, I’d like to send the character back to CC4 for some more adjustments.

Is there a way to send the character back to CC4 after using rigify, with the new weight painting intact?

2

I do not think you could send character back to CC with Datalink after rigify applied.
But regardless, If you tweaked weight paint for the standard character body in Blender and sent it back to CC, those changes will not be preserved and be reverted back using data in FBX Key file (painting cloth would be preserved though).

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3

Thank you for clarifying that, I thought I was missing something to get the character back to CC4 after rigify.

For the clothing weight paints, I tried weight painting in Blender and sending it back to CC4 using the Mesh option in DataLink and Export Replace Mesh option in Auto Setup. Both methods did not retain the updated weight painting.

Could you please share how to get the clothing back to CC4 using the updated weight painting?

4

The Rigify process is quite destructive to the original character.

All the bone vertex groups are renamed to the Rigify DEF bone names, some vertex groups are merged as their bones don’t exist in the Rigify armature (namely in the arms and legs). Depending on what face rig is used, the mesh can be altered to make heat map weighting work (as it’s so unreliable, it may need to separate the head to rig the face).

Basically, it’s never going back to CC4 as a full standard character. CC4 will outright reject it.

5

Got it, thank you. I’m still figuring out the entire workflow.

6

Only by sending whole character back to CC (but before Rigify is applied). Other methods would only update geometry.

7

I see. I tried exporting the whole character before rigify and opened in CC4, but it ended up causing many issues, like accessories location is incorrect, rig isn’t behaving as expected (legs go far below the floor plane when moving) and textures aren’t imported.

I’ll do more tests when I can to figure out the issue. For now, I’ve edited the weight paints in the original CC4 file, and sent to Blender.

8

If you do a lot of custom work in Blender it might not all come back as expected. But, if you only need to transfer a certain item weight paint data from Blender to CC, then just save that item as cloth after re-importing to CC. Then load original character and apply saved cloth from Content.

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9

Got it. Yes, I can do it this way.

  • Saved the CC clothing material so i dont have to manually apply the textures back after reimporting.

  • Sent to Blender and adjusted weight paints for the clothing.

  • Reimported whole character to CC4, and applied the saved material for cloth, and saved the clothing asset

  • Opened the original character CC4 file, and used the saved clothing asset

Thanks for the help.