Unreal 5.6 just launched and with it came the new Metahuman Creator which is now in-engine and offers very similar flexibility and customization to that of CC4, with much higher fidelity characters. Now, I understand CC5 is going to be an upgrade, but I think there’s a real problem here with the Reallusion pipeline being so expensive whereas Metahumans are completely free, along with all of the animation tools for them also being free.
I’m relatively new to CC4 but I’m already heavily invested in the software, so I don’t see myself switching anytime soon. At this point I also can’t see a reason to recommend Reallusion software to friends or colleagues over the new Metahuman creator and tools. What I’m hoping for is CC5 being a significant upgrade over CC4 and giving us features that warrant the premium price point.
In addition to this, I’m not saying Reallusion should make their software free, I understand Epic Games is a massive billion dollar company and can afford to make these investments and ecosystems free (obviously to bring more people into the UE pipeline). However it stands to reason that there needs to be significant advantages to buying into Reallusions software suite.
I’d love to see this community grow more, where people will recommend CC4/5 online withing holding their nose, or more tutorials on Youtube by creators who’ve discovered neat techniques or additional pipelines, etc. My suggestions would be something along the lines of:
Start making a push toward indie game developers and animators. At the moment the price points for some of the plugins and features are extraordinarily expensive, perhaps thats the intention but indie devs/studios are not high-budget enterprise grade companies.
The licensing should be more lenient. This is the BIGGEST critique I see online regarding this software. Maybe change the standard license to be similar to the extended license but based on revenue of the persons using it (i.e Can be used on multiple characters by companies making less than 100k, etc)
Some of these plugins should be standard features and are locked behind massive paywalls. This is a huge turnoff for most people. (I.e. Accuface for Iclone, Realistic Human Skin for CC)
Please don’t turn it into a subscription model.
I’m sure there are other things I’m missing but this is just from my point of view as an indie developer who’s already spent thousands on this software suite.
Well for The longtime Iclone users ,who wish to remain inside the Reallusion ecosystem comfort bubble, the financial costs are not at issue here.
The problem ,from a market growth perspective, is that a stagnant user base is literally a dying user base by virtue of human mortality, aging
loss of interest etc.
You need to attract NEW paying customers constantly
and honestly I see quite the challenge ahead for anyone making the argument to a game dev company or animated film studio that buying Iclone/CC5 ,with all of the $$required plugins$$$, are a better value than starting with UE 5.6 right now.
Even if you believe that the native Character animation tools of UE5 are trash compared to iclone well…there is cascaduer to shore up UE and at $300 dollars it costs nearly $200 dollars LESS than one Iclone plugin and does everything that the subscription based Accupose unlimited does and things Accupose does NOT such as ragdoll collision physics.
Agreed. My post wasn’t really about keeping people currently invested but rather trying to find ways to bring new people in. I’ve already purchased the software and I’m not bothered by the amount I’ve already invested into this ecosystem (I mean I am, because it was expensive but it is what it is right now), but with all the new tools available I’m honestly not sure I’d continue to spend additional money.
If they change the pricing models it’d only be a good thing. There’s tough competition out there. I like a lot of what the Reallusion pipeline does, it’s why I invested in it 3 months ago. Though I can say I probably wouldn’t have spent that money had I known about the upcoming Metahuman updates. I’ll continue to use it for now and I’m excited to see what CC5 brings. I suspect big changes will be necessary for CC5 and Iclone to stay relevant and gain more users though.
Indeed the economics of it make it a very tough sell even to users in naturally adjacent ecosystems like Daz studio.
Right now there is a thread on the Daz forums
with some users oozing with glee over this one
product that sort of does in Daz studio what Motion puppet does in Iclone
But telling them about how Iclone can do this already means nothing when the cost to use Iclone is so much higher than Daz which ,(Like UE5) , is free.
With many of the new YT videos I see showcasing the new UE5
with included MetaHumans
the comment sections are full of people saying that they are “done paying for Reallusion products”
I think the most important factor is, how much time you save with these tools.
If I get the same stuff done with a paid tool in a single day while needing a week in a free software, I gladly pay something for a perpetual license.
That’s why Cascadeur is such a great tool and time saver, because it can convert basic keyframe animation into good looking, fluent motion. It takes like 90% of the work away. Reallusion’s animation tools are also a great time saver.
On the other hand, I don’t think that people that say “This is free, you’re too expensive” would’ve been a customer base in the first place, if the free tool didn’t exist. Don’t start a race to the bottom but set prices so that your business stays afloat comfortably and don’t get greedy, but be transparent with your prices.
Perhaps not, but what I am seeing are people who were in the customer base saying they are leaving Reallusion because they consider the FREE Metahumans to finally be a viable alternative for Character creation.
That’s a fair assessment, while I was mostly comparing CC4/5 to Metahumans admittedly the animation tools in UE are just ok which is the main reason I purchased Iclone, I needed better animation tools for what I wanted to do. Taking animation software out of the question at the moment though, Metahumans are a very good free alternative as of UE5.6 with higher fidelity. At the very least it does beg the question “Why would a developer need to buy Character Creator when Metahumans exist?”
Maybe but that’s a hard assumption to make. As I stated before, I probably wouldn’t have bought the CC software if I knew about the update to metahumans sooner. Ultimately I made the decision to and I don’t regret it, but there are probably going to be a lot more people that are turned off by the pricing.
No argument here. Hopefully Reallusion keeps the metahuman pipeline available as well for people who want to convert their CC characters.
Well if you never buy another upgrade ,and just use your current version, it is the same as leaving in that RL gets no more money from you.
This will really hurt sales of CC5 IMHO
and there is alway the issue of the render engine
as well.
You can make a stylized base mesh with Metahumans in the new 5.6 update, but it does require editing in another tool (such as Blender or Zbrush) to finalize. When the option for indie devs needing stylized characters is Free with a little bit of blender work, I’m pretty sure Free will be the chosen option. In this case, yes you’d save some time with Character Creator. But is the amount of time saved worth the price point? Probably not.
“Why would a developer need to buy Character Creator when Metahumans exist?”
If you look at it from the perspective of a game developer or animated filmmaker who is not already bought into the Reallusion ecosystem,
Then no I cant imagine anyone would need Reallusion character creator
Also Ibelieve the metahumans allow you to create an in game character builder which is forbidden by Reallusion with CC
I believe I saw short video snippets where you could see that Clair Obscure Expedition 33 or Split Fiction was using Character Creator. I sadly cannot remember which one. But I believe it was Expedition 33 or both?
I wouldn’t be surprised, it’s a great tool. I’m not arguing against their use. Both of those studios, while indie, are larger studios with funding and full of developers who’ve been in the industry for years, some for decades. Of course they’re going to use paid tools for their work. I’m talking more about small studios like mine who have no publishers/funding, or solo devs. What I’d like to see is this ecosystem expand while also being more affordable and with licensing that is more forgiving for small scale creators.
Look at the state of the AAA/Enterprise gaming industry right now, major studios are laying off hundreds of people left and right and larger games with budgets of millions of dollars are flopping hard. While at the same time the indie game scene is booming. The two games you mentioned, for example, both critical and commercial success’. I think it’d be wise for Reallusion to capitalize on this, but they need to make several changes in order to do so.
I’m only using the gaming industry in my examples because I’m familiar with it, I’m not familiar with other industries that use these tools (such as film and animation).
The end result of UE looks wonderful if you like that look but to get there and actually make a film seems to be a major PITA.
I have great respect for how StyleMarshal explains everything but the size of the current UE thread and the previous ones on the old forum indicate to me it it is not particularly easy to do the whole process in UE.
There are definitely more steps involved when looking at UE filmmaking from the perspective of an Iclone user but I suspect that Iclone users would feel the same way about watching someone
using Blender or Autodesk Maya for film animation
lets not forget that actual video game developers are the target market that Reallusion (and even Daz) have been trying to attract
(with questionable success IMHO)
Historically the typical “traditional” Game character pipeline always involved modeling & rigging all of your game characters and sets & props from scratch and then animate them in a professional program such as Maya or 3Dmax before export to the game engine.
Epic is obviously trying to consolidate that entire process into their engine supported by an ecosystem of engine ready content in the Epic store.
while we no longer seem have the old paradigm of individual competing software applications but indeed competing ecosystems but the fact that the Metahumans are now being made available for apps outside of unreal indicates that they are seeking to compete directly against individual character systems such CC4/5 and Daz as well.
Blender I can at least understand and I use it sometimes, and I would be able to master it if I took the time because the elements are that of a traditional 3D program. I was tought 3D animation using 3D Max, but I simply could not afford the software at the time. Then I used Poser for some time (made one short with it) and I took a class in TrueSpace, a software that went belly up. I also looked at DAZ for a bit. So you can say I have been around the block. When I became aware of iClone in 2006, it spoke to me, and here we are.
The way I see it, game engines are conceived with a different philosophy as, traditionally, they serve a different purpose.
Unreal Engine has plenty of easily useable film and animation tools. I’d argue that camerawork inside UE is much easier than Iclone, I don’t craft my cutscenes in Iclone because I don’t like the camera system. So I create my animations in Iclone with props when necessary and export the animations to UE where I handle shot composition and everything else. You’re saying the longer threads indicate it’s not easy to use, but it’s a constantly evolving piece of software with regular updates almost every month, which means new things are added or changed all the time. The longer thread just indicates the creator of the thread is continuing keep information up to date or sharing something new he learned or found.
UE is definitely a different kind of tool, but it only takes a few minutes to set up a level sequence and camerawork for a basic cutscene or animation. For character animation I’d choose Iclone every day over the current UE tools, they are certainly working on those as well and making control rigs better with each update. But even from a character animation side, there’s programs like cascadeur which are once again cheaper (and in some ways an improvement over the tools in Iclone, such as essentially doing what accupose does without needing an additional subscription for it).
But I’ll go back to my first point, if someone or a small studio needed an animation pipeline on a tight budget, what would they choose? The now almost completely free UE pipeline, which will work with a little bit of work (or even UE and Blender for animation) or the massive paywalled pipeline of Reallusion? That’s my whole point, there are now enough additional programs with a much lower barrier to entry that can do all of what reallusion does without the massive cost. It was already headed this way before but UE 5.6 with the new metahuman creator was basically the final nail in the coffin.
This thread wasn’t about people who are currently invested in the Reallusion pipeline. If you already use it and it works for you I’m not arguing that you should change what you’re doing. My point is how could I possibly recommend the Reallusion pipeline over these other programs to friends and colleagues without being disingenuous? I enjoy these programs and like what they do, however “I like it” isn’t a solid argument when there are now plenty of cheaper or even free alternatives that do everything these programs can do.
Even looking at just alternative rendering engines (since you don’t like unreal) you have Marmoset Toolbag which you can setup scenes and keyframe animations in as well, and once again it is cheaper than Iclone as a rendering engine. And with Marmoset they give you a massive library of assets to start with (materials, textures, etc) that don’t require an extra purchase. Admittedly that’s not really what marmoset is for, but it is another option at a much better price.
My point here is that without substantial changes there is practically no reason to recommend Reallusion programs over others with the price-point being as high as it is. With the additional costs of plugins and assets that you need (for example, hair or clothing assets for CC since you get practically nothing to start with).
