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?
You can’t
not without looking like a shameless
Reallusion shill/fanboy
or a “tourist” who has no clue about the state of the game dev industry thus not qualified to give
advice on a pipeline.
In the end the hard economics of it will prevail
in determining where new incoming users will
land.
I will give Reallusion credit for one thing
in that they at least seem to be confident enough in their own software offerings that they do not Ban the discussions of competing software like Daz does.
I think this is inevitable with new software programs. I started off with Poser and Vue Xstream. Then I moved to Daz3d and Blender. And now I am with CC4 and Unreal Engine. The only reason I use CC4 and Iclone for characters is because UE5 was very limited and very complicated. BUT…if metahumans and its animations are as flexible and as easy as CC4 and Iclone, I will be switching even though I have paid for the two programs and many of their plugins. One stop shopping will always be preferable, especially if it is free. I think if CC4 upped its AI game with prompts and also Iclone gave us more AI animation and expressions, maybe I would stay. But I will be diving into 5.6 to see if it is a viable alternative to Iclone…no more live link and all that.
I gave the metahuman in unreal engine 5.6 a go yesterday. I’ve been working with the unreal engine for close to 5 years and iclone around 15 years. I’ll put in my two cents.
My initial thoughts for metahuman is that the conversion from a 3d scan is impressive and easy to use in comparison to headshot. Skin tools are easy to work and the body morphs have been pretty good, not as detailed as the morphs in character creator, but you can get away with some good character design.
One major disadvantage I have noticed so far is outfits. I noticed that you have to go through some troubleshooting to get outfits to work, which is very limited in selection at the moment, to get what you want. I have yet to check out metatailor though so this can change. Character creator has an easier process overall.
For unreal engine, the advantages are cheaper and better set design, great lighting options, huge access to plugins and tools that will expedite the production, and a great camera system.
Iclone has a strong advantage in the animation side. I find unreal to be clunky and unfriendly while iclone is ready to go and has more options to fix and adjust animations.
So my pipeline is iclone and cc4 for animation and characters, while unreal is for everything else. I’ll have to see what cc5 has to offer though before I make any final decisions.
Indeed I started with Poser for animation and later sent them to Maxon C4D for rendering via a third party plugin.
When Daz introduced their genesis version 1
and their nonlinear motion clip system I dumped Poser for Daz studio.
When Iclone 5.5 pro with 3DXchange supported Genesis with Iclone mocap retargeting via BVH I stopped using Daz for animation except facial lipsinc.
When Blender got a decent user interface (2.8)and Reallusion adopted Victor Soupday’s Blender pipeline tool I dropped C4D as render environment
and moved over to a hybrid pipeline with Blender as the core and sometimes a CC3 character import
sometimes a Daz import via the diffeo addon and sometimes a figure completely rigged from scratch for blender via Auto free pro or even the free Accurig standalone.
all of these options can retarget base layer motion imported from Iclone 7 via FBX from CC3
Because of this I never moved past Iclone version 7 and 3DX pipeline and CC3.
One stop shopping will always be preferable, especially if it is free.
Quite true and people will be willing to sacrfice “ease of use” if they get everything else they want without paying money
The real difference will come down to licensing and project usage. As of 5.6, with the “use anywhere” setup, besides some obvious restrictions, you are allowed to use custom MetaHumans anyway you want. This includes selling them in approved third-party stores with w/limitation. You are also not bound to an extended license by the number of Metahumans in a project. Or have to report the use of a character in an interactive project.
I think Reallusion is going to have to rethink its licensing and usage terms to stay competitive. Epic has not only simplified its licensing but also its usage as well. I was at Unreal Fest and the a massive section dedicated to MetaHumans in the expo…from one of the engineers on the floor…this is not just a tool for them anymore…but they are looking at building a full ecosystem that can be used everywhere.
Agreed, the licensing restrictions right now are not competitive at all and, as much as I’m sure they love their proprietary software and ecosystem, is doomed to fail at this rate. It’s simply too restrictive and does not promote creative freedom for the user.
Exactly and your ecosystem needs to be competitive on all fronts not just the humanoid Characters
Even if the new CC5 characters are on par with the meta humans in quality
what about particle effects like Niagra
Doesn’t matter, it’s currently not an option for CC characters. Assets stores are full of lazy creations, including the Reallusion marketplace. You still have to sort through and find the things that are useful. If you see a lazy metahuman and don’t like it you don’t have to buy it.
Heavily invested in Reallusion and UE.
If UE makes animation as easy as Animation in Iclone which loads an animation character/event - I will likely stop spending money on upgrades.
I love Reallusion workflow, but gimmicky advertising is weird. CC 5 Upgrade for CC 4 owners isn’t clear - I login and see CC 4 bundles (which I already owned) being pitched as main options. Reallision doesn’t feel like an ally but a marketing seller trying to pitch me at all angles. Marketing is the tail wagging the platform. pitch, pitch, pitch. boring.
I’m sticking with CC/iClone, I find it preferrable even after checking out UE 5.6 and the Metahuman updates. It’s still somewhat “online-only” apparently if you want to generate a rig for your character, so that already makes it of little use for me. (What kind of telemetry are they pulling anyway? lol)
Something that has been interesting lately though is all of this new “Nvidia ACE” stuff and the idea of driving NPCs with client side small LLMs.
Not sure if anyone here has experimented with it much yet, they only have the ACE plugins for up to 5.4 at the moment currently. They do have a sample project available already which uses it to drive a Metahuman. I assume there’s a way to get it to drive Reallusion characters, so I’ll have to see what I can do. Hopefully Reallusion and Nvidia can develop some good tutorials / workflows / plugins / streamline some integration of this. Might not be that hard to setup, just as long as the bones and morph targets are being driven the same way.
It would be interesting if someone made an ACE sample project, to show how ACE would be integrated in a Reallusion character based project.
And therein lies the challenge and the question of Why would NVIDIA need Reallusion at all??
This ACE system, of which you speak,
will likely be updated for UE 5.6 as it is a
“suite of AI models are packaged via NVIDIA NIM, which offers an easy- to-use microservice for high-performance deployment of AI models. NIM are available to deploy and operate in the cloud, or deploy models and run locally on NVIDIA RTX AI PCs.”
So developers using this service get everything delivered
by NVIDIA.
A Reallusion plugin would add nothing to this system
but the additional cost of their plugin and replacing those high quality AI driven NPC’s and NVIDIA avatars with what?
Lesser quality CC avatars that come with their own set of usage restrictions.
Thus the only potential user base for ACE integration are existing Iclone users willing to buy another (likely) expensive plugin that only replicates what is already being done better by in the external ecosystem that Iclone the plugin is connecting to.
For the record I am not trying to just dunk on the Reallusion product line as it is excellent
I just do not think their current
strategy of trying to be an external Character provider
to external ecosystem that clearly have their own native Characters is going to be viable in 2025 and beyond.
Take Maya for example.
CC5 promises to give use Maya users full conversion of materials to the native Arnold render engine shader
but CC only exports a basis FBX file and provides a Maya human IK profile to convert the CC character rigging to a basic Maya human IK control rig.
That basic HIK control rig is great for using Maya’s retargeting system to apply body mocap from generic sources like Mixamo etc.
However for facial animation and using facial capture systems such as Live link CSV, NVIDIA audio to face,
Apple Arkit, professional Maya animators need the Character rigged with Maya Advanced skeleton System not just the basic HIK that you get with a Reallusion CC3/4/5 imported character.
Now looking at the blender community, first
the fact is that the overwhelming majority of the blender user baser are Hard surface modeling enthusiasts
who care nothing about Character animation.
Trust me I have been trying for YEARS to promote
the amazing Blender pipeline tool by Victor Soupday
They just Don’t care
and few that do want Characters have this for only $128 dollars: https://superhivemarket.com/products/humgen3d
It is good to hear that Reallusion is in discussions with Ben ,the creator of the CC4D tools, as Maxon C4D really has no native integrated suite of native characters in their ecosystem or plugin that serve that purpose
Finally it seems to me that since MODO is now a Free software
( with no further development though), that a CC5 to MODO pipeline tool might be worth considering as there really are very limited Character options for MODO
I’m doing some tests with Metahuman and really like how the face looks. Metahuman bodies are more difficult to modify. Still, I am hoping seriously that CC5 will be close to the fidelity of Metahuman. Here is one of my characters, Adrea:
I think Reallusion is not factoring in competition from AI. I can’t do anything in Unreal after trying a few times. Learning curve is too steep. IClone is nice and simple, but AI video is getting to the point anyone who can write a prompt or ask an AI to write a prommt for you can create better work. It won’t be long before there is complete control in AI Video, probably next year or two at the pace of progress. $400 would buy me a lot of AI credits.
And your only “production costs” are your fees for the AI service and your high speed internet.
No need for a top end NIVIDIA GPU PC
system for “Accuface” etc and you can even edit your AI videos online with capcut.
When I retire in six months, I am
probably going full AI for my creative projects
I’ve been testing a lot of AI video creators lately like veo3 but its still very limited. Part of it is the censorship not really allowing fight scenes which I use a lot. But also ai gets easily confused with scenes that have multiple things going on. Keeping characters from changing too much from scene to scene is hard too. I think its something reallusion should look into bringing to iclone 9. Basically start off the animation with a prompt but have a way to save your characters and keep them persistent between shots and edit prompts in software after they are created to make them look just as you envisioned. I was looking at this when deciding to see if I could justify getting cc5. Overall I just feel making the kind of projects I want with AI Video is still too far away. At least 2 years before we can make decent show or movie style content that has any sort of action. AI is the future and Reallusion needs to take a deep look at it to make their product not only use it but enhance its capabilities. That being said AI Video is not ready yet.
I’m a little biased when it comes to AI. Maybe I enjoy the creative process too much, but I would much rather create my own characters and animate them when doing my projects. Now, some AI tools to help simplify animation I’m all for. Even some kind of AI integrated into CC4/5 to help speed up the design process would be great as long as it isn’t an additional cost. I’m getting really tired of all these different subscriptions and extra costs necessary to keep up with doing creative work. I definitely understand and see the appeal of moving to something like Metahuman or AI when it costs like $200 just to get better skin textures in CC4.
We will see when CC5 drops though how much of an improvement it really is.
