Same here, I am excited about CC5. I just hope it’s worth it. The new Iclone/Icontent update they just added leaves a lot to be desired… so I have a feeling they’re not going to adjust licensing terms to be competitive. If CC5 does not absolutely knock it out of the park with features and content, it will not be a good look for the CC software suite with todays market.
I understand. For me the character fidelity is key, and a lot of fun. Metahuman faces are amazing but the body is really limited in customization, even n 5.6, verses what CC does, so If it can hold a candle to the Metahumans, I would be super happy. We will see for sure.
My 2 cents: I tried both. I tried meta human before trying CC few years ago. Back then the deal breaker for metahumans were:
- no body configuration
- very limiting human based limitations in the editor (realistic ranges of color for eyes and hair)
- The online only editor for which you had to wait for an open slot.
Then I used CC 4 and tbh never looked back, as the configuration is limitless, you can seamlessly import export from DCCs (specifically blender that I use).
When UE 5.6 went out I downloaded it first day and jumped on the MH editor…
Well the only thing that is fixed from before to me was that the editor is now offline…
The body configuration is ok but quite basic to me, especially compared to what you can do in CC. Characters are still limited to height that are “human” plausible which is limiting IMHO. Still the same limitations in eye and hair color. Characters don’t have nipples, even males, not sure why. Plenty little things that make the workflow harder to me.
Also somehow, once you rigged the character you can’t modify it anymore unless you unrig it, which is ok because it’s a one button click operation, but it’s long and adds a lot of back and forth with the server as it’s an online operation.
There was this “conform” feature that was promising, I thought I could do like in CC and I thought I could use it to sculpt the body and re import it. But it’s unfortunately heavily bugged and I haven been able to make it work.
see Is MetaHuman 5.6 Body Conform feature broken in the public release? - Character & Animation - Epic Developer Community Forums
However face construction and shading are better than in CC to me. More realistic, CC still has the uncanny valley look. That’s why I’m eager to test CC5 which seems to have made progress on that aspect
In my opinion MH is a good free tool to create Human characters. If that’s your target, go for it. If you want to customize it even a little bit (like sculpting the base mesh to enhance muscles) well you’ll end up spending a lot of time working around issues rather than working on your character.
If you want the top level character creator app, being able to create goblins, elves aliens and hulks without any trouble, to me CC is the no brainer. But sure it comes at a cost, and I understand why it can deter some.
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I tend to agree with you. I love the faces in Metahuman I can create in it, but the lack of real body manipulation really makes it, for me, pretty unusable right now. fun for facial animations as you can use a video to drive it or live cam. CC5, the preview at least, seems to promise pretty close character detail to MH, and I love the ability to customize the body a lot or bring it into blender to create a morph.
To bad the MH Conform tool doesn’t work, it would have been a game changer for me.
So here is to hoping CC5 is really good.
My 1 cent. I’ve tried both. More than that, I’ve seen a ton of works using metahumans … and can now immediately tell it’s metahumans. Yes, they’re realistic, but they have a certain visual quality to them that makes them uniform to me, no matter how varied the facial features are.
With my CC characters, I’m not achieving a fully realistic look (and I’m trying to offset uncanny valley by giving a sketchiness to the textures), but at least to me, the CC characters feel varied and unique with little to no effort. I’ve also created Metahumans by importing CC character meshes, and the “uniqueness” is lost and the Metahuman uniformity kicks in.
So, I’ll continue importing my CC characters into UE and I’ll continue following Epic’s advances crossing fingers for streamlining my pipeline, and I will be telling anyone asking my opinion exactly this without necessarily recommending one pipeline or the other. It’s true Reallusion is expensive and a bit difficult to sell to newcomers, but for some, the ease of use and control over the look of the character may be worth it.
As for AI video generation … ethics issues notwithstanding, it’s coming and it’s likely going to change animation as we know it. But for now, if you want to look into consistency, try creating your first frames of each scene in UE or iClone, etc. using your existing models and give those to Veo 3 or MidJourney video (Sora, FramePack, etc. are meh). Or, alternatively, MidJourney’s —oref feature can take a portrait of your character(s) and place them in generated environments, even toning down the uncanny valley a bit in the process, before you feed the image to video. Even with the consistency improvements, though, I still feel our traditional tools give us better control and creative freedom than current gen AI does (and possibly ever will). I’d rather see AI used to make good results easier with our current tools, so I hope to see Reallusion and Epic leveraging the new tech to remain competitive and bring in the next generation of creator.
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Yes. I do like a lot about Metahuman but you’re right, there is a uniformity to them. Funny, as I love making my characters (most are my Sirens) and they are so varied, with metahuman, it lends itself very often to the masculine look. A challenge to over come, but with iclone, I do make my characters different.
The lack of body modification tools (other than Maya/metapipe) really bother me. Even Blender, which I do use for some CC4 morphs, is problematic with metahuman (atleast in UE 5.6).
I am looking forward the CC5 for sure.
One can achieve quite convincing-looking characters in CC4, if they are willing to work at it. As I have said in previous forum posts, I’m certainly no artist. But I have learned through trial and error, i.e. “what-ifs” to give my CC4 characters a bit of convincing realism, that I have been quite pleased with.
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The good thing about MetaHuman is that you can export their head to CC4 and use Mesh to Head to create a character and edit it however you want.
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I am a newcomer who recently bought it, but the licensing and payment process is so restrictive and convoluted that I feel like I’ve been tricked into buying a shiny, cool tool that I can’t use for anything, because the license doesn’t allow me to or I have to pay some serious cash in order to not worry. With UE you can just do whatever and pay a percentage when you start getting some serious money. So I don’t see how this company will survive with the current model that they have.
It’s like a hammer that you can’t use to hit nails.
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For everything included (the base content) you don’t need any additional license.
If you find licenses from additional content to restrictive you don’t need to use Reallusion content. You can also import DAZ figures or use third party applications to create your own morphs and import them. There isn’t any restriction on using your own content.
The restrictions on Reallusion content is basically here to compensate the artists accordingly. Without that you could simply create dozens of figures for asset stores or games and sell them and make a lot of money while the artist sees nothing. I’m pretty sure Epic has a lot of more cash to compensate artists that made Metahumans.
The licensing is one of my biggest gripes with RL software, they could still be more lenient with licensing. There are plenty of non-epic games examples of companies having different tiers of licensing based on revenue or company size. RL could change their standard licensing to be “Indie” or something and give it the same benefits as the extended license and have it based on the tier of your company or production (i.e. revenue less than 100k you buy the standard, higher then you buy extended).
This will benefit creators by allowing them to be less restricted with purchased assets based on budget, and would benefit RL by having an influx of customers who want to use their software because they show they can be more supportive of individual or low-budget creators. The standard license being essentially “single use” is frankly ridiculous for a digital asset.
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Following the Pareto principle you would make 80% of your revenue with 20% of your customers. And 20% of your customers are usually requiring 80% of the support efforts.
So, it’s not always a good idea to get an influx of new customers. In my experience, the lower the price the more problematic the customers can get.
See also here regarding the value of artists work: IContent severely undervalues creator work
Well we are in the era of competing Character ecosystems.
Epic has made it clear that they prefer you to produce within their character ecosystem and are providing all of the tools to do so
with the option to export the metahumans out if you choose.
Unlike Epic Games reallsuion does not get a single dime if you somehow earn over $100K with Iclone and CC4/5
thus they have to have a tiered license system with restrictions on the lower tiers.
It seems to me that many people here are using the Reallusion ecosystem because of the prefabricated content but convenience that comes with a cost. 
Other game dev or even animated film ecosystems do not have Reallusions up front costs or licensing restrictions but you need to be skilled in content creation editing and rigging your own characters etc.
so pick your poison 
I can model my own clothing content as seen here.
Hypothetically if I was to decide to make a video game using the Godot engine, I
have the modeling skills and tools to create my own Characters by enhancing/renovating/costuming base figures from the HUMGEN addon for Blender
or could go super cheap
and use something like the free open source MD labs addon or the free VROID app for stylized “Final Fantasy” type characters.
No restrictions and I could sell my characters on the Godot market or where ever etc.
Here is just a quick example from a NON game developer.
I grabbed an animated “assassins creed” type character from Mixamo
Clicked two buttons on My auto rig pro quick rig panel and converted the mixamo deform rig to an ARP IK control rig and retained the animation now baked onto my ARP rig
then exported to Godot
here is the character in Godot
yeah he looks like cr*p but this
is 5 minutes of work with a random Mixamo prefab likely over a decade old.
But if I spent some actual time on a decent bespoke model from HUMGEN with decent materials with or and rigged his face with my faceit addon($70) so he could talk during cut scenes etc.
I would own everything
because I am not tied to someone
else’s prefab character licensing eco system.
UE5.5 makes Marmoset human, which can use audio to drive mouth shape and facial expression. ICLONE does have many shortcomings in making movies. In terms of simulating physics, it is always unsatisfactory, which is no different from computer configuration. For example, it is normal to break a cup and play it without a scene model, but when you put it in an indoor scene and press the play button, the picture will not move and the sound will keep moving. Making flame, flowing liquid, interactive weather, etc. can be controlled in Blender and UE in a friendly way. In making a movie, details often occupy an important position. It seems that flame effects can also be achieved in ICLONE, but plug-ins need to be purchased again. Even importing a green screen video requires keying. For individual users like us, the prices of these plug-ins are expensive, especially for our users in China, calculated in US dollars. I support the charge of iclone8, but it hurts our hearts to charge extra for making a plug-in every time we update a function. I think the plug-in only helps ICLONE8 to make a complete movie, instead of charging users all the time, which may attract new users in the early stage. When users know that there are free programs like ue and Blender, they will not buy it again next time, because there is no need to pay a lot for this function in UE and Blender. The above is my personal opinion.
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You post has Nothing to do with the topic of this thread ,you are Ad spamming. flagged!!
I am an existing CC4 user, along with the Facetools plugins for Zbrush, but in reality, the release of UE 5.6 has pretty much made the whole Reallusion workflow obsolete.
With Metahumans now built into the editor - with the licence opened up to allow use outside of UE - and the process of customising the character now being extremely straightforward, I see no reason to use CC anymore.
UE 5.6 also brings all sorts of new features for rigging/animation/chaos cloth/retargeting/new skeletal cloth assets that adapt to the MH/etc. Plus the quality of MH is far higher - both the mesh and the rigging - than CC. I honestly don’t see a single reason why I would keep paying to use CC?
Plus, I have no idea why people would be paying extra for iclone, and extra again for facial capture tools when all of this can be done directly in UE.
And people are doing final rendering in iclone? Absolutely terrible quality.
Why on earth would you render in iclone when you have far superior rendering tools and quality in UE? Plus a pathtracer for offline rendering.
I imagine that Reallusion customer base will drop off over the next year as more and more people realise that the whole cash grab business model of Reallusion is over. The monopoly is gone. Epic is supplying all of the tools and workflows (and a lot more) than Reallusion, and all for free.
Sure, it’s free. So is Blender. Still won’t use it.
Also, you do realize that there are people who don’t want to use UE and still need characters? Who don’t know how to use UE and don’t care to re-learn all the stuff they already learned using RL software, either?
And if an iClone/CC user already has the tools (and paid for them), why would they switch to UE just because it is free if that means getting into a whole new ecosystem as well as disregarding the money already spent?
The only thing I use UE for is to export assets and animation data as FBX for use in iClone and Cinema 4D. Other than that, there is really nothing else UE can do for me that I can see (apart from character assembly and animation, I do everything else in Cinema 4D, not iClone).
Long story short, I’m looking forward to CC5, especially since I’ll get it for free. 
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Why do you even post this rant? You apparently have no use for iClone/CC, so you assume that nobody else has a use for it or there must be something wrong with them.
You are obvious not interested in the reasons why people would still use iClone/CC so there is no point in telling you those reasons.
Anyway, good luck with UE, which, frankly, I find a pain in the butt to use, free or not.
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I’m a UE game developer, and I use a lot of UE tools. However, as far as Iclone not having any use, that just isn’t true. Yes you can technically do animations in UE but I find it way more intuitive to create animations in Iclone. I don’t use it as a renderer because as you said, the quality of the render just isn’t there. As an animation tool though, Iclone is very powerful. Combined with the UE plugins, exporting animation assets to UE is a breeze.
MH does have better quality mesh for now, we will see what CC5 brings once it releases. I’m not against the RL pipeline though and I still use it. I started this thread because there’s a lot that RL can change to bring more interest to the software, especially for indie devs who need a suite of tools like this for their games. UE is taking a step in the right direction by offering a similar suite of tools completely free. As others have pointed out not everyone who uses this software are gamedevs, there’s plenty of use for it outside of just game dev tools.
I want to see a competitive market, I don’t want one company to dominate the industry, Daz, Epic, RL, etc. Competition is good for everyone, I’d like to see RL get more competitive with their prices and licensing. We’re super early into Epic’s release of the improved MH Creator, but at the current rate I think they will end up with market domination for 3D character creation unless someone steps up to compete, RL already has the tools to do so, they just need to be more competitive.
I want to be able to say something like “If you need a free character creator, MH is great. If you want a more professional quality with a streamlined ecosystem and animation tools, go for RL suite.” At the current pricing though, it’s tough to make that recommendation. I spent upwards of $1500 on CC4, Iclone, and the various plugins I needed, and as far as hair and clothing options I have, I’m still very limited. I could learn to make those assets myself I suppose, but that sort of defeats the purpose of using a character creation software in my opinion. Also I’m mostly a programmer, so I have doubts about my artistic ability 