Custom cat head on CC5 base — keep CC Avatar status and UE5 facial rig compatibility

Character Creator General
1

Hi everyone,

I’m currently working on a stylized character for Unreal Engine 5.
The character has a human body (clothed) and a custom cat head (including new eyes, teeth, and tongue).

My goal is to:
1. Use the CC5 base body as the foundation.
2. Export it to Blender.
3. Replace the head, eyes, teeth, and tongue with my custom meshes.
4. Reimport everything back into CC5.
5. Keep the model recognized as a CC Avatar (not Humanoid).
6. Then use Reallusion Auto Setup for UE5 to get:
• full Control Rig for the body,
• and a Face Control Rig for the custom head (with morphs, lipsync, and Live Link Face compatibility).

Is this workflow supported in Character Creator 5?
If not, what’s the correct way to achieve a custom head with a working facial rig that remains compatible with the UE5 Auto Setup and facial control system?

Thank you very much for your help!

2

You cannot simply replace parts of the base mesh. This changes the topology and the vertex order of the mesh. The topology or vertex order mustn’t be changed otherwise the mesh is no longer compatible.

Of course, you can edit the base mesh in blender and deform the head so that it looks like a cat head. But you need to make sure that you only move vertices. Don’t add or delete any vertices, edges or polygons.

Generally, this is a lot of manual work.

The Headshot plugin for CC can project the base head topology onto a custom head model you import, but I’m not sure how well it will work with vastly different anatomy. There are also other tools that help with projecting different topologies onto each other. For example, for ZBrush there is ZWrap and as a standalone software there is Faceform Wrap.