Hi,
I’m running into an issue with CC4 and Maya and I’m kind of stuck at this point.
I created and skinned some clothing in Maya. Everything looks correct in Maya, but once I export it to CC4, the deformation is clearly different — same animation, same frame, but different result.
What I originally did:
- Imported a CC character into Maya
- Adjusted joint orient / pose a bit to get a better working pose
- Built and skinned the clothing in that pose
- Then put the rig and skinned cloth back into the original CC pose
- Exported and imported into CC using the key file
→ Result: No import-errors, BUT wrong deformation in CC
After that I tried to clean everything up properly:
- rebuilt the bind pose (including rewriting bindPreMatrix)
- restored jointOrient
- no more FBX errors on export
→ still wrong deformation in CC
Then I thought maybe it’s the mesh pose:
- moved the mesh into the original CC pose
- duplicated it
- rebound it
→ looks correct in Maya
→ still different in CC
Then I went fully clean:
- new scene
- imported a fresh, untouched CC rig
- imported the mesh already in the correct pose
- skinned it from scratch (no copySkinWeights, nothing reused)
→ Maya: correct
→ CC: still different deformation
So at this point I’ve basically ruled out everything:
- rig is original
- bind pose is clean
- mesh is in the correct pose
- skinning is freshly done
→ and CC still deforms it differently
The differences are also consistent, especially around the shoulder / clavicle area. It’s very noticeable on straps or tight-fitting elements.
So my question is:
Is it just normal that CC deforms differently than Maya even with a clean setup?
Or am I still missing something obvious?
Is there any workflow that actually gives you a 1:1 match?
Or is the expectation wrong and you always have to tweak weights inside CC in the end?
Any help would be appreciated!
Hi, I don’t actually work in Maya but in Cinema 4D, but I’m familiar with the problem. I’ve tried various things too, but without success. It got really tricky for me when the characters in CC5 deviated from the standard. It just didn’t work.
However, I always thought there was a Maya pipeline that allows you to exchange files directly between CC5 and Maya? Something similar to Omniverse. It worked well there. Do you use that?
Another thing that occurred to me – is the FPS set to the same value for both projects? Have you tried using an OBJ file?
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Hi,
Well, there is Maya Auto Setup, but that’s a solution to get characters set up in Maya, not the other way around.
Also, it’s mainly a CC5 thing, and I’m working with CC4.
OBJ isn’t an option either, since it doesn’t support joints/bones, skin weights, or animation.
The clavicle joint in particular is causing most of the issues.
When I rotate the shoulder down into a more neutral hanging position, the mesh deforms in a pretty bad way in CC, while the exact same pose in Maya looks perfectly fine.
My guess is that this has something to do with the different character/rig you have to use for external cloth creation.
Then, on import into CC, everything gets converted to a different rig, and maybe the skin gets rebound or weights get transferred, which could mean some information is lost in the process.
I’d love to hear from someone official on this. We can’t be the only ones running into this. If there’s an actual issue, the devs should be aware by now and if not, then I’m probably doing something wrong. Either way, an official statement would be great.
First things first – in my opinion, the physics simulation in Iclone and CC is simply poor and can’t be compared to Maya or C4D. The collision detection, in particular, is dreadful. And the more complex a piece of clothing becomes, the worse it gets.
Have you ever tried recalculating and reweighing the clothing in CC4?
You can find the functions here.
Back then, I always used to start by re-weighting it first. Then I recalibrated it (conform). You can also adjust the distances between the clothing and the avatar there, though you’ll need to experiment a bit with that too.
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I’m just wondering whether ‘Skin Weights’ might be of help to you as well? There are a few really good tutorials on YouTube. Put simply, this calculation aligns the garment with the skin.
Yes, I tried reweighting the clothing in CC, and that fixed it. But that is not the solution. I have tons of clothing pieces, props, etc. to skin, all of which need to be weighted together in a single scene so they function properly as a modular set. I simply do not want to do that in CC, as the weight painting tools are very basic and, quite frankly, not very good.
Maya with ngSkinTools, for example, works extremely well and offers far more control for my workflow.
Conform also doesn’t change anything, and Transfer Skin Weights destroyed my custom weights. That might have been an option if this were just a single item, but since I carefully crafted dozens of clothing pieces and props to deform consistently together, using any weights other than the ones I created is out of the question.
I would simply expect weights created specifically for a CC cloth creation character to import correctly. Otherwise, why would creating skinned clothing in external software and importing it into CC be such a heavily promoted workflow if you ultimately have to reskin the meshes anyway?
