This is the most realistic work ive ever seen in character creation.
Can that be achieved with CC4 ?
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In CC alone? No. In combination with Zbrush, Marvelous Designer, Maya etc. Yes. But then it’s basically the same workflow like shown in the video.
No, I don’t think so. You can probably get some way towards that highly realistic look but not all the way.
However, as explained in the video, he used several (expensive) tools and also a more advanced render engine than iClone/CC have. Also, as he stated, he has years of experience in that area so even if you used the same tools as him, you would probably not get the same results without a long period of trial and error.
And even if you did finally get there, you would have to bring everything else in the scene to the same level of realism, otherwise the highly realistic character would stick out like a sore thumb.
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Lol!!..No! 
“so I’ll be starting with
texturing xyz’s fif Face Pack and we’ll
be using their base mesh to start
blocking out forms and Anatomy based on
the likeness that we’re trying to go for
blah blah….
in Marvelous Designer we’ll be
building the t-shirt and I’ll be showing
you guys how we can do some retopology
on that in Maya and then bring that back
into zbrush project all our details and
then continue to build up our sculpt
Textur
then we’ll swiftly move on to the texture
module which will be in and we’ll be
in Mari using nodes to start modifying our face
textures so we can get closer to the
likeness as well as building more
bespoke maps such as the roughness the
coat and the specularity
Blah blah…
resolution of our mesh and zbrush and
start to do a finer detail pass we’ll
export out this displacement and combine
it with our XYZ displacement when we go
bla blah… bringing in all of our maps
from Mari and connecting them to the
Arnold surface shaders so we can start
building look dev for the eyes the
skin and the clothing to get ourselves
to a really nice level of
Grooming
realism The Grooming module will
comprise of grooming and Maya’s xgen we’ll be
doing the facial groom the eyebrows
eyelashes and Peach fuzz and even nostril
hair as well as the beard and the actual
main hair too
Dev chapter I
created this chapter as more like deep
dive into the hypers shade in the Arnold
renderer and how we can push our
characters and the quality that final
51% you’ll also be provided with some
bespoke light setup so we can create
some really nice renders
too in the animation module I’ll be
Animation
showing you guys how I apply a basic rig
to my character sculpting up some blend
shapes in zbrush so we can animate a
cool blink sequence Blah blah etc etc.”
He is describing a Pipeline typically undertaken by entire teams of CG artist at a pro studio 
single artists jumping between all of those programs with expert level productivity is very rare.
That’s why I think that if you want to make films you are better off with a somewhat more modest kind of “look” and concentrate on your story, environments, motions, lighting, etc.
I understand the fascination with hyper-realism, but chasing it is a waste of time in my opinion.
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particularly “hyperealistic” humans
All that labor and if one thing is “off”
during the animation it all falls apart
I still think the mighty metahumans look like creepy animated human corpses in most examples I have seen.
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I am getting the feeling we can get relatively far with CC4 in this concern. Made this headshot char below in 1 day. It doesnt look exactly like the original but quite real, what do you think ? (ok, cloth could look much better)
No one’s ear would glow red like that ,in that light setting, unless you placed a high powered focused light source right up against the back of it.
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LOL, i replaced the image. That faint light from behind made the wrinkels look more real though
the thing i learned from experimenting with hyper-realism is the closer you get to it, the easier it becomes to mess it up, because any nuance that is slightly off stands out like a sore thumb.
it’s easier to go pseudo real where you focus on creating the illusion of real…for example, make a video black and white, add a shaky cam vibe like someone is filming it on a smartphone, add noise so it looks like security cam footage …what happens on a psychological level is the human error correcting systems like paraeidolia kick in and automatically try to fill in the blanks - so reality is in their perception and not the actual visual. - in reality we are not seeing anything, we are interpreting energy and lightwaves, converting that to data in our neural networks, and error correcting the data in our brains - you don’t actually see anything, you imagine what these waves look like in 3D.
long story short, the more you try to minimize the error correcting features we have as humans, the more your errors will stand in your video because you are correcting errors for humans, from color to shadows, to a lack of a twitch. for the best pseudo real view, you want humans to error correct - the pain in these peppers is very real lol
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The example you linked is a film quality workflow using displacement maps, VFace textures, pathtrace rendering like Arnold or VRay, offline shading model with GGX and SSS, and strand-based hair system and rendering.
CC4 uses a game character workflow with normal maps, real-time rendering, game shading with faked GGX and SSS, and game card hair.
the best results you will get will be if you have full knowledge of human anatomy and can sculpt to a high level. You can also project/wrap VFace textures back to the CC4 characters, but it will still be using game shading and a normal map.
So, while you can get decent quality characters with CC4 and Zbrush/3D artist skills, it’s not technically possible.
And this is just for the still render side of things, ‘uncanny valley’ in animation is still a massive gulf, even for a team of 200 film professionals.
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it’s easier to go pseudo real where you focus on creating the illusion of real…
And this is just for the still render side of things, ‘uncanny valley’ in animation is still a massive gulf, even for a team of 200 film professionals.
I wonder what would we need more then the illusion of real.
artificial intelligence, do your animation in iclone, and run it through a video to video ai, like runway to make it look more real - making stuff look really really real in animation software, is a physics experiment, not entertainment, and it’s not done in one render, it’s done in layers of renders with teams of specialists from texture, to animating and lighting, fx and coloring
but took me about 10 minutes to do with ai - with an image I made with ai… there is no animation software that will do this in 10 minutes
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Although AI animation still has a ways to go though in terms of coherence & taking precise art direction, that future is closer than most people think.
Also in addition to the utterly ridiculous amount of softwares involved in creating that still in the OP’s first video
There are the expensive hardware requirements to keep up with where you need a high end gaming PC to do the bare minimum in some of these applications.
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here’s an example of running the character image through a photo to photo ai
and AutoDidact is right, all you have to do is look up youtube for a behind the scenes on any hollywood movie, and they will show breakdowns of how different teams of artists and specialists worked on various aspects of any given render.
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Well, the point of doing 3D animations as a hobby for me is to do it “myself” and not with the help of AI (for visuals).
If I were into Legos, I wouldn’t want a robot that assembled the models for me, either. The joy is in the creating/building; at least for me. Even if the result does not meet the highest quality levels or what could be achieved with AI enhancement.
But, perhaps, that is just me…
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right, and that would be the point, the best you can get with any given medium - make cc4 renders the best they can be in their signature styles, maya has it’s own style, so does blender and houdini - and for that matter even in real life photos, different cameras capture different forms of real, like a cannon won’t look like a nikkon - that’s why we have filters …trying to quantify “real” to one standard, is not how it works, real is subjective - colorblind people see it one way, near sighted people see it another - people with glasses may see it occasionally with smudges. if you want any given thing to look more like…x - then you use tools that generate stuff more like …x - you don’t try to get cc4 to try to look like maya or a canon camera. you get the best you can from cc4, then bring it to something like photoshop and get the best you can do from photoshop, then print it to paper and take a photo of it with a cannon if you want to add that flavor.
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For me it has always been about
telling stories.
I went through a period where I acquired pretty decent modeling/sculpting skills
and stopped using Daz prefab clothings etc in favor of my own’
I even got a feature article
about my modeling& animation pipeline on a major Blender website.
(because ,of course, modeling is ALL
the Blender community mostly cares about)
After while I realized that no one
watched an animated video because I modeled All of the content myself.
I am happy to have these skills but at this point in my life (age 61)
Modeling,UV mapping, baking out normal maps texture painting blah blah is just time stealing labor that is DELAYING My storytelling narrative
In fact my favorite Software to be in right now is Davinci Resolve
because there is where you make the real decisions about how you story is presented.
Everything preceding that is just gruntwork to me now
I am longing for the day when AI can just follow my direction and create the exact animated shots I want
in the visual styles I want and I just assemble them with audio tracks
that I directed AI to create and tell my Sci-fi stories.
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Nice too see that i raised a good discussion, haha like that AI copy.
For the evenly TV masses AI may become quite entertaining, not shure, in my opinion everything is going to look the same as it already does.Just look at all those current Action Movies, all about explosions and big noises, TBH this doesnt attract me at all. A good creative story telling will always top more thn anything else and if its only using stick men.
Even there are so many AI tools allover the place i only use Face Swappers for my mothers Birthday to make her look like the Queen, I have more fun beeing creative with a crashing CC452 (lol) . I see no fun part in trying to be “creative” with AI TBH.
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i personally love AI because i enjoy the more intellectual side of art, so I’m always making abstract request for some really wild renders that illustrate my quantum consciousness experiments -
this a render I made to illustrate consciousness in a 5th dimension for a quantum theorist I met on x - and now I’m also using AI to create unique textures for clothing …and I also use it for photobashing, and animating in cta 5, and backdrops for iclone as well…so it works great for me in my mixed media approach…
this isn’t discounting what can be done in animation software from scratch, but the act of building stuff is artisan, the act of illustrating concepts is artist, i do both - both of them are artists in their own right… but it comes down to the focus of what you want to show as entertainment in your unique perspective. The only thing I know as real, are bills and inflation! lol
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