Hey yall, I’m working on a project that I am passionate about, but I cannot for the life of me find a workflow that “works”. I need help from someone.
My goal : Customize the mesh of a CC4 finished character in blender, then make an animation in Iclone 8 that I can export or retarget in blender.
Roadblock : Nothing works, I keep seeing errors left and right.
What I’ve tried : So far I have made a character in CC4, and exported to blender to further customize (after invalid data issues with a bra of all things), but when trying to import into Iclone 8 my mesh is destroyed.
Since my original CC4 base has the same shape and everything as my customized blender CC4 character, I was able to make an Iclone animation, export that animation to blender, then retarget with a rokoko plug in to my blender CC4 character. This does not work well, the body motion is perfect, but the facial expressions do NOT work.
What I am asking : I have hit so many roadblocks and brickwalls that I have found work arounds to, but I cannot keep doing this, I am not progressing. I am willing to pay someone to give me a tutorial and watch over my workflow to guide me. If this is not allowed then just give me some tips. I am not new to blender, I have watched dozens of videos on CC4 and Iclone.
Since I’m not a Blender user, I cannot help you. But I do have a few questions:
In what way are you trying to customize the mesh in Blender? Just sculpting or are you changing the poly count in any way?
Also, if you are using a rokoko plugin (probably meant for retargeting mocap data) are you sure that plugin also transfers morph data/blendshapes for the facial expressions onto your Blender CC4 character? If the body animation is fine but there is no facial expression maybe that is because it was “lost in translation”. If you are not sure, I’d suggest you ask rokoko.
Changing the poly counts yes, I haven’t actually done that yet to the model I am having issues with because I have hit this roadblock first. All I know is all 101 bones of my character are getting retargeted to the other character. If I do a humanoid character is now 106 bones. There is like 2 other unused bones such as shadow catcher I haven’t tried to retarget but they are not even detected by rokokos plug in so I do not belive they are the issue. Either way it’s my major hiccup right now as I have no way to actually transfer these animations from iclone into my blender character
I could be wrong, but my understanding is that facial expressions in CC4 characters are not (completely) driven by bones but rather morphs. And those will probably not be transferred by the rokoko plugin.
He can’t get the character he modified in Blender (the MOD) to re-import into iClone for animation and export to Blender fully animated.
Therefore, he animates the character he designed in CC4 (the BASE) that served as the basis for his additional modifications in Blender in iClone and exports this animated BASE to Blender.
In Blender he tries to retarget the animation imported with the BASE to the MOD, but loses the facial expressions. For this workaround, he would need retargeting, correct? Or can you just copy & paste animations (including facial expressions) from one character to another in Blender?
He can’t get the character he modified in Blender (the MOD) to re-import into iClone for animation and export to Blender fully animated.
He cannot make any modification that changes vertex counts or it will “break” things upon re-import to CC4
Or can you just copy & paste animations (including facial expressions) from one character to another in Blender?
He needs to learn more about how Blender animation system works.
imported CC4 facial/lipsync animations are
are morph based and are standardized for CC characters.
His Iclone facial animation will create an “Action”
in the Blender Action editor with the animated shape keys that can be applied to any other imported CC4 avatar or even replaces with a new animation brought in from a base CC4 avatar with the new facial performance.
Again this is a matter of not knowing Blenders animation system.
My CC3 blender pipeline tool is very outdated because I have migrated over to 2D animation & Graphic novels.
But at 11:30 of this Old video you see how I opened the shape key editor and applied facial animation to a CC3 avatar imported from Iclone Via FBX with the pipeline tool.
this is however apparently handled automatically by the new “live link” pipeline for blender so the OP need to study that first video I posted from Reallusion youtube channel.
IIRC Rokoko has a plugin that works with retargeting facial blend shapes as well but there really is no need for him to further complicate the process when the CC4 Blender pipeline tools can do it all.
I did watch that video about the Blender link you mentioned above: I wish I had something similar for C4D; almost makes me want to consider switching to Blender… almost, but not quite.
(In his webinars, Kai always makes these things sound so easy and foolproof but, on more than one occasion, I found that things were a bit more difficult than they appeared from the webinar when I tried them myself and I would not be surprised if that was the case for this Blender link as well…)
Yeah it looks pretty cool for Reallusion store content creators needing to “round trip”
Characters back and forth for testing clothing and morphs, props on the spot.
Beyond that I personally have little need to send anything back to iclone from blender because it is generally not a useful render environment unless I am using the toon renderer for a NPR styled project
Hi there, I’m not an expert but I had difficulty in re-importing a CC character back to CC4 a few days ago and wanted to share what ultimately worked for me. I originally had a character made in CC4, used the data link connection to import it into Blender and made some clothing and tried to add new eyes. When I tried to re-import to CC4 I was getting an error that my tongue bone was incorrectly parented (I’ve made no changes to mesh or bone, just created accessories and swapped out eyes).
Anyway, I decided to troubleshoot and started a new blend file and re-imported the CC4 character. Then I made changes one by one and after every single change I tried to re-import to CC4, then back to blender. It was tedious, but in the end I was able to make all the changes I needed and had no errors.
So maybe doing something like this - making a single change, then trying to round trip re-import through the data link - might help. It’s not exactly a fix but hope it helps.
Also, I haven’t tried importing from blender straight to iclone 8 yet, but maybe try reimporting back to CC4 and transfer to iC8 from there might help - at least initially until you know there’s no errors in transferring the model.
Yeah, like already mentioned, CC meshes have specific vertex count and order as well as bone count and order that cannot be changed in any way if you want to reload the mesh as a CC mesh into Reallusion software.
If you change the number of vertices or bones, the system no longer works because number of the mapped vertices and bones are now different and they have a different order.
Hi @adrianlrps I’m pretty experimented in the iC → blender pipeline, it’s made really simple now with GoB, you essentially one-click send your iC chars to an automatically generated blend file, then you just rigify, and you care only about the remapped body action, and the Facial shapekey action (Base_Body shapekeys). so you can save this file randomly on your desktop, then just append these body + facial actions, to your real animation / polish blend file with your final custom complex rigified character, and just slap them on. It’s essentially just one click, just complex to visualize the logic and order of the whole thing. you can do whatever you want in blender, just keep the rigify more or less as is, and make sure the facial shapekeys still work, make sure it’s still the same profile, (the same shapekeys names, apple ARKit, cc3, cc4 extended ect… just look at the bros shape names and compare it’s still matches iC)
I can do screen share consulting on this kind of pipeline as I’m freelancing on similar projects atm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heOdLGfstbE&t=5s but my rate is 45$/h
