Problem with Alembic exports from iClone to Cinema 4D

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By the way, there is this Turkish guy that does all kinds of physics simulations including ragdoll in C4D:

Nice!! C4D has really good constraint system
so it has been possible to make ragdoll”crash test dummies" in C4D for quite a while now as he is apparently still using R19.

But severely limited without the ability to retarget the ragdoll to your high quality “hero” character rigs.

The problem is that “old” software is often no longer supported or compatible with more recent OS and hardware. These days, I expect sims to run on GPUs; I kind of doubt that Poser could do that.

Poser supports GPU for rendering only but For Ragdoll you would not really need GPU
computing as it is just really bullet physics with constraints(on the characters joints)
as the Turkish guy on YT(ShadeDancer619) is doing.

I still run the 20 year old Endorphin Physics software and get real time viewport simulation.with no GPU

BTW the Old poser physics plugin is still available as a free open source plugin for poser.

I actually have a copy of the older poser 12
to run ragdoll simulations that I import to Iclone 7 Via 3D xchange

Someone really needing to create their own unique ragdoll sims for Iclone/C4D/ Blender could still buy poser 12 for $50 on Amazon and run the simulations in poser and export FBX to iclone to retarget to your CC4 dudes/gals

or buy Cascadure pro ,with its new ragdoll physics, for $396 (perpetual) and do the same

or buy Reallusion’s recently released 17 new ragdoll Actorcore motions for $59 and be limited to what is in the pack

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I guess so.

Yes, for bullet physics you don’t necessarily need GPU-simulation but if you combine that with cloth or other simulations then it becomes a different matter (imagine running sims that already take hours on a pretty decent GPU (RTX3090 or RTX4090) on a CPU instead…).

I guess the reason why ShadeDancer619 still appears to use R19 is probably because he also sells models (e.g. on cgtrader) and, AFAIK, R19 is the oldest version whose C4D files can still be read by current C4D versions (i.e. be as widely compatible as possible). That is also why I still keep a version of R19 around.
However, that also means that all his simulations (and tutorials about such sims) are now “outdated” if you want to use the modern/current physics engine in C4D and somewhat more difficult to follow because the look of the C4D GUI has changed quite a bit since R19.

Personally, I would not buy and/or try to learn legacy software for current and future use (that applies to both Poser and Endorphin); it might be different if I already had the software or knew how to use it.

Cascadeur does more than ragdoll physics, so it does not really compared to the poser plugin (I see Cascadeur as a tool to create (physically correct looking) animations which would be (a) too tedious to do completely by hand, (b) difficult to do or get as mocap (e.g. because they are dangerous in real life or simply not available)).

The Explosion motions are apparently not simple ragdoll physics (which I kind of expected them to be) but were created by mocapping a wire-work stunt team (at least that’s what they show in the promo video) and thus not really possible for a hobbyist to do even if you had mocap equipment. So this pack does not really compare to the Poser plugin either.

When money is not the main consideration, you could also get the Explosion Stunts pack AND Cascadeur; my “problem” with Cascadeur is not the price but the time needed to learn it (the more time I spend on trying to figure out new software, the less time I have for actually creating something; pretty much the same problem I have with Blender which is free software).

The motion pack, on the other hand, is just drag and drop without the need for third-party software or retargeting. That is worth a few bucks to me, even if the number of motions is quite limited (you can always modify them in iClone to get variations; many of the pre-made/purchased motions that I use in my projects I have to modify anyway for the cloth sims to work).
BTW: I would not be surprised if this pack were also used to train AccuPose.

Besides, I don’t really see myself needing a ton of ragdoll motions (unless those were just to be used in ragdoll demos like the video by ShadeDancer619); so if I did get Cascadeur, it wouldn’t primarily be for the ragdoll physics, as fun as they may be.

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Wow, all these ragdoll physics examples make me want to include a scene using them, just because they look cool, and also kind of hilarious. :grin:

As to other points in this thread, there really is a time vs. money, and even new vs. old consideration in animation. I recently had to make a simple column of smoke for a scene in C4D, and after struggling with the 1000 different settings and watching endless tuts for the new Redshift particle system, I finally went back to the old Pyrocluster/Standard render system (which I used to think was difficult!) and made the smoke column in a few minutes, and composited that with the scene in After Effects. I imagine I’ll eventually be forced to learn the new system, but by then they’ll probably come up with a new system. LOL

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Hi Tim
yeah to be honest Ragdoll physics are only really appropriate when there is a very specific plot/story point to be made by such a sequence or if you do alot of military/fighting, human violence types of animations.

BUT…they sure are fun.

Pyrocluster?? yikes!!

Glad you got the result you wanted as
that is truly all that matters in the end, even with so called “obsolete” solutions :smile:

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For smoke you need Pyro (not Pyrocluster); the particle system is more suitable for things like snow and rain (and can be used to “fake” simply fluid effects). Of course you can combine Pyro with particles (e.g. have the hot air of the fire and smoke advect particles or use particles as fuel sources for the fire). And the Pyro output can be rendered with Redshift (or any other render engine for C4D that can work with VDBs).
Pyro also runs on the GPU and is part of the unified physics system (meaning it can interact with the other physics stuff (except hair)).

I have not used Pyrocluster in many years.

I don’t composite my renders, meaning any effects are “in camera” or directly rendered in the scene. My “post production” is pretty much limited to converting image sequences into a video, adding audio, and, perhaps, do a little color correction. So far, all my animations use just a single project file which means that any “editing” is also “in camera” (using the Stage object). If I did longer animations with different scenes/projects file, I would probably need to adjust this workflow, but for the time being, this works for me.

While I used to have Adobe CC, I stopped using any Adobe products (except the free ones such as Acrobat reader) years ago. So if I did compositing, I’d do it in Fusion (since DaVinci Resolve Studio is my go-to video editor); I don’t want to go back to a layer system as in AE.

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RL used to have another Ragdoll Behavior pack (from 2015) with over 50 motions. I bought the pack on sale for $0.41, that was when we had real sales sometimes. I haven’t tried them recently; I wonder if they still work.

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Fired up my old C4D R26 and imported an old Daz optitex cloth sim via Alembic

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Warlord’s Old ragdoll pack seems still active.
https://marketplace.reallusion.com/warlord’s-ragdoll--shot-against-wall---motion-pack

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Well, the character does not seem to move far from the point of origin, so the Alembic issue that I mentioned at the beginning of this thread may not make that much of a difference.
The cloth simulation itself seem a little better than one in iClone might (since the dress appears to be fully dynamic, whereas most iClone outfits that use soft-cloth physics are only partially dynamic), but I would not be entirely satisfied with it. The cloth seems a little “thick” in the simulation while not visually (I’m not sure how to describe it, but to me it does not quite behave like something made of cloth/textile, but perhaps that is just me…).

Yes, a pack of 5 motions from 2013 that lists for 1,499 points. These motions still work, but IMO they seem a little “artificial” in places.

There is also a ragdoll motion pack by Sen (but that creator does not seem to be active anymore (at least not reactions to messages); some time ago I bought the All-in-one pack by Sen but that turned out to be quite a mess and I got a refund from RL, so I’m keeping away from this.)

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Well, the character does not seem to move far from the point of origin, so the Alembic issue that I mentioned at the beginning of this thread may not make that much of a difference.

Actually, in this case, the entire scene was exported from Daz as Alembic (Character included) so the cloth would always match in C4D anyway.

I have encountered this issue in Blender
and had to employ the “offset fixes” ,as 4u2ges demonstrated ,and in my personal opinion it is not worth the hassle trying mix externally baked cloth simmed elements to be “worn” by rigged animation characters.

Better to just import both the character and cloth as one Alembic or USD file
( and manually reapply textures) unless it is a main character who wears a long cloak etc the entire film.
in which case I would be doing my entire Character animation production in the software where the cloth is properly simulated ( without alembic imports) ,such as Maya.

The cloth simulation itself seem a little better than one in iClone might (since the dress appears to be fully dynamic, whereas most iClone outfits that use soft-cloth physics are only partially dynamic),

Frankly Creating a better cloth sim than Iclone ,is not a very difficult task these days as even the vestigial poser can do better with it’s cloth system from 20 years ago

Actually the sim I exported to C4D is with the “old” optitex plugin that Daz had to abandon
(for quite embarrassing & hilarious reasons)

Daz now have their own “Dforce” cloth & hair physics system which my system does not support, so I never use it.

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Well, I was only interested in importing animated iClone hair, not any animated clothes (since I do that in C4D obviously)…
Also, I need the joint hierarchy of the characters (for camera targets and motions, DOF, etc.), so just importing a fully Alembic character would not work for me.

As a non-Daz user I don’t now anything about Dforce. Is that dependent on particular hardware or why does your support not support Dforce?

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I don’t use Daz studio to actually produce final rendered animations or stills.

only to test my few commercial animation products that I sell over at Renderhub.

My version of Daz studio is really old (2019) with an early versions of Dforce and back then it was highly unstable, super crashy on mine (and many others) systems.

Dforce is supposedly much more stable in the recent builds of Daz studio.

But I have no need to upgrade to find out, because again, I don’t really use Daz studio for anything beyond exporting genesis figures to Blender via the free Diffeomorphic addon
where their rigging is replaced with either Blenders”rigify” control rig or My Autorig pro rigs to retarget motion from iclone/CC3
and most of the major mocap systems for projects like this

Or on some rare cases I use Daz studio to harvest the ragdoll animation data from Endorphin or Poser because the exported figure animation data from those old legacy apps is most compatible with a really old PRE-GENESIS Daz Figure called “Millenium Man” 3
who is easily imported into Reallusion 3Dxchange 7 ,from Daz studio, for conversion to Imotion for iclone.

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Seems like a pretty convoluted procedure:
Endorphin/Poser → Daz → 3Dxchange 7 → iClone plus (possibly) → Maya/Blender. But if you do that only once in a while. :wink:

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Speaking of DForce, after my recent experiments with cloth, I wondered if DForce clothing could be imported into C4D and cloth simmed there, so I picked up an outfit with some complex DForce cloth and brought that into C4D, and I have to say that it worked out pretty well without a lot of fussing. I was surprised that the cloth even retained some of its pleats and folds, and mostly behaved itself. Character & armor composed in CC/iClone; cloth imported as fbx files.

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As I said there is not a true story need for ragdoll physics most of the time.
(for me at least)
But Endorphin is realtime

Also technically I could send the ragdoll simulation/animation straight from Endorphin or Poser to the universal retargeter in my Blender Autorig pro, native rigify
or Maya Human IK rigs via manual remap and save a custom profile for later use.

But it is actually worth the extra step of applying the ragdoll to millenium man 3 in Daz and sending him to Iclone because
iclone makes easier to mix in some
plot/story relavent animation before the actual ragdoll event/impact.
As seen here:

I use Iclone the same way other people use Autodesk Motionbuilder.
I Don’t care about it’s renderer, particles, material lighting hair or cloth engine.

For me Iclone is just a central staging hub to patch together base layer motion captured data from many sources.
(Soldier running animation from my massive offline Mixamo archive)
(soldier gets blown into air the from Endorphin or poser physics
or cascadure etc)

Export and STORE unlimited base layer animations on a Blender or Maya IK CONTROL RIGGED Character for manual refinement and switch between them at will
Eventually rendering with EEVEE, Cycles or Arnold.

Its a classic linear animation pipeline where I never have to re-import a new FBX Character from Iclone /CC3.
into my rendering app and redo textures etc
I only move new motion data down the chain
and replace whatever motion that previously was on the control rig.

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Nice!!
Yes I have read that those Daz “Dforce item have to be very well constructed for optimum performance with the “Dforce” engine.
you can toss any mesh at the Older optitex engine.
(With a funny hack)
For context, Daz originally licensed the optitex plugin for Daz studio many years ago
however it only works with meshes SOLD BY optitex in a proprietary format called “Dyncloth” :roll_eyes:

Well some enterprising fellow at a competing
store ,(Renderosity) reverse engineered
“Dyncloth” and started selling an $8 dollar Daz script that converts any mesh to “Dyncloth”
(which I bought of course) :rofl:

the Daz mods desperately Deleted any posts/threads about this script making it a forum TOS violation to even mention it.

They soon ended their partnership with Optitex
and later introduced “Dforce”.

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Thanks! Hah, I didn’t know the history of Optitex and Dforce–thanks for the history lesson!

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Yes, I wonder why and how that is (you can also see it in the Dancer #9 video above). Almost seems as if the cloth engine “remembers” the original shape of the cloth mess.
However, I also noticed situations when the cloth would unexpectedly tend to curl up on itself without any reason I was able to figure out.

Mesh topology also plays a role in how the cloth “behaves”. After re-meshing I have had better results on meshes that were giving me problems before

Well, at this time, I still need to move animated characters from iClone to C4D because (a) that’s where the characters are coming from and (b) I have not figured out yet how to retarget motion data for an iClone character that is already in the C4D project file.
I don’t use any control rigs in C4D; very small changes to the animation (e.g. to avoid cloth simulation issues) I do the old FK way (i.e. by rotating and keyframing joints manually), larger changes are done in iClone with exporting the modified character to C4D again.
I had thought/hoped that “CC4D Tools” might help, but, as far as I’m concerned, it is not yet where it needs to be so I don’t use it. Also, there have been no new developments in 5 or 6 months, so I’m not holding my breath either that this is going to change any time soon.

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Yeah it’s a real shame that guy seems to have “gone dark” but sadly it happens alot with one man operations offering cool plugins.

I had thought that Reallusion would have
“co-opted” the CC4D tools and refined them the way they did with Victor Soupday’s Blender pipeline tool
and more recently this Pipeline tool for Autodesk Max which ,(like Blender’s tool),
started out as one mans personal project for better integration between Iclone/CC4 and Autodesk Max.

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As I said before, in view of the small number of users that use both C4D and iClone, I don’t think that RL is going to bother. So it is either the creator of CC4D Tool or nobody (unless someone new takes up the mantle).