Well, since I’ll be facing the same problem in the not to distant future, I decided to give this a try.
This video shows two copies of Camila with identical animation and C4D hair grown on a “scalp piece” (extremely simply, messy hairdo). This is then transferred from the Camila with the red shirt to the one in the blue shirt (no cuts or edits, one continuous shot). It is clearly visible that the hair reacts to being “transported”.
If this works, I don’t really see why putting the same hair on a character in a new outfit shouldn’t.
I used a separate scalp piece (copied from the head mesh of one of the Camilas) and grew the hair on that. Since it is independent of a specific character, you can putting it pretty much anyway. So I then parented it first to the left and later to the right character (to the head bone/joint in each) with a Constraint Tag and animated the level of influence to make it move between characters.
The scalp piece does not render (is set to be invisible to the camera), only the hair is rendered so the character needs to have a complete head mesh. The character’s head/body also needs to have a Hair Collider tag, but that would also be the case if you grew the hair directly on the character’s mesh (which I would not recommend for what you want to do).
Pretty easy, really. It only took a few minutes to set up but a lot longer to render this clip (4 hours for the render plus set-up time, hair does take its time).
My characters are usually only in one scene at a time and don’t really need a change of clothing. (Also: since I often simulate the clothing in C4D, the character I export from iClone is occasionally nude when I add clothing in C4D that has never been in iClone (i.e. is not from the Content Store or the Marketplace).
But I do often have to go back to iClone to fix the animation (there may be mesh intersection or pinching that I had overlooked before that needs fixing because it crashes the cloth simulation in C4D) and when I re-import a “new” character with the “improved” animation, I would also lose any C4D hair grown on the older character. I have had projects when I had to import the same character 3 or 4 times.
Thank you for your explanations. I am of the opinion that I proceeded in exactly the same way back then. However, I also exported the clothes from Iclone to C4D, which always required a certain amount of post-processing. You had to adapt the material data to Redshift. I will simply try this again in the next few months. I would be happy to contact you again if I need an exchange. Is that ok for you?
One more thing - do you know this plugin? I got it and it works really well :-).
Yes, I purchased it a number of months ago but so far I haven’t really used it.
I’m still waiting for the automated material conversion for Redshift (to save me a little time) and, in particular, the adaption of the textures, etc. of the wrinkle system for Redshift and C4D. Even though I asked in the legacy forum some time ago, I have never found proper documentation as to what texture does what and how they are to be used.
I don’t animate characters from scratch in C4D and if I need to change the animation of an iClone character to make the cloth simulation in C4D work or for other reasons, then I’d rather make those changes in iClone than use a control rig like the one in the plugin.
