Hi all,
This time Reallusion drop the ball, really. Not sure about people wanting just to make some talking head animation and their eagerness to pay $150, but for game developers it proves to be useless piece of... crap. So why in the world one may need CT8? For making custom heads for Character Creator, of course! Just imagine possibilities: you create a custom head in CT8, import it CC, animate in iClone, export by 3dExchange and you have great asset for your game, animation, whatever.
But it turns out to be NOT TRUE, or lie in other words. For example you made a great looking custom head in CT8:

Cool! Great job! Bravo!
And then you apply this custom head to character creator model, and you see :

This monstrosity with huge nose, squint eyes, you name it... totally different face.
So why lie? You can not use faces created in CT8 anywhere, except in CT8, for making idiotic head talking animations!
Pity, it could be a very usefull piece of software, not useless piece of... crap.

No, you just don't know the secret.

And it IS a secret -- too bad they made it work this way, because it isn't intuitive at all.  What you need do is to simply bring up CC FIRST and then "reset" the head you are using.  So for the female you posted, load a female base in CC and press the reset button (in the bottom right of the morphing panel) and THEN import the CT8 head.  All will be well, then.

It's a PITA and I'm going to guess that in the next iteration of pipeline this will be an option (along with the "reset head texture") but for now this is what we have to do.

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Alienware Aurora R16, Win 11, i9-149000KF, 3.20GHz CPU, 64GB RAM, RTX 4090 (24GB), Samsung 870 Pro 8TB, Gen3 MVNe M-2 SSD, 4TBx2, 39" Alienware Widescreen Monitor
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

This is my best attempt- after resetting base female model.

No big difference, indeed. And model only slightly resembles the original. The main advantage using photo fitting should be the ability to create heads of real persons, that could be used in games and animations. The whole thing is useless, if your model only slightly resembles the original. It seems models and morph in CC and CT8 are incompatible and imported head is just some approximation,. It is just not enough. 

One more example. This is the head in CT8:

and this is monstrosity imported in CC:

Another pathetic attempt of creators of CT8 to deliver photo fitted head to CC.

Other than the eyes (which can easily be fixed -- just use the eyes in CC) and the camera angle those faces are the same.

Bring the head into iClone and reset your camera angle (try around 100 degrees) and with the lighting you'll see it's exactly the same head (or so very close you can't tell the difference).  Again, it's the understanding of the tools and not their limitations that's tripping you up (so it's your OWN limitations.  Sorry).

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Alienware Aurora R16, Win 11, i9-149000KF, 3.20GHz CPU, 64GB RAM, RTX 4090 (24GB), Samsung 870 Pro 8TB, Gen3 MVNe M-2 SSD, 4TBx2, 39" Alienware Widescreen Monitor
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

Actually, Swoop, CT8 *does* reshape the face.

Have you not been able to use it properly?

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Alienware Aurora R16, Win 11, i9-149000KF, 3.20GHz CPU, 64GB RAM, RTX 4090 (24GB), Samsung 870 Pro 8TB, Gen3 MVNe M-2 SSD, 4TBx2, 39" Alienware Widescreen Monitor
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

Hyper-realism is neither desirable nor practical with anything other than very high-end Hollywood productions (and even then it tends to look "off", as recent efforts with Arhnold and others have proven).  Since you really don't know much (if anything) about CT8 other than what you can speculate from what others are posting, your own posts don't have too much validity in determing what is useful inside of iClone or not.

iClone is very specifically purposed in a way that the folks who use it will find CT8 useful for what they want.  Folks CAN make it do things for which it wasn't designed, but if you look at those who post in this forum and who are VASTLY unsatisfied with what they can do, iClone clearly isn't the software for them.  I find it amusing that they continue to rant as if, somehow, they want to change the basic nature of a product that from the start was not designed to do what they want.

(And, honestly, I find it amusing that you continue to work with it when there are much better alternatives that you have the skill to use -- and apprently the time, as well, since you spend so much posting).

If CT8 is the biggest disappointment of the year, then I guess those same folks would say that iClone is the biggest disappointment of the decade.  But WHY are they still on this forum?

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Alienware Aurora R16, Win 11, i9-149000KF, 3.20GHz CPU, 64GB RAM, RTX 4090 (24GB), Samsung 870 Pro 8TB, Gen3 MVNe M-2 SSD, 4TBx2, 39" Alienware Widescreen Monitor
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

I have had bigger disappointments this year than CT8. For instance, my health care costs went up 25%. Be that as it may... Here is my 2 cents worth about CT8.
Reallusion made a product that is suitable for the needs of the particular project I am currently working on. CT8 is not a high end ultra-realistic 3d creation tool. There are many products on the market for that purpose. I have used many 3d applications and each one has its place. They are simply tools. But for this show I do not need the power of those programs. 
For me CT8 is a quick way to make usable models. Of course it takes time to master any software product. But, after only a few hours I was able to use the latest updates and additions to the RL family of products.
Granted, the program is a bit finicky and it is not a perfectly running application. I am guessing that RL will continue refining the user interface as well as the precision of the feature set.  The latest additions and updates to RL's tool sets are a welcome addition to the arsenal of products on the market for doing 3d animation work. IMO the updated lip-sync features make it worth the price. 
Take the time to figure out its idiosyncrasies I think you will find it to be a very useful product.   

I see some persons are hard to see obvious things. Zbrush, Topogun, whatever face rigging tool you prefer, whatever animating tool you prefer existed long ago CT8 came out. And of course such possibilities still exist and may be used. On the other hand, of course creating realistic face in Zbrush, then rigging and animating it - is hard task.
CT8 WAS MARKETED (yes! was marketed - just see damn videos) as upcoming software for face fitting photos and using those models in CC-iClone-game engine/animations solution. And it fails at announced task - created heads just slightly resemble originals. It means there STILL does not exist a good solution for photo fitting, except making everything in hard way by ZBrush, Mudbox or similar software. So, there IS NO REASON to spend money on CT8.  If you are making, for example, head of some celebrity you want to get a model, that will be undoubtedly recognized by your game/animation audience as a same exact person - not somebody that slightly resembles above celebrity and also resembles my neighbor or guy I met in Burkina Faso etc. If some slight resemblance is enough for you, I would suggest using DAZ models instead, or Mixamo, or character creator, or make it yourself - because those are easier and cheaper ways to get good looking somehow some celebrity resembling faces. The only reason you may be interested to use CT8 instead of another choices is to recreate original face and fit resulting head to some usable model  - a task at which CT8 fails miserably. 

Speaking of the videos...

I went back and watching the side fitting video and was encouraged to try again.  And, guess what?  It actually works.

For me, the problem was I was trying to take it too literally in terms of setting those side fitting points (also, as the video points out, the chin point goes *under* the chin, not on the point as is shown in the product itself).  Following how the guy in the video did it, I was successful using a profile image of Scarlett J (Black Widow :> that wasn't even under the same lighting conditions as the front facing one I was using, and it came out quite good (as always, hair is the biggest issue with any of these -- the "long hair" that I have is adequate but not really what is needed for her -- for at least 70% of all people hair covers about 30% of their head and is a BIG indicator of what they look like).

In any case, I'm now convinced that a lot of problems people are having are due to ignorance and user error -- some of which can be pinned to the way the software leads you into thinking it should be used.  But overall, short of some sort of 3D scanning program (which do exist at much $$$) this is a very adequate way of getting good looking 3D heads and far from a disappointment (unless people were just so clueless about what *could* be done their expectations were unrealistically high).

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Alienware Aurora R16, Win 11, i9-149000KF, 3.20GHz CPU, 64GB RAM, RTX 4090 (24GB), Samsung 870 Pro 8TB, Gen3 MVNe M-2 SSD, 4TBx2, 39" Alienware Widescreen Monitor
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley