Alright. It's time to get it out there. I purchased iClone and the whole bundle for 600$ looking at the promotions and the trailers. 3DXchange was advertised as this big bridge between iClone and any 3D program out there. I thought I could import and export any model in and out of 3DXchange to ANY 3D program. I bought iClone with the intention of making quick characters for my game, be it the main character or an NPC. Let's be clear, my intention was never to find the perfect model right out of character creator or get the perfect set of morph shapes handed to me by iClone. My goal was simply to have fully customizable characters generated by the character creator which I could then use 3DXchange to export, make modifications like change poly count, decimate for NPC characters etc.
Now comes the part where my hopes have been shattered and my money has been burnt. So, being an indie developer myself and unable to afford a Maya license which costs a whopping 4.500$, I have been using BLENDER for quite some time now learning sculpting, retopology and all the intermediate stuff. Here is the biggest problem that I faced. I exported a basic character that looks like this from CC through iClone to 3dXchange:
Imported this in blender with different 3dXchange export configs and different blender import configs(I tried them all, brute forcing every single combination). The best result I got was this:
Observe the scene objects and how they do not have a parent.
Looks at the hands and the breast area. Also, notice the boots.
Now, one theory was that all of this looked bad just in blender. So, I exported this imported fbx from blender, opened the exported fbx in 3dXchange to get this weird result:
I tried every export configuration in blender for fbx and all of them resulted in the same mess.
So, now tell me if this software should even be sold at any price? The sole purpose of 3dxchange is maintaining compatibility with other 3D programs and there aren't many of them on the market, just about 6-7 programmes. So, why does this half broken crap of a software exist? I request the reallusion team to take a hard look at their bundle and think if they are really doing their best.
P.S. If anyone has a workaround for the 3dXchange to blender pipeline, do post it as an answer.
SkyRoads clone for Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gog.skyroads
Target Number - A math puzzle game: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tomag.targetNumber