The workflow of content development

• Follow the CC 1.52 + iClone 6.5 PRO workflow to develop the base mesh. (There is body template available for download, so 3DXchange 6 Pipeline is optional)
• Content development guide, resource and video tutorials
• 3rd party tool workflow
• Assign PBR texture maps in CC 2, and export CC contents.
• Submission guide

Content Usage

• Either Traditional or PBR, the contents created in CC 2 can not be loaded in CC 1.5x.
• New releases of Reallusion CC PBR contents will be installed to the CC 2 folder, and can be loaded by CC 2 only (they will not be backwards compatible).
• Reallusion will cease to maintain CC1.5x

Advice and Tips

• Texture Instancing to Save on File Size
• 8-bit vs 16-bit Textures

Texture Instancing to Save on File Size

Please upgrade to 3DXchange 6.51 or above to utilize texture consolidation, preserving one instance of the texture rather than having multiple copies of the same textures within a scene.
Once 3DXchange has been upgraded, one can use the paint bucket tool to copy and apply materials to multiple objects.  
No matter how many times the material is applied with this method, the textures all reference the same texture files, thus use up less video memory.

76% of original size (was 666x19) - Click to enlarge

Here, a total of 8 materials must use the same texture sets.



You can use the paint bucket to drop the same texture sets on different materials.

76% of original size (was 666x19) - Click to enlarge

Once all of the materials are consolidated to source from the same texture set, one could see a drastic improvement in the file size.

76% of original size (was 666x19) - Click to enlarge

The resulting file size can have significant bloat from creating each material separately and input textures on each one separately, instead of using the paint bucket.

8-bit vs 16-bit Textures

The general rule of thumb is that artists working on textures should do so in 16-bit per channel mode to increase fidelity of pixel data.  When one is ready to export the PBR textures to iClone, storing the file in Png format will suffice.  Png format will neither compress, loss data, or become too large.  Also make sure the mode is relegated to 8-bit/channel during export or else the texture size can increase more than two-fold.  Due to the fact that there is no noticeable visual improvement from sRGB 8-bit to 16-bit under iClone's PBR environment, one should avoid using 16-bit textures in case of file bloat.

Exporting 8-bit png texture files from Substance Painter:



Changing 16-bits/channel png to 8-bits/channel png in Photoshop:



16-bit texture file sizes are more than double that of 8-bit.  We recommend using 8-bit textures because that is sufficient for the sRGB color-space within iClone:

76% of original size (was 666x19) - Click to enlarge