Ah!! OK.

Well going out of CC3 to Blender certainly works.  I just loaded my own Avatar which I exported as LOD0 and imported it into Blender using the FBX default settings in the dialog, did not touch anything.  It loaded fine, all the textures turned up and all the Shape Keys are present in the Data tab under the Outliner in Blender and seem to work fine.  You can of course add body animation clips into the export dialog, but I have not tried loading any clips that include facial animation, so I am not sure if it is only body animation that comes through or if you can get the face working too.  Using the Action Editor in Blender seems to work fine when you have an FBX file that has all your chosen takes in it so it seems to all work for me I have to say.



Alan M

OP does not have an iClone, only CC3.

CC3 is not an animation system, it is a character creation system.  Though you can load up a list of body animation in the FBX export dialog and they will show up in Blender.  I transfer animated characters with face to Blender all the time but you need to send your character to IClone first.  Apply all you face and body animation there and then export the FBX directly from iClone and not from CC3.

I have loaded full characters, with textures, facial animation and body animation into Blender and they work fine with very little tweaking.  I can also swap out the FBX motions for those characters in a non-destructive fashion too.
I will be putting up an Alembic pipeline to my YouTube channel this weekend and should have the FBX pipeline screedcast recorded by the end of the weekend to show that route.  So stay tuned.

I am currently using Blender 2.79b and have yet to try 2.8, just waiting on the beta.




Alan M

@ Lord of the Stack


How did you apply those expressions you mentioned in CC? It really should not matter which facial expression is applied to character. Once saves as Motion Plus, your character would retain the expression in Blender, when that saved Motion Plus is applied at the FBX export screen in CC as shown in video.

Thanks for sharing, just saw the video and followed it, unfortunately for me, it still isn't working for facial expression ;/
Though my facial expressions came from the facial expressions pack (prebuilt ones) they don't appear in the expressions menu, just as prebuilt features to apply, perhaps they're totally separate again. I've only just bought CC3 and it continues to disappoint me TBH, as things like this just fail to work without explanation and the support team are literally useless with their handling of support tickets.

Thanks a lot. It's really admirable that you even made a video, I think it will help other new creators too, for sure. Have a nice evening! 

And, additional question, how did you gave that character texture so fast? I always thought it was pretty complicated process and never found a way how to do that easily. Can you advice me in this too please?

Man, thanks a lot... Huge smile drew on my face while I was reading that you figured it out... Could you just please send some screen-shots or more detaily describe how did you do it? Again, I'm new to this, very confused and already spent several hours trying to figure this out - unsuccessfully, don't want to waste more time when someone more skilled can help me :D Again, Thanks!

Yeah I know.. and I have not switched gears to CC3 either, still thinking in terms of CC2 :)

And what interesting, the expression keys are properly mapped and can be further tweaked in Blender