I'm new to Character Creator but have bought the Pipeline version of CC3 and iClone and have a new iPhone XS. I've seen some apps like Scandy and Bellus 3D that allow me to use the iPhone's 3D scanning functionality (i.e. Face ID) to quickly create a pretty nice 3D model of my face, including textures. I wonder if anyone has used this to create a realistic character of themselves or friends/family.  Even better yet I'd love to create a morph slider of a scanned face. Not only would it be cool to be able to create an avatar of me to use in my Unity games, but I could envision creating a library of morph sliders of various realistic people of different ethnicities like "Japanese Woman 1, 2, 3..." and "African Man 1, 2, 3..." 

Any ideas on the simplest workflow one might use to accomplish that goal?  I'm trying to avoid having to do something like move a standard character to z-brush and creating the morphs there - that requires significant artistic skill.  I'm looking for something a non-artist can pull off by 3D scanning.  One issue is that most of the scans the iPhone apps create are not perfect, e.g. it is just the face but the top and back of the head might be missing. The other issue is how to map the topology of the standard CC3 character bases to the scanned faces.

Thanks in advance for any insights you can share!

I think the only way you're going to even get close to what you want is to use something like Facegen (or Crazytalk Pipeline) and work with 2D images.  You can get pretty good results, but the end will be more of a "caricature" than someone anyone would confuse with the real person.

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Alienware Aurora R12, Win 10, i9-119000KF, 3.5GHz CPU, 128GB RAM, RTX 3090 (24GB), Samsung 960 Pro 4TB M-2 SSD, TB+ Disk space
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

Thanks for the reply.  Actually, while they aren't all great, some of the new 3D scanning apps do an amazing job in making realistic 3D models. I've scanned myself and it looks EXACTLY like me. It is freaky how good it looks.  I 100% need to work in 3D because I want to make 3D animations and game characters. 

So, getting the quality 3D face mesh isn't the issue...  it is how do I take that 3D mesh (which only includes the front/sides of my face, not the entire head) and map it to a standard CC3 base character.  If I'm understanding how morphs work, it should just be a matter of somehow blending my mesh onto a "blank" head so that the scan gets filled out in the back and on top.  Then, I'd have to map the topology of the standard CC3 face to the the new one.  If that is done I think I should just be able to make a morph slider using the "difference" between the two.

I could totally be misunderstanding how this all works but from the videos I've seen on making morph sliders (like the awesome one by WarLord here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNMyWcr1yXA) you can just export a model to obj, modify it (e.g. using z-brush), and then bring it back in. Whatever difference there is between the original and modified models becomes the "morph" and I should then be able to morph between the two effectively with a morph slider.

I wish you the best of luck.

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Alienware Aurora R12, Win 10, i9-119000KF, 3.5GHz CPU, 128GB RAM, RTX 3090 (24GB), Samsung 960 Pro 4TB M-2 SSD, TB+ Disk space
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

For the workflow you're after, I think you need some kind of tool that will project the CC3 mesh, the face part anyway, to another shape. To create the morph, the original CC3 mesh needs to change shape.

Maybe something could be done using the Blender shrinkwrap tool.

Yes!  Thanks!  When I said "map the topology of the standard CC3 face to the the new one" that is what I was trying to get after. "projecting the CC3 mesh" as you put it is exactly what I'm after since like you said, the original CC3 character mesh needs to keep the same topology but just change shape.  A first glance at the Blender Shrinkwrap Modifier looks promising.  Their docs say it "allows an object to 'shrink' to the surface of another object" which is very close to what I think I want - though I'm not sure that only "shrinking" is needed since the two face meshes (CC3 and my scan) will likely overlap, rather than mine being "inside" such that the CC3 could only shrink. If it can "project" in both directions perhaps it would work...  I will try to look into it (though I've never used Blender) and maybe the new terminology of "projecting" will help in the search for solutions.  Thanks again!