Appreciate the insightful perspective.    I'll go ahead and stick with Umotion Pro with the CC3 exports for now.
Thanks!

RAG DOLL COLLISION ANIMATIONS FOR ICLONE 8 & 7
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ghost Origins

My latest Feature length film created with Iclone.

My Sci- Fi Graphic Novel on Amazon: https://a.co/d/9k3cwoY

My IMDB listing
Anabran Abdhul Quarnain - IMDb

I'm not familiar with Umotion Pro, but what iClone would give you is access to quite a large library of pre-made animation clips (they would need to be purchased). In addition to that, you can create your own animations using keyframes. There are also various Mocap solutions that can be integrated with iClone.

As to the pre-made animations, you could check out the Content Store and the Marketplace to see if those motions would be of use to you.

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So this post is a couple years old, and I just wanted to get your take on how the landscape shapes up now?
For reference, I've been using Unity for most everything the last 5 years, but I really was impressed with the look of character faces created in CC3 with new facial plug-in, so I bit on buying CC3 with that plugin.
Been using it a week or so, and like the flow and export to Unity for custom created characters.

Now my question is, should I also pick up the iClone 7 asset for animation?    I'm a bit of a novice in this area, but I have used Umotion Pro in Unity to do a few small custom animations for my characters.
Would I be better served to continue educating my self in Umotion Pro with my CC3 characters or is iClone 7 now in a place where it could dramatically improve my workflow?

This has been an interesting and insightful thread... I have a couple of thoughts/questions and need input on something.

I’m a 1 person Game studio using Unity. I’m not an expert yet… probably just below the intermediate level. 

One can get lost in trying to figure out which tool to use… then learning how to use that tool, etc. to the point you’re always learning/researching and never doing.

So,to leverage my time… and actually get to the place of making an actual game… I gotta do a combination of picking the right tool(s) and buying assets to use…and just get on with it... so I don't get stuck in the learning/researching vortex.

When I look around the “tool universe”… you basically have Blender, Maya, 3dsMax, Cinema4D,iClone, zBrush, etc. And the high level “topics” / features (in the context of this reply) would be Rendering,Modeling, Sculpting, Animation, Rigging, Texturing, VFX, Lighting. 

So,when I break down the various topics… here is how I see it.

Rendering– I’m using Unity so rendering can be handled by Unity… so the rendering prowess of the various packages I don’t think would/should matter?

Animation– Unity has some great animation assets you can get in the asset store… they seem to work great for folks… like the “Very Animation” asset, UMotion Pro and a bunch of other ones… not to mention assets like Final IK. Also, for Unity 2020,they are redoing their animation/rigging process/tools and from what I can see and heard… they are pretty good… to awesome. So, I don't see a need to take the deep dive into learning how to do animation on some other software package.

Rigging– same as above for Animation… Unity and some of the assets in the Unity Asset Store seem to do a good job.

VFX& Lighting – I would use Unity for that… especially with what they have coming out for 2019 and 2020… in terms of the VFX & Shader Graphs… Render Pipelines… along with a ton of solid assets in the asset store. 

Texturing– I think Substance Painter is a must learn tool and software to have. It seems like it has become the industry standard and I haven’t seen any assets in the Unity Asset store that comes close to doing what Substance Painter can do and I do plan on learning how to use this tool.

Now,here’s my issue… I’m not that talented of a modeler/sculptor… so a solution to my shortcomings in this area is what I’m looking for…  a way to buy a model/asset(from the Unity Asset store or from the various sites which sells 3d models)…and use that purchased 3d model as a “base” and then edit/modify it in a software package (perhaps using iClone or Character Creator 3) to make it “my own.” And then I can take it into Substance Painter… customize it some more…and then use the finish product in Unity where I can use the animations I already have in Unity to work with it… ie. retarget animations I already have to the new model/character that I created. SO... long story short... what is the best tool/software package to do this with (edit/modify/customize already made models/3d Objects)... given all of what I said above… where the learning curve isn’t as steep as it would be using Maya,Blender, zBrush, etc. and where you don’t have to have world class talent to produce something good?

PS – on an unrelated note... and curious... where does DAZ fit into all of this? I see it mentioned on the site but not sure, other than being a place to buy models… where it fits in at?

Speaking of way way way too many variables lol I have been really testing the waters on Daz3d/3dxchange/CC3/iClone7/Unity/Unreal
and I believe its really a matter of pickling the workflow thats the less of the evils lol
Unity, for instance, (from my perspective) is and has the most number of possible errors/compile issues - outdated assets/components - whatever - that will stop you dead in your tracks without any kind of warning
good luck resolving;;; hours if not days trying to find some shifty C# code to fix - and if you find it, just hope that it was written by by someone competent for the version of Unity that you are working in ...and good luck with those 3rd party assets hope you dont have to find out about all the gazillion incompatibility issues the way I did
Hate to bash  ...but if finding programs like iclone/cc/daz/3dxchange to speed up the work flow sounds good - like it does to me -
you will have to weigh pros and cons vs how much they help speed things up - in other words the fixing that you have to do of whatever still might be faster that all the challenges within Unity
What Im looking at is boiling down the "convertion" processes to a 3dxchange to Unreal / iclone to unreal/ and-or cc to unreal ;;;; sequencer is awesome and actually works
...Ive had plenty of challenges but with all the challenges Ive had experimenting with these platforms - still nothing compared to the challenges of "dealing" w Unity

Unity and the custom Asset Store Devs are really doing some awesome things. Unity is being converted into a fully feature Cinematic and VR platform as well as a game development engine. UE4 is on top of most of the Architectural Visualization with companies restructuring to make use of this new awesome technology in Virtual Experiences. The possibilities are endless...virtual vacations and escapes (Think Total Recall)...advertising...building design...next gen industrial controls technologies (think of The Matrix Zion Control Tower).....Visual Books that play out unlimited injected storylines in fully 3d environments (this is where my company is going).

Indeed....Exciting Times. Hard as hell right now though since the tech is 'almost there'. Bleeding Edge Dev! hehe. It IS WORKING!
Cheers
O

Indeed. Exciting times. Software development is really getting there.

Okay....really short! =)  but with pics! Very interesting QC Test Results!
So this morning over the first cup of coffee I decided to expand upon the 3DXChange7 transform changing issue on 'some bones'. This is me doing the tests as well then linking up a walk cycle to make sure the Mecanim Bone Mapping transferred properly. I am not showing the walk cycle pic but showing what is happening on G3F and G8F as well. Looks to be a 3DXChange7 conversion issue....as expected.

So here is the first rub....this test took me 32 minutes start to finish....opening up Unity, Blender, iClone7, 3DXChange7, DAZ Studio 4.10, Loading in the models and exporting and importing. An additional 15 minutes to place text and arrows on the screenshots. So...it took me 47 minutes to test this stuff. So Reallusion cannot QC this as a checklist in their own software and workflows? Really? If I did this sort of nonsense in my industrial controls and consulting work I would no longer have a business.
Bottom line is => It either works...or does not work. There is no grey area.
**Blender 2.79 shows identical results.

The test as above is to determine if the Transforms to get animation OUT OF iClone7 via 3DXChange7. This is the pipeline and iClone7 is the Catalog of 1800+ animations. So indeed 3DXChange7 Pipeline must work exactly correct IN and OUT.

Reallusion Character Creator 3 (Clothed Female). As expected this is a flawless process.
- FBX Export Directly from CC3 (Non-Orange)
- iClone7 iAvatar Animated transferred to 3DXChange7 for FBX Pipeline Export (Orange)  *I slide the Orange over just a bit for visual comparison.


DAZ Studio 2011 Binary vs 2014 Binary Export Test



DAZ Studio Genesis 3 Female (Clothed Female). As suspected...transforms are changed. I used the Reallusion DAZ Extension to set the required T-Pose and Facial DUF Keys.
- FBX Export Directly from DAZ Studio 2011 Binary (Non-Orange)
- 3DXChange7 for FBX Pipeline Export (Orange) *It is in iAvatar format here but did test an iClone7 animation on this character.



DAZ Studio Genesis 8 Female (Nude Female). As suspected...transforms are changed. I used the Reallusion DAZ Extension to set the required T-Pose and Facial DUF Keys.
- FBX Export Directly from DAZ Studio 2011 Binary (Non-Orange)
- 3DXChange7 for FBX Pipeline Export (Orange) *It is in iAvatar format here but did test an iClone7 animation on this character.

Hi
Thanks for taking the time to share all of this
detailed info about your animation pipeline
.I hope you get your remaining major hurdles sorted ASAP.
I admit that alot of your process is wayyy over my head not being a game dev myself ,But I am always fascinated to hear detailed descriptions of the multi application,character animation pipelines of others as they always present opportunities for me to learn something

I have been watching the development of the Character tools for Unity
such as Umotion and Final Ik etc with great interest

 We have so many options today.. A very exciting time indeed!!!

Cheers.

RAG DOLL COLLISION ANIMATIONS FOR ICLONE 8 & 7
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ghost Origins

My latest Feature length film created with Iclone.

My Sci- Fi Graphic Novel on Amazon: https://a.co/d/9k3cwoY

My IMDB listing
Anabran Abdhul Quarnain - IMDb

@AutoDidact  Read the entire thing. =)  Thanks for the reply and great to have a dialogue. I had my animator read it as well. You are well respected in the DAZ and RL forums. Actually I am surprised you are now using G3. =)

I actually have to disagree with you about the RL testing the In and Out of the model/animation. =)  Not you have that happen before right? hehe. When the model is Auto Detected as a G2 (in this example) then those scripts need to be set up so that bones are in the same places when converted. As example Unity's Mechanim and UE4's Skeleton Tools don't change the bone mapping transforms. They are perfect. So there is no excuse for 3DXChange7 to change the shoulder area bones when remapping to RL-CC# skeleton. So indeed this is an issue. Our Out methods go in different directions so perhaps that is part of the difference. Again, great to have the dialogue.

We don't use DAZ Studio for animation...for a few things we start with poses over a couple of frames then blend the poses in iClone7. This gives a great visual of where the animation is supposed to flow. I have both Graphmate and Keymate in DAZ which are really the needed if any type of animation (AniBlocks/Timeline) are to be done. You stated so yourself in the DAZ forums. We found DAZ Animation to work but is really interesting when exporting. Also the animation files really need a lot of cleaning (my animator and other sources explain this as well). So we simply just do the start-middle-end poses and export those. You are using the BVH technique which is really slick...but our motion engine is Unity. It is a hybrid Game/Visual Book with (7) 67km2 maps all with realistic weather, wind, day/night, fog...etc....all in real time. So framing in a movie via a rendering capture system is not going to work. Side note is to capture video we actually use 1920x1080 PNG at 30 or 60 per second then combine them to render a video from the in game camera. Cool tech.

Before all of this CC2 and CC3 stuff (which is another reason why I purchased iClone7) is to see if there is a different 'Standardized Skeleton' we can use to run all of our animations on in lieu of DAZ G1/G2. We have Mixamo, a few Unity Asset Store, Maya LT HumanIK, and now our iClone7 customs & converted. I am not an animator but I hired one and what we did find is that DAZ G1&2 and CC2 skeletons all animated great in Unity and with a little extra work in UE4 as well (CC3 now makes UE4 a snap). We had troubles with DAZ G3 & G8 because of the intermediary 4 new twist bones that re-targetting systems really have trouble with. DAZ would not work either....I guess until this new 4.10 version...which we never went back to check animations as well. Thanks for the info!

So we actually REALLY want to use the CC2/CC3 skeleton and framework. I am awesome at textures so the new CC3 textures did not phase me at all. My college girl hated the CC3 Male's feet (terribly modeled!! That lad needs some serious surgery. =) ) but overall we were both on board with CC3. LOD issues could be manually managed out of CC3. It could work....the killer of CC3 is, blendshape naming of the expressions and phonemes, and then no facial shaping blends being exported. So RL definitely has the tech to export blends in the FBX export but no other shapes....with zero explanation as to some reason not to. We really only need about 25 facial blends to give some customization. Lip Sync Pro does really well with CC3 so facial voice animation is smooth as butter. So we were left with a tough decision....fix CC3 after export in Blender to add facial blends or stick with DAZ G1 & G2. We did a side by side animation test and essentially they are equal....so we stuck with DAZ. And thusly...we never noticed the shoulder conversion issue until the bitter rant above (the nude DAZ G2 model shown in the pictures is already broken with the 3DXChange7 import  conversion....which changes the transforms). The one thing we did note in our workflow is that once we leave DAZ the model does not return (outside of the initial re-rigging of the model OBJ from Blender).

And a little side info....we did a test on CC3 with a slew of our animations in iClone7 and as expected there are no shoulder glitches and the skeleton re-targets in Unity's Mecanim just fine. I knew this would work too based on all of our CC3 Beta dedicated 'Hard-Core Break the F-ing' thing testing we did for RL. We hammered the heck out of it in every nook and cranny for a workflow for a Real-Time HD Motion Engine (Unity/UE4/Lumberyard/Godot all tested). We know where it will break and what we have to do to get it to work. We liked it and the iClone7 workflows. Seriously.

At the end of all of this we are discussing as to whether simply making a metric ton of head/face templates then selecting them via a slider (MMOs do this as mentioned above). Not the first time this has been discussed but now this is serious with all the animations already converted in iClone7 and many exported to Unity. I can change the tools easy enough and it does simplify things on syncing up the blends so the vertex don't hiccup during frame shifts during heavy loading. Perhaps it may be the better option in the end. We all love iClone7 and how it works....so we are discussing.

Sheesh...I type fast but another TLDR opportunity. Tough topic to be shallow text on though. Sorry. Thanks again for great info.
Cheers
O