Hi,
After opening my own Indie company, I recently started to work as creative director in a b2b company that wants to enter the gaming business and I'm running a pre-production plan, our goal would be bringing the ninja theory "indie AAA" model even more affordable.

So my question is this: If we would like to have hyper-realistic faces to animate with the iPhone system, would it be possible?
Is it possible to import the rigged head and use it with any actor in character creator? If yes how?

For example: can we insert in the CC3 / Iclone pipeline a custom high quality animated head like this one? https://www.eisko.com/louise/virtual-model

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

Giacomo

Hi Giacomo

Character Creator 3 uses its own CC type avatars that can be fully customised using morph sliders. So for example, you can take a CC avatar into 3rd party modeller (ZBrush etc.) and create custom head morphs based off the original CC head, but you can't just import a 3rd party custom head straight into Character Creator 3.

The only exception to the above is for Daz/Poser/Hivewire characters which can be imported into Character Creator 3 Pipeline using our special "Transformer" feature which automatically converts the models into CC type avatars.


                                                                

Peter
Forum Administrator

www.reallusion.com

Thanks for the answer Peter,

Can I ask one last clarification?
Regarding blendshapes for facial mocap, I see that virtual human has 60, is it possible in some way, tweaking the Zbrush tutorial for virtual humans, to manually customize blend shapes with scanned data to have more realistic skin and muscle contraction? (I guess not for the same reason)
Or there's any way to go over 60 and adding even more blendshapes?

Thanks!

Hi Giacomo,

Following from Peter's answer, yes - both the base/ neutral expression CC avatar model and all animation morphs can be modified/ reshaped as long as the mesh itself (vertex number and index) remains unchanged.

To modify the animation morphs - you'll need 3DXchange pipeline: load your avatar and scroll down to the Face Setup panel on the right hand side of the UI. Here, you can select an animation morph and export it for external modification - then use the 'replace' function to slot the modfied animation morph back in.

Also in the same panel, you can if you wish select the base avatar mesh - and you'll see buttons activate in the small 'Replace Mesh' panel below Face Setup which allow you to export and replace the base (neutral expression) avatar too: this provides an alternative path to modify an avatar - purely in external tools, outside Character Creator.

The Face Setup panel also allows you to add custom morphs - so yes, you can go over 60. Custom morphs can be used alongside (or as alternatives to) existing morphs by applying them to particular expressions in the Expression Editor. They can also be used independently in Face Puppet by setting them up as custom morphs - again in the Expression Editor.

The most important thing to bear in mind is - as I said before - not to alter the CC mesh structure, only its shape.

I hope that helps -

Mike