I've been thinking a lot about the subdivision / tessellation problem that exists in exporting Character Creator characters into UE4.
Character Creator is certainly marketed as an all-in-one solution for creating characters and getting them into Unreal Engine, but I feel they have been disingenuous as far as the quality of the character appearance in Unreal Engine. The characters in Character Creator are much smoother, if you have enabled the subdivision smoothing in CC3. As we all know, the characters do not transfer to UE4 with that smoothing ("that's a GPU thing"), and so end up in UE4 looking very low resolution.
Adding triangle tessellation in UE4 is Reallusion's official answer to character smoothing, but it only works if the character doesn't move. When the characters move, you get artifacts at the mesh stress points (unacceptable).
HERE'S MY THOUGHT:
Would it be possible to transfer the CC3 characters into Unreal Engine, so that the bone naming hierarchy is correct for UE4, and then take those transferred FBX character files into Blender, Maya or even Zbrush, and add a level of subdivision for smoothing (this doesn't have to be an insane amount of subdivision), and then render in Unreal Engine while animating the lower resolution version in iClone LiveLink? In other words, a proxy workflow.
Has anyone tried creating a proxy workflow to restore the smooth resolution of the characters? Would this work? Would subdividing the characters ruin the UV maps? Would the facial morphs work?
Thanks!