Hi, folks.  Friendly neighborhood Martok2112 with another somewhat of a tutorial, more of a tip and trick.... no images just yet.
So, how to make a CC3 avatar match the face of a photograph, since, at the present time, CC3 avatars cannot have photo images mapped onto their heads via Crazy Talk 8.
Well, here's how I do it....

Import a decent quality headshot (preferably looking straight on at the camera) on a plane.   (I brought in a plane mesh from iClone7 and stored it in the props section of CC3 so that I can apply a photo to it without having to jump through some hoops....although I do believe there is a way to just straight up bring in an image plane by dragging and clicking a photo.   I've forgotten about it, so I stick with my method just for safety's sake.

Anyhoo,
1.  Bring in the plane mesh, and apply a headshot image  to the plane in its diffuse material box.  You might have to do a little scaling on the X,Z axes in order to make sure the face is proportionate according to the original photo.

2.  You might want to adjust the pivot of the image so that it is centered on the image. 

3.   Bring the image up to and in front of the the head of the CC avatar.  Put the image right in front of the nose of the avatar.

4.   Adjust the Opacity (I keep saying Transparency....dunno why)  of the image so that you can just start to see the avatar's head through the image plane.  Scale accordingly so that the size of the head in the image is roughly the same size as the head of the avatar behind the image.

NOTE:  Once that is done, from this point on,  you will be moving the image plane quite a bit on the Y axis back and forth as you make adjustments to the head morph of the avatar.

5.   Move the image back on the head of the avatar until you get to where you can just start seeing the lips of the avatar poke through the image plane.   Morph the height of the mouth to where it is in the image.  You might have to bake that morph slider after your first adjustment, and then make one more height adjustment.   Then make adjustments to the size of the mouth...lip thickness, etc.   You will likely be doing occasional moves of the image plane on the Y axis, or altering its opacity sometimes just to check the shape of the mouth.  

6.   Move the image back a little further on the Y axis until you can just see the tip and nostrils of the nose poke through the image plane and do the same thing...adjust for height and width.  Make other adjustments (bridge witdth/crookedness, etc) as necessary.

7.  Then move back the image on the Y axis for the eyes and brows.  Same thing....height and distance adjustments, slanting, shaping....remember to bake if you've reached the limits of the morph, but need to make further adjustments beyond that. 


I have yet to try this approach with a CC1 avatar, to see if it will make for a more accurate template upon which to apply a photo image of a face onto the head of the avatar.   Using the CC1 at its default morph, I get varied results from pretty darn good, to downright HIDEOUS!

Anyhoo...sorry no images this time around.  I hope these tips will be fairly self-explanatory.   Maybe when I've completed my first CC3 match attempt, I will post results here.

Friendly neighborhood Martok2112... out!




"Incompetence will always prevail so long as evil men stand by and do nothing."
-Martok2112

Thank you, this will be really useful.

Now I wish someone would take it a step further to create even more accurate match applying wrinkles, pores, skin defects etc. through some texture adjustment or sculpting & mesh projection tools.

I hope Reallusion's new Headshot (coming at the end of the year, if everything goes as promised) tool will finally help to achieve photoreal faces.

You actually don't need iclone to do this. You can just import or drag the RL head onto a base cc1 character inside of CC3 then export as CC3 character. That is how I make all my characters. Works great  but max texture size from crazy talk is 2048 and you have to do a lot of Photoshop editing to make it look good!

Can I "combine" or use a single 2d Photoshop image as the front-facing portion of a Character Creator or iClone character - somehow?
I'm trying to "dimensionalize" a PSD image of a front-facing statue (lacking left and right side angles of it) and my hope was that I could somehow "paste" this  2d image onto a CC character whose body
I had squished and stretched enough to conform to the shape of the statue in order to then make it seem like a single 3D animatable iClone characater - and make it look
enormous - looking down at a comparatively tiny iClone character, looking up at it.

I'm guessing that if I had time to learn Z-brush or Blender I could have "sculpted" a back for this 2D statue but I'm hoping there may be a faster way to accomplish this.

Thanks for any suggestions!

Robert