I'm wondering how people are aging CC3 characters without the appearance editors. In the past I've created CC1 characters and used the Dynamic Appearance Editor and then converted them, but since Headshot creates CC3 characters I'm trying to figure out options.

Aging is really just two things -- actual, physical wrinkles on the mesh, and maps to fake it.  Using Headshot can give you those physical wrinkles but good normals/diffuse/roughness maps can do quite a bit without those.

My go-to approach is to save out the old skins Daz offers and apply those maps (assuming I'm not making a Headshot character - if you have HS you can just create some old people and save out the skins there, although you'll need to create your own normals, which is a snap with Photoshop).  Old people in general have much the same sort of issues and wrinkles, so if you have four or five such maps you're pretty set.  And then, with HS, you have a TON of morphs you can use to add the necessary bags and blemishes.

Edit: Here is an example -- default CC3 character with Default hi-res skin, and then a Daz Floyd skin applied.  No other changes made.

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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

@kellytoons
Supposedly RL is coming out with wrinkles this quarter. If HS actually deforms the mesh to create wrinkles, do you predict that RL's solution will be of the same quality? I.e. is it worth the wait?



Nathan

When you say "worth the wait" do you mean not buying Headshot?  Because, no, everyone needs HS <g>.  (Seriously, worth it for the many morphs alone).  I don't know what else you'd be waiting for -- unless you mean you don't want to create old folks right now (and you can wait if you want but my advice is to never hold back doing whatever you want to do on the off chance that new software/hardware will make it better/easier.  It may well, but in the meantime you've stopped being creative.  Do whatever the hell you want now and if it gets easier/better so much for the good).

And when I say HS creates bags and blemishes I don't mean it creates a lot of high def wrinkles.  You can create eye bags (and pretty extreme ones) but not, AFAIK, forehead wrinkles.  It just allows you a lot of different morphs to adjust the face properly but a good texture map laid on top completes the look.

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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

In addition to Mike's tips:

The Essential Morphs pack includes various wrinkle morphs, so that is also an option. 



3DTest recently posted a video on how to create an old person with Head Shot:

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So I took the challenge and created this elderly gentleman from one of the AI images provided by Sonic7.



Head Shot provides a setting for older faces so I used that to get some of the wrinkles. And I used the wrinkle morphs I mentioned above.

The morphs also allow you to add jowl, a double chin, to shorten the neck and add other signs of decay associated with old age.

Because the body skin is a bit too smooth, I added Blend maps to each of the skin textures to simulate age spots. 

I see this as trying to do a portrait, which also takes practice.

EDIT: Find an actual render with this character in this post: https://forum.reallusion.com/FindPost432727.aspx.

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this is a good work Animagic, wrinkles are shown well, and thank you again Steve