Hi,

I was looking for a solution to create high-quality character models for our upcoming game in high-end VR. A requirement was that we didn't have to do any modelling, texturing, and rigging. Character Creator 3 + Headshot seemed like a potential combo to achieve this.

What I wanted/expected:
- Use a photo to generate a model with Headshot and tweak it a bit.
- Pick a body.
- Pick clothes.
- Export FBX to use in Unity.
- Import FBX in Unity.
- Tweak the materials in Unity a bit.

My experience:
I tried it out and Headshot itself is pretty interesting, with a lot of stuff that can be tweaked. It requires good photos of faces. Anyway, the big problem came when trying to export the character - it didn’t work with the trial of Headshot. So there was no way I could test the whole pipeline. That's a deal-breaker.

When trying out Character Creator 3 there are almost no clothes to chose from. It's unclear to me what's included in the full purchase, but it seems like we would have to purchase clothes separately. Looking at the marketplace there's very little with high-quality. We would want (and pay for) a good set of basic clothes. The pricing of the few clothes in the marketplace was also confusing. In some places it showed real currency, with two different prices (one called 'Export') - what does that mean? And in other places it showed what looked like a virtual currency - what? Just show me a price. I'm dealing with multiple marketplaces on a daily basis and I've never found it confusing before.

I then created a “regular” model with Character Creator 3 and exported that to Unity, and while the export worked, the import was the usual mess of unassigned materials, textures, and all that jazz. I couldn’t even figure out what the texture files were - where was the albedo/color texture, where was the normal map? After searching around, I found a post on the Reallusion forum that talked about an Auto importer made by Reallusion, but that wasn’t up to date with Unity 2019.4 LTS (which has been out for a very long time), and it was unclear how to use it, and all in all I couldn’t the materials and textures to work in Unity.

I want to like it, but almost everything about using it is frustrating, and the documentation is lacking and spread out over the website, YouTube, and the forums. I give up for now.

There's clearly value on the product you make, but you're leaving money on the table by having a messy and confusing first experience. There's a massive market of game developers out there that are prospective customers. I looked at Character Creator 3 a few years back, and the first time experience was pretty much the same as it is today. It doesn't seem to be just me either, when I look around online and ask my peers, people seem to have the same concerns.

I really hope you read this, and I'd be more than happy to discuss the experience and further improvements. I wish you the best of luck, and I hope things get cleared out. I'll come back and try it again in the future, because I want you to be the right tool.

All the best,
Jonas

Hi Jonas

Thank you for the feedback. I will pass this on for review by Character Creator team.

To be fair I do feel some of the concerns raised will be easily overcome with a little bit more experience. Character Creator after all is advanced avatar creation software and with that comes a learning curve that can't be avoided. However, if you are willing to invest the time the results you can get are really outstanding and worth the effort.

To answer a couple of things you mentioned, the full version of Character Creator 3 comes with a sample selection of clothing (underwear, t-shirt, jeans etc.) but more clothing packs are available for purchase from the Content Store and Marketplace. However, if you purchase Character Creator 3 Pipeline you will have the tools to be able to easily import clothing and accessories from almost any source including the huge Daz3D library.

The Content Store is where you will find all Reallusion official content and content from our approved partners. The Marketplace is where end users can sell their content so obviously you may see some variation on quality. The currency used in the Marketplace is DA Points (virtual currency) but in the Content Store the prices are displayed in real currency.

The two different prices you see are for iContent and Export. iContent (the cheaper option) is for those who only plan to use content in iClone or Character Creator. The Export price is for those who wish to export their content to 3rd party software and game engines like Unity and Unreal.

Hopefully this answers some of your questions but please always feel free to post usage questions in the relevant forums and we will try to help. :)


                                                                

Peter
Forum Administrator

www.reallusion.com

Hi Peter,

Thank you for reading and replying.

What's the difference between Character Creator 3 and Character Creator 3 Pipeline? They sound very similar by name.

Thanks for explaining Export vs iContent - in our case we would have to use Export then since we'd use it in a game engine.

Regarding exporting to Unity, how can I do that? Is there one comprehensive guide to export a character and import it to the standard rendering pipeline in Unity 2019.4 (the stable Long Term Support version). The standard rendering pipeline is used by most VR games because the other newer ones don't support the full feature set and aren't ready for production yet.

Feel free to reach out to me if you want to collaborate.

Thanks,
Jonas