Hi Guys, 
My First Forum Post and WIP link for the Digital Human Contest 2020. I use CC3 and IClone as part of my newly developed indie game studio ,(Appifiny https://appifiny.co.za/arcanum-evolutions/),  visit and subscribe to my website youtube etc if you want to follow my game development, its gonna be awesoooommeeee, hopefully lol as a one man team....
These programs are highly integrated into my workflows along with Blender, Rokoko and Unreal Engine (including Live Link) to try to bring the best AAA quality i can. Unfortunately i do not have Zbrush , yet lol, so i rely heavily on the headshot detailed morphs and Blender wherever possible for sculpting and 3d edits until i can get Zbrush. For these characters i focused more on design within CC3. Texturing is mainly done in Quixel Mixer whenever necessary.
I will be submitting two entries for the contest in animated stylized and animated realistic and showing the WIP for both entries in this thread for all my characters. 
My entries will include a stylized characther of my own design that will be used in my new game planned for development in 2022, see link above. This is the perfect time to sneak peak the designs of the new characther for my game known as the Zephyr - a humanoid -reptilian vampyr type creature that is a warrior race.
The second entry will be the world famous Rock- Mr Dwayne himself. This is just for entertainment purposes only. (Not included in my game due to IP etc.) This is for contest only. I will be using vocals from one of his most famous movies and paying tribute to his Haka warrior calls. Still in concepting so this may change.


The assets i plan to use for my animated video will be using the Unreal engine marketplace purchased and free assets for sounds from the MegaGames sound pack -battle pack along  with a game demo sample map for the rocks, brigde and particle effect assets to place them in a cold blizzard bewildered world. Thereafter i will adjust lighting accordingly to perfect the scene. I will be posting i compiled video of the progress 

The Headshot image i plan to use for the rock

This is ideal image for headshot along with the colour texture i plan to use to merge with tribal paint to create a face like mask. The black and white fill will perfectly mix to create the white like face paint a tribal warrior would have. For his body i used these images as references, for the side of the face and tatooo, along with skin validation. I will be focusing on a much older rock so wrinkles veins and a beard will be kept to match the original headshot image. These images are all available from Google just searching for The rock face or the rock tatoo.



Some temporary characther renders , 










THE ROCK CONCEPTING:
So i put the photos into headshot and began morph sliding away....trying to sculpt with morphs hehehehe, so far so goood.....



Videos of the Full process for each characters will be uploaded soon on how each character was created within the Reallusion suite of products....
Final Renders will also be coming sooon....This has been lots of fun , frustration and fun again getting it all too work , trying to get perfect movements and perfect texturing is quite hard....especially since im not a 3D artist by trade...i am self thought so still learning how each of the texture maps , normal maps etc work and how each of the software works....
so far so good....stay tuned for more info...



A view into my work in progress for the characther creation with Characther settings, design choices and some renders...Its quite a quick short video but captures the entire creation process.




So i initially thought of using the original face colour white as a mask for tribal effect , however a few people mentioned it looked like too much on his face. So i decided to decrease the original Mud type mask on his face and add more of a original but still dirty messed look to maintain the imagery of a warrior , so i kept some features around the eyes and decreased the effects layer of the tribal paint. Did some Rendering out... these were the differences....a more realistic looking rock... 

So total time for characther development so far has been 84hours with animation for all characters and environment. All work has been done on a 10th Gen i5 6core cpu, GPU NVIDIA GTX 1060 6GB and 16gb of RAM system, Windows 10. 
I used Unreal live link and UE4 in accordance with Iclone for characther animation and set up. Most of the design was done in CC3 and IC7 and UE4. Progress Success... now just to refine the animations and submission in a next 24 hours...

Video:Video was Rendered in Unreal Engine and created in CC3 and IC7 using Live link.Sound:Voice sound clips were composited from Extracts of The Hercules and Fast and Furious movies. Using Hitfilm Express.Background music was sourced from paid assets:https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/mega-game-music-collection
The Dragon Roar sound: From Soundbible.com -Dragon Fire Breath and RoarUploaded: 7.16.16License: Attribution 3.0Recorded by Daniel Simon

3D Scene and assets: Characters were created with CC3.Soldiers were purchased assets from the UE4 Marketplace, Gothic Knight pack.The scenery rocks and dragon was acquired from the UE4 Marketplace, Particle effects demo and fantasy monster packs respectively. The Rocks Clothing was acquired from the CC3 content packs included with the software. Lighting and compositing:Lighting was custom created within Unreal Engine, and final video composited using Hitfilm Express.

Animating the characters were done by creating keyframes and matching there mouth visemes tracks as close as possible to the sound track that was created for the scene.
So steps was to 1- finalize the sound track for the video. 2- animate the characther to match the planned soundtrack and story  3- Link to Unreal engine and render the scene.
I found the biggest issue was that my PC could not handle the link well and i often dropped below 34fps even when using optimized minimal settings during the link. I also had lots of trouble once the scene was captured into UE4 that when exported out its frame rate and timeline would not sync with the original sound track i used in iClone. I am still trying to find a way around this. If anyone knows how to get this part working well i am open to suggestions. I tried changing playrates in Ue4 but it still could not match perfectly. So to meet the deadline, i basically exported the frames and then manually synced them to the audio matching lip actions as best as i could, and after a total of 98hours worth of design and animation the final result is ready and submitted......