Hello everybody,
This will be my entry for the Digital Human contest 2020, I tried making the digital double of Gellert Grindelwald using RL Character Creator, Iclone, Marvelous Designer, Substance Painter, Blender and After Effects. I will share some of the steps I took along the way.

To begin the project I started with a picture of Johnny Depp which I mirrored in Photoshop to get rid of the uneven lightning. Then, I drag and dropped it in Headshot and adjusted the generated mesh using the morphs slider to get someeething that looks close to the reference picture. I took advantage of the Skingen face decals and dropped one in on top of the generated Headshot head texture to get a higher quality texture quite fast.75% of original size (was 669x19) - Click to enlarge

Now that I had the base mesh and texture it was time to use the sliders to get it quite close to the real deal. It took me a bit to get used to the morph sliders way of working and to get to know what morphs should be best used to deform specifics regions. I went through quite a few iterations to get to something that I liked but the process was fun and easy and I avoided Zbrush and sculpting completely.
75% of original size (was 669x19) - Click to enlarge
75% of original size (was 669x19) - Click to enlarge
75% of original size (was 669x19) - Click to enlarge

At this point I started working on the clothes in Marvelous Designer to see how the character will look with clothes on and to get a better match with the references that I was using.I also dragged and dropped a standard hair model that comes with Character Creator to get a better feeling of the face proportions. It is incredibly useful to be able to do this so easy and fast, just drag and drop.75% of original size (was 669x19) - Click to enlarge75% of original size (was 669x19) - Click to enlarge
75% of original size (was 669x19) - Click to enlarge

Having the clothes in, I continued playing with the morph sliders and skingen textures to try to get a better match of Johnny Depp's Grindelwald. Again, the process is fun as it does not have to be linear and I can change the model, textures and props and have them all rigged instantly. When I was happy with the look of the face I started testing it with different expressions and adjust the proportions and textures while using references with the same expression.75% of original size (was 669x19) - Click to enlarge
75% of original size (was 669x19) - Click to enlarge

After I called it quits on playing with the morph sliders my next target was to get the textures final. At this step I've exported the model with the rig to Blender to see how everything will react to Eevee ligths, going back and forth in between blender and character creator as I was updating the Skingen layers. One very nice and useful tool from Skingen is the ability to paint your own masks for the decals in Photoshop. That helped me to get a better blending between different layers and normal decals. And the decals look great, I love the hand decal from the library for example.75% of original size (was 669x19) - Click to enlarge75% of original size (was 669x19) - Click to enlarge
75% of original size (was 669x19) - Click to enlarge 

Happy with the model but also constrained by time if I wanted to finish the animation in time, I moved to Iclone. Click, export, magic, model is ready for animation in Iclone. I had in mind what I wanted to animate already, it was a speech that Grindelwald holds in Lestrange Mausoleum. I prepared the sound clip from that part and imported it into Iclone; next, I took a walking and talking animation, dragged and dropped it on the character and taadaa, I had a moving Grindewald. Next, I set upt the cameras and the cuts; it is super sweeeet that Iclone manages to keep the high frame rate while animating, the process was smooth as butter.

With the camera set up, character moving and the speech in the file, it was time to adjust the body motion to make it a bit better and to do the lipsynch. Using the body puppet, face puppet and edit motion layer I was able to get the whole thing to a decent level in around 4-5 hours of work overall. And again, having 60 fps in the viewport (with clothes off as you can see), makes the process quite playful; it's nice not fighting with the software when you try to achieve something.

75% of original size (was 669x19) - Click to enlarge
75% of original size (was 669x19) - Click to enlarge75% of original size (was 669x19) - Click to enlarge75% of original size (was 669x19) - Click to enlarge

Having the model and the animation ready it was time to jump to another part of my adventure and that is Houdini to try the new Kinefx tools that are especially made to tweak mocapped animations. I noticed in the step before that the shoulders of the character were a bit inwards in different poses and since I'm a sucker for making simple things harder, I chose not to do that in Iclone and adjust it manually but to take the automation route to see how that works and learn something new in the process. Took a bit but in the end I got it working and the tool automatically adjusts the angle of the shoulders based on the pose of the character. Pretty neat! Maybe there is such a thing in Iclone as well and I don't know about it?

75% of original size (was 669x19) - Click to enlarge
75% of original size (was 669x19) - Click to enlarge

Next step was to take everything into Blender and make the hair. The process was pretty straight forward; I've painted weightmaps for the 5 regions of the head that will have hair, like you see in the attached screenshot. It was a matter of tweaking and brushing untill I got something that looked close to the reference. One thing that I've notice lately is that sometimes it is better to use simple interpolation for the hair children instead of the interpolated one, especially for clumping; it looks better if simple interpolation is used.
75% of original size (was 669x19) - Click to enlarge

With all the pieces of the puzzle in place, I could move to lightning and shading the model for the final result. Here, I played a bit with Octane and Cycles but the render times compared to Eevee are, well, unreasonable for 2020. I also tried exporting everything to Unreal Engine too but I encountered problems with the hair alembic. It made Unreal crash or I was having weird scale/interpolation issues with it and I didn't manage to find a fix for it. Maybe final 4.26 will fix these problems or I will be less dumb in the future, hope for the best! :D

The shaders in Eevee are a bit of a node mess, I will share them when I have time to clean them up. The most important tip I can share for now(if you like tips) is to play with coloramps on the textures for roughness and transmission and that will give you better control on the sss and reflections. That's what worked for me, at least.
For the animation, I used morphs/shape keys to fix intersection problems with the body and I also masked most of the body as you can see.
75% of original size (was 669x19) - Click to enlarge
75% of original size (was 669x19) - Click to enlarge

Two previews on how the model and shaders work in Eevee viewport.