AutoDidact (4/14/2022)
Hi victor,
thanks for adding a rigify option
for those scenarios when one needs to hand key an imported CC3 figure with a control rig.
On the matter or retargeting to that control rig inside Blender inside Blender.
I am using a Hybrid Pipeline, where I mix Both Daz genesis figures and CC3 Character in side Blender.
Daz studio has an excellent free plugin called Diffeomorphic which also has a convert to rigify option.
Someone has recently released a free Add-on called Expykit that enable retargeting of mixamo motions directly to a Daz genesis converted rigify rig in blender
Perhaps you could take a look at how his add-on is built to assist you in developing a retargeting solution for the CC3 Characters converted to rigify.
I'm going to focus on re-targeting CC/iClone/ActorCore animations as they are effectively the same skeletal structure as the Rigified CC characters, and should in theory re-target very well. There are plenty of 3rd party add-ons that can re-target other animation types, Mixamo, Rokoko, Maya, etc. But for the native CC type animations none of the 3rd party add-ons can re-target these fully as they can contain facial animations too including blend shape animations, which all need to be re-targeted too, but nothing else can do this.
I've been researching various methods of re-targeting, the most promising of which (and the one that needs the least amount of mind bending transform calculation on my part) uses an intermediate re-targeting rig that includes elements of both the source and target rigs and the internal parenting effectively does all the heavy calculation and the target transforms can be copied out of it.
So I extended on that idea and using the original CC3 skeleton of the character as the basis for the re-targeting rig and included bone relative displacement scaling from the source animation for different character sizes. Effectively re-targeting from:
animation source rig > original cc3 rig > rigify rig.
The idea being as the rigs have the same structures then the re-targeting should be very very accurate. And... it actually worked: (after a few failed attempts that would give John Carpenter's "The Thing" a run for it's money.)
In the second part of the video, the character in the middle is the source animation export from iClone, and the two at either side are rigged and re-targeted from it.
This is only for CC/iC/ActorCore animations. This approach won't work for animations with different skeletons.