CC/iC Blender Tools 2.0.5

Github: Github Project Page - Releases
Online Documentation: Documentation
CC3 Plugin: CC3 Plugin Releases
CC4 Plugin: CC4 Plugin Releases

Changelog:
2.0.6

• Restored Rigify retarget limb correction utilities.
• Fix to Blender 4.1 import crash caused by 4.1 removing auto-smoothed normals.

2.0.5

• Fix to converting generic objects to props.
• Fix to baking value textures back to CC4 when exporting converted props and humanoids.
• Datalink data send rate synchronization improvements.
• Rigify retarget and NLA bake options to bake to FK/IK/Both.
• Rig FK/IK mode set appropriately, unchanged when baking to 'Both'.
• Quick FK/IK switch button added to rigify mini-panel.
• Send Rigified pose or sequence fix.
• Rigify Jaw alignment changed to -Z.

2.0.4

• Linking/Appending:
• Added linking/append functions to auto-link to characters in blend files with full character data and functionality.
• Added connect function to re-build character data for linked/appended characters.
• Added custom properties to armatures/meshes and materials to aid re-connection of character data.
• Rebuilding materials will add this custom data to existing characters.
• Auto-linked/Re-connected characters can use full add-on functionality i.e. rigging, retargeting, exporting, rebuilding materials, etc...
• Rigify:
• Datalink pose retargeting teeth position fix.
• Eye bone and jaw bone alignments corrected.
• Face rig jaw constraints adjusted for less lip deformation.
• Parallax eye shader AO fix.
• Basic materials SSS fixes.
• Importing a bad or incompatible mesh should fail more gracefully.

2.0.2

• Datalink:
• Lighting and Camera sync.
• Send Character (Go-CC) back to CC4.
• Facial expressions and Visemes transferred in the pose and animation sequencing.
• Animation sequence now writes to rig and shape-key action tracks directly using low level fast keyframing, all at once at the end. Which is much faster, for both native rig and Rigify rig.
• Sequence rate matching so CC4 doesn't get too far ahead of itself.
• Supports Morph editing and mesh updating for sending back morph OBJ for automatic morph slider creation in CC4.
• Subsurface Recalculations (you may need to reset the preferences in the add-on prefs)
• Export of Hue, Sat, Brightness params to CC4.
• Fixed SSS material detection.
• Fixed ActorBuild generation detection and export.
• HIK and facial profiles copied with character export (if generated by CC4)
• OBJ import/export fix for Blender 4.0.
• OBJ import now supports full materials.
• Fixed T-pose orientation when exporting Rigified animation.

2.0.2

• Correction to malformed json texture paths when exporting character from CC4 directly to the root of a drive.
• Disabled image search on FBX importer, should import a little faster now.

2.0.1

• VRM import fixes.
• VRM to CC4 export generates HIK profile for auto characterization.
• Rigify fixes:
• Face bone roll axis corrections.
• Tongue bone meta-rig positioning corrections.
• Teeth bone retargeting corrections.

2.0.0

• Blender 4.0 support.
• WIP Experimental Data Link added:
• Currently in alpha stages, more a proof of concept at the moment.
• Bake add-on updated and merged into this project.

1.6.1

• Object Management:
• Generic material conversion better detects AO maps in Blender 3+
• Transfer vertex weights with posed armature fix.
• Empty transform hierarchy to Prop conversion puts bones in the right correct places.
• Exporting rigified animations with parented armatures now excludes those armatures from export.

1.6.0.1

• Fixed bake rigify retarget not assigning action to rig after baking
• Removes facial expression bone drivers on Rigifying (caused cyclic dependencies)
• Re-importing/rebuilding materials on a character will reload any texture images that are being re-used from existing or previous imports, just in case they have been changed on disk.
• Except when the image has been modified by the user and has not yet been saved.

1.6.0

• Rigifying character keeps meta-rig and allows for Re-Rigifying the control rig from the meta-rig.
• Useful for re-aligning bones, re-positioning face rig, etc...
• First draft of (optional) Dual Specular skin shader (Eevee & Cycles) with specular micro details.
• Added build options to generate drivers for Jaw, Eyes and Head bones from facial expression shape keys.
• Added build option to generate drivers for all expression shape keys driven from the body mesh shape keys.
• Which means only the expressions on the body mesh need to be updated/animated.
• Fix to turn off vertex colours in hair materials when hair mesh has blank vertex colour data (i.e. all zero).
• Facial Expression shape key value range expanded to -1.5 - 1.5 (except for eye look shape keys)
• Characters exported with Mouth Open as Morph, now correctly detects the body mesh.
• Fix to support sphere colliders in collisions shapes.
• Some additional lighting arrangements: Authority and Blur Warm.

1.5.8.5

• Fixes:
• Fix to empty transforms or deleted objects in export.
• Fix to transfer vertex weights leaving working copies behind.
• Some object management UI corrections.
• Fix to bake path when exporting character converted from generic with materials added after conversion.
• Fix to replace selected bones from hair cards.
• Fix cloth settings error in detect physics.
• Fix CC4 spring bones creation.
• Fix to exports of objects which originally had duplicate object names.
• Fix to import collider parenting crash when using Blender versions before 3.5.
• Fix to UI panel in 2.93.
• Fix to collider generation in 2.93.
• Fix to collider generation when Rigifying when posed.
  

1.5.8

• Spring Bones:
• Blender spring bone rigid body simulation added for spring bone hair rigs.
• Spring bone simulation controls.
• Hair spring bone chain renaming.
• Bone generation truncate and smoothing parameters.
• Added support for not quad grid poly mesh hair cards, should work with any hair mesh.
• Rigid body colliders for the spring bones that use the collision shapes from character creator.
• Rigify update for spring bone system.
• FK, IK and tweak bones for spring rigs.
• Rigify and spring bone UI updates.
• Baking spring bone simulation and animation into new animations
• Exporting rigified spring bone characters and animations, including the rigid body simulation as animation.
• Cloth Physics overhaul:
• Physics UI update.
• Better mapping of PhysX weight map to blender vertex pin weights.
• Physics presets updates, mass, tension and bending to better simulate the cloth type and work more consistently with external forces.
• Cloth physics preset detection on import.
• UI tools for point cache baking.
• Fixes to weightmap paint mode resetting texture.
• Browse button for painted weightmap, so you can find it.
• Weightmap assignment fix for materials with the same base name.
• Sculpt / Mesh:
• Character geometry transfer to shape-keys function.
• Character Objects:
• Add object to character (from another character) now copies the object into the new character.
• Transfer weight maps now works when posed to effectively parent in place target mesh.
• Other:
• Fix to eye close slider.

1.5.7

• Hair bone de-duplication.
• Bones from grease pencil lines or hair card generation now replaces (matching) existing bones.
• Grease Pencil lines generated only from active grease pencil layer, allowing for better organization.
• Added some color space fall-backs when using different color space configurations.

1.5.6
1.5.5

• Flow maps added to wrinkle map system.
• Better texture limiting for the head material.
• Fix to export crash when a texture field is missing in the JSON data.
• Corrupted JSON data detection and error report on import/build.
• In some cases resetting the collision shapes in CC4 will fix corrupted JSON data.

1.5.4

• Wrinkle Map system implemented.
• Characters with wrinkle maps will setup wrinkle shaders in the head material automatically.
• Preferences for Build Wrinkle Maps.
• OpenColorIO ACES color space support.
• Preferences for ACES color space overrides.
• Optional Texture Packing and Texture limits added to reduce number of textures in imported materals.
• Some systems can have very low texture limits (i.e. only 8 on some OSX systems) this can help import full CC4 characters.
• Preferences for pack and/or limit textures.
• Body sculpting updated:
• All sculpting modes work on a copy of the character.
• Multi-res applied base shape copied back to original character in a way that preserves existing shape keys.
• AO Map added to baking, layers and export.
• Additional strength, definition and mix mode controls added to layer ui.
• Spring Bone Hair Rigging (Cloth Rigging to follow)
• Added initial Hair curve extraction from hair cards.
• Spring bone hair generation from selected hair cards or greased pencil lines on surface.
• Hair card weight binding fine tuning controls.
• Hair cards are weighted individualy to neighboring bones and uniformly across to avoid lateral stretch and behaves more like cloth physics implementations.
• Spring bone generation from grease pencil lines.
• Fixes:
• Some extra transparency material detection.
• Fix to hand & finger bone roll alignment when bind pose has arms and hands at a steep downward angle.
• Fix to partial material name matching errors from ActorCore and AccuRig.
• Export bake socket fix for Blender 3.4+.
• Shapekey locks will be disabled and all shapekeys reset to zero on character export.

1.5.3

• Fix to retarget baking in Blender 3.4 not baking pose bones to rigify armature action.
• Fix to Rigify motion export bone root name.

1.5.2

• Rigify IK-FK influence controls replicated in Rigging panel.
• Fix to material setup error caused by missing normal map data.

1.5.1

• Fix to Generic character export.
• Fix to Generic converted character export.

1.5.0

• Rigify export mesh and/or animation overhaul.
• Smoothing groups added to export file dialog options.
• Support for CC4 Plugin, facial expression and viseme data export.
• Fix to legacy hair detection & scalp detection.
• Very slight subsurface added to scalp to prevent the dark/blueish artifacts on skin.
• Fix to bump maps connecting to normal sockets.
• Eye limbus darkness recalculated.
• Initial attempt at exporting Blender 3.3 Curve hair on characters via Alembic export.

Original Post
Setting up the materials in Blender was becoming quite time consuming and it's way to easy to make mistakes so a few weeks ago I thought I would try and speed it up with some python scripting as I'd written a few python scripts for Blender years ago and they weren't too terrible.

Over time I got entirely too carried away with it and my little helper script grew into a full blown add-on with a UI and import/export functions and such. As I have a tendency to keep building and building and never really finishing with these types of projects they usually never see the light of day and end up collecting dust in some darkened corner of my hard drive, so I'm releasing it now and if anyone is interested they can try it out and see if it's any use to them.

For the moment this is mostly for setting up materials, but I've made a start at importing / exporting for character morphs and accessories which works(ish), but needs specific export settings from CC3, which are outlined in the readme.

I must stress this is very much an alpha version and still work in progress. It's Blender and it's running my janky code so expect bugs. It works they way I use it, so far, and with the character exports I have tested it with, but any expected conditions could cause it to go wrong.

This is for Blender 2.83+. Tested in 2.83 and 2.92, 3.0, 3.0.1 and 3.1

And I've made a quick demo video of installing and testing the add-on with some cheesy music:

Rendering
A quick rendering test video using the add-on to quickly render a character:


And this is the rendered image from the video:


Character Morphs
And here's a quick demo of using the add-on to help create character morphs:

This is simply amazing! Your plugin is probably a prototype of what people have been asking for a long time. A link to Blender from RL suite.
Great job with material controls! Thanks.
I use Blender for modeling mostly and I am lousy when it comes to setting up environment, materials, lights, cameras... etc.
So I followed your tutorial straight. In 15 minutes I got this (out of which I was looking for Render button for whole 1 minute )
I barely touched any material controls - almost default (just subdivided the mesh).

This is indeed great for those that are not Blender experts (like me) and want to try rendering in Eevee, for example.

Material conversion from CC to an external application is one of the most baffling subjects to master, so this will be very helpful. If I have some time I'll try it out as well.

---

Wow! Thanks a lot for great addon!

@Victor.Suopday
Wow that's great
Many Thanks
My first Test.

Greetings rosuckmedia

RAG DOLL COLLISION ANIMATIONS FOR ICLONE 8 & 7
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ghost Origins

My latest Feature length film created with Iclone.

My IMDB listing
Anabran Abdhul Quarnain - IMDb

I'll have a play with Daz conversion, see what it's doing differently to base CC3 characters.

RAG DOLL COLLISION ANIMATIONS FOR ICLONE 8 & 7
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ghost Origins

My latest Feature length film created with Iclone.

My IMDB listing
Anabran Abdhul Quarnain - IMDb

wow, this is great, I've been just testing it a little bit and it really saves a lot of time when importing CC3 cahracters into Blender then having to set up all the textures again to work properly, thanks for sharing this.

It seems to work nicely when importing characters, anyways I noticed that importing a character into an existing blender file the process deletes my current cameras in blender, not sure if this happens because I'm using an add-on for my cameras or if it's due to the import process using your tool, anyways thanks for sharing it, I'll try to post some renders I'm working on now too

Edit: my bad, I just saw there are two buttons to import characters, using the lowe one kept my current cameras in the blend file, this is really great, I hope you continue developing this add-on and if you are thinking to sell it on blendermarkt or gumroad I would be glad to support you by purchasing it since I don't think I can really help developing the tool itself

Edit 2: unfortunately the second import option doesn't have all parameters set, skin is not showing micronormals and similar stuff, so I tried using the first import button again and as before, my already set cameras are gone as well as the lights, am I missing anything here?