I really appreciate all the time and information you have given me.

mark's cover works also look great.

First of all, it can be very difficult to dress the character in photoshop.
The reason is that if you give the character a pose, for example a sitting character or a character waving a sword, it is almost impossible for you to dress it up.
For this reason, you need to export the character fully equipped, dressed and equipped.

Unfortunately, CC3 doesn't come with a lot of content.
So you need to buy them separately.
You may want to take a look at the Reallusion Content store and marketplace stores.

I recommend you to get the headshot plugin as a character face. A program that creates characters from an image that works with CC3. (Of course, you will need to work on it after scanning.)

Also not only clothing but also hair etc. You may need accessories such as
Frankly, I don't know how much your budget is for this, but if you want the iClone program together with CC3, I recommend you to buy the "Complete 3D Character Design & Animation Bundle v2" version. You qualify for free for the CC4 and iC8, which will be released in the spring.
https://www.reallusion.com/store/product.html?l=1&p=ic

If you only need CC3, I recommend purchasing the "Ultimate Digital Human Creation Bundle v2 with Headshot".
This also gives you free rights to the CC4 release in the spring.
https://www.reallusion.com/store/product.html?l=1&p=cc

You may need to pay an average of $700-900 for the above packages.

Another option is to add the headshot and hair package to the cart from the link below, along with the CC3.
On average, it will cost you around $350.
(with your 10% first shopping voucher)
https://www.reallusion.com/press/ContentStore_MemberRecall/update/2202_iCCCaddons/default.html

You will still need to buy clothes.
If you're willing to spend $900, you can read my comments below. This will give you some profit.
https://forum.reallusion.com/506785/Prepurchase-Question-Buy-now-or-wait-for-the-newer-versions

Of course, no matter how high the prices seem, don't think about it just for the cover work.
You can produce various works in many different projects and studies throughout your life.






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My last post went twice for some reason. I cannot find the delete button so I changed it to this.

WOW! 

First of all I would like to say thank you so much for everyone responding with information and tips on this here thread. As a graphic designer, I do have years of experience designing from the Adobe package so the basic requirements like needing at least 300dpi and you cannot scale up graphics.... among many others. As far as 3d creation and rendering.........absolutely no experience at all. With my experience the only time I ever used a png was to create a logo or graphic without a background for webpage. Now, thanks to you folks, I now have a much better understanding of the capabilities and usage of and for png files. This is awesome..... Oh but I do have one more question.....

So the scene will be set around the year 1590 and there are very good proposed theories of either Spanish or Dutch sailors stopping here. This is almost 200 years before Cook arrived at Kealakekua Bay. Now I can spend an extra 50 hours putting clothes on all the characters in photoshop after I imported them, but I am hoping there is a quicker way. If I purchase this CC3 software, would it come with a lot more options in terms of clothing styles... not just modern times, but ancient times as well. How about a loin cloth and shawl for a few Hawaiian warriors standing on the rocky shore with a spear...... looking at the Dutch pinnace approaching them with curious expressions? Actually I would probably use illustrator to create the clothes because the end result of vectoring would be better. Anyway it will take me much longer to design and vector a spear, loincloth, and Kihei on an ancient pacific islander than it would if there was something similar I could simply pop on them... and then alter a bit. What about face templates? Does CC3 have any pacific islander faces? I am sure I could alter an African American face to match.........and of course I could spend hours altering each face structure from scratch. I dunno is there some kind of race and ancient weapon/clothes bundle you can buy for CC3?

Here are some covers I did for a writer friend of mine. Each started life in iClone and ended in Photoshop...





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Jeffkirkland's cover work looks great.
Important for printing is a resolution of 300dpi.
As others have said, if you export a high resolution png, there will be no degradation unless you enlarge the character. Since the character will be large enough, on the contrary, you will reduce it, so a clearer image will be created.
Of course, no matter what picture it is, if you enlarge it, you can see blur around the edges, but these do not deteriorate the print quality. Even if you use a picture taken outside normally, the character may be slightly blurred around the edges. This is something that will only be noticed if you look very closely.

The images you normally use for printing (if it is not a scanned tiff format or a vector work) are usually in jpeg format.
As animagic said, png format offers a much higher quality image than jpeg.

You should already understand how this will more or less look on your work screen.
If you get a color output with a CMYK supported printer or Laserjet, you will have more or less an idea of the colors.

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You can render out in up to 8192 x 8192. If you use that together with 3x3 Super-sampling you will have pretty good results.

PNGs are lossless, so you don't lose quality. For the web one usually uses JPEGs, which are lossy and therefore smaller.

I render my movies out as PNG sequences and obtain good quality.

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Actually I did try Daz for a short time, but then tried CC3. It looks like you can give characters better details in CC so I am going to stick with this one. Thank you for the answer of exporting it as PNG. Another question I have is if it is imported into photoshop as a png, will it be low resolution or low print quality. PNG files are usually low resolution files for the internet and not for printing right? Unless there are great high resolution for printing pngs....... maybe these are?

Another question.. If I purchase CC3, will it come with a bunch of easy to download templates and pre made stuff. I could spend 50 more hours getting my characters to look like 15th century Dutch sailors and native Hawaiians, but if there is things out there that would help me create all of them much quicker... please let me know.

I've been combining Photoshop and 3D characters for a couple of decades now and it's pretty straightforward. Create your background (and foreground if you want to give things a little depth) in Photoshop. Create, pose, and render characters as PNG images in something like CC3, and then composite them into your final image. 

If you haven't committed to CC3 yet, I'd recommend checking out DAZ Studio as well. It's definitely not as easy to use as CC3, and maybe it's just that I've been using it since 2005, but I think it still has a slight edge when it comes to creating still images for print.  The Digital Human Shaders in CC3  tend to beat it for realism though.  I find I tend to use all three apps these days.

Here's an example movie poster image that was created with Photoshop and CC3. The backdrop and the planet were created on different layers in Photoshop, then I used CC3 to import, modify, and pose a DAZ character. Exported as a PNG, she was added as a layer in photoshop where I did a bit of image manipulation to bed her into the rest of the image. 




Jeff Kirkland | Director • Cinematographer • Storyteller
Hobart • Tasmania • www.one18films.com
SYSTEM: AMD Ryzen 5 5500 | 32gb RAM | RTX 3060 12gb | 1tb SSD System | 44tb HDD Storage

I render out as a .png image, that way as long as my "set" doesn't have a background per-se  I'll get an transparent alpha-channel that makes compositing in Phootshop pretty easy.





Click here to go to my YouTube Channel filled with iClone Tutes and Silly Stuff

Visit ANIMATED PROJECTIONS Powered by iCLONE

Intel Core i7 3960X @ 3300MHz Overclocked to 4999.7 MHz Sandy Bridge 24.0GB DDR3 @ 833MHz Graphic Display HP ZR30w 
GeForce GTX 980Ti 6GB  Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-bit SP1 ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. P9X79 WS (LGA2011)