The Reallusion Content Store doesn't appear to allow users to leave reviews for products for some reason, so I'll leave my feedback here. This is both to give other users some additional information on this package, and also to possibly affect future updates to this package that might improve what I considered to be the weaker elements.
First, I should explain the way I'm using this package, since I expect it will have a big impact on my impressions of it. I'm using iClone to create lip-sync animations by combining AccuLips Visemes with Expression to add emotion to the performance. I then export these into Unity. Importantly, within Unity, I'm manually controlling Head rotation, Eye look direction, and Eye blink on the characters. (That's important here because the Digital Soul animations also control those elements.) So what I was mainly looking for was to add just facial expressions (not Head/Eye rotations) to my Lip Sync clips. In short, I was hoping for an upgraded version of the Expression_Loop clips included with CC4/iClone.
My overall evaluation of this package is that while it does have a fair number of purely facial expressions, most of the animations achieve most of their expressiveness through head and eye rotations, as opposed to purely facial animations. This means that if you're only interested in expressions that can be applied with blend shapes (instead of bone rotations), the expressiveness is fairly limited.
In order to use these in my project, it was necessary for me to remove the Head and Eye animations. Otherwise, there were many artifacts that led to strange-looking expressions. For example, if the animation itself has the character look down, that has a strong impact on the characters eyelids. If I override the look direction in my game, the eyelid movement would still be applied, which looks very strange. By disabling Head and Eye animation on these clips, it removes those artifacts. Unfortunately, for the majority of the animations in this package, removing the Head and Eye rotations pretty much left a character with a fairly blank look on their face. Again, for most clips, the expressiveness was mostly driven by the head and eye rotations, not the facial expressions.
I made a short reference video for myself to show what these expressions look like on the default male CC4 character. These clips were created by Sampling the digital soul clips, and deleting all key frames for Head and Eye, leaving only Muscle and Eye Blink. These were also using the CC4 Standard 60+ facial profile.
Overall, I was a bit disappointed here to see just how much of the performance in these clips came down to head movement mocap, rather than facial mocap. On the plus side, the mocap itself is very high quality (very cleaned-up), without any problems or noise in the animations themselves.
Here are some suggestions for similar future packages:
- Provide stronger mocap performances for facial muscles, rather than head/eye rotations. Having most of the expressiveness coming from head rotations is really disappointing when I'm controlling head animation with other tools.
- Ideally provide versions of the clips that don't have Head and Eye movement included. Just the character looking forward, with a variety of facial expressions. It took me a long time to manually go through, sampling all clips, removing Head and Eye, and saving a custom version of all the clips.
- And please don't include random eye blinking in these animations. Eye blinking is something that is generally added/controlled in various ways, and having it baked into these clips is extremely awkward.