Wanted to establish some best practices around Non-Standard Human Creation in CC4 as it relates to creating/modifying a fully rigged character for jiggle effects among other things.  I'm interested in life like representations of the human form and have experimented in the past with Daz3D/CC3.  CC4 with the addition of spring effects combined with weight maps opens up some possibilities that I wasn't able to fully take advantage of in the past, either due to lack of knowledge with 3D Exchange and or general knowledge of character creation and 3D design.  I've only been at this for the past 1-2 years, mostly getting used to lighting and rendering still shots (have to start somewhere) but have been creating characters my whole life with pencil and paper.  Semi-realism and believability are important to me as a result.

Anyway, I was able to create a successful jiggle (yes, talking about the glutes) by adding child "hip" bones to a Daz3D G8 character and exported as FBX to CC4.  I didn't bother weight mapping in Daz3D as I found the process daunting.  CC4 weight mapping proved to be a lot less painful, and the weight blend (low to high, blue to red) provided for a nice spring effect whereas with Daz, required a lot of tweaking and never got the right look.  Also, depending on how the weights are applied, CC4 (iClone7+ too) allows you to adjust your spring effect to find the best scenario.  I had to go back once or twice to tweak the weight map but was pretty painless overall.  I was pretty happy with the end result and took me only 1-2 hours to figure out and have something rendered that I could be proud of.

I did have a few challenges though.  In order to have CC4 recognize the additional bones of the non-standard human character, I had to turn off  HumanIK, register the bones for weight mapping and spring effects, and then go back and turn it on again.  I feel like something was lost in the process.  I no longer could use the facial expressions for example, and believe that my character was being treated more as a creature than human...  Also, as I'm still learning, I struggle a little bit with textures looking right on imported characters (requires tweaking), and especially hair and clothes, as CC4 doesn't seem to allow compatibility between Reallusion content and non-standard characters (which makes sense).  So, your character has to be pretty much complete when you import to CC4 and apply the weight and springs, etc...

So, long story short, I wanted to find out if there are best practices for workflow on something like this, and if anyone had any feedback or suggestions.

I appreciate it.

Thanks,