To the non developers, maybe you have played a game, and you see that your character is breathing, and the chest is expanding, contracting, and nostrils shape changing... How do you think they did that? I will tell you: blendshapes. (aka exported morphs)

No blendshapes and your game character is a stiff frozen popsicle

Yes, this is really the number one feature right now missing, that makes my team question whether we can use Reallusion as our character pipeline at all. I really hope the Reallusion team will strongly consider adding this to their 2021 roadmap.

This part of the AP EULA also prevents us from building custom morph targets ourselves, post export:

You may not do the following applications unless getting explicit permission from Reallusion:

• Use the characters or their morph assets to build up another character generation system in games or interactive services.

So using Reallusion's products right now prevents us from doing any kind of morphs beyond the limited selection of facial expressions exported by default. I just can't fathom this decision. CC3 and the pipeline here has so much potential for games, and then this one restriction is here that limits its applicability to so many of us. Again, I really hope we can see this in the 2021 roadmap. We would really like to use Reallusion's software and content as our character pipeline, but we can't if this restriction is not resolved.

The interesting things I found eventually... contrary to the learned forum opinions... is that you actually can import morphs (without them being baked), apparently. But its in the out of date 3dxchange software. It cannot be done in cc3 transformer. But apparently it can actually be done with 3dxchange pipeline, but it gets murky for me on how I then get it onto my cc3 figure. Which I have 3dx also, but the tutorials and documentation is very old and limited, and the steps appear to be very tedious and complicated, so I didn't try to do it there yet. I have also encountered a lot of old unfixed bugs when I tried doing other things in 3dx. So I've developed a bit of instant 'repulse back' and hmm what else can I work on... whenever something says oh go do it in 3dxchange. It was not money well spent for me, but maybe it was required so I could have cc3 transformer. But I thought I would get more use of it for models/props/etc but I get better experience and results if I just don't bother and instead now if daz content using the daz bridge, or anything else but 3dxchange.

AND... you can 'sort of' export morphs it seems. But is also roundabout tedious. You have to do it via iClone, which I have that too, and export them as fbx mesh animations, it least it sounds like it I haven't tried it yet been too busy on other things that had less resistance, less steep learn curve, or higher priority. And there are ways to make your own sliders and expressions I found too. It seems. So, some of it can already be done if you have the full suite - and tons of time. However its out dated, tedious, limited docs/tutorials, and not gotten the developer love or focus on the game dev workflows. I haven't had time to spend on digging into it more yet, so in the meantime am hoping for some improvements to come along. But of course its totally bs ridiculous that you can't just pick and choose a morph list at export time. [and why did I buy an export version of morph packages if I can't export them??] And at import time too of course. Foolish and shortsighted by RL, imo. But I can't totally fault them for catering a lot more to their main user base that appears to be more about making short animated videos n such, if that is who has supported them the most over the years.

And regarding the EULA stuff... at least from my interpretation of it and various commentary/q&a I've observed... I think that pertains more to if you were building a generation system where you were creating/selling/exporting characters. And also reselling within your game as dlc content of morphs/clothes/textures/etc is typically a no go from rl and daz. 

But not necessarily that you couldn't have a user customization player experience contained within your game. But I could be wrong too. If its true though for the extreme interpretations, well that's just another supreme dumbo manager decision by somebody clueless who is totally out of touch with how games work in the present future.

I am very interested in this, if you can provide some kind of guide for how to do it I would really appreciate it. I have all three software as well, as it was my understanding that getting all of them would allow this kind of full access, and was quite disappointed to learn its limitations, and lack of useful documentation. 

These are some workarounds for getting morphs into cc3 by Mike Kelley, I think he is frequently on the forum here also and helps with questions. Very helpful but imagine you had to do this for many characters and morphs (it is bake to the base you brought it in with too, hack methodology imo)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkIi6t63Yrs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z9e9TF85ys
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkrPVSBbzWA
There was an older video by the main webinar/tutorial guy but I couldn't find it again which had the old 3dx stuff. But I did find this one in my bookmarks that touches on some aspects.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9_mcIOUrqY


Here is an official RL video on morph animating in iclone, they don't think we want to do this in game engine??? can't do it to any cc3 character products in game engine with no morph export!!! HEY RL: THIS IS WHAT WE ARE COMPLAINING ABOUT:
https://youtu.be/tN96oCe7ShM

Ok rest of this is probably more aimed at the RL team:

But its true, unfortunately most of the RL folks seem to be more oriented to making animation movies. Which, thats maybe great if you're making cutscenes for your game or something. But this kind of tunnel vision unfortunately leaves a lot of gaps and wasteland results when it comes to the game development pipeline. And the old days of videos for cutscenes... old... I'm sure its still done some but that is all being done live in the engine now with scripting, Timeline, Director, Slate, etc.

Where in the developer space we are concerned more with creating components, widgets, reusable objects, repeatable patterns and fast workflows. I don't want 5 min clip of cool animation, usually, I want 50 small chunks that smooth transition and can use over and over on many figures and actions.

I can't afford to spend many hours doing repetitive tasks. If I have to spend 8 hours hammering at a tool and then come up with results that are bugged (my 3dxchange experiences), then I have already lost a lot of money on it, more than the cost of the tools. And my odds of spending another 8 to get it working drop with each pass.

They don't seem to 'get' the nature and use of blendshapes in the game pipeline. They are only think in the concept of static figures, or skyrim character maker.
They don't get that we can apply code to blendshapes to create living breathing reacting changing meshes at runtime. And how blendshapes could be used across figures and instances.

Nor do I want to go through and make thousands of sets of custom mesh animations to apply to every possible character variant and action. I'm Indy guy, I need stuff that makes less work, not more work. If its a blendshape, I could export same morph on 10 different characters. Then in code I can have the same code on all 10, spinning the dials at runtime on the blendshapes. Now I could do same with bone animations sure, and do! One set to work with many characters sharing the same rig. But if I do this in mesh animations (which I have not even done it yet, so I may not yet know this flow correctly, I will try this later for premium up close character interaction) but then now it is a custom animation for the individual figure, and no longer shareable across the 10 characters. Now my workload has grown exponential if I want to mesh animate them all, because the mesh animation has to match the figure and clothes and have been done in iClone. Mesh animation also uses more cpu at runtime. Adding up... file sizes of game... adding up... Now here is another key they don't get: change management! If I did it that way, now we made hundreds of custom mesh animation, oops we decided we need to change the shape of this figure. Catastrophe!! Oh now you got to start over and make all new updated animations. But if I had just had it as a blendshape in the first place, well I could just change my figure and be done.

I can go in daz, take a figure and export it with blendshapes for facial expressions (smiles, wink, frown, etc)... and take that into unity, and then in code at runtime call a function maybe I named Smile and it smiles by altering the appropriate blendshape(s) value(s). Execute the Wink function by changing the blendshape in code at runtime, etc. And then do it all to any figure which has the Wink blendshape using the same code, ie reusable, shareable. CC3 no blendshape export totally torpedoes this whole game industry standard methodology.

Instead they answer back like, why does your CC3 have to be an NPC? well duh you don't 'get it' right? So, those kinds of answers don't make me happy. I am an independent software studio. I use Unity all day in that capacity. Primarily I work with enterprise content production and big data. But the rest of the time I am working to transition that to producing more game like content and experiences. So I'm not an expert on making character/animation but learn more every day, but when you are already learning what is a very challenging pipeline if you are going for AAA style work, and well who doesn't want that? So that when you hit these kinds of barriers and artificial road blocks its very frustrating. And hey if I'm doing it wrong or there is a better way, show me what it is, help us succeed.

Which, in some way RL tools are really sweet (clothing mesh tools etc OMG wonderful), and I continue to invest in RL at this time. And there are a lot of features I haven't yet been able to spend the in depth time with but look to be really super. But, there is some big gaps. I am hoping some significant updates arrive with Unity Live Link, if it ever arrives.

To me Time is the most important aspect of anything, time it takes to achieve your goals, time is money, mine or someone I have to pay (which is even harder because these days good luck finding that someone). I only have so many hours and what to choose to spend that on. When they give me a solution that wastes those hours, it is not good. When they give me a solution that reduces hours so that time can be more productive, then it is a win. So for example, just having the materials setup from the cc3 to unity autosetup, that alone was worth the price of admission of the whole suite of RL software in time savings. Of course now there is unity bridge from daz... but its still not as good as cc3 to unity, but maybe they improve... but they let me have blendshapes (so frustrating). Now if I could get the rest from RL... like blendshapes, that would be super. Because without that, I'm not sure it is really a valid solution set to use on a production product. Until then it is just a toy to see if maybe this can work, and maybe only parts of it are good production business.

OK enough rant for this week. Thanks!

Here's another clip on importing multiple daz morphs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytIf52Cym0o

Here maybe what we want can be done? It seems like it has to have been 'used' as part of an animation sequence which then the morph becomes available? Because when they open the export in this video into Maya, they have the blessed morph sliders???
RL official vid: iClone7 Visual Learning - FBX OUT
https://youtu.be/iKQbjG_d97s

There is another set of videos somewhere on making your own morph sliders too.

So since there is no CC3 or iClone UI that I can find which lets me choose morphs to export to unity on the character fbx...

But is there a secret backway which is make a short fbx animation which exercises all the morph sliders you want to export and then select that animation along with the character export?

It could save so many people who run into this frustration in the quest for blendshapes in the game engine if this is true. I guess I will now try an experiment. And think of all the potential customers that walk away by finding no obvious morph exporting. I think it has a lot to do with the culture difference and tunnel vision between those making animation videos, in the confines of iClone, vs the game development workflow where cc3/iclone are just a set of steps to aid in art creation and to get certain art contents into the game engine, and make animation to export (not iclone movies).

No, after more poking around in iClone I can't seem to do it. From the video maybe it looks like if you are cycling your character out of iclone, into zbrush, back into iclone, making custom morphs off the zbrush import, and then morph animating only those morphs, then when you export that resultant animation you'll get morph sliders on the final export? I didn't go all the way through. Because I could not find anyway to access any of my morph library, or the figure shaping morphs because they are all in cc3 and not iclone. When I click the morph animator button while my cc3 figure is selected in iClone there is no morphs for me to choose. If I click morph creator, and click the plus it wants me to import an obj or iavatar.

So between these two videos below... there it is!!! iClone doing what we all want. But the videos speed past the details. And as far as I can tell, you can't use your morph library, and using your daz morph and expression library is an epic hurdle that is a kludge of work arounds to get it in there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tN96oCe7ShM&feature=youtu.be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKQbjG_d97s&feature=youtu.be

And here is the product page: create your own custom morphs and import them.
https://www.reallusion.com/character-creator/custom-morph.html

So I don't know what the answer is... Can it be done? Is it just the UI and steps are spread out and buried?

Here's what I want: I want morphs (blendshapes) in Unity.
Ideally I want to take morphs I own and have interactive/export licenses for, ones from RL and Daz, and be able to use them, on my cc3+ characters in Unity.

Probably that is what everybody trying to mess with RL and Unity/Unreal wants. Why is it so difficult to achieve it?

Those are some interesting results from your research Garrett, thanks for sharing.

What I'm looking for, is to be able to set up a selection of body types (for instance skinny, fat, athletic), and then be able to morph between these shapes in the game engine. So I'd want to create custom morph targets and only export those, not the full range of existing morphs in CC3. Further, I'd like to be able to extend this to export clothing as well, such that the same blend-shape value for the body would extend to the clothing. Right now the method of exporting clothing without a body is a bit cumbersome, but that's a topic for another day.

As an indie developer, what we want is to be able to punch above our weight. The RL toolset and content is giving us exactly that ability. And we see a lot of potential in what more we could get out of the RL pipeline. Whatever can be done to streamline the production pipeline of characters into our game engines would yield absolutely massive benefits to our production. Morphing body types or face details, efficiently exporting clothing that fit on these body types, anything that make the export pipeline as streamlined and efficient as possible would be absolutely massive.

I'm not bashing RL for the lack of this ability, clearly the team is extremely talented and capable. So there's either a reason why they don't want to support it, or it's somewhere on their future roadmap and it's been of lower priority.

Clearly this is a must have for most games today. The ability to change clothes on a character, or change the look of a character, in the game engine, and not pre-export from the creation pipeline. To me, CC3 is a tool that allows my team to achieve amazing quality content at an affordable price and in a time that fits our production capacity and schedule, and that's what we want to use it for. Anything the RL team can do to enhance the efficiency of that workflow, to get content into our games with less overhead, to be able to quickly change details and re-export the full content portfolio back into our games, that's truly what we really need.

CC3 is so close to be amazing, and we're so passionate about what we do that we cry out about the few things that are still essential to our production and we see missing. So again, I hope that we can see exporting selected morphs as a part of the 2021 roadmap.

So yes, @Peter-RL, you're absolutely right that not all games require the ability to change clothing, or customize the look of a character, but more and more of them do, and I'm certain that the RL team wouldn't want to limit the CC3's applicability to just those types of games.

Very well put ptrefall!

I should probably limit my forum responses to when I'm not actively frustrated with a tool... LOL... but I'm gettin old and definitely there's a lot of other cranky devs around too. But anyway I like the way you put it better.

And you have detailed another fine use case that is hampered severely with this morph locking. And yes like in your use case, I only want to bring a few selected morphs, not all the morphs. In fact I think that in the 'make your own saved morph slider' steps if I did the hack steps to save a daz morph, then set that up as a custom morph slider, then did the iClone export, it might actually get me the daz morph to be in the final fbx export. But its a lot of time and steps to get it there, versus I could just take an original model directly into unity and have all the morphs without the headaches. I will have to try the whole series of steps later when I get more time.

Maybe what we should do is build a running list of developer use cases that are blocked, or made excessively tedious by the present limitations.
And please anyone chime in with better terminology for these line items if you have a better name to give it.
So far off the top of my head here's four, I think there is more.

1. Morph animating of character faces and bodies [in game engine]
2. Player customization of character face and body
3. Performance optimizing character mesh instancing and sharing techniques
4. Added change management and code maintenance burdens and risks

It might also be good for us to craft a list of features of the RL suite that presently do work great for the developer pipeline. Which could help them to not neglect those, or remove those.

Hello all
i am very new here, just installing the trial and reading about the software positives and negatives I stumbled into this discussion.
Can you explain me why you think that blendshapes are a Nono in Reallusion product?
I recently found this:
https://forum.reallusion.com/400067/Creating-custom-blendshapes-tutorial
where the workflow for unity blendshapes out of Iclone/CharCreator is nicely described.
So , why do you think, that this is not what you need?