I'll admit, I broke it in the latest versions of the main add-on with the new material shaders.

I was thinking of re-writing the baking code into the main add-on, as I thought the baking add-on was too incompatible with the new shaders. But looking at the code just now it might be a lot easier than I thought. So I'll give fixing the baking add-on a try.

Baking add-on brought up to date, with a few updates to the main tools add-on to make it work...

CC3 Blender Tools 1.1.6
https://github.com/soupday/cc3_blender_tools/releases
CC3 Blender Bake 1.0.1
https://github.com/soupday/cc3_blender_bake/releases

The baking add-on can bake the complex materials of the CC3 characters down to compatible export formats for Sketchfab, glTF, Blender Principled BSDF, Unity HDRP, Unity URP/3D.

It can also bake most Principled BSDF texture based materials (so long as it's the only shader node present) into these formats.

• For best results be sure to build materials for Eevee with Parallax Eyes. Some of the cycles shader versions (Tearline and Eye Occlusion) don't use the Principled BSDF and can't be baked.
• It seems to be most stable in Blender 3.0+.
• 2.93 has some crash issues when changing file formats of existing images (fixed by not changing formats in 2.93).
  
• Baking characters for Unity is a bit redundant now as the CC3 Unity Tools exist. But it is still useful for baking Unity compatible textures for other models.
  

Any thoughts on best practices for getting hair structures to work well using the material builds and bakes in blender cc tools and bake? So far, I can get it to work fine with a .png set up, but the .png ends up being too large. I try to use with .jpgs but blender exporter seems to keep creating .pngs of the diffuse and alpha combined regardless of what settings I try... am I missing something or am I trapped in blenders demands of .png hair only. If thats the case, i'll probably need to find a .png compression system. 

That's because Jpegs don't have an alpha channel, so to pack the alpha data with the RGB diffuse it can only use PNG for those textures.

You can uncheck the Pack GLTF checkbox and it won't generate the glTF packed textures and will leave everything as compressed Jpegs.
But keep in mind: The Blender GLTF exporter will pack these textures automatically into PNG's anyway, resulting in a .glb that is roughly the same size either way.

Since GLTF is mostly just a transport format, you could shrink the baseMap PNG's down and replace them with the baseColor and alpha Jpegs in the target application?
It depends what you are exporting the .glb's to.

Thank you for the clarifications! This matches the information I have as well, I should be able to make the best decisions on pipeline actions from here in regards to hair texture exports.
I am considering reducing the resolution of the packed .pngs to lower resolutions to compensate for the increased size, this solution is viable for my use case *edit: I see that there is a png compression already included in the bake tool. Thanks!

Hi... I'm kinda new to this and not very good.  I was wondering if there was an available tutorial for importing animated characters into Blender with this add-on.  I've managed to create the character in CC3, add an animation with iClone, re-export the character with animation (minus facial animation for some reason) as an FBX and import into Blender with this add-on.  The problem I'm having is that if I import physics (I'm using the same dress as you used on page 3 of the comments here), it turns into a very odd, globular mess.  If I import without physics and add them (I used the 'silk' physics option for cloth and hair), I get no physics.  I've spent the last couple of days trying out different things but haven't been able to solve this and honestly, with my lack of ability it's a bit like taking shots in the dark.  Any bit of information regarding work flow (for dummies) would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Bender's physics simulation is one of the most difficult aspects of Blender to get to grips with. If you're new to Blender I would suggest that you deal with the physics last.

Blender isn't like iClone, you can't arbitrarily play the animation from any point and expect the physics to work. The physics needs to be baked (from the Physics properties panel) or cached (by playing the animation from start to finish). Once cached/baked then you can freely play the animation, but: if anything changes about the character (position, rotation, scale, even material changes) the physics cache will become invalid and it will do all sorts of entertaining things, like the mesh exploding over the scene or flying off into the distance. Baked physics is a bit more stable

That's why I say the physics should be done last (at least for the character being animated), because once you have physics data in the scene, you can't change anything about the character without it going horribly wrong.

I did make a video about bringing a character with physics into the scene a while ago:



I think it's still mostly relevant. You'll notice that once I've played the animation though completely to cache the physics, I don't touch the character ever again.


Edit: The work flow for dealing with physics could do with some work. Maybe a way to turn the physics on and off for the characters so you don't have deal with it going crazy on you while setting up the scene. A way to bake the physics for the characters all in one go perhaps? So you can choose when to deal with the physics rather than being stuck with it at the start.

Hi Victor,
Many Thanks for the Physik Tutorial.👍
Greetings rosuckmedia

Hey guys, quick question. What facial expressions can be exported with the model to blender? I know that CC3 characters in blenders will have some expressions from CC3 as shapekeys, but I was wondering if the new ExPlus expressions will export too with my character? 

All facial expressions in the character will be exported. Though if you've got older characters created before ExPlus was added to CC3, you will need to add those expressions to the character first, also CC3+ base characters only.