All the upgrades, look awesome! great job Reallusion! but.. Character's still looks too flat.. SkinGen needs a fix to support displacement especially for older people and creature creation.  I've heard from tech that it would cause Characters to break/create seams.. yes, you can't just throw displacement textures on something that is not prepared for. I'm used to creating with Displacement, I know what's required and I know you have the tech built in to make it work -it's very possible and I could help you if you need it.

I also recently found a way for CC3/iClone to be lighter/have more performance, and will allow more layers that can handle the creation of displacement. I've reported it already but everyone should know that all Reallusion's non color textures, conversion and generation are using RGB color format and should be using Greyscale instead!

-why is this so important? -
 Currently all the textures are taking up 2x the Vram/maybe performance and hard drive space than needed.. For example 1 simple prop are typically using THREE non color images but might use more! Each texture when converted to greyscale becomes half the size (AO, Metal & Roughness, Bump and Displacement) CHARACTER's are mostly using 3 non color for EACH material!   Substance Painter also has acknowledged this issue when exporting textures although Substance Designer works correctly. 3DCoat also has this problem. 
  After all these years (for me since iClone 5) these textures have been bloating projects, slowing down all your Rendering and real time performance.   I hope Reallusion will offer a reward for this and all the other research/suggestions I have spent my time at personal cost discovering. 

I've also discovered a way how everyone can export Iray projects for rendering or render Iray direct faster (best choice rather than exporting a project if you use existing computer), bake physics faster by completely closing the viewport to get 3x more speed. (might have to additionally set iClone Resolution to 48x48. 

  I'm also the guy that came up with the method to disable/lower iClone's shader quality and increase virtual memory to 32 GB or more to increase stability, disable smooth mesh by subdivision (reenable in standalone) and allow large projects to be exported from Indigo which it seems was then also adopted to Iray.  Indigo is great, new version supports RTX acceleration and with the full Renderer you could have your own render farm and it also smooth mesh by subdivision can be reenabled in the standalone, Iray can not and isn't compatible -it would take days to export. Indigo should never had been dropped.  yes, I'm a bit off topic now but I'm just demonstrating that I know my stuff.   Anyway, mistakes are created and forgiven, but it costs everyone (including Reallusion) time and money.  I hope you reward those that take the time to improve the lives of others and Reallusion. 



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I'm not disputing that you might have found a way around it, but I recently tried displacement on a character and yes, it did pull apart at the seams.



Animating now to life itself --Walt Whitman 

Hello,
I have awarded free iClone 8 and CC4 upgrade and acquired the product number. The problem that I have is updating from iClone  7  to iClone 8; and CC3 to CC4. I checked the Reallusion hub for updates and there are no updates. 

How do you upgrade to iClone 8 and CC4 from iClone 7 and CC3 respectively?
Appreciate your help!

iClone 8 and CC4 have not been released yet. Release is expected sometime in the Spring.

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Hi...

iClone 8 and Character Creator 4 will not be released until Spring 2022. When they are released they will show up in the Reallusion Hub as separate installs. You can then install them onto the same computer alongside iClone 7 and CC3 or you can uninstall the older versions and just install the new versions.

                                                                

Peter
Forum Administrator

www.reallusion.com

make sense, thank you, @animagic

Thank you, @Peter (RL)

@Distiguished Member
Yeah,  you can't just throw heighmaps on a character and except them to work. There are two methods that can work 1. is take the  normal maps from each material, mirror it in photoshop because the normals are not correct/erratic and add it to the displacement channel for each material, set the smoothness to 1 in the adjust color panel. 
And this is what can be done:
 

There is a problem with how skingen blends normals from layers, you can't simply layer normals, it needs mathematical pixel offsets and I've explained this in the feedback tracker/provided the research. 

Any cracks between materials require displacement adjustments, 3DCoat for example, will export what each material's displacement map multiplier value needs to be set at but in my example above you'd just set the head to the ideal displacement multiplier yourself, then adjust the torso's multiplier next, then arms and legs so that there is a smooth crack free transition. You can open any texture in photoshop and darken the rim areas of the eyes on the head texture and nails on the arm texture and blur it to blend.

2. The other method I'm talking about is how models are prepped for displacement painting like my character here (custom meshes weight painted)  CC3 already has all the tech to make it happen for this method. They also have to stop the generators making non color images RGB instead of grayscale, or else all those textures become 2x the size, take up 2x vram and hard drive space.
This parasite CC3 Character is using is using my own sculpted mesh as cloth but on top of that is also using displacement.
 

My Troll character using a CC3 + Character topology  


Plus I applied soft body physics to make skin areas jiggle, something I proved works and could be made available to users if they reenabled physics for character they removed in early iClone 7.   
I'm not gonna spell it out for them how to do it, I've provided a lot over the years and they pay other people to figure it out, so they can pay someone else or offer to work with/or reward, but they currently offer no reward for your time,  yet have no problem dropping a lot of money for big contests, it just seems like your doing it for nothing especially if they use a few of your ideas in the next release but you can't afford to get it. I'm not mad at Reallusion at all, it's just their current model and likely haven't thought about incentivizing in this way. 

The only incentive for people contributing on the feedback tracker is if you are someone with a lot of money to drop all the time and need bug fixes, companies are likely cannot spare time to give them ideas. I've  dropped money since iClone 5.. For years they promoted to certified developers that they could get access to betas, I've asked but it never happened, there was no portal for this and then last year I noticed they removed that incentive. 













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Hi Ascensi,

Many thanks for your feedback and demo clips.
Please check your inbox for further discussions.

Best regards,
Fionn