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By Ellessarr - 5 Years Ago
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A option to export character morphs direct from character creator to fbx and engines like unreal.
currently you can export daz characters morphs direct to unreal throught fbx export and use them in unreal to make characters customization, but you can't do that with CC3 characters the only morph which are exported are few "facial blendshape morphs, could be awesome if character creator 3 could full export all morphs to the fbx to be used on the game egines like unreal or unity.
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By bloodzseekerz - 5 Years Ago
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7 months later this is still not added, but free software like Daz have it. Yes with CC you can make good looking characters (you can do that with Daz too and its free) but without being able to export morphs you can only make NPCs that you will see once in game and forget they existed. You can't create a customizable player character with CC, its only worth using it for simple NPCs as I said.
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By Peter (RL) - 5 Years Ago
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bloodzseekerz (8/9/2019)
7 months later this is still not added, but free software like Daz have it. Yes with CC you can make good looking characters (you can do that with Daz too and its free) but without being able to export morphs you can only make NPCs that you will see once in game and forget they existed. You can't create a customizable player character with CC, its only worth using it for simple NPCs as I said.
Why do they have to be just NPC's? Leading characters in games are not always customizable. Lara Croft from Tomb Raider or Nathan Drake from Uncharted are just two examples. Character Creator 3 can certainly be used to bring to life detailed ultra realistic characters that can be leading men or leading ladies in your games.
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By gabrielle - 5 Years Ago
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Hi Peter,
I agree that main characters do not have to be customizable characters just like you demonstrated with your examples. But customizable characters are also a part of games characters and something that would still be achievable with CC3 at this point but with a great deal of pain and efforts.
I too would be very interested in this feature (morph exports) but at this point, I could do with a straight answer to this question: is exporting morphs with fbx as requested in this post a feature that will come in an upcoming version (say 3.1 or 3.2), might come in a more distant future as the potential of the feature is acknowledged and understood but not a priority or is it already clear that this will never come to CC3?
I would really like to know where CC3 is going with this to be able to make an informed decision as to what to do with this part of my game in the future. A clear answer about that would be really much appreciated. Thank you.
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By Peter (RL) - 5 Years Ago
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Hi Gabrielle
Unfortunately exporting morphs is not part of our 2019 plan but it may be something that is added in future versions/upgrades. You can see (some) of what is coming in version 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3 in the thread below.
https://forum.reallusion.com/418339/What-to-Expect-in-the-Second-Half-of-2019
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By joao.henriques - 4 Years Ago
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its interesting that a tool advertised as being a pipeline to game artists lacks in so many really simple areas that almost all completion already have... for each new workaround I make to be able to use this I find another limitation making it impossible...
CC3 / 3Dxchange works really well... if you use it in there terms... you want to export body morphs from CC3... Nope... you want to use genitals since its part of the human body... ops also not... I'm used to workaround in my pipeline with free tools... buy for the money I gave for this I was not expecting...
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By micahpharoh - 4 Years Ago
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I just bought this last night and it seems like a great tool for my characters. But...
It seems really short sighted not to allow any morph exports to UE4. I'd like to allow for full character customization, but there are plenty of other gameplay implications as well. I just don't want to have Thug 1, 2 and 3 who you keep seeing over and over when we could easily have randomized faces. Or I could create a game where the character gets fat or more muscular depending on their activities. It just seems silly that the morphs are available to me but not usable for my game.
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By wink3319 - 4 Years Ago
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I have the exact same issue: I would like to adjust my character in UE4 using Morph Targets. I can do it with DAZ3D models but for whatever reason not with CC3 models. The function would be really helpful.
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By SeanPollman - 4 Years Ago
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I am extremely disappointed to find this. I just purchase CC3 this two days ago thinking I could use it and then implement randomly generated NPCs in my game, and a Character builder for the player, but the limitation of not allowing exporting morphs completely ruins that. I may be seeking a refund.
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By SeanPollman - 4 Years Ago
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To elaborate the only thing I expected from CC3 was the ability to export a character mesh with morph targets, so that I would only need a single character mesh, that I could then manipulate in-game to achieve different visuals. Doing it this way would reduce runtime overhead by only needing to have one mesh in memory and then instancing it to the other characters and applying the different values. As it stands now the only option for CC3 and video games is to have static characters, with unique character meshes for every character that you do not want to be the same, as a development resource, it makes CC3 practically useless.
Every single other product on the market can export morph targets, there are even ways that I can get morph targets out of CC3 using two other Softwares, but its time consuming, getting CC3 was supposed to save me time for development, not cost more.
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By bewise_studios - 4 Years Ago
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Hello,
can you send me what softwares do you use for CC3 morph export, please?
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By davydmayfield - 4 Years Ago
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Gday Peter,
Seriously all the new features added in CC3+ are awesome but there is no way I am going to fork out another US$229 (roughly $450 Australian) to add more morph targets if I cant export them into Unreal, I already forked out $100's of dollars to find that i couldnt export the body morphs like I thought I would be able to 
I would happily pay for the ability to add body and all face morphs to the export. The amount of hassle it would save would be worth it 
I understand as a company you want people to create there content in your editor, but for games having 50 different meshes for characters is a pain, when I could just export a male and female base mesh and a few specialized custom characters, and use morph targets to add variety to the characters in game. people editing morphs in game is not going to take away from your business model, hell it might increase the usage and your profit margins
I think you need to make this a priority, and am sure you would make your customer base very happy, and probably increase your customer base, people would stop trying to do the same thing from Daz
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By stkoenig - 4 Years Ago
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This has been the main limitation of CC3 since it first released and it is the only reason why I still have to use DAZ for all projects. I need to be able to selectively export morphs to my game engine, including body morphs. It's beyond me why after such long time this has not made it on the feature list yet. I've been making video tutorials for DAZ and CC for a while, but I stopped using CC3 and have to tell people who get excited about CC3 that morph export is not on the menu (beyond the included facial morphs). *shakes head*
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By Velo2 - 4 Years Ago
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I second all of this! I really would like to be able to export body morphs (i.e. muscle mass, belly size, leg size, arm size, etc.....) into the Unity 3D engine. I see that we have some of the facial blendshapes available, but none of the other body morphs. I paid thousands of dollars for this software and plugins only to find out that we cannot use the body morphs in our game engine of choice.
I am actually considering using the FREE UMA character system in Unity over CC3 + IClone because of this. To me this is really sad for a paid for product. I understand it's probably to control how people use the product overall, but could we at least get another "paid for" plugin option to be able to use the morphs? I too, would be willing to pay for at least an option to do so.
Please make this happen Reallusion.
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By kvergot - 4 Years Ago
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By animagic - 4 Years Ago
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Velo2 (10/1/2020)
I second all of this! I really would like to be able to export body morphs (i.e. muscle mass, belly size, leg size, arm size, etc.....) into the Unity 3D engine. I see that we have some of the facial blendshapes available, but none of the other body morphs. I paid thousands of dollars for this software and plugins only to find out that we cannot use the body morphs in our game engine of choice.
I am actually considering using the FREE UMA character system in Unity over CC3 + IClone because of this. To me this is really sad for a paid for product. I understand it's probably to control how people use the product overall, but could we at least get another "paid for" plugin option to be able to use the morphs? I too, would be willing to pay for at least an option to do so.
Please make this happen Reallusion.
Did anybody put this as a feature request in Feedback Tracker? That is the only way to make this visible as a request and also allows the feature request to gather votes.
RL products have a varied user base and what seems essential for you may not be of interest to others.
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By garrettg11 - 4 Years Ago
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Why do they have to be just NPC's? Leading characters in games are not always customizable. Lara Croft from Tomb Raider or Nathan Drake from Uncharted are just two examples. Character Creator 3 can certainly be used to bring to life detailed ultra realistic characters that can be leading men or leading ladies in your games.
Obviously the above is not spoken by a developer. No blendshapes is total fail for bringing a character to life with code. And definitely some of the CC3 development decisions are oriented to appeal to small indi game developers. It sort of seems to be that we are the target market demographic at this point? I selfishly hope so at least. Maybe they should talk and listen to some developers on exactly how much of a kibosh on functionality it is to not be able to import, export, and manage blendshapes on the figures for game use. And subsequent 'bringing the character to life' with code on the blendshapes, especially facial expressions.
I'm a total fan of the whole Reallusion toolset and pipeline, and especially the end product of the cc3+ character that I end up with in the game engine after following the complete pipeline which is a far, far, better, lighter, (and now with skingen even better looking) much more usable thing than one could ever get if they just moved a g8 figure into unity and setup the materials. I have all the things Reallusion could want me to buy. But this, this is what kills you for your success into the indi/solodev/smallbiz game dev space. And of course the big studios are not interested in the pipeline, they have dozens of people on Maya, Max, etc etc. Let us import, save, and export morphs. You could sell so many more copies and all the plugins etc. I already own them all and know how great they are. I see clearly how accessible and user friendly, and powerful these tools can be. Reallusion is so much more friendly of a toolset to a developer type user than any other I have found. But now I have found the Achilles Heel.
Heck make it a paid addon, plugin whatever IDC I WILL BUY IT. YESTERDAY.
Vote Vote Vote Issue 7313
https://www.reallusion.com/FeedBackTracker/Issue/Import-and-export-morphs-Not-just-clothing-and-hair
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By garrettg11 - 4 Years Ago
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I'll add, I realize there is a technical challenge to achieve this, to reproject the morphs to the new figure structure, etc. And another angle which I did not mention in my feedback tracker issue is, probably it would need a UI mechanism to enable/disable (maybe just shift them to a disabled directory) sets of imported morphs in the interfaces, rather than incurring the performance degradation of having the daz way of hundreds of morphs accumulated always loading up.
Maybe at one time there was some business sales decisions regarding monetizing morphs. But at this point maybe they should rethink that angle. As much as I love buying the new content store pack that seems to arrive about once a month or so... The other content marketplaces out there now combined are producing more new content per day than Reallusion content store and marketplace puts up in 6 months. But also the content store is not even selling me any morphs I could export on my character as blendshapes in the first place. But that aside, its not even that, when you are viewing this from the customer and developer viewing lens... Not having this feature set, just one example is that it also even prevents me from hiring an artist to sculpt custom expressions or basically anything not completely baked, for any figures and game use. So ya it blocks other marketplaces content, but then also blocks any content at all. And well not being able to have blendshapes to code to in the game engine, just do some background research, it is a mystifying decision.
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By kvergot - 4 Years Ago
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All of your points in both posts are right on!
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By garrettg11 - 4 Years Ago
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I'm a fountain of ideas today... here is another feedback issue... VOTE VOTE VOTE
https://www.reallusion.com/FeedBackTracker/Issue/Ability-to-create-custom-morph-dial-blendshapes-for-export-to-game-engines
It dawned on me why can't I even just make my own expression or set of body morph dial configurations and save them as a morph dial I made myself to then export it? How awesome would that be? You can do it in Daz already.
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By garrettg11 - 4 Years Ago
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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
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By ptrefall - 4 Years Ago
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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.
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By ptrefall - 4 Years Ago
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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.
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By garrettg11 - 4 Years Ago
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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.
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By SeanPollman - 4 Years Ago
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garrettg11 (11/20/2020)
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...................
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.
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By garrettg11 - 4 Years Ago
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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!
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By garrettg11 - 4 Years Ago
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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?
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By ptrefall - 4 Years Ago
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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.
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By garrettg11 - 4 Years Ago
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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.
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By klobbi1212 - 4 Years Ago
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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?
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By garrettg11 - 4 Years Ago
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Thanks klobbie1212! You must have attained the magic search term combination. This is a really great find. Its the first demonstration I've seen which actually shows how one might get a morph other than the built-in ones into unity. Its also the first I've seen showing the key piece of sending it from iClone back into CC3 after setting up the custom morphs instead of exporting from iClone to something like Maya. Reallusion should give this lady a job. I think I have said in previous posts that it seems like we should be able to do these things but where and how, and that the information is all over the place spread out. And also in the past I've been told it can't be done.
They should consider perhaps to learn two important things, they need better documentation and tutorials which gear toward the game engine workflows, including some step back and look at the overall common use cases to then cover those end to end flows. And second they should consider structural improvements to streamline the complicated many step zig-zag tool use pattern presently required. I think I have read that eventually they are going to merge CC3 and iClone into a single app, and perhaps that will help a lot. I have often thought to myself that they should have someone internal employed as a tester whom is working the tools in the paths that a developer would encounter, to help pinpoint the information gaps and the structural pain points that are encountered to then facilitate the streamlining of RL development and ensuring the training material meets the needs. As well then they could continue to gauge the quality of the results that are produced in Unity whether that is blendshapes accessibility or hair, eyes, and texture results improvement. In fact some of the new daz bridge results have been promising enough that we have been struggling a bit to decide whether to settle on CC3+ as we had planned, or just doing our own thing with G8, and focusing our RL use on iClone for creating exportable animation, and leave the CC3+ until further improvement arrives.
In fact on her video description she says:
"Hello! I wasn't able to find this anywhere on line and figured it out on my own so decided to create a tutorial. "
I'm sure that there are many users or potential users for which RL toolset is an auxiliary component in much larger workflows. And the time they may have to spend on decoding its mysteries is limited. I'm lucky if I can spend 8-10 hours on RL spread over a week. And a significant chunk of that time will be spent waiting on import/exports during which the tool is locked up busy, and you cannot run multiple instances sadly, even if one has plenty of horsepower to do so. And then of course one wants to spend a lot of that time actually learning/doing/editing animation clips to export.
I will be trying out these new steps at the first opportunity.
Thanks for finding and posting this!
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By garrettg11 - 4 Years Ago
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Well I took some time to try her tutorial steps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZXQs2TVDE4
It doesn't work. But I could not even take the steps as far as Unity, since the morph slider steps gave me a slider that instead of applying the face expression I had setup it shrinks the whole body in a strange way which I found while testing it in cc3. And there is no point to try to test that in unity.
Also on the tutorial video there are many comments about it not working or various alternate steps but more saying it doesn't work. Or that they take it all the way to unity and the morph doesn't work there also.
I also tried some alternate paths by following the CC3 manual and creating a saved iavatar first to use in these steps:
https://manual.reallusion.com/Character_Creator_3/ENU/3/Content/Character_Creator_3/3/06_Customizing_Morphing_Sliders/Morphing_Current_Character.htm
That flow produced a slider that had no effect.
So, unfortunately I don't have all day to experiment and guess as to what the work around should be if there is one. Maybe RL can produce a proper tutorial and check for bugs in their app?
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By garrettg11 - 4 Years Ago
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Also, one of the comments on the video was:
"But this is only good for facial morphs not body morphs. So if i wanted to use corrective morph shapes for like elbow and other joints since CC3 doesn't seem to do a good at skinning weights, therefore when arms bend they look rubbery not realistic. Is there a way to get around this, or would we have to re paint skin weights in a separate DCC?"
This is descriptive of a significant problem with CC3+ figures in Unity that I have observed and am not happy about, which, it would be SUPER if there was something to deal with that.
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By der_kenshin - 3 Years Ago
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Hi everybody
It's already an older post but here I found a workaround to get them into the engine.
https://forum.reallusion.com/472137/WIP-Custom-Morph-Tool-morphing-during-runtime
Greetz
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By SeanPollman - 3 Years Ago
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Neat, do you plan to let us know how? it would be quite useful, and hopefully not terribly tedious.
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By amazinde - 3 Years Ago
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I am having a hard time with this process, is there a tutorial on how to do this?
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By amazinde - 3 Years Ago
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Is there a tutorial on how to do it? I can't find anything and I need this Bad!
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By joao.henriques - 3 Years Ago
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There is no tutorial since its not possible to achieve with real illusion software. If you need this kind of basic features you will need a different pipeline.
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By SeanPollman - 3 Years Ago
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joao.henriques (4/27/2021)
There is no tutorial since its not possible to achieve with real illusion software. If you need this kind of basic features you will need a different pipeline.
This is actually not true, it is possible, I've done it, it's just unreasonably tedious. about 20 actoions per morph, and required 3d software like blender to remerge them all, the end result isnt even something that can be considered a reallusion basemesh, but has near-identical morphs.
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By mark.jsday - 3 Years Ago
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I agree exporting of blendshapes/morphs is a vital part of character creation in a game.
I was able with a basic script able to take morphs from CC3 into Unity without any issue.
CC3 Steps
1. Choose a base character e.g. cc3 female base
2. Reset the morphs to ensure all are default
3. Export out a clean base character (fbx) to unity folder e.g. cc3_base.fbx
4. Dial in a morph e.g. abdomen to 100
5. Export out a base character (fbx) to unity folder e.g. cc3_base_abdomen_100.fbx
Unity Steps
1. Create an empty game object and reset its transform (e.g. call it blendshapes)
2. Attach the following component script to it
3. Assign the body mesh from the Base character to the source property
4. Assign the body mesh from the Base_Abdomen_100 to the target property
5. Play
Notes
This works with morphs that don't resize the character in height.
To achieve morphs that change the height you will have to do something
like
a. Calc delta pos of the base bone positions and the morph bone positions
b. In the LateUpdate()
{
Calculate new bone positions from blendshape weights
Calculate bind poses for new bone positions
Create new mesh
Assign bind poses to the new mesh
Assign new mesh to character shared mesh
Update the animator
}
Make sure on import of the fbx to unity to set Read/Write in import settings.
Result
You will notice that the blendshape on the base character skinned mesh renderer will show the blendshape "test" with the slider working
Hope it helps
Mark
using UnityEngine;public class BlendShape : MonoBehaviour{ public SkinnedMeshRenderer source; public SkinnedMeshRenderer target; // Start is called before the first frame update void Start() { Vector3[] verts = new Vector3[target.sharedMesh.vertexCount]; source.sharedMesh.ClearBlendShapes(); target.sharedMesh.ClearBlendShapes(); // Calculate delta verts from source to target for (int i = 0; i < verts.Length; i++) verts[i] = target.sharedMesh.vertices[i] - source.sharedMesh.vertices[i]; source.sharedMesh.AddBlendShapeFrame("test", 1, verts, null, null); source.sharedMesh.RecalculateNormals(); source.sharedMesh.RecalculateTangents(); }}
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By creationsmaxo - 3 Years Ago
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While exporting morph could greatly help many devs fast-forwarding in the development of their game(s) project(s), I got to point out that there are also a TON of possible ways of handling morphs which, in most cases, also means the morph can't be just "made and done" universally. Because of that, the current "best" way of handling morphs is to use CC3 (or iClone) as a base, then modify the pre-result through a 3D software like blender, Maya or 3Ds Max (yeah yeah, I know).
For example, you don't morph the whole body in any game engine as that's simply a huge waste of CPU over the Vector3 calculation prior to the rendering pipeline (done through the GPU). You usually use a mix of in-engine mesh manipulation (cloth for example) with an armature-based rig (bones) with "some" parts done done with a morph (face). Obviously, there are exceptions, but that's the general way of handling it. You usually try to minimize the morphed area to as few vertex as possible because the cost of a morphed vertex is at least 3x bigger than that of a skinned vertex (make it 4x if it's a skinned + morphed vertex). Bones are still highly used for anything "repetitive" and general.
To make it work, you got to think of thinks as tools and steps and not just whole-solutions. Having some knowledge in using mesh data in the game engine is also an HUGE plus.
In my case, I use CC3 initially for building 4 version of a character (per gender) with 1 single base (same amount and IDs in the vertex), rig only one of those (no morph yet) in Blender, export the 3 non-rigged + 1 rigged into Unity.
In Unity, I generate each character as a brand new skinned mesh, by generating the same vertex values (vertex position, triangles order, UVs, etc.) as each of the 4 variances, but by multiplying the value based on a Vector2(x,y) where X is the value between variance A and B, and y is between C and D. Then, I apply the same weight values as I registered one of the 4 variance on each vertex by their Vertex IDs. (Remember, each of the 4 variances used the same base, meaning they got the same vertex in the same order as well as the same UVs, but just placed differently in their vertex positions.)
This allow an quite simple flow and same you a LOT on performances when it comes on creating character as you don't really have a skinned + morph mesh, but just a skinned mesh generate morphed purely once via script.
What about morph movements then like some lips-sync? You can use a old-fashioned bone-based mouth animation or... generate your own blend shapes!
With unity, you can add new blend shapes Link to the Unity Document about adding Blendshapes.
To add a blend shape, use the code shown in the link above twice with the same (yet unique) string name (called shapeName in the link's declaration above).
The weight is basically where, on a 0-100% value, the blend shape is located where so, yeah, you can add multiple "shapes" in line. (It has to be added in the proper order, so you can't add a blend shape at 25% if you added on at 50%.
You can literally take the each of the "blendshape" source (which are regular mesh) and feed their data to the AddBlendShapeFrame() call.
I know I make it sound simple, but it's not necessary that simple. To add proper blend shapes through script on a pre-morphed-now-regular-skinned-mesh, you got to take into account the morphed mesh, hence you have to generate the same morphed data (like mouth animation) for each of the variances, then as you add the blend shape, you got to multiply the value by each of the variants the same way as the regular non-blend-shapped way explained above. At the same time, using this method can be used for specific characters who needs it and avoid the waste on characters that don't need a proper morph.
In my explanation above about having 4 variants, I'm usually using that for having A and B as age-variance of a skinny version while C and D are the muscular version of the same age-variance.
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