Table of Contents:
Expression Wrinkles
Progressive Texture Loading
Unreal Related
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Expression Wrinkles
Materials can store a lot of data as demonstrated in the illustration below (for more information, see the Online Manual). Because the Wrinkle system is encapsulated in the material data, it has a few limitations. We will talk about these limitations and offer workarounds. Solutions for currently known limitations due to the constraints of the data structure:
Notice 1
An instanced material can be shared across multiple characters and Expression Wrinkles are part of those instances. By default, cloning a character (Ctrl+Drag) will also instance its materials and cause any adjustments to the wrinkles to affect all of the clones.
FAQ: Instanced material and wrinkles | Character Creator 4.2
Solution: Right-click on the instanced material under Modify > Materials and select Make Unique. After having done so, you can then operate the material independently from the other cloned characters.
Know more >
Notice 2
Adjusting base texture strength affects the entire Wrinkle appearance. You can observe this phenomenon playing out on the normals by changing the character’s diffuse texture to pure gray and adjusting the normal strength.
FAQ: Base texture strength affects the entire Wrinkle | Character Creator 4.2
Notice 3
Wrinkles lose their effects when any one of the base textures under Texture Settings are removed.
FAQ: Remove base textures lose wrinkle effects | Character Creator 4.2
Notice 4
Deleting textures on a character with General (Live) Wrinkles applied generally takes a while (with 2K Live Wrinkle textures taking around 7 seconds to remove). This is because the Live Wrinkle system uses the character’s textures to calculate the final appearance in a Substance compositing graph.
Notice 5
Currently, there is a problem with adjusting instanced Wrinkle settings. While the base data of the material is updated in real time, the appearance of the other cloned characters fail to update automatically within the viewport.
FAQ: Adjusting instanced Wrinkle failed update viewport | Character Creator 4.2
Workaround: Select the cloned characters to force update their instanced materials.
This problem persists for Overall Influence, Strength, and Rate of Appearance > Speed attributes (pictured below) while other attributes: AO and Crease Line, Redness, and Normal Strength work as expected.
Progressive Texture Loading
Notice 1
When Preference > Performance > Delay Texture Loading is enabled and the textures have not finished loading, users are prevented from rendering images/videos and exporting FBX files. This is because textures are required to properly run these operations.
FAQ: Texture loading delay with disabled UI | iClone 8.2
Notice 2
Enabling Preference > Performance > Delay Texture Loading > Manual Loading has an adverse effect on static and animated textures in Unreal. This problem affects General Wrinkles, skin color, and Smart Hair.
You can see how this defect appears around the 2 min mark in the following video. Once the textures are loaded and the character is transferred to Unreal, the shader textures behave correctly.
FAQ: Not finished texture loading causes the visual problem | iClone 8.2
Unreal
Unreal Performance Settings
Under certain circumstances, Unreal Engine 5 has a tendency to switch performance settings. For instance, using Unreal with remote access causes Live Link to perform poorly and the engine will automatically scale back on the settings for real-time feedback. If this happens to adversely affect your working environment, make sure to check the Unreal preference settings. For example, by disabling Edit > Editor Preferences > General > Performance > Disable realtime viewports by default in Remote Sessions, you sync the camera movements between iClone and Unreal via remote access.
FAQ: Unreal LiveLink preference settings | iClone 8.2
Create a MetaHuman with the exact features of the CC character
By exporting a mesh with Character Creator's Export Head feature and using the "Mesh to Metahuman" plugin for Unreal Engine 5, one can create a MetaHuman with the exact features of the CC character.
Only an internal test video is provided to demonstrate the process of using AutoSetup to apply CC textures. An explainer video will be released shortly with details of the entire process.
- Mesh to MetaHuman using geometry exported from Character Creator (Export Head).
- Apply CC Textures in Unreal
- Use Unreal Engine's retargeting feature, drive the MetaHuman by controlling the CC character.
- The result is a MetaHuman with CC textures applied (skin and wrinkles) with motion driven by the CC character.