Upgrade Character’s Realness to the Next Level
Get ready to unleash the full potential of your digital actors with Character Creator 4‘s Dynamic Wrinkle system! This groundbreaking technology is a game-changer for industry professionals who dream of creating characters with unparalleled realism and personality. With facial expression morphs triggering high-resolution wrinkle maps, you’ll achieve an astonishing level of detail and expressiveness that truly brings your characters to life.
The Dynamic Wrinkle system is intuitive, customizable, and suitable for game and cinematic characters of any gender, age, and ethnicity. You can even fine-tune the nuances that make each character unique, ensuring that no two characters are alike. But what really sets our wrinkle system apart is the combination of two cutting-edge technologies: Flow Map and Wrinkle Constraints. These technologies work in tandem to create realistic and stylized wrinkles, perfect for pushing the boundaries of realism for digital human actors and giving comical expressions to cartoon characters.
With a slew of customization options at your fingertips, you have complete control over the final result. And the best part? The Dynamic Wrinkle system is completely free with the trial or purchase of Character Creator 4. That’s right, you can dip your toes in the water and if you are hooked, upgrade to unlock all of its features when you are ready. So what are you waiting for? Join the revolution and discover the most advanced wrinkle system on the market today! >> Download Here.
Release note: CC4.2 update | Dynamic Wrinkles Arise | Wrinkle Essentials | Where to Find New Wrinkle Assets
See the latest update in CC4.2:
▪ Wrinkles Magnify Human Expressions – Facial nuances let your characters stand out.
▪ A Universal Wrinkle System – High adaptability for all ages, genders, and ethnicities.
▪ Real Human Wrinkles from 3D & 4D Scans – Hi-res scans 4K Texture Maps, Reactive Expression Wrinkles.
▪ Intuitive Wrinkle – Influence Sections, Wrinkle Texture Set, Custom Design.
▪ Our Proprietory Wrinkle Technologies – Flow Map, Constraint System, Rate of Appearance.
▪ Pipeline-Friendly Dynamic Wrinkles – Unreal Live Link, Unity, and Blender.
▪ Wrinkle Pattern Expansion for All Styles – 10 Expression Wrinkles for Realistic & Stylized Characters, fully customizable.
1. CC4.2 Spotlight 1: Wrinkles Magnify Human Expressions
Facial wrinkles are not just superficial details; they serve a deeper and more fundamental purpose of expressing our personalities. As our faces relax and complexions go blank, these wrinkles dynamically disappear, giving way to other expressions with their own set of unique wrinkles.
When it comes to digital actors, the inclusion of this complex system of wrinkles can make all the difference in having them appear truly life-like. While wrinkles are often disregarded as trivial, they are actually a crucial part of what makes us human, and their portrayal in digital characters can elevate their believability and relatability.
2. CC4.2 Spotlight 2: A Universal Wrinkle System
Our proprietary General Wrinkle system is designed to seamlessly enhance the appearance of CC3+ characters of all ages, genders, and ethnicities. With our system, you can generate wrinkles that blend perfectly with your character’s skin tone and are fully compatible with SkinGen layer effects. Its advanced CC Wrinkle shader enables high-resolution multi-texture blending, without sacrificing real-time performance.
3. How it’s made: Real Human Wrinkles from 3D & 4D Scans
Our wrinkle texture patterns are meticulously extracted and baked from a full set of high-resolution human expression scans. By creating complementary morph and wrinkle data within the guidelines of our stringent process, we can ensure digital human performances that are nearly on-par with real-life actors.
Experience the ultimate level of detail with our 4K high-definition wrinkle textures. Each set of wrinkles is carefully crafted with diffuse, normal, roughness, ao, and flow map textures, allowing users to customize the blend level of each map for the perfect appearance. And if you need to conserve space or optimize performance, our wrinkle asset library makes it easy to downsize to 2K textures without sacrificing quality.
Upon activation, the expression wrinkles are synchronized with the facial movements that are triggered by a range of animation tools in Character Creator and iClone. With tools that include key editors, puppetry, and look-at constraints to features such as lip-sync and facial mocap, you will never run out of options to bring out the most from your characters.
4. How to use: Intuitive Wrinkle
Influence Section
Expression Wrinkles are divided into 13 common facial regions that govern the wrinkles lines, crows feet, smile lines, and more. Users can intensify or neutralize any target region of the face, down to the individual channel map like Normals, AO, and Redness. The colored regions of the facial diagram indicate the set of texture maps that is currently being controlled for blending.
Wrinkle Sets & Facial Regions
The expression of wrinkles on a character’s face is defined by three sets of wrinkle maps with each set corresponding to a specific wrinkle pattern. When certain expressions are performed, the corresponding texture blends are triggered at the targeted area at sufficient strengths. Learn more about the expression wrinkles and their corresponding morphs by watching the demo video below.
Custom Design: Live & Flattened Workflow
With our innovative flattening technology, you can save and load wrinkle textures and use your favorite image editor to make unique modifications that suit individual characters. You can also modify live wrinkle patterns while ensuring compatibility with all other CC3+ characters. This flexibility lets you bring your creative vision to life with greater precision and ease than ever before.
Wrinkle Crease Profiles
Get the perfect smile for your characters with our specially optimized wrinkle profiles designed for CC3+ facial topology. These profiles enhance the overall appearance of your character’s smile, creating a more pleasant and inviting expression. To ensure seamless compatibility with your existing characters, apply one of these facial profile extensions before making any changes to your character’s expressions.
5. Why it’s important : The Uniqueness of Dynamic Wrinkle System
Flow Map
Realistic facial expressions are all about the details, and that’s why we developed the Flow map. As characters express deeper emotions, their facial muscles contract more, causing wrinkles to spread out over a wider area. With the Flow map, the wrinkle pattern gradually expands outward as the expression morphs intensify, providing an extra layer of realism to your virtual characters. Whether you’re animating a heartfelt conversation or an action-packed scene, the Flow map will bring your characters’ emotions to life in a way that feels natural and authentic.
Constraint Systems
Wrinkle Constraints are a game-changer for creating complex facial expressions in Character Creator. These constraints prevent overlapping wrinkles from conflicting with each other when multiple morphs are activated at the same time. By unifying the wrinkle pattern across facial regions, Wrinkle Constraints ensure that your virtual character’s expressions look natural and coherent, even when displaying extreme emotions.
6. Export to Major Platforms: Use Dynamic Wrinkle with Your Pipelines
Upgrade to Auto Setup 1.25 and gain access to the Expression Wrinkle shader in Unreal Engine, now equipped with advanced features like Flow Map and Wrinkle Constraints. Connect to iClone via Unreal Live Link or export your actors in FBX format from Character Creator to take advantage of these exciting capabilities. With this latest update, you can easily bring your virtual characters to life with even greater realism and detail. >> Free Download Here.
7. Customizable Wrinkles: Wrinkle Pattern Expansion for All Styles
Introducing our versatile wrinkle expansion pack, designed to enhance the realism and character depth of both realistic and stylized characters. With a vast selection of high-quality wrinkle patterns to choose from, you can easily customize and find the perfect fit, regardless of the character’s gender, age, and style.
These wrinkle assets utilize the General wrinkle standard, making them compatible with any existing CC3+ character so you can animate in iClone, export to Unreal, Unity, and even Blender.
Free Download:
>> Auto Setup for Unreal Engine: Release note, Plugin
>> Auto Setup for Unity : Release Note, Plugin
>> Auto Setup for Blender: Release Note, Plugin (scroll down to find the ‘Download’ button)
High-res 4K Wrinkles Scanned from Live Actors
Our high-fidelity source textures for the wrinkles were scanned using advanced photogrammetry and then meticulously refined in Zbrush. These textures are then partitioned into multiple high-resolution texture channels, which work in tandem to push the boundaries of realism.
5 Types of Groovy Notches for Toon Expressions
Wrinkle Essentials comes with a set of 5 wrinkle styles that are dedicated to cartoon characters and each style comes with its own unique groove profile to make them more interesting. >> Learn more about ‘Wrinkle Essentials’.
8. 3D scan & ZBrush workflow: Dynamic Wrinkle Design Guides for Character Artists
Reallusion is working on the tutorial and documentation on how to create dynamic wrinkle assets. For professional character designers or production studios who wish to create unique wrinkle assets for commercial projects. Please contact marketing@reallusion.com for dedicated support.
Website: Dynamic Wrinkle | Free Resource | Wrinkle Essentials | Where to Find Free Embedded Content
