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Festive Character Animation with iClone BuildingGen, Character Creator and Houdini

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Project “Henshin!” (変身!) is a one-minute full CG animation, showing a uniform-dressed crowd celebrating during a festive time. Made with Character Creator, animated in iClone and environment decorated with the latest BuildingGen Plugin. This is also John’s artistic and metaphorical transformation, representing his exciting leap from Cinema 4D to the captivating world of Houdini.

John Yim

Kay John Yim is a Chartered Architect at Spink Partners based in London. He has worked on a wide range of projects across the UK, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, including property development and landscape design. His work has been featured on Maxon, Artstation, CG Record and 80.LV.

Yim’s growing passion for crafting unbuilt architecture with technology has gradually driven himself to taking on the role of a CGI artist, delivering visuals that not only serve as client presentations but also as means of communication among the design and construction team. Since the 2021 COVID lockdown, he challenged himself to take courses in CG disciplines beyond architecture, and has since won more than a dozen CG competitions. 

“Henshin,” a beloved term in Japanese Anime for initiating electrifying transformation scenes, fittingly translates to “transformation.” In this project, I blend the pulse of modern dance with the grandeur of Gothic fashion and architecture. Inspired by the vibrant and whimsical dance scenes in Anime, I sought to capture that same energy and playfulness in “Henshin!.” As a former Cinema 4D enthusiast, this project marks my first deep dive into Houdini’s procedural magic—a transformative experience for me as both an Architect and a CG Artist. Houdini’s unique node-based interface was intimidating at first, diverging significantly from what I was used to. To navigate this new terrain, I balanced experimentation with thorough research on relevant use cases. In this article, I will outline my workflow, highlighting the key takeaways and challenges I faced during this project. I will also share valuable resources, including articles and tutorial links, that helped me troubleshoot and ultimately achieve my desired outcome.

Intro – why I switched to Houdini

Rhino has always been my go-to tool for 3D modeling as an Architect. Its accuracy and intuitive user interface, reminiscent of hand drawing, made it my favorite for over a decade. My muscle memory in Rhino modeling was so ingrained that I became very accustomed to a ‘manual’ or ‘destructive’ workflow. In the early days of exploring CG rendering, I turned to Cinema 4D as my gateway to third-party renderers like V-Ray, Redshift, and Octane. My process involved exporting models from Rhino into MOI3D and then into Cinema 4D. This repetitive workflow, especially with frequent design iterations and client brief changes, was grueling. Yet, I brute-forced my way through, never considering an alternative.

A turning point came a few years ago while working on an Unreal Engine project, ‘An Unreal Diorama‘, which required baking hundreds of texture maps in Substance Painter. The sheer volume of repetitive tasks quickly overwhelmed my excitement and physical stamina. Desperate for a more automated solution, I discovered Houdini. Houdini’s fully procedural nature was a revelation, easily handling repetitive tasks. At first, I used Houdini as a Cinema 4D ‘plug-in,’ exporting models into Houdini for poly-reduction, quad-meshing, or UV-mapping before re-importing them into Cinema 4D for rendering. Over a year and a half of intermittent use, I gradually transitioned most of my modeling, texturing, and rendering tasks into Houdini. This shift unlocked new possibilities for my professional and personal projects, particularly in iterative FX like pyro and flip simulations, cloth simulations using Vellum, and procedural modeling.

Character (iClone + Marvelous Designer + Houdini)

My character workflow began in Character Creator, where I primarily used the body morph sliders and Skingen to create my two characters. I then brought the characters into iClone and explored the Actorcore library for mocap animations. I chose 5 sets of Actorcore Motions and blended them into 3 sets of character animations:

The ‘Edit Motion Layer‘ and ‘Motion Correction‘ functions were the ones I used most frequently.

Edit Motion Layer’ allows me to manually keyframe character movements with IK joints
‘Motion Correction’ helps me fix foot sliding.

I always set the first frame as a T-pose or A-pose, with at least 15 frames of buffer before the character animation starts. A-pose is recommended for cloth creation in Marvelous Designer and cloth simulation in Houdini Vellum.

Tips: 15 frames of buffer is set before the animation!

Once I was happy with the character animation, I exported it from iClone as both Alembic and FBX files for use in Houdini and Marvelous Designer. The Alembic file was my primary working file throughout the project.  Note that at the time of writing Houdini has a known bug that does not import iClone FBX characters’ accessories properly (hair, clothes, shoes etc.), so I recommend using Alembic to avoid issues down the line.

Cloth Preparation

The character clothes are prepared separately in Marvelous Designer using the first frame of the exported Alembic file from iClone. Cloth creation is a complex topic beyond the scope of this article, but I generally look for sewing patterns on Etsy or start with the clothing templates that come with Marvelous Designer by default.

There are two essential points I always keep in mind during this process:

1_Avoid adding garment details with overlapping cloth (e.g., the hem of a dress), as this can cause issues during cloth simulations with Houdini Vellum.

2_Maintain a particle distance above 10mm for the garment. Lower particle distance increases the simulation time in Vellum.

Marvelous Designer’s cloth simulation is extremely user-friendly, but its lack of control over partial simulation and collision masking makes it unreliable for art direction or design iteration.

Once I have the garments fitted to the character’s A-pose, I re-topologized them as quad mesh (right click on garment ‘Quadrangulate’) and then export them as OBJ files into Houdini (as welded). Note that Alembic files exported from Marvelous Designer do not include any material data, so unless I am exporting animations from Marvelous Designer I always default to exporting in OBJ.

Vellum Simulation in Houdini

With both the character animation and garment A-pose imported into Houdini, I first use the ‘Transform’ node to scale them down to the correct units. Houdini’s native unit is meters while Marvelous Designer and iClone works in centimeters, so I always have to scale imported files down by 0.01.

My overall cloth simulation workflow in Houdini can be categorized into four main stages:

i: Character pre-Vellum setup

I separated the main body from the rest of the body parts, including the eyes, shoes, and nails. From the hundreds of Vellum tests I did, I found that armpits are the most problematic areas during cloth simulation due to the minimal space for the cloth mesh to fit into. To address this without delving into muscle simulation, I perform a Vellum simulation solely on the main character body, with the armpits masked out to solve intersecting frames. This simulation resolves skin intersections and prevents future issues down the line.

This workflow is also outlined in detail on SideFX’s site: ‘Vellum Cloth: Tips & Tricks.’

ii: Garment pre-Vellum setup

I first separated the imported OBJ file by materials. I used a handy free plugin ‘MASSEParmUtilities‘ to do this, but one can just use ‘Blast’ nodes to do the same. My principle is to always perform Vellum simulations on each separate clothing item before combining multiple items in one simulation, making iteration and fine-tuning more efficient.

I manually painted masks on the cloth to define which parts of the clothing should ‘stick’ to the animated character at all times. Buttonings of jackets were also defined with paint masks. The paint mask attribute is then promoted to point groups with a simple expression: @mask_name > 0.5.  I then used a ‘Point Deform’ to deform the static clothing to the animated character.

This process involves a lot of trial and error, as Vellum properties vary by mesh density and do not adhere to real-life metrics. I usually begin with the Fabric Samples found in the SideFX Content Library. SideFX documentation recommends using a ‘Remesh’ node to triangulate clothing into uniformly distributed triangular meshes before Vellum simulation, as triangular meshes use fewer points than quad meshes (renderable mesh) to capture more details (e.g., wrinkles). However, I find that quad meshes can produce more realistic simulations for thicker fabrics like leather. I always run test simulations with different mesh densities on both quad and triangular meshes whenever time allows. One of the best tutorials I found online on Vellum setup is ‘Houdini Vellum Creature Setup’ on CGCircuit, which explains how to set up multi-layered clothing for Vellum simulation in great detail.

iii: Vellum simulation

Once I had all the separate simulations dialed in, I brought all the clothing together using either a ‘Vellum pack-unpack’ workflow or by combining them into a single stream.

I personally prefer setting up multilayered cloth simulations within a single stream, as I find it much clearer to read and easier to attach different cloth parts together when necessary. For instance, I attached the jacket sleeves to the shirt sleeves to ensure that the jacket does not slide down the character’s arm when her arm is lifted.

iv: Post-Vellum clean-up

On average, it took me about 40 iterations to achieve the final Vellum simulations that I am happy with. I usually add a ‘Post vellum’ node after the simulation to smooth out some of the spiky or rough surfaces. Vellum sometimes produces jittery results during minimal animation (e.g., idle character animation with very little movement), for which I use the ‘AE temporal smooth’ node from Aelib to eliminate unnecessary movements.

With all the simulations cached, I use a ‘Point Deform’ node to transfer the simulation from a low-res/triangular mesh to a renderable/quad mesh.

Cloth Transformation

The cloth transformation is composed of three parts:

i: Disintegration with Sop Solver

Disintegration is essentially achieved with a Sop Solver that spreads and accumulates grouped points, using a Blast node to delete points with values above a certain threshold. I first learned about the Sop Solver from Applied Houdini’s tutorials—Particle IV covers the theory of the Sop Solver and how to spawn particles (such as petals) along the disintegration effect.

Applied Houdini – Particle IV / Another great intro to SOP Solver from Far Out Studio:

In retrospect I could have used a combination of ‘MOPs Spread Falloff’ & ‘MOPs Clip by Attribute’ to completely replace my aforementioned setup, both nodes could be found within the free MOPS houdini toolkit and simplifies a lot of what I did for this project.

ii: Pyro simulation with Axiom Solver

With the SOP ‘Solver’ cached, I blasted out the disintegration edge and fed it into the Axiom Solver for the pyro simulation (the same result could also be achieved by Houdini’s Pyro Solver, Axiom Solver is speedier on GPUs) . The resulting pyro simulation is then fed into a Pop simulation to generate swarming particles onto which I instanced butterflies. The butterfly swarm consists of nine time-shifted variations of the same butterfly animation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJa5RbQK9zU&t=2s

See the cloth transformation result!
Pyro sim result.

iii: Butterfly spawning with Pop simulation

I setup a TOPnet for all my simulations, such that in case when I have to tweak my character animation and re-import into Houdini from iClone, I could just press a button and let Houdini re-run the Vellum simulation and cloth transformation automatically overnight, rather than checking manually.

Environment

What’s the point of Procedural Modeling

Coming from Rhino NURBs modeling, procedural modeling has been one of the most challenging aspects of learning Houdini for me. As the only DCC tool that enables a fully procedural workflow, many online Houdini tutorials advocate for a completely non-destructive approach to modeling. However, this can be technically overwhelming and time-consuming. To determine the complexity of the procedural setup needed, I ask myself two questions:

Is there a possibility that I will need to model something very similar later on, or is this a one-off project?

For most architectural or geometric objects loosely modeled from photos, I prefer to keep my setup as procedural as possible. However, for one-off projects where I’m recreating an existing product, such as a chair or sofa, I may model it in Rhino and then bring it into Houdini, knowing that it’s less likely to be modified later on.

How strictly do I need to adhere to the reference, and how much freedom do I have to tweak the design of the environment?

For architectural modeling, if I’m tasked with modeling a house based on a loose sketch, I’ll set up everything to be procedural, anticipating that every dimension and proportion may change. However, if I’m provided with a CAD drawing, I might model everything in Rhino and then export it into Houdini with material attributes.

My procedural modeling workflow

Throughout the project, I typically adopt a hybrid procedural setup (10% destructive, 90% procedural) for efficiency. For instance, the altar arch-shaped screen begins with curves drawn in Rhino by tracing a reference image. Since Houdini’s curve drawing utilities are relatively primitive compared to Rhino, I prefer to do any line or curve drawings in Rhino first. This included the backbone curves of the altar screens as well as the profile/section curves.

Later, I bring them into Houdini either as FBX (planar mesh) or IGES (NURBs curves).

In Houdini, I utilized a ‘Sweep’ node with imported backbone curves and profile curves to create the main arch. Subsequently, I added more intricacies by manipulating the same backbone curves with ‘Soft Transform’ and ‘Transform’ nodes. Then, I used ‘Copy to Points’ to duplicate them geometrically, using the arch shape as the foundation.

Frequently used nodes

Here are a couple of nodes that I constantly utilized for a procedural modeling setup. The name of the nodes are “Match Size”, “Labs Extract Silhouette”, “Labs ExtPolyExpand2D”, “Sweep” and “Boolean & Thicken (AELib)”. Pleas see the illustration below for detailed info.

‘Match Size’ to center objects to the origin or align objects with each other.
This node provides a 2D outline of a geometry, many of which I extruded for ‘Boolean’ operations or as a backbone curve for ‘Sweep’.
‘PolyExpand2D’ offsets curves based on a defined distance.
‘Sweep’ can quickly generate cubic or circular sections along them.
‘Labs Extract Silhouette’ together with ‘Thicken’ to create a base shape for ‘Boolean’ operations.

Assembly, Look-dev & Shot-framing

Assembly, look-dev, and shot framing were not linear processes; they required extensive back-and-forth testing to achieve the final result. I parent objects to ‘Null’s when moving them around in the scene. This way I can easily replace the object in the same position by re-parenting the ‘Null’. I used ‘Instance’ objects as much as possible to populate my scene in order to reduce RAM usage, this included the altar screens, the characters, chandeliers and the floating petals. When working on materials or shaders, I always prefer to work in context—viewing through the final animation’s camera, with appropriate lighting and environment settings—rather than isolating different objects. This approach ensures that I focus my efforts on objects and materials most visible on camera. To maintain a relatively mysterious atmosphere throughout the animation, I emphasize bottom-up artificial lighting. A major part of the look-dev process involved testing the placement of bottom-up light sources to enrich the scene. Here, Reallusion’s French Style BuildingGen Content Pack proved invaluable. This pack includes nine variations of detailed houses, optimized with minimal point counts and baked textures.

BuildingGen & French Style House Content Pack

Assembly, look-dev, and shot framing were not linear processes; they required extensive back-and-forth testing to achieve the final result. I parent objects to ‘Null’s when moving them around in the scene. This way I can easily replace the object in the same position by re-parenting the ‘Null’.

I used ‘Instance’ objects as much as possible to populate my scene in order to reduce RAM usage, this included the altar screens, the characters, chandeliers and the floating petals.

When working on materials or shaders, I always prefer to work in context—viewing through the final animation’s camera, with appropriate lighting and environment settings—rather than isolating different objects. This approach ensures that I focus my efforts on objects and materials most visible on camera.

To maintain a relatively mysterious atmosphere throughout the animation, I emphasize bottom-up artificial lighting. A major part of the look-dev process involved testing the placement of bottom-up light sources to enrich the scene. Here, Reallusion’s French Style BuildingGen Content Pack proved invaluable. This pack includes nine variations of detailed houses, optimized with minimal point counts and baked textures.

BuildingGen & French Style House Content Pack

Using iClone’s BuildingGen plugin, I exported all the French Style BuildingGen presets into FBX format. I then imported them into Houdini using a simple drag-and-drop method, facilitated by the Houdini plugin ODTools. ODTools automatically created a Material network with all the materials exported from BuildingGen, allowing me to easily drag and drop the building textures into the network.

I separated randomly selected windows as Redshift Mesh Lights and scaled the buildings down to knee-size models, effectively turning them into miniature floor lanterns. I scattered points on the ground and placed the nine variations of the French Style buildings onto these points using an ‘Instance’ object. This method added significant visual detail and provided fantastical direct light to the scene without overwhelming global illumination.

Additionally, I scattered two variations of chandeliers and spheres across the scene as light sources to diversify the “floor lantern landscape”.

Adding Camera Shake

I introduced a subtle random camera shake to the camera’s parent ‘Null’ and added an extra layer of noise, keyframed to sync with the dragon’s fire breathing. I personally find intense shakes disorienting and indicative of a haphazard, handheld filming style, so I keep camera shakes minimal to mimic the steadiness of heavy cinema cameras.

Rendering

As SideFX’s native GPU render engine Karma exits beta in Houdini 20, there is a lot of push from official tutorial and Film industry veterans promoting the migration of rendering into Solaris (LOPs) from OBJ context.  Having done extensive experiments with Redshift in both OBJ and LOPs, LOPs is too time-consuming to set up for a one-man team and slower to render with Redshift in general, so I kept the entire project in OBJ context.  

As John’s long-term partner and also his favorite render farm, Fox Renderfarm stands out in the CG industry since 2011, offering fast & secure cloud rendering services to 3D artists, VFX companies, and animation studios.

Managing objects in the OBJ context can quickly get messy – unlike LOPs where everything is node based and has to be interconnected, everything in OBJ is loosely positioned.  I used ‘Bundles’ to manage my OBJ render sets in Houdini OBJ Redshift; this allows me to render and debug objects separately whenever necessary.

Motion Blur

To render characters with correct motion blur, I enabled the ‘Deformation Blur’ option under Redshift ROP. Using a ‘Trail’ SOP, I calculated the characters’ velocity and transferred this velocity to all the clothing using “Attribute Transfer’. Without this step, I noticed that at higher ‘Deformation Blur’ settings, the characters’ skin would pierce through the clothing.

Irradiance Caching Trick

To reduce rendering time, I rendered a single irradiance cache from the first frame, setting the motion blur frame count to twice the total number of frames in the final animation. Although this is not the officially recommended method for rendering sequences with significant motion, I found that it mitigates the ‘light patches’ issue often caused by small light sources and can save up to 10-20% of total rendering time.

Post

With the whole sequence rendered, I used Red Giant looks for slight color correction, adding lens artifacts like halation and chromatic aberration to soften the final render to a more “filmic” look. As John’s long-term partner and also his favorite render farm, Fox Renderfarm stands out in the CG industry since 2011, offering fast & secure cloud rendering services to 3D artists, VFX companies, and animation studios. To celebrate its success in cloud rendering service, Fox Renderfarm offers a special welcome offer with exclusive $50 USD render points. (Link: https://bit.ly/4f9VQQN)

Afterthoughts

Transitioning to Houdini has opened up numerous possibilities for both my personal and professional work. The number of iterations this project required to reach the final result would have been impossible without a procedural setup. Houdini fully procedural nature enables me to very quickly update files exported from iClone, Marvelous Designer or Rhino; its capability to handle heavy scenes is also superb compared to other DCCs; for instance, Cinema 4D would have struggled with more than two high-res characters and constantly crashed the viewport. However, as much as I love Houdini, I cannot wholeheartedly recommend it to everyone. It has notable shortcomings in areas such as sculpting, curve drawing, modeling from CAD data, and freehand drawing or painting.

Additionally, I do not recommend Houdini for projects that need to be completed within a very short time frame, such as an artistic brainstorming session within a couple of hours or a day. In my early days of using Houdini, its procedural nature could quickly turn a fun artistic project into a technical nightmare, diverting my focus from achieving the render to getting lost in optimization rabbit holes.

Despite all the technical hurdles, “Henshin!” represents a significant personal milestone, a thematic and technical “transformation” that has profoundly shaped my approach to future projects.

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create toon-shaded character with Character Creator and Cinema 4D
Featured Story

Design Toon-Shaded, Sci-Fi 3D Characters Using CC & Cinema 4D

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This article is featured on 80 Level

Calder Moore

Hey Everyone! My name is Calder Moore and I’m a digital artist that focuses on both 2D and 3D illustrative work. I’ve been in the industry for over 12 years doing everything from preschool tv shows, numismatic coins, video games, board games, and even trading card games. I’ve worked for companies like Disney, Nickelodeon, Google, Royal Canadian Mint, Magic: The Gathering, and Dungeons and Dragons.

My passion though, has been creating art for my personal project, In Search Of, a sci-fi anthology project where I explore creating and developing 3D stylized scenes that take place within a gritty dark universe. For the first few years of making art for this project, I had only really created landscape and location art, never really diving into creating characters for it.

I had all these vast landscapes and cities, but the world I was creating still felt lived-in but very vacant at the same time. Last year I wanted to change that and start to bring some life into the universe inside In Search Of and figure out how to create animated characters without any knowledge of rigging and very little for animation.

Calder Moore’s Artstation

So with that drive to make characters, I reached out to a few friends, one of which had recommended checking out Character Creator 4. Once I checked it out and saw what it had to offer for character bases that are fully rigged, UVed, and completely customizable to top it off. After a couple of weeks of tinkering around I finally found a sweet spot that blended CC4s realistic characters with my stylized rendering. After creating about 10 of these stylized characters I have established a solid workflow that I would love to break down for you today!

Throughout this breakdown I will cover my workflow for creating these stylized animated characters using Character Creator 4, Zbrush, Marvelous Designer, Substance Painter, Cinema 4D and finally rendering using Arnold Render.

Reference Images for Stylized Character

I’ll start every character and scene the same way, with collecting reference images and inspiration to build up the overall idea and direction. To do this, I like to explore through Pinterest and Artstation, collecting everything together with PureRef, a great mood board tool for collecting images together and creating collages to refer to as I create the character. When I’m looking for reference images, I wont search for a similar character to what I’m wanting to create but rather bits and pieces to help create what I have in mind. Stuff like jackets, sci-fi gadgets, color scheme inspiration, fabric inspiration, face sketches, and other photography or sketched characters that help to inspire the general direction.

Sketching the Design

Once I get all my reference inspiration and idea of where I want to take the next character, I will sketch out the design and further flesh out the idea. To do this I’ll use either Photoshop or pen and paper. When I’m sketching the character I’m not really trying to create a finished piece, but more of a solid direction to guide the 3D workflow with. I feel like it’s important to figure out the direction with even just a quick sketch as it makes the 3D process much more efficient as you have a direction to go into, without a sketch or direction, you’ll find a lot of time is wasted as you don’t really have any direction and aimlessly creating in 3D which tends to take much longer than a quick sketch would.

Character Creator 4 and ZBrush

When I dive into creating the character in 3D, I start by building the base model using Character Creator 4. This amazing tool provides great character bases that are already rigged, UV-mapped, and fully customizable in a non-destructive way.

I’ll load up the CC4 Neutral male or female base model and then go into the morphs tab and play with the sliders to adjust the face to what I want to have for the character. With these characters being a bit stylized, I’ll push some of the features more extreme then they would normally be to help give them more of that character I’m looking for. Things like a bigger nose, sunken eyes, prominent cheekbones. Stuff where the shader can interact with as well as push the silhouette.

Sometimes though I’m not able to push the forms into where I wanna take them, and that’s where the ‘GoZ’ function comes in handy. I’ll send the character over into ZBrush where I can sculpt the forms a bit more into exactly how I want them and then click the GoZ button in Zbrush to send the adjusted model back into CC4 where it updates to reflect those changes. This workflow is so good for not having to worry about reweighting the geometry as everything still works perfectly.

Once I’m done adjusting the model, I’ll then export it as an FBX checking on ‘current pose’ and ‘first frame in bind pose’ to have a nice default state to attach assets onto with.

Marvelous Designer

Next I like to bring the exported model into Marvelous designer, which is an amazing tool for creating the clothing for characters. It’s a physics-based software where you can create clothing for your characters with accurate folds/wrinkles and everything you need to create realistic looking clothes. Depending on the character concept I’ll either start from scratch or find a template to build off of that you can find in all the 3D marketplaces and one their website.

Because I had the sketch for this character, I had a great direction to go into for creating his clothing. I created a simple turtle neck shirt as I knew I wanted to play with the branding logo and the sheen of the fabric and not have it be too noisy in the end. For the jacket I wanted to build this mix of a ski jacket and a classic pilots jacket with the wool collar. With that direction in mind I had found an ok base jacket as a starting point, then tweaked the base shape into a spot I was happy with. After that I added details and cutlines to help guide the viewer’s eye up toward the face, which is the end focal point for the character. I knew I could create the wool collar better in Cinema 4D so I left that for later as well as any of the hardware on the jacket and all the lettering on both the jacket and the shirt. I then exported everything as FBX.

Substance Painter

With the stylized nature of this character and how I built the toon shaders, neither blend well for creating an interesting face so I like to bring the head portion of the model into Substance Painter to hand paint all the face details. This is another great reason why I like the CC4 models so much — as I don’t have to UV the face!

In Painter, my scene is very basic, I’ll usually turn on the wireframe and lower the opacity for that just to get an idea of where I’m painting on the face and get a sense of the contours as I’ll work in diffuse mode . Then I’ll start to block out the general shadow areas, as well as the areas that help define features like around the eyes or wrinkles on the forehead. You’ll notice that all the face details are done through hatching and not just a solid line drawing out the detail, this was something I found works much better for this style, as the solid lines pushed it too far towards that borderlands look.

Because this guy is older and battle worn, I had then pushed the bags under his eyes a bit more, added moles, dings, small deformations to push the face in a more asymmetric way and lastly the giant scars that reach across his face, I added the pinkish color in them so they are more pronounced compared to the skin color.

Lastly, I export out the texture to apply to the character in the Arnold shader.

Cinema 4D

Now that I have all my externally created assets done, I can import everything into Cinema 4D, My main software of choice for all my modeling, scene creation, and rendering. I import the CC4 character, Marvelous Designer clothes, and will import the face texture later when I have the material ready for it.

With the jacket imported I’ll then work on the finishing details for that, adding the hardware bits and pieces, the comms unit, the text on both the shirt and the jacket, and the wool collar using C4D hair generating thick and short strands of hair that look like wool once rendered with the shaders. Next, I added the face hardware, modeling the face piece that wraps around the head and acted as a bit of a cybernetically repaired eye and the receiver side of the comms unit.

Next, I tackled more of the face with importing the face texturing and applying it to the face using my Arnold toon shader setup. This also acts as a guide for me to shape the beard around that I created using C4D hair. After molding it into the shape and form I wanted I turned off all instances of gravity or any forces in the scene as I have to keep the hair ‘live’ so it reacts to the CC4 Pose Morphs on the face.

With all the pieces modeled and set up, I then attach all of it to the CC4 rig that gets imported. The jacket and shirt I skinned and weighted as well as some of the smaller hardware pieces on the jacket. For the headwear and comms unit stuff, I created constraint nulls that reference the bones where I wanted the pieces to be attached to. Like a head constraint for all the head assets and added those assets as a child to that null. Rinse and repeat until all the accessories are attached to the character and everything is ready to be animated. I had also created his pet that I sculpted in ZBrush and imported into C4D and rigged for animation.

After that, I created the animation loop using the CC4 rig and pose morphs that come with the character model. I’ll start by creating his base pose then keyframing everything at the beginning and end of the timeline, and then block out all the middle poses I want him to have throughout the animation. After that, I refined all the in-between areas, added the extra details with pose morphs like blinking and reacting to the pet as well as adding the eye movements.

Arnold Render

Throughout the creation and assembly of the character within C4D, I’ll work in tandem with Arnold, rendering out WIPs and checking on how the shader is reacting to the geometry, or how the face texture looks when rendered out.

To render the scene, I’ll usually have just a direct light casting down on the scene to mimic the sun, and for these characters, I render them using a parallel or isometric camera. The shader itself is a toon shader where I’ve gone and customized the entire setup with a series of nodes to create this stylized look that I can then adjust all aspects of where I can tune it to each surface it’s applied to. The shader is built into a few main sections. Creating the inner line details like hatching lines, speckles and bigger stains. Then, the light and color area where I can play with all the colors that make up the lit and unlit areas. And lastly, all the masks that tell the previous sections where to show up on the model based on stuff like the scene lighting, Facing ratio, procedural noises. The shader itself can look quite intimidating, but it’s mostly just layers of blending things together by multiplying or adding, like in Photoshop, or mixing together based on those masks.

I’ll find a good camera position and light angle for the character and lock it in place fairly early into the workflow, as I find it helps to have a good direction to tune the shaders too and be able to refine them throughout the workflow.

I’ll create a bunch of duplicates of the main shader where I’ll then change the colors for them, or in some cases, add the face texture or adjust how much of the lit area shows up to change the material from looking like fabric to metal. I’ll then apply these shaders to the character and refine them until I’m happy with the result.

When rendering using Arnold, you can add a bloom effect onto the render which I love to do. I’ll adjust it so the light on the character gives off a nice glow, adding that little bit of extra detail onto him.

Lastly, I render out all the frames and composite it together using After Effects.

Conclusion

Even though the character is complete visually, they are still not quite fully finished. I’ll send these over to my buddy Duskosound to create the SFX as well as a backing track for all of the characters to just push them that much further and bring them to life that much more. After he works his magic, they are fully done!

So with creating over 10 of these characters now with a bunch of very different concepts, some not even having any human to them at all, I find myself still using that CC4 rig and this workflow to create them. For the fully cyborg characters I will use the rig, but then use the body geo as a guide on where to add the metal details so they still have the sense of being human.

After creating over 10 characters with a variety of concepts, some of which aren’t even human, I still find myself using the CC4 rig and this workflow. For fully cyborg characters, I use the rig and the body geometry as a guide for adding metal details, ensuring they maintain a sense of humanity.

My process and style is always evolving, and with every character I make, I tend to explore something I haven’t tried doing yet. What I’ve loved with using CC4 is that with this very stylized look and even when I replace everything but the rig, I still find it such a useful tool as it speeds up my process so much and it’s super easy to use and get great results out of.

Learn More

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The original article was written by Calder Moore and is also featured on 80 Level.

The submission deadline for the 2024 Reallusion 3D Character Contest on September 1st . Work from a CC base to vie for top prizes in character design and animation, or use other software and tools to create original characters and use AccuRIG to pose and animate your characters to perfection.
Events

Last Call and New Sponsor Prize: 2024 Reallusion 3D Character Contest

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It’s now or never

The countdown is on. With the submission deadline for the 2024 Reallusion 3D Character Contest on September 1st (PST), there are only 30 days left for 3D enthusiasts worldwide to join the fun! Work from a CC base to vie for top prizes in character design and animation, or use other software and tools to create original characters and use AccuRIG to pose and animate your characters to perfection.

This is your chance to shine! Winners will be showcased in magazines, promotional videos, and marketing materials seen by millions online. Don’t miss out on this golden opportunity to showcase your skills around the world!

$2,700 boost to the prize pool

Fox Renderfarm has joined our esteemed roster of sponsors, raising the stakes by offering $2,700 worth of render points to the top 18 winners. Additionally, Fox Renderfarm is providing an exclusive $50 USD coupon for newly registered members using this link. If you’re looking for top-tier cloud rendering services, now is the perfect time to register.

The expanded prize pool for 2024 Reallusion 3D Character Contest, now includes:

  • NVIDIA ASUS ProArt laptops with NVIDIA RTX 4070 GPU
  • Maxon One License (includes Cinema 4D, Forger, Red Giant, Redshift, Universe, ZBrush)
  • Rokoko Coil Pro, Rokoko Smartsuit Pro II, Rokoko Smartgloves, Rokoko Headrig for iOS
  • Noitom Perception Neuron 3 Body Kit
  • Kitbash Cargo Pro
  • 3DConnexion SpaceMouse® Enterprise
  • KeenTools FaceBuilder Studio License
  • TexturingXYZ VFACE Commercial License
  • Fox Renderfarm Render Coupon (ranging from $100 to $300)

Freestyle your way to a $500 cash reward

Are you eager to showcase your unique style and brand through your own characters? The AccuRIG contest category is perfect for you. Simply rig an existing 3D character with AccuRIG, then repose and customize it to your liking. Make sure your character stands out to secure $500 cash.

The opportunity is still available for 3D artists ready to explore the advantages of AccuRIG. Don’t miss the chance to bring your incredible models to life before the September 1st deadline!

Featured Story

Creating Advanced 3D Animations with Perception Neuron Studio

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Alejandro de Pasquale – Motion Graphic Artist / 3D Animator / Filmmaker / Content Creator
Alejandro de Pasquale – Motion Graphic Artist / 3D Animator / Filmmaker / Content Creator

Alejandro de Pasquale

Since the age of 9, Alejandro de Pasquale embarked on a creative journey, crafting his first rudimentary comics and discovering his fervent passion for storytelling. With each passing year, Alejandro honed his creativity, delving into diverse tools and skills to encapsulate narratives across a spectrum of challenges.

From scripting movies to producing motion graphics for various enterprises, Alejandro explored the avenues of storytelling, eventually finding his true calling in breathing life into characters and immersive 3D worlds. I

Lately Alejandro has been creating episodes for his EVA Project, which is an animated series using Unreal Engine and Reallusion tools like iClone and Character Creator (CC).

The EVA Project is about a character who awakens to find herself and others in a mysterious high-security complex, with fragmented memories hinting at a destroyed Earth. As she explores the surface, she seeks answers about the past and the technology that keeps them confined. The project combines digital storytelling with motion capture and shares its development process through online tutorials​

EVA Project, is an animated series using Unreal Engine and Reallusion tools like iClone and Character Creator (CC)
EVA Project, is an animated series using Unreal Engine and Reallusion tools like iClone and Character Creator (CC)
EVA Project, is an animated series using Unreal Engine and Reallusion tools like iClone and Character Creator (CC)

In EVA episode 18, Alejandro de Pasquale tested the Perception Neuron Studio mocap suit. The project focused on optimizing 3D animations with iClone 8, using ActorCore for specific movements like falls. By exploring iClone and the Unreal Engine, Alejandro has been able t streamline familiar processes and identified areas for further enhancement.

WORKFLOW PROCESS:

  • Character Creation and Motion Capture:
    • Developed all 3D character animations using Perception Neuron Studio, leveraging its advanced motion capture technology for realistic animations.
  • Animation Optimization:
    • Optimized animations to enhance character movement and fluidity, using iClone 8 features like:
    • Utilized ActorCore for specific actions, such as fall animations, ensuring precision and realism.
  • Challenge Management and Execution:
    • Managed multiple characters and intricate action sequences, overcoming the challenges of solo animation production.
    • Employed a comprehensive workflow that enables a single animator to produce high-quality animations efficiently.

This episode highlights the potential for individual creators to achieve professional 3D animation results using advanced tools and a strategic workflow, reflecting the power of modern mocap technology.

Follow Alejandro de Pasquale:

https://www.youtube.com/user/alerendersoc

https://www.facebook.com/aleRENDER

https://www.instagram.com/alerender_ae

https://www.artstation.com/alerender

Related Posts:

iClone is the fastest real-time 3D animation software helping users easily produce professional animations for films, previz, animation, video, and games. iClone simplifies the world of 3D Animation in a user-friendly environment that blends facial performance, character animation, mocap production, scene design, and cinematic storytelling.
Learning

Nine Reasons Why Cartoon Animator is the Best 2D Animation Software

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So, you want to be a cartoon animator? Maybe you have a story to tell or need to put together a pilot for pitching your show. Maybe you want to learn what this 2D animation thing is all about and why so many people are excited about it. With the web, there is unlimited potential to get your work out there in front of as many eyeballs as possible and maybe trigger a few opportunities.

The trouble is that the work has to get done, whether it is a one-person operation or a team, the work still has to be planned, animated, and produced. You do the planning and Cartoon Animator 5 will help with the animation and production.

While there are more than nine reasons to use Cartoon Animator, let’s take a look at nine of the most standout reasons to embrace this software for your projects whether you are a seasoned pro or too new to animation to even know what to look for.

1. Facial Animation & Lip Sync

Facial animation and Lip Sync have long been strong suits for Reallusion since the days of CrazyTalk. The Face Key Editor and the Face Puppet give us control over the facial expressions of our characters. Both tools have a small learning curve and can be productive on first use. The more experience you gain the better your animations become over time.

A few features of the Facial Key Editor include Morph, Template, and Free Form Deformation

For Lip Sync you can load the file with the character selected and Cartoon Animator will do the rest. If you aren’t satisfied with the results you can go into the timeline and edit the visemes to get the outcome you are looking for.

Auto Lip Sync and Editing

You can also Record Voice, TTS (text to speech), MP4, and Cartoon script which dates back to the days of CrazyTalk.

Cartoon Animator’s facial animation and lip sync tools are easy to use giving you one less thing to worry about while making your masterpiece.

2. 3D Motion Support

The ability to use 3D-based motions cannot be overstated as many 2D animators are also 3D animators with a large library of 3D motions. While it might seem confusing to some, Cartoon Animator can make use of those 3D motions with its import 3D motion popup.

Some tweaks can be made in the popup, but it works well just by loading the motion and then continuing. The popup provides a section for camera projection from -180 to 180. There is also a Motion subsection with a Ground Offset slider and checkboxes for Hand Contact, Foot Contact, Root Motion, and Flip Body. Below that is a checkbox for Camera Tracking.

Furthermore, in ActorCore you can find a collection of Cartoon & Anime motion assets designed for 2D-styled characters. Easily import them to Cartoon Animator and project the movements to your character for advanced performances.

3. Motion Capture Animation

Motion Live 2D is a go-between interface for recording and importing motion capture from a variety of solutions. Cartoon Animator can get you started with motion capture devices like webcams, iPhones, Leap Motion, Perception Neuron, and Rokoko. While not all of these solutions are within everyone’s budget, it does include more affordable ways to get started using a Webcam or iPhone for facial capture and Rokoko smartgloves for hand motion capture. From there on to full motion capture suits, Motion Live 2D is an easy-to-use interface to provide mocap solutions for your 2D animation projects.

For more information on mocap solutions please visit the following pages: FACIAL MOCAP (Webcam), FACIAL MOCAP (iPhone), HAND MOCAP BODY MOCAP

4. 360 Head

The 360-degree head simplifies the work of presenting your character from multiple angles. You can do a quick setup or go into a more detailed setup depending on your needs. The Quick Head Turn Setup uses a head-shaped mask for a boundary that keeps the face within that mask. This gives us the option of turning the head within the mask to create different angles without a lot of confusing work if you have never done this before.

If you want to get into more detail there is another mode, Toggle Head Turn Layout, that will provide much more control with more points available for more turns of the head. All this without additional sprites to keep things simple if you are learning while still having the tools of FFD, Transform, and Sprites for more advanced work.

The 360 Head and Head Creator eliminates the difficult and confusing learning curve when trying to emulate 3D movement in a 2D environment.

You can also purchase 360 Head characters from the Content Store and Marketplace. There is the 360 Head Maker with drag and drop head assembly tools and the Face and Hair Tools.

The 360 Head and associated tools make it easier than ever to animate 2D heads in a 360-degree manner.

5. Motion Pilot

Motion Pilot is one of those tools, that when released, had a huge impact on users. It also had a big impact on new animators who could now animate more easily with the movement of a mouse. From personal experience, I can attest that this is one of my go-to tools for fast 2D animation due to my experience being in 3D. Now legacy 3D animators like me can join in on the 2D fun with little to no learning curve.

To quote from Reallusion’s website:

Motion Pilot is tailored for a new wave of 2D animators seeking opt blend simplicity and efficiency. With its intuitive, real-time interface, it empowers you to effortlessly animate characters and props using puppet animation techniques.

When I say using a mouse that also includes tablets with pens or a stylus, the point is that the animation is created by following the input device across the screen or drawing surface. Draw in some easily added spring bones, set their parameters and you have just added more motion to the animation. All in one pass after the spring bones are added.

Motion Pilot is just one of many 2D animation tools packed into Cartoon Animator. Like other tools, Motion Pilot saves time which saves expense and frustration leading to a more pleasant and creative animation experience.

Motion Pilot Features

Transform

Transformation is at the heart of puppeting, providing you with the ability to effortlessly manipulate the movement of objects. You can axially guide objects, rotate them, adjust their size, or automatically reorient them using flips and turns.

WATCH TUTORIAL

Wave

Generate naturalistic wave motions by adjusting its frequency and amplitude, then sprinkle in a bit of noise for pizazz. To time the wave patterns with precision, align its cycles with the cursor speed.

WATCH TUTORIAL

Motion

Puppetry can facilitate character animation and prop motion. Through straightforward mouse control, frame sequences can be played back with smooth blending of animated effects like free-form deformation and elastic motion.

WATCH TUTORIAL

Flock

Simulating natural flocking behavior and controlling the animation tempo has never been simpler. You can establish a leader and its followers, define the animation sequences, and choose between uniform or random delay times to create organic swarms.

WATCH TUTORIAL

6. Motion Path

Motion Path, not to be confused with Motion Pilot, is another easy-to-learn tool that allows you to “animate anything along a path”. This makes quick work out of tasks like airplanes, helicopters, and spaceships flying across the screen or animating a passage across the sea with a map and a ship icon to show the progress as it moves along the path.

You draw out a path, pick an object like a prop or a character, and assign it to the path. There is a Path Properties dialog box that pops up allowing you access to attributes like Path Progression, offset, rotate, and scale. There is also a Follow Path check box with a drop-down menu offering a positive or negative axis to follow.

The Path Progression slider is where Cartoon Animator sets keyframed positions along the path. If you want the object to be 35 percent down the path at frame 200 you go to frame 200 and set the Path Progress to 35 percent.

Yes… it’s that easy.

Watch Tutorial

7. Spring Dynamics

To use Spring Dynamics you will need to create bones that can be converted to spring bones. The process of creating the bones is shown below and is a very simple task to complete. Don’t let the necessity of creating bones stop you from using spring effects. This is a skill that new users can pick up quickly as creating bones is a fundamental part of making your own, custom characters.

Another big dog on the block when it comes to quickly animating anything from a simple image to a more complex object with lots of moving parts, Spring Dynamics is a hero in its own right. Like Motion Pilot, this tool adds another layer of movement that does not require manual keyframing and is done on the fly as the program runs along the timeline.

Whereas Motion Pilot is for a specific movement, Spring Dynamics adds that extra flair of moving parts that inherit movement from the character or prop they are assigned to.

8. FFD – Free Form Deformation

Free Form Deformation is a tool that many 3D and 2D animators are familiar with. It is a bunch of dots (handles) across a grid that allows you to move those dots deforming the image. If we move up or down the timeline between deformations, you get an animation that morphs from one deformation to the other.

Yet another easy-to-learn and use tool that has many uses and makes quick work out of an animation task from swaying flowers to more complex movements like the roaring TRex shown in the demo video below.

9. Pipeline (PSD, Vector, AE)

Cartoon Animator’s 2D animation pipeline utilizes SVG and PSD file types and works with both Vector and Bitmap formats that will export to industry standard tools. The Image and Vector sections of the Preferences panel are where we hook up our editors such as Photoshop for image and Illustrator for Vector.  

This allows for a seamless passthrough (round-trip editing) to the preferred external applications in both directions eliminating the need for export and import.

Currently supported for Images are Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo, Clip Studio Paint, and Krita along with Photoshop. On the Vector side supported applications include Affinity Designer, CorelDRAW, Inkscape and Illustrator.

Create new characters and props or edit existing items with tools used by professionals around the world.

Speaking about professionals, to get a cinematic finished look in Cartoon Animator projects, After Effects plays a crucial role in providing high flexibility in final compositing and VFX editing. AE Script contributes a seamless workflow to reconstruct exported CTA projects as AE layers, while keeping the keyframes and Z-depth of all objects, along with the sound and camera movements.

And… here is a little bonus if you haven’t checked it out already. Take a look at motion link. This is a live link between Cartoon Animator and iClone to create and edit 3D motions! Not only can you convert 3D motions to 2D as mentioned above, but with motion link you open up endless possibilities for expanding your motion library.

SUMMARY

These are just nine reasons to use Cartoon Animator 5 for your next 2D project. While these are great reasons to use the software, they are far from the only reasons. Cartoon Animator 5 is packed with 2D tools to help you accomplish tasks that used to be reserved for seasoned professionals and fine artists. As with all Reallusion applications and tools, Cartoon Animator is easy to learn, easy to use, and contains a big toolbox of 2D tools.

MD McCallum - WarLord

MD McCallum – WarLord

Digital Artist MD “Mike” McCallum, aka WarLord, is a longtime iClone user. Having authored free tutorials for iClone in its early years and selected to write the iClone Beginners Guide from Packt Publishing in 2011, he was fortunate enough to meet and exchange tricks and tips with users from all over the world and loves to share this information with other users. He has authored hundreds of articles on iClone and digital art in general while reviewing some of the most popular software and hardware in the world. He has been published in many of the leading 3D online and print magazines while staying true to his biggest passion, 3D animation. For more information click here.

WarLord’s Workshop

Featured Story

3D Printable Action Figures with Character Creator & ZBrush

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Esteban Cifuentes - 3D Sculptor/ Toy Entrepreneur
Esteban Cifuentes – 3D Sculptor/ Toy Entrepreneur / Action Figure Creator

Esteban Cifuentes – 3D Sculptor/ Toy Entrepreneur

My name is Esteban Cifuentes, better known as Donman Art and I am a 3D sculptor with more than three years of experience specializing in action figures. Thanks to my skills in social media and marketing, I have managed to stand out globally and participate in renowned events such as San Diego Comic Con and Wonder Con. Two years ago, I established a partnership with a toy factory to create FIST, the first figures of action of Colombia. With this project, we not only seek to promote an innovative product, but also put Colombia on the map as a producer of toys and collectibles.

Currently, a significant portion of my income comes from selling 3D printing files focused on action figures. Through platforms such as Patreon, CGtrader and Cults, I have managed to generate income that far exceeds the industry average.

In addition to this, I give talks at universities and participate in international events sharing my experience and teaching how to monetize the art of 3D sculpture. My goal is to continue contributing to the growth and recognition of the design industry in Colombia and globally.

I start my workflow by gathering references from 80s and 90s movies, video games, and classic toys. After listing the character’s traits, I sculpt in ZBrush and pose with Character Creator 4, leveraging skills learned in a Master Course at Libel Academy. Using Character Creator, I saved months of work by effortlessly rigging and posing high-poly characters, transforming my ZBrush sculpts into posable, and playable 3D print toys.

“What used to take me almost a week, now I can do in a few hours. Character Creator is very effective for ‘action figures’, as it works very well for viewing certain poses. It has helped me a lot with hand poses and making some decisions regarding joints.”

Esteban Cifuentes – 3D Sculptor/ Toy Entrepreneur / Action Figure Creator
Action figures made in Colombia
Action figures made in Colombia
Action figures made in Colombia
Action figures made in Colombia
FIST - the first action figures made in Colombia
FIST – the first action figures made in Colombia
Miniature 3D printed action figures made with Character Creator
Miniature 3D printed action figures made with Character Creator

Workflow: When I started this it was initially as a hobby, so I didn’t have the best computer or the best tools, so I got used to sculpting with a mouse. And so I generated my own workflow.

Esteban Cifuentes action figures and workstation
Esteban Cifuentes action figures and workstation

My workflow always starts by looking for references of what I want to create, movies from the 80’s and 90’s, video games, classic toys and a lot of the history of my country. There I make a list of characteristics of the character I want to create, from physical aspects to qualities and defects. 

From there I look again for some visual references, and with this I start the sculpture in ZBrush, once I have the piece in a standard pose and accessories. My great help has been Character Creator 4 (CC4), to make fluid poses that tell a story.

With the help of Character Creator, I can transform ZBrush sculpts into posable ones in just a few clicks. Its ideal for character artists and 3D print designers. I can effortlessly rig and pose high poly, multi-subtool characters with precision, even at millions of polygons.

Sculpting action figures in ZBrush to later pose them with Character Creator
Sculpting action figures in ZBrush to later pose them with Character Creator

What used to take me almost a week, now I can do in a few hours. Then when I am clear about the pose I want, I move on to detail and add more accessories. Finally I do the printing test. 

Although some believe that the Character Creator program isn’t very effective for “action figures,” it actually works very well for viewing certain poses. It has helped me a lot with hand poses and making some decisions regarding joints.

Posing ZBrush created action figures with Character Creator
Posing ZBrush created action figures with Character Creator

Check out Esteban’s interview on Libel Academy where he shares on how he discovered Character Creator through a Master Course at Libel Academy.com, which would eventually help him produce the very first action figures made in Colombia 🇨🇴 .

“My name is Esteban Cifuentes, the creator of the first action figures made entirely in Colombia. If you ask yourself how was the process?

Well, it all started after ending the pandemic as my passion was always about action figures and toys. So I started creating some for myself and my own collection. So how did I go from my personal use, to my own business?

Publishing on social media, I started making 3D prints that led to international contacts reaching out to me. This led to North American companies contracting me to design them action figures and a couple of other things.

And all this led to brands wanting to produce in different regions other than China. And that is how Colombia came to the point of producing its own action figures.

But that is just one part; as I needed to learn all the areas of hair sculpting, and hand sculpting, That is where Libel Academy came in and it introduced me a tool that saved my life. Which was Character Creator where I could make poses.

For something that would take me almost a month of work, now with Character Creator I could do it in just hours. And with that I could be more effective, which allowed me to charge more, to have a better life and develop my own projects.”

Esteban Cifuentes – 3D Sculptor/ Toy Entrepreneur / Action Figure Creator

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FIST - action figures made by Esteban Cifuentes
FIST – action figures made by Esteban Cifuentes

Follow Esteban Cifuentes:

Donman Art Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/donmanart/

FIST Instagram Colombia:
https://www.instagram.com/fist.colombia/

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Product Release

Reallusion Launches Free Character Creator Auto Setup for Autodesk 3ds Max

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Reallusion, a pioneer in enhancing the character workflows of 3D software users, is thrilled to announce the release of the free Character Creator Auto Setup for Autodesk 3ds Max. This groundbreaking tool automates the setup of shaders and rigs for CC Characters, offering lookdev essentials like lighting and PBR swapping to significantly streamlining the character creation process. Finally, realistic Arnold or V-Ray renders of CC or ActorCore characters is now possible without manual material graph setups.

Seamless character and animation import into 3ds max

3ds Max has been a cornerstone in the industry for 30 years, widely adopted by professionals for 3D modeling, animation production, archviz, concept art, and game development. Its powerful scripting capabilities make it essential for studios maintaining long-standing production workflows.

Character Creator, iClone, and ActorCore offer high-quality characters, animations, and assets for film studios and game developers. Traditionally, importing these characters into 3ds Max required complex setups, including creating and assigning material graphs for each part of the character. The Reallusion Auto Setup tool reduces workloads by automating the Digital Human shader and PBR material assignments for characters, outfits, props, and scenes in 3ds Max.

Lifelike Digital Human Shader

Auto Setup automatically converts the CC Digital Human Shader into Arnold and V-Ray material graphs for realistic ray-traced rendering. Easily tweak texture details for skin, eyes, hair, teeth, and tongue using the Auto Setup options panel.

  • Skin: Adjustable subsurface scattering, roughness, specularity, and micro-normal properties for achieving lifelike results.
  • Hair & Beard: Enables natural color variations between hair strands and gradual chroma changes from root to tip.
  • Eyes: Fully adjustable iris, sclera, limbus, and pupil components. Anatomical accuracy is represented with realistic roughness, depth, and refraction effects. 
  • Teeth: The Teeth Shader can adjust SSS, color, and brightness to reflect different natural constitutions, ages, or health conditions.
  • Wrinkle: Enhances the appearance of CC3+ characters with high-resolution, multi-texture blending. 

PBR Materials for Crowd, Prop, and Scene

For ActorCore crowd actors and models like cloth, accessories, props, or scene elements with PBR materials applied in CC and iClone, Auto Setup can automatically build the material graph, and provides matching PBR values, such as roughness and metallic that helps to ensure visual consistency.

  • Crowd: Utilizing a specialized color adjustment panel, effortlessly expand material variations of ActorCore crowd characters, featuring distinct color regions for skin, hair, and attire.
  • Prop & Scene: Seamlessly transfer and convert PBR materials from CC and iClone to 3ds Max, replicating the original aesthetics while preserving custom material adjustments.
  • Crowd Simulation: Generate realistic masses with detailed facial expressions, accessories, and diverse animation styles using iClone. Seamlessly batch transfer these assets to 3ds Max in the same placement for final rendering.

Effortless animation with control rigs

The Auto Setup tool allows designers to easily add facial and body control rigs for custom animation of imported CC characters. 

Face Rig

  • Comprehensive facial control rigs for both CC3+ and ActorCore characters. 
  • More than 140 extended facial morphs for CC3+ characters. 
  • More than 60 standard facial morphs for 3D extras and crowd sim.

Body Rig

  • Works with official Reallusion characters, including CC3+, ActorCore, and AccuRIG. 
  • All characters support 3ds Max Biped and CAT rigging. 
  • Easy body part selection via proxy objects, including dummy IK controllers for IK toggling.

Lightning-fast turnarounds with integrated look dev

The Auto Setup Look Dev mode supports different lighting presets, HDR templates and Macbeth Color Checker.

Light Presets

Includes five setups for close-up views and five for full shots, each adjustable to achieve the desired visual outcome, whether for high-quality main characters or low-poly crowd and extras.

HDR & Macbeth Chart

Allowing for HDR background rotation to adjust lighting direction, and integration of custom EXR images. Also features a Macbeth Color Checker with Grey & Chrome balls for accurate color calibration and lighting analysis.

V-Ray & Arnold Multi-pass Rendering

Auto Setup empowers the creation of realistic Arnold and V-Ray renders for high-definition characters from Character Creator, iClone, and ActorCore, and breaks down the rendering process into separate passes.

Crowd

Break down the rendering process into separate passes for diffuse color, specular highlights, shadows, and reflections. This allows fine-tuning specific visual elements and easy tweaking of the final image without re-rendering the entire scene.

Character

Enabling flexible and different post-processing effects applications. Facilitating clearer organization of rendering tasks, enhancing overall rendering efficiency and quality in complex graphics applications.

Free download and upcoming beta version for Maya

The Auto Setup for 3ds Max is available for free download upon registration on the Reallusion website. Recognizing Maya’s pivotal role in film and game production, Reallusion is also developing a beta version of the Auto Setup tailored for Maya. Interested users can gain early access by signing up through an online form. For more information, including download instructions, visit the website.

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Featured Story

Game Changer: iClone LIVE LINK and Control Rig for Unreal

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This article is featured on AWN
Nildo Essá – FX Animation Studios | CEO, Founder, Writer

Nildo Essá – FX Animation Studios

Hello, my name is Nildo Essá and I am the Owner of FX Animations Studios. The studio was founded back in 2004 and up until around the year 2017 we were focused mainly on working with TV Commercials being mostly sub-contracted by local advert agencies. Lately we also cater to NGOs and such to make animated PSAs (Public Service Announcement Videos) dealing with several day-to-day issues.Alongside client work, whenever we could, we would invest our time on our own IP, Os Pestinhas aka The Troublemakers

Over the years we have produced a few award-winning shorts and several PSAs using these characters and with great success. Seeing how well they were received locally, we thought it would be a good idea to take the next step… doing a feature film.

As we complete 20 Years of existence in 2024, we find ourselves in the middle of production of our very first Animated feature film “KIBWE” and when it’s complete, it will be the first Animated film out of Mozambique.

We are now using Blender, Unreal Engine, and Reallusion’s iClone and Character Creator 4 (CC4) tools. As a small team, we can leverage iClone’s LIVE LINK and the CC Control Rig plugin for Unreal Engine to enhance speed, efficiency, and enable real-time animation editing, character control, and synchronized camera movements.

“The ideal scenario is iClone to Unreal Engine, and with the iClone to Unreal LIVE LINK, and Control Rig plugins, making that bridge less painful. The Reallusion team has been very helpful and receptive to ideas to improve their tools, and I’m glad to consider them our partners in this crazy adventure that is to make a full feature film with a team of just 2 people.”

Nildo Essá – FX Animation Studios | CEO, Founder, Writer

‘Os Pestinhas‘ aka The Troublemakers

Kibwe is a story about Lili’s life and her journey to save her grandmother who was poisoned, while discovering stories from her past, unravelling mysteries of her tribe and family of traditional healers. They are a group of 3 children headed by a 10-Year-old girl named Lili who is very spirited and inquisitive and always wants to know the why of things. She was raised by her grandmother and never got to know her parents due to a curse placed on her family when she was born. The other kids in the group are Minhoca aka Stretch and ZeGordo. Stretch is 12 Years old. He is an environmentalist/inventor that is always trying to come up with interesting ideas to use waste in his inventions. ZeGordo is the Glutton. Despite being chubby, under pressure he can be quite agile. Lili and he grew up together and they are like brothers. ZeGordo is super protective of her.

Kibwe, Lili’s story, unfolded amidst the lush greenery of their village, where the scent of medicinal herbs lingered in the air. As they delved deeper into the mysteries that entwined their lives, Lili’s curiosity drove the trio forward, seeking answers to age-old questions. Stretch’s inventive mind brought a new perspective, turning discarded bits into treasures, while ZeGordo’s loyal presence provided a sense of security in their perilous journey. Together, they embarked on a quest that would test their courage, faith, and the strength of their bond.

Ensuring Animation with the Right Tools

This will be our hardest project yet as we aim really high in terms of quality. Our team is very small… it’s just me and my wife. And because of that we are always looking out for tools that will help us tell our stories without “breaking the bank”. Up until 2020 our main tool was Autodesk 3ds Max. In that year we switched to Blender and seeing how Reallusion was developing their animation tools and plugins that connect with Blender in a seamless manner, it seemed to make perfect sense to add those to our pipeline as well.

Today all our characters are Character Creator 4 (CC4) based and every animation we do we start in iClone 3D software. Then we refine them in Blender , to have the Unreal Engine being the end render goal of the pipeline. This workflow works very well, and it is stable. But being a team of 2 (Me and my wife), it’s still time consuming especially when it comes to export/import times involved between all 3 applications. 

The Unreal Live Link plugin allows seamless transfer of data between iClone and Unreal Engine, enabling real-time animation editing, character control, and synchronized camera movements.

The ideal scenario is iClone to Unreal Engine, and with the iClone to Unreal LIVE LINK, and Control Rig plugins, making that bridge less painful. The Reallusion team has been very helpful and receptive to ideas to improve their tools, and I’m glad to consider them our partners in this crazy adventure that is to make a full feature film with a team of just 2 people.

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Optimizing Transfers with iClone Unreal LIVE LINK

The new iClone Unreal LIVE LINK version provides the functionality we’ve been looking for. Previously, we could only export characters through Live Link and save animations using the Sequence Recorder tool in Unreal Engine. Exporting animations through the standard FBX workflow was not ideal for us.

The improved iClone to Unreal LIVE LINK transfer now supports parallel processing for iClone FBX export and Unreal FBX import, ensuring uninterrupted editing in iClone while transfers are ongoing. You can monitor the transfer progress through the progress bar in Unreal Engine to estimate the completion time.

I appreciate how all characters, props, and cameras transfer seamlessly at once. The cameras animated in iClone and the switcher setup, transition smoothly to Unreal sequencer with correct camera cuts, reflecting the work done in iClone.

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With our previous pipeline we had to export the animations from Blender one by one, and then the cameras as well.

At a certain point we even tried exporting eight characters with all their animations as subdivided meshes and the plugin with the free Auto Setup tool for Unreal, did it in such an effective manner and all was neatly organized in their proper folders inside Unreal Engine.

CC CONTROL RIG FOR UNREAL ENGINE

The best part was yet to come however, and this was the CC Control Rig for Unreal Engine plugin. With this tool developers now have the freedom to seamlessly control CC characters using the familiar MetaHuman control rig, enabling precise manipulation and customization of both body and facial animations.

When the Reallusion team said that they were working on an Unreal Control Rig version for CC4 Characters, we immediately jumped on board to beta test it. We are still in the Previz stage of the film but have already crafted about 80 minutes of animations in Blender. 

After some tests with the Control Rig plugin and the iClone LIVE FACE facial mocap tool, we are moving ahead with the production using mainly iClone and Unreal Engine.

“Combining the powerful capabilities of iClone and Unreal Engine, our production workflow is now streamlined and efficient. The seamless integration of the Unreal Control Rig plugin for CC4 Characters and the iClone LIVE FACE facial mocap tool has truly elevated our project to new heights. With these cutting-edge tools at our disposal, we are confident in delivering a stunning visual experience that will captivate audiences. “

Nildo Essá – FX Animation Studios | CEO, Founder, Writer

The Control Rig plugin is designed in such a way that you can just pick your transferred character in Unreal and click a button. After a few seconds it will be ready to be animated within the engine with rigs for both body AND face. This is especially helpful in our case because then it means that we can just bake any animations to the Control Rig and tweak/refine them in real-time, considering the final sets and cameras angles. This is a dream come true for any animator!

There’s even a Picker to help in selecting the controllers of your Control rig and you can have multiple characters in the scene and the picker will list all of them properly named.

“This is especially helpful in our case because then it means that we can just bake any animations to the Control Rig and tweak/refine them in real-time, considering the final sets and cameras angles. This is a dream come true for any animator!“

Nildo Essá – FX Animation Studios | CEO, Founder, Writer
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Conclusions

Lastly, I would like to thank Reallusion for the continued support to this ambitious project. Their availability to help solve issues and the tools they are making really empower anyone to start telling their stories in a very cost-effective way.

I am glad that Reallusion has been such a supportive partner throughout this journey. Their dedication to assisting with problem-solving and providing accessible tools truly enables individuals to unleash their creativity and bring their narratives to life without breaking the bank.

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Follow FX Animation Studios:

Website:
www.fxlda.com

YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/user/FXlimitada/videos

Learn More

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The original article was written by Nildo Essá and is also featured on AWN.

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Mastering the Art of 3D Construction for Buildings and Interiors

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Discover the Power of iClone BuildingGen: The Best-Kept Secret in 3D Architectural Design

José Antonio Tijerín

José Tijerín is a digital illustrator, 3D sculptor, and the creator of the video game “Dear Althea”, available on Steam. You can also find his content pack, “We’re Besties”, for purchase in the Reallusion Content Store. In this article, José will highlight the merits of using iClone BuildingGen plugin to construct 3D buildings and interiors and make a case for why you should use it in your next project.

Why BuildingGen is the Ultimate Tool for Creating Environments

In the world of art and development, creating immersive and lifelike surroundings is crucial. For those of us who love crafting detailed virtual cities, Reallusion’s BuildingGen is a game-changer. As an iClone plugin, it makes building virtual cities not just possible but effortless. I’ll share how BuildingGen has opened up new possibilities for me, from generating unique structures to integrating them seamlessly with other programs like Unreal Engine.

Magic behind BuildingGen

BuildingGen is a fantastic tool that lets you create buildings using modular components. You can start with pre-existing content packs, like Reallusion’s French architectural styles, or get creative and design your own elements.

What I love about BuildingGen is its versatility. It’s not just for urban structures – you can create all sorts of architectural and decorative elements. Imagine designing a palatial garden with various plants and ornaments, or even constructing a train carriage with modular components, like those available on Sketchfab.

Using modular parts downloaded from the internet, even if they’re not traditional buildings, is straightforward. It takes just a few minutes to import models into iClone and prepare them for BuildingGen. Once you have everything set up, configuring the structure’s parameters is intuitive, making it easy to achieve exactly what you envision.

In a matter of minutes, you can create an interior train carriage of any length and arrangement that suits your project’s needs. This flexibility grants artists the freedom to experiment and diversify their projects, incorporating unique and personalized elements that enhance the visual storytelling of any environment.

Creating a BuildingGen Pack

The process begins within iClone, where it is essential to have all the models required for the final building. Reallusion offers a variety of reference models that can serve as a foundation in your favorite 3D creation program. Once the basic elements are established, it is crucial to ensure that the pivot points of each element are correctly positioned to avoid subsequent adjustments. With the models prepared, the next step involves setting up the BuildingGen Packager in iClone. This package will encompass all the elements necessary to construct the building.

In addition to these modular elements, the tool simplifies the task of adding complementary elements like doors and windows. For example, walls with windows should be assigned the “Window” category type and their model dragged into the “Child elements” area. These elements can be added alongside the modular parts within the BuildingGen Packager. Doing so allows for uploading multiple versions of these elements to randomize the outcome when automatically placed during building generation.

BuildingGen’s ability to generate variations and combinations swiftly is a significant advantage. You can effortlessly create ruins, seaports, or gardens. For instance, with a simple wall model and a shrub, you can compose an attractive outdoor space in a matter of minutes.

I created this kind of mushroom house in 3D Maya using as reference the modular parts that Reallusion offers. You can download these models from iClone to be able to use them in your 3D program in a very simple way.

Integration with Unreal Engine and Advanced Techniques

One of the most effective ways to render these BuildingGen-generated models is by exporting them to Unreal Engine 5, particularly when utilizing Nanite technology. This technique enables models to have a near-infinite polygon density without distorting the model’s shape or affecting the program’s performance. Employing Nanite significantly enhances the volume’s finish, light incidence, and shadow detail, delivering unprecedented realism.

If you refer to the tutorial video associated with this article, you’ll see an example of creating a modular Spanish village with houses featuring rough walls made of unsculpted rocks, subsequently whitewashed for a realistic texture. To replicate this, download the modular elements of “Spanish modular village houses” on Sketchfab. Activate the Nanite properties within the material settings, adjusting options like “Used with Nanite” and “Enable Tessellation.” This transformation converts detailed textures, including ambient occlusion maps, into actual volumes within the 3D model. The result is a surface rich in detail, with defined edges that enhance the visual immersion of the village or city you’re creating.

Finally, I must mention a small trick to improve the final outcome of our buildings, especially in villages like the one in this example, where the streets are very narrow, curved, and with significant unevenness. Once the building is placed on the stage, we can enter Unreal’s “Modeling” editing mode. We can select the “Deform” tool on our building to easily and intuitively curve it into the desired shape.

Conclusion

Reallusion’s iClone BuildingGen emerges as an indispensable tool for any 3D designer seeking efficiency and creativity in constructing virtual environments. Its ability to manage modular components, coupled with its integration with Unreal Engine and advanced technologies like Nanite, makes it a powerful option for projects of any scale.

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The original article was written by José Tijerín and is also featured on Creative Bloq.