How To Make An Animal On Character Creator

The "Winning Tips & Tricks" series covers practical workflows and techniques shared past winners from the "2021 iClone Lip Sync Animation Contest". To let users see the full spectrum of the iClone facial pipeline, we are introducing projects that are rendered with dissimilar 3D engines including; Unreal, Unity, iClone, Blender, and Cinema4D.  Let's now take a look at Jason Taylor'south: "Beast Farm", combining Character Creator (CC3) / iClone workflow and Unity render.

Jason Taylor

My name is Jason Taylor. I'g a filmmaker and multimedia artist, running my own digital media studio, Jumping Guy Productions in Ontario, Canada.

I'm the creator and producer of a puppet-based video series for kids which I created using real-life puppets in a 3D animated globe via Unity in 2016. Since and so I take been working on developing professional 3D blitheness skills in an effort to diversify my skillset and tell stories that I couldn't with puppets. Reallusion's Character Creator and iClone have been a real game-changer for me in this regard.

Why I created this showcase

Working function-time over a few evenings or so, I was able to bring a scene from Fauna Subcontract to life. The story needed a variety of characters from talking sus scrofa characters, a talking horse to a variety of crude-looking farmers. With relatively little effort I was able to create eleven original AAA characters for my video in a matter of hours using Graphic symbol Creator. From there, once I exported the characters over to iClone, I was able to easily add facial expressions, animate the head and easily add high-quality lip-syncing to my characters before I exported them over to Unity for composition and final return.

How I do it with iClone

Footstep one: Building V Animal Characters

To create the characters I started with CC3 compatible base characters from the Reallusion Market place and content stores. Rather than reinventing the bike, I was able to take a simple clean looking hog character and add facial pilus, eyebrows, article of clothing and morph the facial features to create the homo-similar pigs that the story chosen for.

Step 2: Building Five Human being Characters

The process for creating the human characters was similar to the pigs. I started with uncomplicated base characters like to what I had in mind for the story and then I morphed their faces, added facial pilus and unique hairstyles and the proper habiliment. For one of the characters, a farmer character, I was even able to add dirt on his face similar he only came in from working in the field.

Pace iii: Morphing Horse Graphic symbol from Deer

Blenderhelped with pretty much everything else. Using unproblematic shapes, I was able to sculpt them into jewelry, pants and even a braid-looking thing. And Blender has for the cosmos of the horse character — this one stumped me at first as I couldn't find the style of equus caballus I was looking for in whatever of the Reallusion stores. I had a specific style in listen and my equus caballus as well needed to be uniform with CC3's facial morphs arrangement for animating the mouth using AccuLips. My solution was to purchase a compatible deer model that came with an isolated head model that I was able to stretch and morph and shape into the horse base of operations that I had in mind. I so added custom textures/materials that I photoshopped together from an actual image of a horse. For the final touch, I added some stylish hair that I purchased from the marketplace.

Step 4: Animating the Torso and Hair

The facial emotions and lip-syncing abilities, paired with the alive facial mocap abilities with LIVE FACE the iPhone mocap plugin for iClone 7 have actually blown me away and take immune me to take my animations to the next level, imbuing my characters with personality and emotion. As a general rule for myself, I kickoff with lip-syncing and so add emotions afterward. To create the lip-syncing, I simply import the sound of my character speaking besides as the text to proceed with the audio and iClone'south AccuLips give me a solid starting betoken that I am able to tweak to my liking, adding more or less jaw motion, more or less lip motion and the ability to add together, remove or motility details. There are besides presets I can employ like "Singing" or "Whispering", that I tin can use as-is or tweak to my heart's want.

Step 5: Mocap and Facial Expression

The scenes I picked to recreate in 3D had lilliputian to no grapheme blitheness. Nevertheless, I took reward of the Move Puppet tool to create some simple movements and avoid having the graphic symbol stand in place like a statue the whole fourth dimension. In the first sequence, for case, I positioned his easily higher up his head and once I am committed to the finalized result of the lip-sync, I'll add emotions using iClone's library of emotion, east.g., "Happy" or "Sad" or "Angry" etc. I tin keyframe these emotions in, blend them together from one to the other, conform the intensity in terms of how happy or how sad, and so on, to bring my character and story to life.

On top of my keyframed emotions and lip-syncing from AccuLips, I like to add facial mocap data to the mix to give things a more human being-like realistic expect and feel. I go subtle here though. Using my iPhone connected to Alive Confront in iClone, I can add a layer of head rotations and another layer of facial expressions from the mocap information that is blended together with the original.

Footstep vi: Breathing the Caput

For this projection, in addition to the head movements from the mocap data, I too animated some of the larger head movements using the "Look at" option in iClone. This allowed me to give the character something to look at directly, which in the finish gave the grapheme more of a believable operation. To do this, I animated a cube to the diverse points I wanted my character to exist looking at. I and then tweaked and keyframed the options of how much the character'southward eyes were looking at the cube without the neck and head moving versus how much the character turned his full head to look at the object. For this project, in addition to the head movements from the mocap data, I too animated some of the larger head movements using the "Expect at" option in iClone. This allowed me to give the graphic symbol something to look at direct, which in the end gave the character more of a believable performance. To do this, I blithe a cube to the diverse points I wanted my character to exist looking at. I then tweaked and keyframed the options of how much the character'due south eyes were looking at the cube without the neck and head moving versus how much the character turned his full head to wait at the object.

Concluding Step: Tips to practice Composition in Unity

And finally, it was fourth dimension to add all the cool effects, such every bit smoke, lighting, magical butterflies, and of course, floating grit particles. I had already bought as a Unity user, I was happy with how slap-up the characters looked in Unity once I exported them from CC3 and imported them into Unity. I used the Unity / CC3 Auto Setup Addon which helped to requite me good results on the materials in Unity HDRP shader mode. After I did a bit of custom tweaking to the materials and pilus and I was off to the races. If something came up in Unity with one of the characters that I wasn't happy with given how my scene was edifice out, eastward.one thousand., a character's nose, caput shape, eyes or arms, etc. It was no trouble to re-export the character from CC3 and then re-import to Unity without losing references to animations etc. The same went for the facial expressions and lip-syncing. In one case I saw things come to life in Unity, I was able to go back to iClone, make some adjustments accordingly to timing and expressions and lip-syncing and I could re-import things dorsum into Unity seamlessly.

Final Thoughts and Conclusionsouthward

Working with 11 different characters on a 30-2d clip, this procedure could have taken me weeks or months to do. And, it's not a stretch to think that this would be the kind of endeavor that a studio team would accept on. Simply no, I was able to do this on my own in a very timely way, working part-time in between my main project. Overall, I'm glad I gave this projection a shot and I'chiliad happy it was fifty-fifty possible thanks to Reallusions professional tools. I'm excited to meet what comes next from Reallusion!

Source: https://magazine.reallusion.com/2022/01/26/winning-tips-tricks-the-making-of-jason-taylors-animal-farm-showcase/

Posted by: southwoodperaweltake.blogspot.com

Share this post