Best Unity Workflow / Features needed - My suggestion as a game artist
Hey there,
I have been working with CC3 and Unity for the past 4 weeks and spent a lot of time researching for the best workflow to get CC characters including animations into Unity. What follows are my suggestions to make the workflow more comfortable for game artists...
The best thing would be to have one fbx file containing all lods sharing one skeleton and to have the option to merge meshes due to your own preference for each lod individually. Animations should be exported from IClone without having to implement them into CC3 export ( - meaning bone structure should have the same naming as IClone ).
1. Renaming Objects & Materials in CC --- I noticed that if I rename objects it wont always keep all of my naming during export. An other good thing would be the ability to rename materials. It would make work more convenient.
2. Full control over merging assets via export --- For example: ------------------------ LOD0 = ------------------------------------ One mesh for the hair and eye lashes ( since these use hair shaders in the engine ). ------------------------------------ One mesh for the clothes. ------------------------------------ One mesh for the body and eyes ( you want these seperated, so morphed meshes are lighter in polycount). ------------------------------------ One mesh for the head and tongue ( since these are the only one with blend shapes ). ------------------------------------ One mesh with transparent material like glasses ------------------------ LOD1X = ------------------------------------ One mesh for the hair and eye lashes. ------------------------------------ One mesh for the body, eyes, head, tongue, clothes ------------------------------------ One mesh with transparent material like glasses
3. Being able to give merged meshes & materials names.
4. All LODs should be exported into one fbx file sharing one skeleton.
5. Choose what textures will be exported ( albedo, metalalpha, normal, ao ).
6. Set the textures size of each element on the baked texture atlas ( maybe you want to have the one texture to have a lower texel).
7. All textures should be named as the material or mesh and copied into one folder ( now its just a mess ).
8. Have the same bone naming as IClone. Its is not possible right now to export animations from IClone and use them on your characters exported out of CC3 in Unity. You have to export motion files from IClone and put them into your CC3 Export.
I can imagine the "dynamic export / merge mesh feature" is a big chunk of work but its desperately needed. Most of the other stuff is just make up but it would help users a lot because there is so much clicking, renaming and checking files involved that its kind of a drag to export. And as you surely know you always have to export several times to get everything right. Also if you get feedback from clients or directors in your company it really slows down the process.
Hopefully you can address these suggestions in future updates. If anyone has a better solution for this workflow please add a comment.
Thank you so much Kareeem, you set the base for my findings.
As a 3D game and character artist I have tried CC3 from the release on and aimed to find the best possible pipeline for the most optimized result in Unity.
This is my workflow so far: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1E2Znix8pbByx_WMgQpdQ0YhtR-vo9af1OrX7EEjL4Ts/edit?usp=sharing
Unfortunately these are many manual steps, but you can add or remove to your liking.
I hope it helps someone!
~Enalya
Kareeem
@joseph :
I have no Problems with eyes or teeth. Maybe you can explain your workflow?
Eyes are controlled by bones.
joseph.dalessandro
This is what happens with the teeth inside Unity when I try to open the mouth with the blendshapes. Also, notice the eyelashes don't look right either and I have no idea how to fix that without messing up something else.
Attachment:
Character Creator 3 issue.PNG
joseph.dalessandro
As a Unity Certified Developer I must say that the workflow from Character Creator 3 to Unity is massively lacking. The advertisements for Character Creator 3 make it seem like a seamless workflow, but none of their tutorial videos actually show the process step by step ... actually exporting a game base character into FBX for Unity and then importing that FBX into Unity and getting the character to look the same and actually function. And here is an example. Currently I waste hours of my time exporting a character from Character Creator 3 in FBX format in hopes of getting it working inside Unity only to realize that something didn't export properly or look the same as it did in Character Creator. Then I start the process all over again and Character Creator 3 crashes frequently when I use the lod mesh reduction feature as well. It just doesn't feel like a solid piece of software yet. I can see the potential, but it needs a lot of work before I could make use of this software on a regular basis. I spent hours trying to get a character in Unity to finally look somewhat similar to how it looks inside Character Creator 3 only to later discover that the teeth of the character don't move when I open the mouth from the blendshapes. Ugh!! Now I have to start all over again with this messed up workflow and I still don't know why the teeth don't move? Also, how do I animate the character's eyes inside Unity? They don't seem to move at all? Reallusion has a lot of work to do fixing these workflow issues for Unity and creating some solid documentation and tutorial videos if they expect people who use Unity to take them seriously.
lollosone
It is clear that the people that are more vocal about specific features, are the ones that actually use the app.
I get that not everyone may be a jack of all trade; but hiring someone that knows the application that work so close to yours (in this case Unity, but I believe is the same for Unreal); would really help to get to the point where your export feature is useful in MOST cases, and not just in FEW cases, that are very specific (like the Soldier in the demo).
As Unity user; I think that the value in Character creator is really high, if it can save me time to export, compared to do the same from DAZ Studio; so I totally agree with the idea submitted by the OP.
