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.
After all of my research within Reallusion and out, I think the greatest improvement
for RL-to-Unity workflow would be putting Kareeem in charge of development.
Seriously, this new member Kareeem is showing great knowledge and insight in the Unity arena,
and (respectfully) more than I have experienced from official RL support, so I hope that RL will
tap a valuable and available resource like this from the RL community.
chrishaley
I'd vote for 7 above all the others - currently if you export from cc3, the textures are definitely there as you can see them if you import the fbx into 3dxchange, but unity cannot see them at all - you have to copy them manually, which is very time-consuming and error prone. If the effect of 7 is that unity can see the textures and import them with the fbx, that would be a massive step forward.
