I’ve recently invested in Narrative Pro, a very comprehensive game framework for Unreal Engine 5. It features maps, quests, dialogues, inventory, combat, Metahuman support and a whole bunch of other stuff – in short, the glue code that would take me a good year write from scratch. As I get into it, I’ll need to …
I was working on a scene for which several actors needed to wear long draping robes as they walk slowly across a scene. This proved challenging to Unreal Engine’s native Chaos Cloth solver, which isn’t designed to drape high-res self-colliding cloth. While it can work, the results looked less than stellar as you can see …
Importing Daz content into other applications is tough on a good day, but trying to use Transformer with Reallusion’s Character Creator pretty much takes the cake: 9 out of 10 attempts will fail guaranteed. In addition, not all textures come in by default. Genesis 8 and older generations usually work, but 8.1 and 9 can …
When you work with other members of your team, you may get files for designs that contain content elements you don’t own. Character Creator will still let you view them, but you won’t be able to export them into other apps or create renders with them without a watermark. Your viewport will look something like …
If you’ve ever tried to set additional keyframes in a looped part of a motion clip in iClone, you’ll probably be familiar with your desired bone change to snap back immediately, accompanied by the following message: This is happening because iClone will instance whatever happens in the main clip (front part) in every looped part …
I like using iClone as animation front-end for Unreal Engine. Although a lot can be done directly in UE, not everything is as convenient to achieve as it is in iClone. The pipeline is designed with humanoid characters in mind and works well enough, but things get hinky when it comes to non-standard characters like …
Spring Effects in iClone are “faux physics” if you will, something that lets a skeletal mesh bounce as it moves. We can create this from scratch on custom figures, and it’s a little finnickety to setup, but very straightforward if you know how to do it. These effects are not baked to the timeline (like …
Character Creator has a similar workflow to Daz Studio when it comes to importing and rigging clothing. We export the avatar, model/fit clothing in MD, export an un-rigged OBJ and transfer the skeleton and weight maps. Pitfalls lurk at every corner of course, so I thought I’d make some notes before I forget it all …
iClone only shows a frame-code in the timeline by default, but that’s not helpful in all situations, especially when you’re switching between applications. If you need to make a 40 second clip in iClone, you’ll have to so some calculations we might not have mental energy for. Thankfully there is a (workaround sort of) way …
iClone has two concepts of parenting one object to another: Link and Attach. They’re slightly different. Attach is like traditional scene hierarchy parenting and good if you want to marry one object permanently to another (the parent moves, the child also moves). Linking is similar but can be animated for durations, so a bottle on …
I had never created a morph in an external app for Character Creator before, but I managed to make it work after a few false starts. Just before that fleeting knowledge escapes me again, here’s how to do it. I’m comparing it to the Morph Loader dialogue in Daz Studio and will use comparable terminology …
Any object in iClone can be attached to a Motion Path, whose position in turn can be animated with a percentage slider on the Timeline. This can be used to make lights, cameras as well as characters follow a path. If we apply an in-place motion to the character, it appears as if said figure …
When we make adjustments to out custom characters’ heads, there comes the point where eye blinks might not work correctly anymore. Take this example, it’s really not a good look for my CC3+ model. Thankfully there’s an extremely helpful tool in Character Creator that makes fixing this (almost) a one-click affair. Take a look at …
By default, an iClone Project comes in with a duration of 1800 frames (0-1799) and a frame rate of 60fps. Being a new user and all, it’s impossible for my brain to remember where to change this, as it’s in an incredibly tricky to find place called Project Settings. Here’s how we get there: The …