Checking out Character Creator 5

Reallusion have recently released a new version of their Character Creator software, namely version 5. Aside from HD geometry akin to the Daz HD morphs, the pipeline into Unreal Engine has been greatly improved. I wanted to check it out and tested it with one of the new toon style characters Mila 5. She took quite a bit of time to transfer because of the complex hair prop, but once I had her in Unreal Engine, no further retargeting was necessary.

We can transfer the full character with or without animations, transfer animations separately, and do so in both UE4 and UE5 versions of the skeleton. This process adds additional bones and tweaks the base pose so that it can be used like a native Manny/Quinn mesh, all directly from CC without the need for iClone. I'm impressed!

To make it even more exciting, there's also a UEFN option in the advanced export dialogue. This means we can use a CC5 character directly as UEFN mesh for anything like native GASP integration without live retargeting, or UEFN productions. They've really thought this through. Something they didn't mention in all the marketing was that these features are also available in the latest update to CC4, so if you don't want to shill out $300 for an upgrade, you can still use your CC4 characters in Unreal Engine 5 the same way. Apparently CC5 figures are also fully compatible with Metahumans too, but I've not had a chance to investigate this yet. Either way, it's dynamite stuff!

I haven't tried the HD features yet, but I can tell you that with the latest updates, some issues have crept in: much of the Transformer pipeline for importing Daz figures has been properly broken for example. There are also some viewport issues that have removed shadows and make your figures blown out, especially when they don't have textures applied or during loading (this has sadly also crept into the latest CC4 updates, so the viewport now looks bad in both versions unless you downgrade CC4 to something like 4.5 or earlier).

For our current Heart of Mercy project this means that we'll (hopefully) be able to use 3D figures easier in crowd scenes, interchange animations by marking the skeletons in UE as compatible, and make use of existing cloth and hair dynamics without additional setup work. I'll let you know how well that works when I've had a chance to test it.

I'll keep you posted on my progress!