Sonic Movie Character Development - Shadow Day 031
19After quite a few hours of trial and error off camera I discovered that Reallusion no longer supports plug and play ARKit recognition for its own CC4 avatars - they have abandoned them for the Meta Humans support pipeline for the hundreds of folks trying to use CC4 to make animations for Metahumans and mess. In the end I will likely not use ARkit motion at all, because its incredibly trash and limited compared to what morphs are actually there from within CC4/iClone (natively). After figuring out some bugs in the blueprint and how to correctly remap 50% of the mappable CC4 facial morph blend shapes over to the sorely limited Apple AR Kit blend shapes analogs I was finally able to get Shadows head swivel, jaw open, and blinky squinty face rigging to work. It seemed he was definitely about to suffer a massive stroke so I stopped shortly after realized this is not the way to move forward.
So for my next short I will again be pre-baking anims in iClone before walking them into unreal and just mitigating shot angles and character interaction based roughly on however those animation outputs turn out. I dont have time to do a lot of manual node hook ups for look ats an eye tracking other than the UV eyes motion so if I just rely on hard baked animations and do my best trying to clean up lipsyncs things should look better in the end. This capture today was just a crude test to get the ARKit running again on just Shadow (Bunnies never was ever enabled). Next is on to doing one lip sync test to see if Im ok with all of shadows blend shapes/face morphs in iClone before moving forward. The point in which new bones are added is the point of no return where his model will no longer be recognized as a CC4 avatar and all morphs will no longer be editable.
If you are a CC4 user you may wanna follow this whole process just to keep up with some success stories, missteps and backtracks. There will be plenty of mistakes made I assure you, but the point is taking advantage of these pre-rigged humanoids, putting your own new bones and appendages on them and still retaining CC4s built in facial rigging if you are like me, a character modeler/texturer with no animation chops whatsoever. Come along for the journey, this mess is finna be wild!
#SonicMovie3 #Shadow #FanArt #Trailer #2024