Iclone Character Creator Pack
Kirby Apodaca
When the Character Creator 3 Omniverse Connector launched in April 2021, creators of all skill levels could efficiently and easily create digital humans for any type of project. Reallusion now enhances the pipeline with the capability to create animations for their characters through the new iClone Omniverse Connector.
Digital humans play an important role in the virtual worlds, but the creation of character animations is often accompanied by a significant expertise barrier and price tag. iClone provides an innovative way to personalize animation for different styles of characters with its fast and intuitive animation production system.
The iClone Connector simplifies facial blend shape animation, body animation, props, camera, lights, and scene setup while exporting everything to Omniverse. With iClone 7 and Omniverse, individuals or design teams can create, animate, and deploy digital humans and 3D characters for simulations and visualizations.
Experience the tools now and see them live during GTC. Reallusion will present an exclusive session about the new iClone Connector for Omniverse. They will also speak at the NVIDIA Omniverse User Group, demonstrating and answering questions about iClone Character Animation Workflow for Omniverse.
Hey everyone, I'm Sam Lazarus, creative director for Rokoko. And welcome to this retargeting tutorial for Character Creator 4 and Icon eight. So we're gonna go soup to nuts in this tutorial. We have some motion capture that we created in the new Rokoko studio, which will clean up and export out to iClone, where we're gonna take a character that we made in Character Creator 4. Send that over to iClone, put the mocap on that character, do some very easy mocap editing, which is so powerful in iClone. And then at the end of the video, we're gonna go through a workflow for taking a mocap take that doesn't have hand we facial animation data. We're gonna take that in icon really easily, add some finger movement and some facial animation, and then have a fully animated character. So without further ado, let's jump into it. It's gonna be a lot of fun.
So here we are in the new Rokoko studio. I've already gone in and recorded some body and hand motion capture data. And if we look at what we recorded here, I have a little wave, you know, doing my karate kicks. And then I'm going to go and touch the top of my head. And you can see that I don't quite make contact also with clapping, that my hands are kind of going through each other. And that's a common problem in inertial motion capture. Like with Rokoko, sometimes things aren't going to match up perfectly and you're gonna need to go in and do slight edit. And iClone makes it really easy actually to do motion capture editing. So we're gonna go over how to fix things like tapping the top of my head correctly and clapping and, and things like that. But for now, we've got our motion capture and we need to export it out.
So I've already gone in, cleaned it up. We have tutorials on our channel to show you how to actually record all this mocap. We have a great onboarding series, but I've, I've already renamed my take. And I'm going to add it to the export list. And then if we go over to the export tab here, we're going to export it out an fbx. We don't need a body mesh and we don't need face for skeleton preset. I'm going to put it on Mixamo, which I've found works really well in this workflow. The other skeleton should work too, but I'm gonna be using Mixamo I'm not gonna do anything for preset overrides, I'm going to export it 30 fps, although you could do higher FBS if you need to. I do a binary FBX when I export it. And that's pretty much it. We're gonna hit export and now I'm gonna go hop into Character Creator 4, where we're going to create a little character and send it into iClone.
Okay, so here we are in Character Creator 4 and you know, as I said before, we're going soup to nuts. So you can just use characters that you have in iClone. You don't need to use Character Creator 4, but in case you are, I thought we'd just go through and, you know, make a quick character. Let's make this Kevin character load it in, we'll add some clothing and things.
Boom, look at this guy. You know, fancy, fancy fellow here. But you could create any sort of character, right? And character creator. And I just created something very basic just because we're gonna send it over to iClone right now. But the great thing about Reallusion is that no matter what type of crazy character you create using character creator, it doesn't affect this workflow. And usually you can actually interchange characters with the same animation and things. So anyway, let's say we're done creating this character. He looks great. I've got Ilon eight open already. And so I'm just gonna go to file, export, send to iClone, send to iClone, and then we're gonna let it kind of do its thing here.
And if we hop over to iClone, yeah, you can see that it's loading in this character for us. And there we go. We've got a character. And now we just need to load in some motion capture onto this character. So if we go to our mocap that we export it, and you can see it's right here. And if you ever need to find the motion capture that you export, you can just go to open folder. You know, you can set where you want to export to right here when you're exporting. And then you can just go open folder, find the folder. And we're actually just going to drag this onto our character, not into the scene, but onto our character. You can see we get this bounding box when we do that. And now we go to motion import settings. This should pop up and you want to go for motion T-pose because Rokoko always exports out as a T-pose in the first frame. We just want to go to the motion capture that we loaded in.
So again, that retargeting demo and I just had the the path saved and I copied it in retargeting demo Mixamo into this motion T pose and hit convert all. And it's really that easy. And our mocap is just gonna be on our care. You can see frame zero. Our mocap is a T-pose, so that's right, we at play. There we go. Does that look familiar or looking good? So we got our mocap and this all looks awesome. So that's it.
That's basic retargeting in in in iClone, but it's really easy to go in and edit your motion capture, which is really amazing. So let's go and do that. And so if we right click on this motion down here and if you wanna get to this view, I just like going to window workspace, all panels and then I just, I don't need to see the curve editor.
Then I have this big timeline down here that I can see if we right click on this animation here, you can see it says motion and we go to motion modifier here. We can make some slight tweaks to the motion capture overall. And then later we can actually do precise changes to the mocap. So if we hit preview and space bar, it'll start playing. But you can see we can start playing around with some of these modifiers. Let's say that, you know, we just want to exaggerate all the mocap more. We can turn that way up, we can turn it way down, set it back to zero. That's for the upper body, the lower body. Sometimes you know, you have problems with shoulders being up too much in Rokoko motion capture. You can see these shoulders are a little bit like up. So maybe we just want to go to shoulder down.
We can see we're bringing these shoulders down a little bit more natural. Looks way better already, right? And so we'll we will stop previewing, but you can preview and make those changes and then you'll hit okay and it will apply those changes to that motion captures. So this already is incredible, you know, being able to just make overall changes, fixing things like sometimes characters are lean too far back, sometimes shoulders are up and it's really easy to just open up that window and make those changes overall. And you can see for the rest of the mocap, you know, it's put the shoulders down, it looks great. So what if we want, however, to fix something like this, right? Well, this actually looks ended up looking pretty good, but let's play this through. You can see we, we kind of need to tweak it though, you know, that's where he taps the, the second time on the head. What if we wanted to bring this arm down or do any other type of mocap correction? You know, usually there's like clipping issues. Let's go and see if we can see any clipping issues. Maybe. So right here, for example, let's fix this cuz this is a little bit more dramatic, but what if we need to fix this arm going through his body, right? That's no good. So if we were to go up
And we went to edit motion layer, it gives us this awesome window from which we can make overall changes and edits to the motion capture. So in this case, if we wanted to grab this wrist and everything is on an IK control rig, so it makes it really easy, we can just go and we need to fix this clipping, right? Right here. It's going through the, the it's going through the body. So we have this wrist selected, we can hit set key. So we just added a key frame, right? And you can actually see those key frames. But we drill down here, but then we can go to where the clipping occurs. Right here you can see that the hand is like inside of the body. So we just need to move this out. And there we go. And because it's on IK it makes it really easy to make these changes. We don't need to adjust the upper arm and then the forearm and then the hand, we just move the hand around set key and it will fix that clipping, right? And then we could go here and reset
And see it's fixed the clipping. And now it goes back to how it was initially when we hit reset. It basically takes it back to the initial motion capture, right? Because we didn't want to fix that hand for the entire course of the mocap, just when it goes into the body and that one moment. So it's really easy to set these keys and make fixes like that. You can also do things like if I grab onto, let's say the wave right here, right? We're waving right here, I can grab onto this little button and I could animate the whole hand and if I, I can just drag around and make these edits and you can see how easy it is,
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