Luckily the JSON file provided enough information to make up for the lack of scripting in CC3. It was a lot of fun to get into Blender scripting for this project, however. Most of the time was spent figuring out how to best interpret the Character Creator output and how to process it in Blender automatically because the UE4 plugin is closed source and CC3 itself sadly does not provide any automated scripting facilities.
I worked on the first iteration of the pipeline for a total of about 3 months. We also cut off the head at a fixed position in order to have a uniform edge interface that is the same across all heads. In Blender, we also make sure that all the characters are aligned with regard to their pelvis height because different shoes have different offsets from the ground which causes offsets in the vertices that make it harder to merge the meshes together at runtime. The challenge here was just that the separate meshes in the FBX were not always named consistently, so we needed to add aliases for different names that are being used for the same mesh.Īfter the Python script merged the textures, we proceeded to import the FBX into Blender where we applied the same transformation to the UVs of the separate meshes and merged e.g.
This is why we wanted to reduce this to a single set of head textures (Diffuse + Normal + ORM). If you take a look at the exported FBX you will quickly see that the head alone has a large number of materials already. To that end, we built a python script that uses the Pillow (PIL) library to repack the textures into the new layout which we defined in JSON. Manuel Wagner: By itself, CC3 already provides a lot of information about the exported FBX if you check the “export JSON for auto material setup”, but because every clothing asset and head and skin part has its own texture and UV layout assigned, we needed to repack the textures and UV layout to make the material use fewer textures. In hindsight, this was the wrong choice because the heads that were created with Headshot look way more believable and diverse than the manually configured ones. Manuel Wagner: In the beginning, we did not use the headshot plugin and configured the heads by hand.
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