/3/ - 3DCG

I'm very aware that realtime engines are not the tip-top of renderers, even with UE5.0 hype, but ultimately I do want my characters interoperable in many spaces. That's one reason I landed on Unreal - not just to render video, but to have the ability to stream, and potentially build nonlinear experiences around the character's project.

Mainly, this project revolves around music videos, but they still need a measure of "jiggle and swish" beyond the animated movement. Been relying on Mixamo for the early work, but lately have moved into Rokoko (mixed results, mixed feelings about the company right now).

>>928977
Why do you have mixed feelings about rokoko? Are they getting greedy?

For some reason, 5.1 is dramatically interfering with body physics. I have the same physics bodies set up as in my 5.0 projects, but even with cloth engaging, the tits just don't physics. In 4.27 & 5.0 they work just fine. Spent half a year just getting into fitting clothing and the body/occlusion method even Epic uses. Quick tip on that: if you want your metahuman character to fit a variety of clothes, you'll need to make multiple versions (or keep downloading the same version and archiving the bodies) of each metahuman with different standard clothes, so you can collect the different upper and lower body types (some have just the hands, some up to the elbows, then the base model with the fake bra, etc.)

>>928980
Yes (rant incoming). I got hyped over the suit, got delayed from delivery for half a year, got the good news they were upgrading my suit to a pro II, then got it in the wrong size (and not glove-ready).

Set all that shit aside, because once I got into the actual software I could see they really want to be the next adobe creative cloud. They have promised for almost a year that even "free" accounts can stream into Unreal, Unity, etc. for 15 minutes per day to get a feel for it before paying the sub fee. Facecap is higher tier, even though Unreal has its own free app and does a better job now. Also, they want to force you to store your animation in the cloud, then limit how many you can store there before going to a higher tier sub. (The "legacy" studio still allows offline work). Tech support requires sub.

Add that to their recent release of the webcam AI feature, no suit needed, apparently. They have decided that the software side of things and their "mocap marketplace" is where the money is. Plus, by the time the animation is in Unreal the fingers get a little...odd (pic rel). Retargeting is only a little hassle, but even then it shouldn't take more work than a mixamo animation retargeting.

>>928983
That sucks. Didn't Rokoko start out with the promise of "mocap for plebs"?
It's like an artist only has two choices: becoming entangled in piecemeal software licenses with recurring fees or put up with less efficient and less advanced FOSS. Is Unreal following the Adobe business model as well? I am doing similar projects as you, non-game virtual character experiences. I am using Makehuman, Blender, and Godot. Unreal looks very tempting because getting good graphic quality is more out of the box, but I don't want to get rug pulled years from now with some horrible license update.

>>928985
Exaaaactly. There's the boilerplate reasoning of "we want to keep updated on le drivers n'setch" but if that were the case, they were dropping the ball already on height detection and retargeting / importing tutorials (they're really just pushing the streaming tutorials, which are halfass, and of course you can't test it unless you bought the streaming tier subscription).

Also, it bears repeating: no technical support for your $4,000 suit setup unless you pay for a premium subscription.

Just like with other high-dollar plugins that require subscription, I don't want the first chunk of my time using that software going through the learning curve, which was a little steep those first few weeks just importing and retargeting.

Unreal itself is great, no fees for standard use (free until you make your first million is the idea, anyway). There's a few shortcomings in cloth out of the box, leading to plugins like Draper (worth looking at). Otherwise, I have very few complaints.

Can't complain about Unreal, it was my mistake to start learning at the tail end of 4, just to relearn it now at 5 with some pretty big differences. I'd say now is the absolute best time to get into it and learn.

There's a lot to cover still on the "jiggle and swish" but it's been a fun ride so far

>>928998
can you add mulitple normal maps to the shirt and fade between them in sync with the animation to make dynamic wrinkles?
sort of like shape keys helping with bending knees for example, but for clothes

>>929025
In Blender, all those weights will transfer over, but there's no real way to start that in unreal. Once things are weighted right, then you can take it into chaos cloth and customize from there.
What I've done with the two gifs above is take the Matrix city sample player character (which they've modeled with slightly bigger assets than the standard female-tall-normalweight model), and steal her clothes. They've put a bunch of effort into those maps to get this.

>>929025
Actually, this guy here is a great resource for clothing creation / customization. He workstreams frequently, just today he's doing a bunch of work on chaos cloth.
https://www.youtube.com/@CinematographyDatabase

>>928974
>How dare you?

>>929089
Lol, no.
The musician has a limited amount of media from the 80's to work with, so we're pairing her music with unreal engine music videos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_F9vUzSQBA

Delivered another video for this client:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=VR2mpXfyrxY

Even though I have my complaints here and there with metahumans, they've brought me this far.

she hot! what's your topo and rig looks like?