Generating and animating digital doubles with exact likeness has typically been limited to high-budget film studios. Reallusion is challenging convention by revealing the creation process of Digital Kevin. Utilizing a professional scan process, alongside essential tools like Headshot and Face Tools, our innovative solutions democratize access to cutting-edge technology for everyone.
The perfect digital replica starts at the professional 3D scanning of an ideal candidate. Primary data is the goal, enabling the extraction of essential elements such as body shape, high-resolution skin textures, and a comprehensive range of facial expressions with accurate wrinkles. Presented below is a fundamental checklist covering the various scan expressions that will be needed for a lively performance.
In addition to high-resolution 3D expression scans, the availability of 4D scans delivers a data stream at 30 frames per second, capturing the various expressions of the actor. The look of happiness, sadness, surprise, and more, are faithfully represented, along with the accurate motion capture of mouth shapes for viseme-based lip syncing. The outcome is a digital replica that authentically reflects a genuine personality by deploying a wealth of morphs that complement the extensive facial rig.
In contrast to individually examining thousands of 4D scanned meshes, video archiving is an essential tool to monitor the variation in the expressions. It facilitates easier browsing and selection of the appropriate frame data for model extraction. When it comes to selecting the basis for facial morphs, iconic or natural expressions are preferred over the extremes.
For transforming scan data into a CC character, Wrap3D is instrumental for the retopology process. By aligning the points between the scan model and the CC base model, you can generate a textured character that closely resembles the original scan in shape and appearance. See Tutorial >
Having separate high-resolution head scans, in addition to full-body scan data, is crucial for preserving all potential facial nuances. Using ZBrush, the surface details of the scan can then be projected onto the CC head mesh to refine elements such as eyes, eyelashes, teeth, tongue, and tear duct orientation. ZBrush Face Tools provides a convenient way to bring the baked texture maps back into Character Creator, in the form of diffuse, normal, and roughness maps. See Tutorials > ZB Face Tools >
Thanks to automated bone adjustment, the character body can be rigged by simply aligning the pose of the CC base mesh with the scan model. GoZ allows for seamless transfer of all high-resolution scan mesh details into CC texture maps. See Tutorials >
ZBrush Face Tools is proficient at crafting custom expressions and dynamic wrinkle effects. Leverage ZBrush to extract 13 core expressions from imported scan models, which are then utilized to create CC expression morphs and wrinkle textures. With a single click, the primary facial morphs and their associated dynamic wrinkle maps — including diffuse, normal, and roughness maps — are automatically updated back to Character Creator. See Tutorials > ZBrush Face Tools >
In addition to the 13 primary expressions that can be generated with FaceTools, there are over 140 secondary facial blendshape slots that are customizable using 4D scan data. Enjoy the convenience of easily editing selected morphs with GoZ or importing required morph sets via OBJ files.
To bolster the authenticity of the digital double's speech, the mouth movements for lip-sync animation can be refined by incorporating a 4D-scanned talking script. This approach ensures a close alignment between the digital double expressions and those of the original scanned actor.
To ensure Digital Kevin delivers an optimal facial mocap performance, an additional tweaking of the iClone facial mocap profile is applied. This flexibility to fine-tune the mapping relation between tracking data and the triggered blendshapes helps to achieve a well-balanced result with real-time feedback.
Character Creator and iClone offer various facial controls, including the “Muscle Panel”, “Expression Templates”, “Expression Morphs”, and “Face Puppet”. These tools facilitate immediate exploration of expression combinations, empowering users to dynamically portray scanned character performances with ease.
In addition to saving your scan project as a complete CC actor, have the option to create exchangeable data such as morphs for the head and body, skin materials, facial animation profiles, dynamic wrinkle sets, or “ccHead” formats containing facial rig settings.
To greatly simply the interoperability between different 3D tools. Character Creator has provided both standard FBX/USD format output, and with additional auto shader assignment, auto skeleton mapping, even dedicated control rigs (coming) for major 3D applications.
