We received an interesting 2018 Roadmap notice from Reallusion yesterday. It would say the "Gauntlet is thrown" and Reallusion is going to compete directly with DAZ3D in the morphable prefab 3D Character market.

For those unaware, We animators who purchased the Full Iclone Pro/3Dxchange Pipeline version( $700 USD) Received a bundled application Called "Character creator " that includes base male Female Characters with Morph & Skin presets and a few base clothing and hairs for creation of more customized Iclone realtime avatars to use in Iclone as an alternative to the stock Icone Avatars.

This is all about to Change later this year.

"The Decision to Make CC a Standalone Product

CC, at its inception, was a plug-in for iClone to fulfill the needs of the animation industry. In order to export characters from CC to 3rd party tools, users were required to purchase 3DXchange Pro / Pipeline edition.

CC quickly became a market leader in the field of 3D character creation with its ability to morph the human body in boundless ways, dress and conform a variety of garments, supple implementation of facial expressions, support for body motions and much much more.

Over the last two plus years, we have received a lot of demand of the character generation features in CC from non-iClone users, spanning the field of 3D game development, AR/VR and other interactive applications. In response, we have decided to make CC a standalone application which can chart its own path and destiny. This has big implications in the way CC will take shape to support all of the necessary character import and export features, minimize its barriers to entry, and lower its dependency to outside 3D tools.

What to Expect for Character Creator 3

As a result of more research and development allocated to CC3, this year saw the rise of significant technological breakthroughs. They include optimization techniques relevant to game characters, deployment of physically accurate fine rendering, and marked enhancements to data exchange with 3rd party solutions. Using mesh optimization and remeshing technology, CC3 can satisfy the requirements of different gaming environments including first and third person perspective, non-player characters and crowd simulation among others.

In addition, the full integration of NVIDIA Iray fine render technology allows CC3 to deliver photorealistic still imagery.

All this comes with the benefit of working with one of the world's most interoperable and user friendly content creation pipeline. This ease of operation extends to the integration of ZBrush with GoZ - the dynamic bridge that allows for the sculpting of CC's quad based meshes for the body and other tangibles.

The asset creation pipeline has also been expedited with the ability to directly import any sort of OBJ file and using CC3 auto-skin and skin weight editing, create content that is 100% compatible with CC3."

( Autorigging self made clothing models much like Daz's transfer utility)

"Users who continue to use CC for iClone will also benefit from the new generation of character bases that will be released with CC3. Assets and garments already owned can be applied to this new generation base body,** as it is completely backwards compatible." **

This new stand alone version of Character creator will also feature a poly reduction feature much like the Decimator plugin for Daz studio It will also feature Iclones professional posing and animation tools with Iclone Foot & hand IK solver.

No word on pricing yet but certainly alot to ponder for us animators.

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