Characters break getting in and out of blender back into CC

[MichaelCSturm]

I have to manually apply and reapply textures in CC after getting it out of blender

https://youtu.be/5ytyl_uz8m4?si=jbp9hW9BlEXQ0bnD

[soupday]

I saw this on the Reallusion discord, and there was quite a lot to track down and fix.

When something comes back all white like that it usually means something renamed the mesh, causing all the material lookups to fail because it's looking for the wrong name. Both CC4 and Blender are very quick to rename things, but here, CC4 renamed the hair mesh because... reasons. Something do with it being treated as an accessory.

I've got it to go looking for the real mesh name if it looks like it's been renamed.

Also, materials using the SSS shader just don't set up correctly going back to CC4, the API is incomplete for them so if you send ActorBuild characters back to CC4, the skin gets set to Pbr instead. Not a lot I can do about that until Reallusion fixes it.

But that wasn't the only problem. Character Creator was exporting the wrong Generation id, so Blender didn't realise it was ActorBuild, and then exporting on to Unity it wasn't setting it up right.

Using the current updated versions of the add-on: Blender 2.0.3 / iC/CC4: 2.0.2, this is how it goes, for ActorBuild kevin at least:

https://youtu.be/xs2yYr4iCDY

The trick was to export the character with the HIK and facial profile, then to use those to re-import back into CC4, and to press Cancel when CC4 tries to convert the character to actor build automatically.

In Unity you would then need to retarget any animations with facial expressions that were exported for a different character (The full Talking Kevin character in the video) because ActorBuild characters have different facial expressions and a different arrangement of facial hair.