Transcripts
1. Introduction: The Toon character you will create in this course: In the next series of videos, we are going to cover how to take the base female model, which is this one here, just a close up of the face. And how to create a cartoon using this great example from the real illusion website of this cartoon girl. And we'll end up with something very similar, something like, like this girl here. The notes. The notes. And on the plane.
2. Toon Body & Head Resize: Okay, we're ready to get going with character creator three. So the first thing you wanna do is launch your program. And it's going to open up to a brand new file in which you are going to get the female default Character. And your layout should look something like this. One of these other tabs may be open. So it may look slightly different. So the first thing we wanna do before we get going is I want to cover the easiest way to move around, how to navigate and move your character and rotate the view and things like that. So on the keyboard, the ALT key going to be your friend. So press the alt key on your keyboard and then the left mouse button. And you'll be able to move left to right, up and down. And this is how you move your character in those directions. Now keep the Alt key down and huge and press the right mouse key button. And this will rotate the character around so you can pivot around and rotate around your character. Finally, use your middle mouse button, scroll key, the zoom to zoom in or out. And then all key, left mouse button. To reposition. Take awhile to get used to. It's kind of reverse from Unreal Engine and my and some other programs. So you kinda have to get used to the controls being a little bit opposite of what you're used to. Okay? So the zoom is the scroll wheel on your mouse, the ALT key and the right mouse button to rotate around your character. And the left mouse button with the alt key to move the character up and down. Now another handy hotkey is the F key on your keyboard. If you press F, it'll just move your character back into the full view. Okay, so let's get this character. So let's move the character with the ALT key and move over here so we have a little more working room. And the first thing we wanna do to create a cartoon is we want to change the size of the character. And this is going to be a girl cartoons. So we wanted to be a little bit shorter. So if we go back up to the actor, so we're going to scale the body down, go over here to the search bar and what the body selected right under Actor type in scale. And you'll see at the top we have character scale a and B. In either one of these will work. I'm not sure what the differences between the two, but go ahead and pick one. And I'm gonna use a. And let's scale it down to about half. So let's go minus 50, just to be exact there. And our character is now half the size. The next thing we want to do is we want to go to the head and type in scale. And now the head scale for a cartoon, let's zoom in a little bit. I'll button left mouse. To move it. We want our head to be scaled up. Pretty big for a cartoon, something like that. Say a 100%. Whatever you like, you may like 80%, that might look better for you. 70%. All of this is subjective and it's entirely up to you and your artistic vision or creation. Now what I would like to do is I found this picture or this character on the real illusion website. And this is a really good face to use as something too. Uses a reference. And this is what we're going to kind of go after as we want to have big eyes like this girl has big lips, tiny little nose, the shape of the face. All of that is what we want to go for. But for right now we want to just go with the big head. We wanna go with the body smaller. And now let's go in there and let's start shaping the body. And exaggerated a little bit, making the waist smaller, the arm skinnier and things like that. So to do that, what we wanna do is go up to the top where it says morph and click on that button right there where it says morph. And this is going to, when you hover over different parts of the body, it's going to highlight in yellow. So what that allows us to do, let's go ahead and zoom in on the waist. And if we highlight it, and then move your mouse to the left, left mouse button and then move to the left. You can see that we are scaling and changing the shape of the waste and abdomen. Also, you can see in real-time how the parameters are changing the sliders over here. And I still have scale selected, so it's given us the abdomen scale. So you can go down and just very intuitively and interactively, you can go and change the shape of your character. So go ahead and just take a few minutes. I'm just gonna go in here. I'm gonna make her thighs a little skinnier, her calves a little skinnier. And then remember with the ALT key and the right mouse button, we can rotate around to get a different look. Your character from different angles. And let's go to her arms. Those a little bit skinnier forearms. And this is so powerful and it's so fun because it just, it takes the technology and all the, you know, the difficult things out of the way. And it just puts these tools in the hands of you as the artist. So just go ahead and take some time and go through the character and make some adjustments. And we're going to be doing a lot of work on the head, so don't worry about that. The neck, for example. We can make the next skinnier. We can make the neck go up, make a longer neck. We have an extreme amount of control and power with these controls. So let's press the button. And you can see that our character is taking shape. We've got more cartoony look with the skinnier limbs and bagel head. That still looks really funny because it looks like a human head with no exaggeration. So in the next video we're going to focus in and we're going to start working on the eyes, the nose and the mouth, and some of the head shape.
3. Toon Girl Nose: Ok, onward we go. Now would be a good time to save our project. You wanna save often. I know I don't have to tell you this. We've all been there where we lost a ton of work because we forgot to save. So let's go ahead and save our project. I'm going to call mine something simple like to girl. And then we'll be ready to go. So you name years, whatever, whatever you'd like. Now the next thing we're gonna do is we're going to work on the head and we're going to start working on the facial features. So let me bring in little reference model and zoom in. You get really, really close to the face so we can see what we're doing here. Now starting with the interactive morph, I'm just going to select the nose. And I'm going to start tweaking it a little bit, making it a little bit smaller, kinda pushing it in. I wanted to get like a little button nose like, like this tune girl has over here. So that's going to take some real work. And as I select it, you'll see if we eliminate the scale in the search here that we have over here in our parameters, we have sliders for all kinds of different settings. So we have the Nos scale, so we can just make the nose entirely smaller like this. And then down here we have the nose height. So a really good one, so we can bring the nose down. Now see, this is a really powerful feature here is you'll notice I brought it all the way down to minus 100 and it stopped and I can't go any further. But if I want to go further with any of these controls in here, all I have to do, all we have to do is go down to bake and it'll bake it. And now it brings the nose height back to the default position of 0. So now we can go ahead and bring the nose down even further so you can bake, move it again, bake, move it again. You can do that with, with all of the sliders and morph controls. Hugely powerful feature here. And I didn't know that at first when I was playing around with character creators. So once I found that out, I was like, wow, that's really unbelievable. So now let's go ahead and see what her nose looks like as a profile. And it it's too much. So what we need to do is bring it down. Let's make it look a little more cart cartoony. So let's bring it in. And I want to change the shape of the nose. So what you do is you just, you go into the sliders and you just have to start playing around with all of these, these different controls. And if you open up the arrow here, you'll see that we have general controls for the nose. We have controls for the ridge of the nose, the tip of the nose, and the nostrils. So you've got an incredible amount of tweaking here that you can do. You can, it's like you're being a plastic surgeon. You can just go in there and dial in the perfect knows that you want to create for your character. So let's go to the ridge here. And in here they tried to show you with the highlighted white what area of the nose that it's going to effect. So we can see here that the nose ridge define, let me get really close in here. See how that's affecting the ridge, the upper ridge here. And if I want that to go further, remember all I have to do is bake. And then we go tip of the nose. You'll find yourself doing a lot of moving around as you create your character. So see how we can make the tip of the nose any, any shape we want. So I want that a bit, a little bit like that. And I still want the nose smaller, so I'm gonna make it a little bit smaller. And in my reference you can see that between the lips and the nose, there's very little space in here. So I want to go ahead and bring my nose down a little bit more nostril scales. So just go ahead and take some time now to familiarize yourself. Get familiar with these sliders and these controls on the nose. And you can use the search if you're looking for something in particular, or just go through them and test them out. If you do something you don't like just 0 it back out. Or Control Z to undo. And I'm just gonna go ahead and work on this, knows a little bit and speed up the video while I do this. And then in the next video we're going to work on the lips and the mouth.
4. Toon Girl Lips: Next we're going to work on the mouth and lips. And this can be fairly easy because all we really have to do is make the kind of scrunch in the lips a little bit, make the top that bigger. So we can go in here with our interactive tool. And I'm just using my left mouse button. And I'm dragging the lips up to make them bigger. And we're going to need to pull them in a little bit now. Not bad, looks pretty close to the cartoon over here, so we will just call that done for now. Now if you'll see there's a little bit of a roughness right here. I'm going to show you later on there is some advanced tools where we can go in and actually smooth the mesh without having to go out to an outside program like my or ZBrush. So we'll cover that. And you're going to love that because it's really, really powerful and pretty easy to use two. So we're gonna just stop right there on our lips. Remember we can just alter or change it anytime we want.
5. Toon Girl Ears: Next we are going to re-size and shape our characters ears. Let's get this position a little bit. And for this weekend, use the interactive, basically just using the left mouse button to drag down. And I've got the year scale towards down a 100%. And remember, we can bake this and then continue to make the years even smaller. So I think right about there and then pull them out just a little bit, just to make them a little more cartoony. And it looks like not bad. Now if you'll look over here in your parameters, there's a ton of sliders where you can change every facet of the year. This is especially helpful when you're working on realistic heads and models to, or if you've tried to make your character look like somebody. Because you can actually go in and define the shape of the year lobes, the top of the ear. There's all of these really cool controls. If you want your ear to be like an elf, you can do that just by sliding it along L. Really fun controls. So the sky's the limit with how you want your characters heres to look. But for now we're just going to leave the years like that subject to change in the future. Next, we're going to get into the really fun part which I really like. And that's the eyes. We're going to get our character's eyes to look very close to this character over here. So we're going to have to make him really big and we're gonna have to move them around and we'll do that in the next video.
6. Toon Girl Eyes: Okay, next we're going to do the eyes. And the first thing we want to do is we want to make them bigger, much bigger. So if we hover over the eyes here and select over here and our parameters, we want to look for the I scale. And what we wanna do is scale the eyes up to a 100% to the maximum, and then go down and click bake. And then we want to scale up more. And then click bake. And then we want to start playing with the angle of the VI. Let's go down here underneath headshot. Under ie, we have all of these different general the openings, the eyeball itself. And what I'm looking for is I want to make the eyes wider, like her eyes are appear so we wanna make them open up a little bit wide. So under eye opening, Let's take that up to a 100%. And that's about where we want to be. We don't want to go too much or we start to get into some problems with the, with the mesh. So let's go ahead and leave that there. And now what we wanna do is we want to find the angle and we want to move the eyes, see where her eyes over here kinda angled up. So let's find the type. And we can see here that we have I all mend Asian Hi, I angled in. If we use the setting I angle in, I like this one. So let's go ahead and pull this to a 100%. And that just moves the interior, the eye a little bit. Then let's go back up to the general of the eye. And up in the search bar. Let's just type in angle. And this will give us the IEA angle overall for both eyes. Notice also that you can do each one separately for the left eye and the right eye. But for now we'll just do them together. So let's crank this up to a 100%. Bake. A 100% again, bake a 100%, again, bake a 100% again. And all I'm doing is I'm just gradually moving these. I's to be angled up higher to give it more character and to look closer like, like this character over here. Again, this is totally subjective and it's totally up to you. And what you're going for with your character. Go ahead and uncheck the search. The next thing we wanna do is we want to adjust our eye height. So we can go up with R i, or we can go down with our eyes. I'm gonna go down with the eye height vacant and go down one more time and bake it. See how she's starting to look more, more cartoony. And then the width is the other one that's really, really useful. So if you want the eyes to come in closer or further now, you gotta be careful when you go further apart because you'll see that the eyeball starts to poke through the mesh. Now if you wanted the eyes to be really far apart like that, there is a way where you can fix the mesh and we're going to cover that in a, in a later video. But for now, let's just keep it to a we don't have that issue and I'm gonna go ahead and bring her eyes just a little bit in. And I'm thinking that looks that looks pretty good. See how she's starting to look like a much more of a cartoon. We still have to shake her head and we're going to do that next. But this is where all of the controls are for the, the eyes. And where you can just totally create the exact look that you want by just going through here. The eyelids, upper eyelid. C, we can pop that up like that. Extremely powerful, extremely creative controls for the eyes and the eyelids, the folds, the tear ducts, the eyeball itself. You can enlarge, you can make the eyeball even, even bigger like this. And again, you gotta be careful that it doesn't poke through. So I'm just gonna go ahead and bring that back to where it was. And that's looking pretty good. So let's say I like that. I like the way that's looking. And we need to do at this time, we need to do a test on the eyes anytime we're manipulating and changing the size and the scale of the eyes, it's necessary to go and do and I check, close the eyes and see how it's looking. So the best way to do that, there's a modify. And we can open and close the eyes here. And the other place is over here in the parameters icon, where it says display. We have an eye control and then a mouth control. So the mouth control will open up the mouth so we can take a good look at the teeth when we start going in and changing the teeth. And the eye control will shut the eyes. Now when I do the I control bomber, look what happens because we scaled the eyes so much, it's not going to blink. So this used to be a real problem when you are creating characters and you'd have to go back and forth into ZBrush and hand manipulate all the, all the points and the vertices. And it was a real pain. It was really hard to do and really hard to keep it looking good. But thanks to real illusion and character create or three, they have a tool built right in here that makes this a fantastic breeze to do. So let's do that right now. We want to go. Let's open up the eyes again and let's go up here to the modify. And let's use the close eyes here that go back up to modify again. And if we go down here, we see this really cool tool called correct. I blink. And all we have to do is select that and bam, the eyes. Blink all the way down. And now you say what are those black marks? It looks like something's poking through the mesh. And you would be right. We've got the eyeball poking through the mesh. Now, there's a couple things that we could do to fix that. And now is a good time to go into this. Because this is where you're gonna run into and you're gonna wanna fix it here. So what we wanna do is we want to be able to actually alter the mesh itself. So to do that, we have to be in the parameter tab here, right where we're at and we go down to Edit Mesh. Another thing I want to mention is to make sure that in your scene tab, you're clicked on to the character. And not the broader the underwear or anything else or the hair. If you have to have hair, or you won't be selecting the right one. So make sure that the character is selected. And then we go over to Edit Mesh. And it's going to bring up our mesh with all the vertices and all the points. And what we wanna do is go over here to the sculpt tab, going to open up the skull. And let's choose the mirror x because these are both in about the same spot. And we wanna go down to the radius of our tool and let's make it smaller because that was way too big. The spring, the size of our tool down to about that intensity. It's set here. I like to bring this down a little bit. And we have the brush type set to the icon. It's a little hard to see, but what it's doing is it's pulling up. So it's the poll icon. This one here is the push. So it's going to push the mesh, mesh in this ones gonna pull it out. This one is the smooth will be used in that later. This is the one we want. So what we do is we go over here and with our left mouse button when we hovering over this area of the message, just click one time. One time is usually good enough. Sometimes you might want to do it twice. Now once we do that, you see a disappears and we don't have the poke through anymore. So we go over here to our Edit Mesh, click on that again and that will get rid of the wireframe. And now let's open up the eyes. Looks really good. I can't tell you those of you who have designed characters before and you've gone the ZBrush route or taking your character, export it in, back into 3D Max or, or Maya or something like that or blender. It's a real pain in the butt to have to go through that whole workflow where now you can just fix the the eye blink right here. Now while I have this in such a close up, I want to mention here also is the smooth mesh. Tick box. If you check that, it's gonna re-render the character and your mesh will be smoother. And now depending on how powerful and faster computer is, you may or may not want to use this. Okay, so that's smooth. My mesh, I like to use that and I should have turned that on in the very beginning, but this is, this is what it looks like. With the mesh smoothing turned on. So we test out the eyes. The eyes look beautiful. Let's go ahead and rotate around. Looks great. Open up the Mao. Close the mouth. Now another good thing to do, especially while we're on the eyes, since this is such an important part of your character, the eyes. I'd like to go into the facial posing and double-check as well. So we'll go up to the posing tab here. Oops, excuse me, the guy that looks like he's running. And then we go down to Edit facial. And this is going to open up the Expressions tab for us right here. And this is a quick way to just test out and see how the, the face is doing with different expressions. So go ahead and all you have to do is click one time and just go through these different expressions and just look for areas that the meshes poking through or breaking, something like that. Just wanna go through the different expressions. And if we do the drop down menu here, we can do a angry. And we can see how our character looks in the different angry facial expressions. That's what's really nice about the character creator three is as we're sculpting and we're changing and creating our character. Even with some pretty massive changes like this, we don't lose the facial rigging. It all stays intact, which is beautiful and a real timesaver. Now to get back to our default face, we just go back to reset right here. Now the thing here want to show you is over in the muscle. This is where we can test out different expressions and actually save them. We'll get into that later to save custom expressions by selecting the different areas here and then clicking with your left mouse in the area. Now the head is moving up and down because I have these selected, so I'll turn those off. I just want the mouth to move. And we can also take a look at how our characters doing and then hit the default key to go back to, back to one, back to original. Another thing, let's check the eyeballs. If you select the eyeballs and then the up and up above the eyes and below the eyes. And then we can rotate the eyeballs around. And this'll be a good test to, to see if anything is breaking through the mesh. And over here, if we click the eraser just takes everything off. If we just want to turn the eyes around, move them around. Now we can see here that we're breaking through the eyelid here. So that could be a problem if we're going to be, if we're going to be making our character looked down like this. The easy fix for that would be to go into the eyeball setting and just pull this right eye characters right I back a bit or go in like we did with the fixing the eyelid and pull this eyelid forward just a little bit with the same tool how we edited the mesh. Okay, so looking, looking pretty good. Let's go back to the expressions. Down here are the other ones. This gets some good blinks in there so you can check. So it's good procedure to frequently check as you're, as you're making changes to your character. And make sure that you're not losing any, any of the facial movements or you don't have any problems for animation later on. Ok, give yourself a pat on the back. You've come a long way, you've learned a lot. We've got the eyes done. What we're gonna do next is we're going to work on the shape of the head, change the shape of the head. And then we're gonna go in there and like fine tune and smooth out some things using the mesh tool like we did before. And that's it for this video.
7. Toon Girl Head Shape: Now we're going to adjust the head and make it look more cartoony, as you can see from our reference photo over here. The tune character has a smaller chin. Kind of slopes down into more of a, more of a pointy chin. So that's what we're gonna do Next. Let's make sure our morph button is selected up here. And then we will select our chin. And over here, we're going to lower our jaw scale. So let's go ahead and bring that in all the way down to minus 50 and bake that. Select the edge of the jaw here. Bring that in just a little bit like that. And we'll get her cheeks. Go ahead and select those cheekbone scale. We can bring these up to where that looks good. And again, this is just entirely how you want it to look. How do you want your character to look? It's entirely subjective. Usually what I do to is I'll go to the back of the character's head and on a cartoon I'll bring it out a little bit like that. If the forehead is too high. I just bring that in a little bit. Look in pretty much the way I want it. Now, a good thing to do also is to go into your base character here. And in this drop-down menu, we can select x-ray. And this will show us a good rendition of where the teeth are. Sometimes what we need to do is we need to move the teeth forward. The upper or lower teeth. If we've moved the lips around too much. So this is entirely within your control through the sliders as well. You select the teeth right here. And then you'll be able to go into the sliders and move them forward down anywhere you need to go. And it'll put it in in that position saying with the eyeballs. So if you need to make adjustments like that, very intuitive and very powerful tools. So let's go back and go to normal. Okay, I'm pressing f to get a look at my character and see if I like how the head looks on the body. And everything looks pretty good. So that's how we adjust the shape for the head and make the major changes. Now, in the next video, we're going to do some detail on the face. Because I don't really like, even though I've adjusted the bridge of the nose is too sharp. And then if you look here near the eyes, there's too much of a hollow here. It's kinda hard to do that with the sliders. So I like to go in there and edit the mesh. So in the next video, we're going to cover that and do that.
8. Toon Girl Smoothing Details of Head: Next we're going to smooth out the mesh using our really powerful Edit Mesh tools. So make sure we're on the Parameters tab up here. Sometimes I get lost. So just be aware that there is a lot of, there are a lot of menus in here that we want to be on the Parameters tab and then go down to Edit Mesh. And again, make sure that our character is selected over here in our scene tab and it mesh. And then we want to go over to sculpt. And this time we're going to use the smooth tool. So I'll bring this strength down a little bit. The radius is a little small like that. Let's bring the radius up so it's, oops, too big there. And what I want to accomplish is see how sharper knows is compared to the cartoon picture, even though this is a face on pose. The bridge of her nose is too, is too sharp. So what we wanna do is go in and just start smoothing out. I don't know if you can really see this very much in the video, but I'm just using my left mouse button and I'm gradually drawing down the nose. So see now, the profile of the nose is much flatter. And I've eliminated a lot of that sharp bridge of the nose that I didn't want. So we can get in really close like this. Bring down the size of our brush, and continue on. That really, really smooth. Also remember that we had a issue with the lips and can see that the lips are really sharp up here as well. So let's go ahead and take care of that while we're in here and will smooth, smooth ellipse out. Because on a cartoon, we wanna kind of, sometimes you have to go throughout the head and smooth it out. We want to smooth kinda roundish shape for a cartoon. So it doesn't look so, so realistic. But again, you know, you may be going for that realistic stylized look. In which case it would be fine. Down here we're going to go and be careful because the eyelashes are attached as well. So you don't want to smooth the eyelashes too much. So kinda go underneath them. And I'm trying to get this hollow of the eyes smoothed out here. And that's looking much better. If we see here, we can see some angles here that might be a little too much the cheap. So I can smooth that out. If you decide that you want a little bit more of a full cheek on the inside here. Just select the, the pole. This is going to pull out. And then just slowly pull that out and that'll give more of a inner cheekbone. Okay, that's looking pretty good. Now, click the Edit Mesh button to get us back into our full textured mode. Yeah, that looks much better because now the nose is much flatter. I could still continue to do that. You see in our reference model, there's very little, there's very little push out of the nose or bridge the nodes in this particular cartoon. So in that case, if we wanted to do that, we just continue to smooth or use the push in tool to push the nose back closer to the eyes. Be really careful when you're round the eyes though, because if you do too much mesh editing here, you can mess up the eyes and cause some poke through and then you'd have to fix that. Okay. I'm I'm really liking the way that's looking. So just work on your character. Take your time, go through the slider and go through the mesh editing. If you mess up something, just do Control Z to Undo. And you'll be good to go remember to save often. So I'm gonna save. And also what I like to do is I like to rename my character because by default it's called C S3 or character creator three base plus. So I'm just going to rename my character to tune girl. And I use an underscore between the words, tune girl. Plus. So we know that she's the latest and greatest skin materials. Go ahead and save that again. Good. Okay, I'm, I'm pretty happy with that. So in the next video we're going to add some hair. And then we're going to add some more clothing so we can get our character ready to ship over two, i cologne seven, then add some animation, animations and get into some fun stuff.
9. Toon Girl Add Hair: Now we're going to add some hair to our character. This is where it gets kind of fun. So we want to go over to our content tab right here on the content tab. And there's also something new, the smart gallery that you definitely wanna install and checkout. But for now let's go to the Content tab. And we want to go up here to the icon that has the two little stick figure people over here. So that's the main area we want to be. And then down in the second row here, you'll see that there's all kinds of other icons. There's skin and morph. Body more, had more hair, teeth, eyeballs, eyelash, and so on. Up here we have poses, we have accessories, we have environments, clop, makeup, and skin. These are the new skin gins up here. We're gonna get into that a little bit later too and the makeup effects. But for now we want to be on the profile of the people. And then we want to go over here to the hair and select that. And go down here to the hair should be selected for you. If you do the drop-down arrow. I have purchased here that I got called like O'Hare. And it's really nice. And we're going to use just the built-in ones that come with your regular standard version or the trial version that you're using. So let's go down here. You can see there's a button, there's, there's male and female hair. We've got fo hawks, all kinds of cool stuff. We've got cartoon hair. Let's go up here to the high pony tail hair and use this one. There's a reason why, because I want to do a little mesh editing with it. So you can either double-click on this or you can left click and you can drag it into the view port. And the hair will load right onto your character. Now, same thing over here with the school. Back to the scene tab. We can see that the hair is now here. And we can also smooth the mesh of the hair as well. I'm just gonna take that off so it so it goes a little bit faster. So you can see that the hair was attached to our character in the proper place. It's conformed properly. And everything looks, looks really nice. And what we can't see here, but we will see over and I clone is that it also has physics built into it. So when our character moves her head, the hare is going to sway. It's gonna follow just like real hair and there's nothing we have to do. No settings we have to play around with to get it to do that, which is really, really cool. Okay, so that, that's a nice look in hair and that's as easy as it is to add hair to your character. And you can go to the real illusion marketplace and the contents store. And you can search for hair and there's a ton of really cool looking, really nice-looking, high-quality hair that you can purchase on the marketplace for your characters. Now, some easy things to do with the hair so that you don't have to take it into Photoshop, go back and forth, make it a little bit easier. Let's say we wanted to change the color of the hair. Pretty simple to do here. What we need to do is go over to these tabs up here and our modified tabs, and click on the materials, swatch or tab. And then we'll see here that we have high pony tail and then we have the scalp, which is underneath the hair. So go ahead and select the high ponytail. And down here where it says base color. Hover over that. And then right click with your mouse and go down to adjust color. And then we'll have this really nice window pop up my character over here. And we have all these controls over the color of the hair. And one of the most simple things to do, let's say that we wanted it to be black hair. We would just take the brightness and pull it all the way down. And now our character has some really nice black hair. The reset button will bring us back to, back to 0. You have contrast settings here. So as you play around with the contrast, you can lighten up that brown color. We have hue. So if we want to slide the hew down, we can get a nice purple color. We can bump the Saturation up and get it to be really vibrant. Or we can pull down the saturation. So you have a tremendous amount of control right here within character creator without having to export your textures into Photoshop or another image editing program and, and alter it there. So I like to use this. This is really, really, really powerful to reset and we go back to the original color. Okay? Now, the next thing I want to cover is how to adjust the hair. Sometimes when you put the hair on, especially if you've you've got a thicker model or a thicker character. I mean, bulkier, muscular whenever the hair might be poking through the mesh, so it needs to be adjusted. So the way to do that as we go up to our scene, make sure our hair is selected. And then we go over to our first tab parameters. And we go again into our good old Edit Mesh. And then we go over here to face. And what we're gonna do here is we're going to select a piece of the hair and you'll see it highlights. And then I'm going to go up to one of my Transform tools at the top here. And I'm gonna select the move. Now from here I can grab the hair and it's very easy to move it around. Now you'll notice over here in the tool menu, I have soft selection checkmarked on. If I take that off, this is just going to work with the face I selected. Soft selection makes it very powerful because you can change the radius. Let me bring it down to one, down here so we can see a little better. And by adjusting this slider, you can tell the program how much of the mesh you want it to affect. And it has a really smooth roll-off to it too. So here we can take that and we can adjust this. So if for example this part, this part of the hair has gone into the body like that. Then it's really easy just to grab this and the Move tool and pull it away from the body. All the tools work, the Rotate tools will work on it, want to rotate it whatever direction. And then there's also some really powerful tools down here called relaxed faces. Smooth faces. So while you have it selected, I don't know if you can really see that in the video, but it makes them an adjustment here to the faces to smooth. It will smooth that out a little bit too. So that's just kind of like a fine tuning type of thing. So you can go to the hair and you can move the hair if you want it to be even a little bit shorter. If you want the hair to be shorter and not so long. You have the power and the flexibility to change that. If you want to move the pony tail up higher, he just select it. Choose your soft selection radius, the Move tool, and you can move the pony tail up and make it into a higher, higher pony tail. Very, very powerful, easy to use tool once you know where the buttons are. That's the way it always is, right? Finding the buttons. And you can totally customize your hair, do quite a bit with the existing hair. Click the Edit Mesh. And now we have our changed hair. Very, very, very powerful tool to edit your mesh right inside of character creator without the need to go out to an outside program. So that's it for the hair for now. And in our next video, we're going to go into the makeup effects or the different skin materials that we have for the characters with the new skin Qian. So make sure that you've loaded the trial version or you have skin Jin, the premium version, not just the standard one because that just comes with a few. And we're going to show some of the cool things that you can do with that.
10. Toon Girl Change Eye Color & Eyelashes: In this video, we're going to change the color of the eyes. And you're going to love how easy it is to do. So let's go over here into our content tab, make sure the content tab is selected. And then up here the icon of the two stick figures or characters right here, just make sure that is selected. And then down here in the window, select i. And what's gonna come up over here in this pane? All kinds of different eye colors. So let's say that we want to change our character's eyes from this nice light blue color into a dark brown, we would just take an either double-click over here, left-click and drag onto our character. Now we're gonna get a little window that comes up and says, do you want to replace the actual eyeball and the material or the material only, you can do either one. We're just gonna do the material for now. And now we have nice brown, dark brown eyes for our character. I'm going to Control Z and undo that. And you can select, you can see there's a lot of different choices here. Here's a really nice Hazel green type color. It's just as simple as drag and drop or double-click and you can change your character's eyes, the color of the eyes. Later on we'll get into some even more parameters where you can change the size of the pupil. The Iris's, there's a ton of controls in the sliders over, over here on this side, the modify. But for now we'll just leave it like that. And now let's go over here and select the eyelash. Make up an S FX. And over here we have all kinds of different eyelashes. We have some like normal eyelashes on our character right now. But if we want to put some darker eyelashes, thicker and a little bit darker, we can just drag that over onto our character and say apply more and apply textures. We need both of those. So now character creator has given us a really nice thick, darker eyelashes. And as you can see, there's all kinds of different looks you can achieve with this. So that's it. That's how easy it is to change the color of the eyes and to change the eyelashes themselves just by dragging and dropping.
11. Toon Girl Add SkinGen & Makeup: If you look at the character now you'll see that I've made some changes. I went in there and I kinda fine tuned around her eyes. And I also wanted to rise to slant up a little bit more, to be angled up more. So I did that about five more times, baking that in, and then just went in there and smooth scenarios and did a little tweaking with the Edit Mesh tools like we were doing before. So now i like how she looks a lot more. This way, a little more cartoony. So in this video, what we're going to do is start applying some different skin materials that come with the skin Jin. So make sure that you have the skin Jin installed the trial version if you didn't have it and you need the premium version so that you'll have access to all the cool things like freckles and the makeup effects and things like that. And then where we find that as you go into your content tab. And then right next to the stick people, we go over to these three little circles where it says skin. And then you just click on that and then go down under the first thing I wanna do is do the freckles. So underneath blemish, we have realistic human skin. And then down here we have all kinds of different freckles. There's old people freckles, there's heavy freckles. There's full freckle. So let's just take that. And just, for an example, pull this over onto our character. And what this is gonna do is it's going to open up the activate editor, which is over here in the paint palette tab. And it's just added our freckles right onto our existing skin material that we had. And if you look over here in the panels, we have an incredible amount of flexibility here where we can click on any of these settings here. And we can change the opacity of it. And this is set to 60. So we can go all the way down and our freckles are gone. Or we can make them go up even more all the way up to a 100% if you want them to be really heavy. So we'll just pull this down. You'll notice that you have all of these layers. This is so cool and so powerful because it's like having Photoshop layers built into your character creator. So now you don't have to go back and forth into image editing programs. You have all the power here. The nose pores. You can see there's a mask here. So this will just affect the nose as you make changes here. And you can see the opacity here. And as you scroll down, you'll notice that there's many, many, many different settings on here. You can change the color, you can change the colors right here, you've got your swatches. You've got capillary cheeks right here. So this will affect the, the cheeks. And the best thing to do is just test it in gold goal along all of these settings here. And try them out. This move them around and just put them back to default if you don't like the changes that you made. Very, very cool right here. So we'll just leave that on for now. And now let's go back up and let's try something different. Let's go up to the full skin, skin based rather. And then check realistic human skin. And what this does is it gives us all kinds of presets. From a baby to a female, African-American. Male. We've got female heavy female, old female, Asian, female athletic. Let's just try this one on our character just to see how it looks. So we can either double-click here or we can left-click and drag right onto our character. And this is going to come up a lot of times I miss this because it goes over on the right-hand side. And you'll be wondering why it's stuck here. So be looking for this little window to come up. It's going to ask if I want to replace the following parts, nails, full body, eyelashes. I'm gonna keep my same eyelashes. So we'll just click apply. And there we go. And what that did is it kept my freckles and it just added the athletic skin materials all the way on to the full body. So as you see, we've got this really nice athletic skin texture that change that. And if I didn't like that, I could just undo that control Z. Over here on the right-hand side, we also have the settings where if we want to remove this aside a little bit, we can change the size of our textures. A good working image size is 2048 by 2048, but you can go all the way up to 4096. By 4096 for high-quality textures, you just select this and then click update. It'll take a couple minutes to resize all of your textures and put them back on your character. So here we go. We've got our freckle girl now looking pretty good. And the next thing I wanna do is I want to go and apply some makeup. This is where we can get some fun, fun things going on. So we go back up and the icon right next to the three circles here is our makeup. That'll pull up all of our makeup effects. And if you go into the eyelash, you can see where we were before. Under the lips. All kinds of different lip colors to choose from. And again, all you have to do is drag and drop onto your character. Lip shapes. Different. Eyebrows that you can put on your character. And then miscellaneous makeup effects. You've got things like dirt smudges and camouflage, all kinds of neat things, scars you can put on tribal paint. So we wanted our character to have some facial paint. You just drag and drop that on. Back was just drag that on right now and you'll see what it looks like. And there we go, beautifully composited right onto our character. And then over here you have a ton of settings that you can do to play around with the roughness, the shininess, make it dull, even change the color. If you'd like anything you wanna do. So I'm gonna go ahead and undo that. Okay, now that that's gone. And I want to go over here to our makeup tab. And we need to find I make up eyeliner. So under eye make up eyeliner. And there's a really cool things on here. Let's say we wanted to use smudge to make our character just look kinda unique. Just drag and drop. Would I like to add a new layer or replace the current layer? I want to add a new layer. And there we go. Now our character has kind of smudgy mascara coming down on her eye shadow. Another good one. We find a really good dark when to put on here to go with that. How about a dark smoky? Want to add another layer? And there we go. So now we've got our girl, she's got some eye shadow on, she's got makeup, she's got nice freckles. And I think I want her hair to be darker to match that particular setup. So remember how we do that. We go over here and we go over to the texture. And then we go down to, we gotta go over Tor seem tab, and we gotta select our hair. And I want to be on the pony tail. And I want to adjust the color. And I want to bring them right down. So she's got black hair. And there we go. Nice black hair to go with all that black smudge makeup. And if I wanted to change the color of her eyes to match the darker color than I would just go into content. Excuse me, It looks back here, tune girl plus content. And then we would go back to our characters, stick people, and go down to I. And then we could choose a different eye color. Let's say we wanted to green Eichler. It's telling me that applying this will deactivate the current skin Jin session. Would I like to continue? And I'll say sure, because I can always start that backup again. Do I want to replace the entire I just want the materials. So let's go ahead and just do that. And there we go. She's got some green eyes now. Pretty simple. Just a matter of dragging and dropping. It's extremely powerful tools and really fun to use. Once you get used to where everything is, he'll be able to pretty much create anything you want, starting with the base character. So that's it for this. In the next video, we'll go over where the clothes are and how to put the clothes on your character. And men will get her ready to send over to I clone so we can start putting some motion capture animations, honor, that are included with iCloud.
12. Toon Girl Enlarge Iris & Pupil: Another setting you'll find very useful for the eyes is to change the size of your irises or pupils. And we have those sliders as well. I brought in the image of our character that we were using as a reference photo. And if you notice her, irises are rather large. They're much bigger than what we have here in our character. And I kinda like that because it goes better. So if we want to change the size of the irises and the pupils, we need to just go over to our more parameter tab right here and scroll all the way down to the bottom. So go all the way from the top all the way down to the bottom. And it's under a tab or an arrow called actor parts. So reveal that. And then down under here you'll see cc base. I see you want to select that. And then over here, we will be able to scale up or down or iris. So I'm gonna go ahead and make her irises about 85 from where it was before. Make them bigger so they match the reference photo a little bit better. And then the pupil is right here. So if we want to make the pupil little bit larger or a little bit smaller, we can do that here too. So I'm just going to bring it up a little bit. Also in these settings that's very helpful is if you find your eye ball or the the iris itself is not where you want it to be. You've got the controls to rotate the eyeball in or out. And you can do it either combined with both eyes or you can do it with each eye. So let's say you just wanted to move it in just a little bit more. And that's better to your liking. You can do it right here with this control slider right here. Or if we want to go for a comedic effect, you can have her have cross eyes. So I'm just gonna put it about it. 20 to kinda like that look right there. And there we've changed our high viruses to be much larger than the pupil, to be a little bit larger as well.
13. Toon Girl Teeth Shapes: Before we send our character to high clone, we need to adjust the teeth. And the controls for the teeth are really powerful as well. And there's so many that headshot contains and all the Ultimate more that come with the program. So the first thing we wanna do is go over here to our Parameters tab. Go down to display. And open the mouth. So that we'll be able to see our characters teeth and position your model, your character too, where it's really close up. The gun might come up even a little bit closer here. So I want to really be able to take a good look at the teeth. Now the next thing we wanna do is want to be able to pull the lips back so we can see the teeth better. So go up here to the morphs. And then we wanna go way down here under headshot, mouth, under the mouth section. And then go down where it says lips seem. Down at the bottom. It will say lip show teeth. So if we just move that all the way up to a 100, we'll be able to see all of the teeth there. Now this is probably a good place to show, talk about favorites. If you look over here to the right, you'll see a little heart icon. And if you click on that, if you find yourself using parameters a lot, this is really handy because once you've favored it, then you can go back up to your favorites up here. And all of your favorites will be easily accessible so you don't have to hunt and search because there literally are so many dozens and hundreds, hundreds of controls that you'll get lost. Also using the search function helps as well. So favorites are your friend, use them. I like them a lot, but for now we're just gonna go and find these where they are in the headshot controls. So we have selected now under headshot, mouth, lip scene is where this is in. It's all the way down at the bottom. Now if you want, you don't have to have the mouth completely open. You can also do this. I find I'm switching back and forth because sometimes I want to see back into the mouth. So it can be helpful to have the mouth open. Ok, so now we've got the mouth open, we can see where the teeth are. And this is a good time to talk about adjusting where the teeth are, upper and lower teeth. So underneath the controls, if we go down to actor parts under headshot, and then we go under the move section. We have front side. Move. And we also have this located under general. So let's say that I decide that my lower teeth are too high up and I want them to be a little bit further down. Well, there's an easy way to do that. I'm going to search for lower teeth, lower height. And then what I can do is I can just lower this down. And now her her teeth are down lower. Be careful when you use this and remember to go back into the, the animation, the facial animation and do the different expression. So you can see if there's any poke through. Because sometimes when you lower the teeth or the upper teeth moved things around, you may experience it poking through the mesh. And we've discussed how you go in there and fix all of that. So this is how you can lower the teeth on the upper as well. We would just go and search for the upper teeth EPR height. And now I can bring them up or I can bring them down. So extreme amount of control on the positioning. You can also do side to side. So if you wanted to move the teeth from side to side, you can rotate them as a set upper and lower. So there's a tremendous amount of flexibility in these controls. So familiarize yourself with it. Just go through and play around with the sliders and see what they do. Now let's get into how we can change individual teeth and really, really make our character stand out. We're in our head shot and we're under bass teeth headshot. In general, we've got all the general controls. We've also got detail controls. So we can very easily change the length of the teeth all at once. Or just the upper or just the lower. We have controls for the t'th width. So by just sliding this, we can make our characters teeth go. Have gaps between the teeth, which really changes look, the upper teeth width or the lower teeth width. Separately. We have controls for the angle of the teeth. So here's the upper teeth. See how we can make them jut out like this or go back in. Now imagine if you had to go into an external program and adjust these by hand. You know, ZBrush For example, I love ZBrush. I've been using it for years. But if you don't have to make a round trip to ZBrush, This, this is even better. And in most cases I've found for character creation and design, the, these morphs will more than be adequate for what we need to do. We've got teeth edge contour. And then we go down and they'll change that way. Teeth root width. C, This is actually changing up there by the gums. Gum up or recede. Kinda hard to see here. So just go through and just try them out. This would be your homework assignment is just just go through all of these and try them out and see what they do. And then just undo it with Control Z or by zeroing it out. If you find ones you like, it's good idea to click the favorite, the heart icon here. So there'll be easy to find again. So like I say, you can get lost in here. I get lost all the time and I use this program all the time. The root, the gum line, the width, the length. So you can either go see each tooth, the upper tooth that can make this one longer. And I can make this one shorter. Or I could make both of them about the same and she could have buck teeth. So you can really change the look of your character because really nobody has perfect teeth unless you get veneers and stuff like that. But most characters, especially if you're designing a stylized one, is going to have teeth that are exactly perfect and sometimes that's a dead giveaway. If you're going for realism cartoons, you can, you can get away with a lot more. Now if we go to the upper canine length, we can turn our character into a vampire, quite easily. Lower K9. We can bring these up as well. And the left and right. So now we have a nice vampire character. Just gonna 0 these out for now. Okay. So that's it for the, the teeth. This will give you an idea of the tremendous flexibility and power and control you have over designing your teeth. You're like a, like a digital or a virtual dentist. You can just go in there and almost by, by the tooth. I mean, you'll, you'll get in here and you'll see all the controls that are here in order to create a custom character. And the other thing that I find helpful, especially if you're moving the teeth around, is to go up to your character, makes sure it's selected, and then go to x-ray. X-ray will give you a good view here where the teeth are. So when you start moving them up or down, you'll be able to pretty much see if you're going to have any mesh poke through. X-ray is a good tool to use. Alright, in the next video, we're going to cover how to change the coloring of the teeth through the materials. So now what I wanna do is I just want to go up to my favorites and my lips show teeth. I'm going to bring that all the way down. And I'm gonna go back over here to my parameters and I'm going to close the mouth. Save. Remember to be saving your project. Save often. And I'll see you in the next video.
14. Toon Girl Teeth Materials & Colors: Now we're gonna go to the Materials section for the teeth. So the first thing we wanna do is go to our parameters. And if you've saved it as a favorite, click on that. And what we're looking for is the lip show teeth. If you haven't, it's going to be under here, under headshot, mouth and lips. And then it will be way at the bottom here. So you can open up and get a good look at those pearly whites. Now, from here we want to go over to texture. But first let's make sure that our CSI baby teeth under our scene tab. So seeing tab and then SCC based teeth are selected. And then go over here to our material tab and select on that. And you'll see here we have upper teeth and lower teeth. So we can do these separate. So let's scroll down the micro normal. These are fine tuning. Its very subtle may want to play around with these settings a little bit. But for now we want to go down to TIF brightness, TIF desaturation, GMS brightness, gums, desaturation, roughness and specular. These allow us to easily adjusts the coloring as far as brightness of the teeth. Sometimes I've noticed, especially not so much on cartoons, but if you're going for realism, a lot of times the teeth just look to white and they look to two bright and kind of lacks the realism. So here's where you can go and, and actually bring down the brightness of the teeth. Mean you could bring them away down depending on the character that you're, you're creating. T, D, saturation, C, we do that and it kinda gives it a yellowing, yellow color, would go the other way. It will go more of a bluish gray color. So this is a very, very powerful slider. Same thing for the gums. We can take the gums and make him really bright like that. Or we can just take the coloring out of it. Now down here, the front a o, ambient occlusion. This is by default set to one. But if we bring it down, we can bring the amount of light that's bouncing around creating shadows. We can get a different effect here too. And we can bring it to where the top teeth are really, really dark. Same with the rear, rear roughness and specular. These are the shininess settings. And here we come down to the diffuse color. This is where if you want to change the color of the teeth in a, in a more dramatic way. You've got your color swatches right here. So if you wanted to have a kind of a, kind of a yellowish green color for a character. And this is where you would, you would change that shadow threshold. These are subtle things that you'll see. Probably could see it better if we open the mouth. This is the opacity of the teeth itself. So you can turn those off and on. And if for some reason you needed self illumination, if you wanted to brighten up the teeth and make them glow, you could do it right here. The roughness. If you bring this down, you can make the top teeth shinier. And especially with the specular, if you crank this up, you can make them really super shiny. So these also are very useful depending on what you're trying to achieve with your character. And that about covers it. How you change the material, the brightness, the ambient occlusion in the mouth. In fact, let's go up there again. I want to just see something. See how this does this. And you can see it with the mouth open a little bit more. What I'll usually do, especially on a realistic character, is I will dial this back down so the teeth or more in shadow. So when the mouth is opening up, you don't have these big ol bright teeth that kind of tend to look unrealistic. So I'll, I would do that with the the top teeth and the bottom teeth as well. Cartoons like I say, less, less of an issue. But depending on the look you're going for. So extremely powerful tools here in the texture panel. And with that, we will be onward to send our character to iCloud.
15. Toon Girl Add Wardrobe: Ok, we're just about ready to send our character over two I clone. But first we need to send her over to the Wardrobe Department. It gets some clothes on. So let's do this. Let's press the f key on our keyboard so we get a full, full body look. And now's a good time to, to look at the shape of the body and see if there's any changes you want to make. Remember all you have to do is go up here to the morphs and then you can go and make changes interactively or use the hundreds of Morph controls that are included over here. I'm just going to call this done for now. And I just want to add some close to our character so that we can send her over ready for animation. So let's go to the Content tab. Normally we have this selected from the last time. What we wanna do is move over here to clothing tab. And then down here we have underwear, shirts, pants. Let's go to the shirts first. And I want to choose, you can choose whatever you want. I'm going to put the camera Saul on. So I'm going to left-click and drag. It will give us this yellow box. And then when I release the camera, Saul is on the character. We go to the scene tab. We can see that the camera SOL is now here. Now I also still have the brawn underwear. So what we're gonna do once we get her dressed is we'll just probably delete those. We don't need to have those on. Back over to content. Let's go over to pants. Can see there's all kinds of pants and shorts included in here. I'm going to select the biker genes. Okay, and there they are, conformed and fitting pretty nicely on our character. Get where we can see here. Now we need some shoes or we need some boots. Will go to the shoes here. And I think we're gonna get some punk boots. These look pretty good. We'll see how they look on. Looks pretty good. Not too bad. Now sometimes lets go close up here. Sometimes when you're fitting boots over pants like this, we run into this issue. We can see that the pants are actually coming through the boots and that doesn't look good. So if we really want to use this, we need to select, select the boots. School find them over here, punk strap boots. And then we need to go over to the Parameters tab. And we need to come form. And we need to calculate collision. Now that looks a little bit better. But it's kinda making our boots go into a weird shape. So the only way around this is we would go into the pants and then we go into Edit Mesh and then we would push those pants back in so that they weren't showing under the boots. An easier way, of course, would be to choose another pair of boots that were here we go. So these boots which oh, okay. I don't know if I really like the look that looks kind of jumpy. So basically you're doing like you would wardrobe in, in a film for your characters. You're going to try on different things. See if you like it. If you don't, you'll use something else. Let's try this pair of boots here. Or I could switch pants two. Okay. That looks kinda dorky. I like that. Let's go back over to pants. Maybe those look a little better but you get the hang of it. You just try on different clothes and see which combination you like. If we wanted to have a coat, we can even put a code on her. And she'd have a nice biker code. So she's dressed, kinda ready to go, except we got a little issue here. We got a little poke through. So we go into our scene and we go to the mixture of the jacket is selected, and we go into our conform and calculate collision. And it's doing the best that it can. But we have an issue. So the only way out of this particular problem is to go and edit Mesh. So let's go into it mesh. Remember the tools that we use that worked really good. Sculpt Tool is the one I like to use a lot. You can see little poke through here. Okay, that looks better. And I really don't like those pants. Yeah, I go back in there and change those. Replace. That matches the alphabet better. And the shoes. I think I wanna get some like black style these. Okay. There's our little biker girl now. Look in, not too bad. Now, a good way when you're trying on clothes and especially if you've made accustomed character like this where we have changed the default caret character considerably. The dimensions and the head and arms shape and everything is to go into the pose tab and put her in a different pose. So we can double-click or click and drag. And by putting her in opposed, we can see if we have a problem still that needs to be fixed, which we can see right here. We do this, this particular shoulder is poking through. So we need to go over here to our Edit Mesh. And the problem is I just selected my character. Common mistake I make all the time. I need to go to the punk leather jacket and sculpt. I'm gonna make this a little bit bigger. If it's a big poke through, sometimes it's better just to go to the face tool. And good our radius up a little bit. Then click on our Move tool and just pull that, pull that out. So see I've kinda like stitch that together where we're not seeing her skin come together in this extreme pose. Let's try a different pose because it will show all the flaws. And if we get into I clone and we start doing animations, it really shows that fast as the, as the character starts moving around. And then you gotta send the character back to character creator to fix it. Try a seated position. And this one will also bring up a lot of flaws in the clothing. K. So you get the hang of it. That's what you do is just a process of moving from pose to pose, trying out, editing the mesh, and fixing it. Okay? We have our character fully dressed, fully created, and ready to go into I clone.
16. Toon Girl Into iClone & Add Mocap Anim: Now we're ready to export our custom character in center over to I clone. So this is, this is really cool. It how easy and an effective this is all we have to do is go up to File Export. And down here to send character to I clone. Select that one. And right now the entire character is being prepared and sent over to I clone. And there we go. We've got I clone here. In our character is in the T-Pose, ready to go. She's fully dressed. All the materials are on accurately. Look just as good as in character creator. And if I hit the button, I can get her back to a full position so we can see the whole thing. And now we have our character ready to animate inside of IE clone seven, preparing for our trip forward into Unreal Engine, which we'll do shortly. So the first thing we wanna do is go to the Content tab. Over here, we've got the folder here, looks like a file folder. Then we've got the person icon. And over here we have the Animation tab, the little person running. And we want to go down to motion plus. Motion plus has Animation and audio. So what it's gonna do when we apply this to our character, it's going to give us the full animation, as well as the lip sinking right on, on top of the character. So select female since our character is female. And then we'll go down here to where it says Heidi, talk one. You can either double-click it just like over in character creator, or we can left-click and drag. It will highlight a square, and I release the mouse. And now we have applied a motion capture animation with audio so we can audition our character and see how she looks. So let's do that. Let's move a little bit closer. And the animation is already down here in our timeline. If we scroll down here, it's a motion animation is called Heidi talk one. So what we wanna do is just go ahead right here and click our play button. Well, let's see what happens. Please have a seat. And let's start the class by trying to remember what we reviewed last week, what was covered, and your summaries about the lesson. As I am pretty sure that most of you do have an opinion about both sides of the story. Am I right? Good. Let's begin then. Okay. Doesn't look too bad at all.
17. Toon Girl Export Animation: All right, give yourself a pat on the back. You just done your first animation in ICC loan. It's really a big step. But the next thing we wanna do is export this animation as a video file. Because you may want to, you know, when you're doing your test animations, you may want to, to have those as references. Although the primary focus of this course is we're going to bring our character into Unreal Engine and then set up our scene and our lights and everything like that over there in Unreal Engine. It's just really good to know how to get quick animations at here. So let's do that. Let's bring our character back to one at the start position. And if we want to export this as an animation, we go up to the render tab, and then we go to render video. And this is gonna give us some options here we want video checked MP4, that's usually what I use, but you have all these other formats as well up to you. And then the quality compressor. How much quality you want. If you were gonna do final pixel type video export, you would want to go down here into some of these other settings like super sampling, high-quality depth of field, if you have that all set up in here. And again, we're gonna be doing that over and Unreal engine. So I'm not going to be going into all of these settings and things you can do inside of IE clone at this time. Export range hall. And actually what we wanna do is let's just figure out how many frames we have here. If you look at our timeline, Let me just get rid of this for a second. Down here. If I hover over this, it'll turn into a little icon where we can pull this up and see more of our timeline here. If we wanna get rid of the timeline right here, this little icon or the hotkey F3 will take our timeline away. F3, or click here to give us more space. F3 brings it back. So down here we can see at the very bottom, there's the little timeline. If we want to see the entire animation, we just have to press down on the Alt key on the keyboard and then use your mouse wheel and pull it back towards you. Pushing it forward will make it go smaller. Pulling it back towards you. We'll bring it all in line here where you can see the entire clip. So we can see here that this goes up to around, let's just say 1400 frames. So if we want to render that, we would just go up to render video. We would go down here to the range of one. Let's just take it to 1400. And then we would just say export. It's gonna bring up our window. And going to call this to rural. Tests. Will save. In this begins rendering. And we can watch the playback. As I clone is rendering this out. Media Export, complete. Open it now. Yes, let's go ahead and open that up. Please. Have a seat. And let's start the class by trying to remember what we reviewed last week, what was covered, and your summaries about the lesson. As I am pretty sure that most of you do have an opinion about both sides of the story. Am I right? Good. Let's begin then. Ok. And now you have exported and recorded your first video with your first animation in iCloud. Good job.
18. How to import sound: The next thing we are going to do is import audio into our project and into our timeline. When I first started using I clone, I couldn't figure out how to bring in audio. It wasn't like a peer and just the easy menus. So it took me a while to search around and figure out how to do that, but let's go into how to do that right now. Go up to go into your timeline. And under the project track, there's a little drop-down arrow here. Select that. And it's gonna give us these options. We need to add a soundtrack in here. You can see that sound is unchecked, so we need to check that. And it's going to add our soundtrack down here. So now we can get some sound into our timeline. Move our cursor over into the timeline on the soundtrack and right-click with our mouse. And it'll bring up the Import button. So we select that. And it's going to open up a window where we can pick our music. So choose any, any audio that you want. I'm going to skip to my Lu to bring this in as some background audio for, for our animation. This is also going to be really handy when you do lip-sync. You're gonna want to bring in your dialogue track in this way so you can animate to the actual dialog. Click open. This brings in the track right at the point of the cursor. Now a lot of times I forget to go back to the beginning of the track. So you just need to either left-click and drag here, or this will tab right here and bring it to the start of the timeline. So now what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna play this. And it's playing the audio, the dialogue of the character, as well as the background music. Now here's where we can adjust the levels. This is the music track that we just imported the skip to my loose so I can raise this are lower. This, if somebody's talking, I'll bring this way low. This is the dialogue track, and I want this as high as it can go. We play this and we'll have skipped to my Lu and the background. Start the class by trying to remember what we reviewed last week, what was covered, and your summaries about the lesson. As I am pretty sure that most of you do have an opinion about both sides of the story. Okay, now what we wanna do, let's go back to one. Let's export this. And this time when we export the video, it's going to have our audio track on there as well, the background music. So we'll go to render, render video, and go back up to the top here, makes sure the settings are all correct. Frame size of course is right here. And we'll just leave this as the range of one to 1400. Going to call this one to1 girl with Claudio. And we want to go ahead and open that up and take a listen. Haven't seen. Let's start the class by trying to remember what we reviewed last week, what was covered, and your summaries about the lesson. As I am pretty sure that most of you do have an opinion about both sides story. Am I right? Let's begin that ride. So now you know how to bring audio in by creating a soundtrack. By going here, checking on your sound. It'll bring the track here. And then by right-clicking, selecting import, it'll bring the sound right into your timeline. Good job.
19. Toon Girl Automatic Lip Sync with Audio File: Next we're going to import a dialogue track. And we're gonna let I clone, figure out what the lip-sync is automatically. So the first thing we need to do is we need to get rid of this animation that we just used down here. And the easiest way to do that is to have our characters selected in the viewport. Right-click and go down to remove object animation. And then you'll see down in our timeline that all those tracks. So we're ready to start from scratch. So let's zoom in with your scroll wheel on the mouse. Remember the Alt key button in the left mouse button to move around. And the right mouse button with the alt key on the keyboard selected to rotate around. So I'm going to get good and close here so we can view the lip-sync. In your course, there is a file, an audio file called female dialogue track for this particular lesson. So you'll want to use that, you want to import that in next. So what we do is we go to the tab, Animation tab, we go down to facial and create script. We select that. And this gives us some options. We can either record a voice, we can use text-to-speech, or we can import an audio file or have a script file. We're going to, we're going to import the audio file. So go ahead and select that, and then select the female dialogue track and click open. Now that fast, we have imported that audio track, but in order to find it, we need to go down here into the timeline. And where it says tune girl plus or whatever you named your character. We need to do the drop-down arrow here. And we need to make sure that the vice seem track is selected. And now we go down and we scroll down and we can see that right here is our audio track. Click on the left arrow. And this will open up some powerful tools for us. We can see the audio waveform and we can actually scrub through it. And down below it, right along here it's very tiny, kinda hard to see. These are all the lip sync positioning that I clone has figured out through its Artificial Intelligence, AI does the best that it can do to analyze the audio file and provide the proper lip-sync movements. So let's just go ahead and do the beginning and let's just play that through. Please have a seat. And let's start the class by trying to remember what we reviewed last week, what was covered, and your summaries about the lesson. As I am pretty sure that most of you do have an opinion about both sides of the story. Am I right? Good. Let's begin then. Okay. Not too bad. It doesn't do it too, too bad for a, for a first pass, our first run through. Now we have some tools that we can use if we go down here to lip options down here, and move over into the timeline. And right-click where it says lip options, we select that and we will get a box that pulls up and weaken smooth this out. By selecting smooth. Let's make sure we're at the beginning of our clip. Select smooth and we can go up to 34 or five. Let's just go to about four. And let's click apply. And then, okay. Now when we play it again, we'll see some smoothing out of the lip movements. Please have a seat. And let's start the class by trying to remember what we reviewed last week, what was covered, and your summaries about the lesson. So it's a lot smoother. So that helps quite a bit just making that adjustment. The other thing I wanted to show you is over here, under facial animation settings, we have devising strength. And you can bump that up or lower it down. If we lower it all the way down, we have no movement at all and just killed all of the lip-sync. If we move it up to 200 class by trying to remember what we reviewed last week, what was covered. And your summaries about the lesson. As we can see that it's more exaggerated. So somewhere here, this is all your discretion. What you're going for, the look you're going for, you can enhance your lip-sync quite a bit by just this slider here with the Strength slider. And another thing down here under lips, underneath where all the individual lip positionings are. If you go into the lip track right here, find an empty spot. Let's just go down here to the end and right-click. We have reduced lip keys, option right here. So go ahead and click that. And what that does is it just gets rid of some of the, maybe some of the redundant keys that are in there. So now let's go back to the beginning and let's play it and see what we have. Please have a seat. And let's start the class by trying to remember what we reviewed last week, what was covered, and your summaries about the lesson, as I'm pretty sure that most of you do have an opinion about both sides of the story. Am I right? Let's begin then. Okay. Looks better. So you can see here with just these tools that we have right here in the timeline, can go a long way to enhancing the accuracy of your lip-sync. In the next video we're gonna go in and we're going to, we're going to learn how to actually go into each mouth position and make adjustments. There.
20. Toon Girl Adjust Lip Sync Manually & Add Expressions: Now we're going to go into some fine tuning adjustments of the lip sync and the mouth positions. So to do that, we need to scroll and you see this track that says lips where we have all of these individual lip positionings, We need to magnify that. So by pressing the alt key on your keyboard and then using your scroll on your mouse, you can zoom way in like this and you can see each one of these individual map positionings. I clone gives you a lot of power and flexibility to alter each of these lip positionings and keep in mind that the AI, the artificial intelligence built into the system is figured out the best way it can for now to do the mouth according to what the audio track is saying. But sometimes it'll get it off or sometimes you may not like what would it has figured out? So we can go in here and just change this manually on our own. Keep in mind also that later on in the course, we're going to be using the iPhone live face app. It uses the iPhone tan or the iPhone 11, along with the really good tool to where you can record facial expressions and near perfect lip-sync are much better lip sync with that app. This is just doing it manually for people who maybe don't have the iPhone ten. We don't have that particular app that you can actually manually do lip-sync animation right here in the program. So keep that in mind. We're going to, we're going to cover that later on. Right now we're just using the basic tools here. We can scroll. And as we listen, we can hear the sound and see where the positioning and what the mouth position should be. And what I wanna do is let's go ahead and give ourselves some more rooms. Was bringing the timeline up so that we can see our waveform, the audio wave form is a really handy thing and the ability to scrub and to hear the audio is really important in order to do this kind of fine tuning. If we start right here at the first word, please. You can see that maybe it's not perfect. Maybe we want to change this. So let's select this square right here. Double-click and this will open up our lips editor, a hidden menu. So we wanna go down here and just select the PI which is up here. This particular lip position is for B, m, or p. So we select that and the expressiveness is set at 37. We can move that up or down. And as soon as you release it'll, it'll show the change in position on your character. And instead of None, let's choose ie. And let's move this up. Or we could use this one. It's kind of your choice which one you want to use. So this is the e and then the S right here. That's up to 75. So you can move this up or down. So basically the workflow with this as your MIT manually doing it is you just go in. We may want the ellipse to be closed here. Please have this process is you just have to go through here, syllable by syllable words, word by word. And manipulate these little lip shapes to where it goes the way you want it to be, where it looks the way you want it to be. It's very tedious and time-consuming. You'll spend he'll spend a lot of time on this to get it right. But once you get it right, it'll look really good. So it's just a matter of scrolling back and forth. Selecting the little box here with the lip movement, changing it to what you think is going to look better. The next thing I wanted to cover is the face key, which is over here. Not our expressions, but down to the muscle. You can also help you your lip-sync, especially with cartooning, with cartoon characters, by choosing to open the mouth wider. And you can do that. The, the muscle controls right here. So what we'll do is just for an example, just to show how to use this particular tool. Where we're saying have right here, let's say I want the mouth to be open like that. And it's gonna give me a key right there. Say with a, and we want to bring this down and like that. And what's happening down here in our timeline, you see is we're getting a new expression clip. We're creating that as we go along. And then we press the default key, it will go back as if we hadn't used this. Kinda goes back to the first position. Let's bring this down like that. Move forward. So let's bring her mouth opens like that. And then back to default key. By pouring it down by back here. I like to have the mouth opening a little bit more and it's easier for me to do it this way. You can do it with letters up here. But I just find it's a little more, a little more intuitive for me. Okay. So let's see what that looks like. Please have a seat. We have to go back to the beginning and then do the default key. Please have a seat. And let's start the class by trying to remember what we reviewed last week, what was covered. And you're summaries of k. We've already gone past where I, where I did that. So you can see that by using these controls here, you can add more movement to the mouth, which will give you more realism or maybe more of the lip sync that you want. You can also do that. We're going to use some other tools and a little bit, but you can also do expressions here at the same time. For example, let's say we start off here. She's just in kind of a neutral expression. And we'll start her there. And then let's say we wanted to look a little bit happy, right? So let's do happy. As she goes along, she starts talking. He's told that that's the kind of grin on her face. We can at this point do a different happy maybe do this little smirk like that right there. And then if we want to go back to the default, we do that like that. She turns angry all of a sudden here. Right here. She looks a little bit mad. Better undo that when those kind of flooding. And we go over here under expression, if we click on the little arrow key will be able to see where our they'll keyframes are for all of this. So we can move these key frames or we can delete them. So you get the hang of what you can do here with the expressions. You can either use the existing expressions or you can go create your own expressions. Right here. Click the eraser key to undo that. Let's say we wanted the eyebrows to move up, right here. Eyebrows. And then they moved down. And they move up. We move forward. And they move down. And you're just moving down. What we reviewed last week, what was covered and your summaries about the lesson. If I don't like that, I can just select all those right there. And I can hit delete. And now all my eyebrow movement up and down, it's gone. Same thing over here with the muscle track. I can just go left-click and drag to highlight all of those key phrase and get rid of them. And I think it looks like I forgot one over here. There it is right there. So now we're back to just the please have a seat and let know expressions by trying to remember what we reviewed last week, what was covered. Okay, so we've covered now how you can adjust the individual mouth positions and how you can also use the face key to further enhance, get the jaw to move opening the mouth more ads and facial expressions manually. And then how to move those key frames to move them, you just grab them and slide them along. Or how to delete them just by selecting it and deleting. In the next video, we're going to cover a very, very powerful tool, the motion puppet. And we're going to add some motion capture that's built into I clone to our character and we have some really cool controls over it to, so that's what we'll do next.
21. Face Puppet Preview Examples: Next we're going to be having some fun with face puppet. These next three videos that we're going to watch here, short little videos were created with face Puppet, not using the iPhone app or anything. This is just all done using the built-in tools of I clone. So this is a character called Gomez that I created in character creator and then animated him with face puppet here and I clone the next one will be skipped to my Lu, a little girl character that I created. And then the last one is a character called Manfred, which is based on the does Genesis eight character. And you'll be able to see how the facial morphs work once you bring it in from a desk character into I clung, works really good. So let's just take a look at these real quick. Well, I really don't know what I should do right now. I'm thinking about what I want to say, but I'm not coming up with anything really. So this is the kind of fun stuff you'll be able to do with face puppet right inside of IE seven. So let's go ahead and get started.
22. Toon Girl Face Puppet Tool: Okay, now we're going to use face puppet, which is different from the face key that we used before, where we were manually key framing and then moving ahead in the timeline and then setting another keyframe. The face puppet is really exactly that. It's like, it's like a puppet that your puppet hearing in real time. So it's extremely powerful and once you get used to it, it's really fun to use. And you can layer, you can layer on top of layer on top of layer, which is what we're going to do next. So let's go into our timeline. Let's make sure that we get rid of our existing motion. Plus we just want to start clean so we can either click here and click delete, or we can right-click on our character and remove object animation. Let's go back. And let's see. We'll just go ahead and click play to make sure we have nothing on there at all except for the eye blinks. And you may have noticed that earlier when we were animating that the eye blinks were happening automatically. And where that is is up here in the Parameters tab. I clone helps us out a little bit. I clone will add the eye blinks for us automatically. If we go to the Parameters tab here, we look down here and you can see auto blink and it's set to normal. We also have some nervous, speechless, charming child. These are all different eye blinks for emotional states. Or you can select None if you'd like to do your own eye blinks with the face puppet, you can do that as well, but this just helps out if we have a normal eye blink going on when we're animating. So just wanted to point that out to you. Now, what we wanna do first is we want to go up here into our animation tab. And then we want to scroll down here to face puppet in mind opened up off screen. So I'll drag it right in here. The way I like to do it. There are some setups here already where they have some of the facial controls already selected where you can begin manipulating the face. You can go through here if you want to see, let's just go down to Natalie. And the way this works ourselves more room and then I want to scroll down a little bit closer so I can really see the facial animation is over here we have a preview tab in a record tab, and then we have a strength tab here as well. We'll leave that just on the default. Select the preview tab. And now it says press Space key to preview. So we'll go over here with our mouse. We're going to be controlling this with our mouse are left mouse button. So when I hit the play button, you can see as I rotate my mouse around, her eyes are moving. You can see her eyelids are drooping down and coming down. Her head is turning. Stop there and that's because it's selected in green right here. Every, everything that's selected as green will move and also the head tilting and the head rotating is also selected. Now what I like to do rather than having something preset is I like to layer my animations. So I go down to this solo feature and I click the eraser so that nothing is there. And then what I do is I select which parts of the face I want to animate. Let's say it was going to accentuate the lip-sync and I wanted to move the jaw down or move them mouth open. Say I can select the mouth and the jaw or just the jaw tested out by hitting preview and the space bar. And you can see just by moving your mouse up and down, you don't even have to have the left mouse button. You'll open and close the mouth. Everything else is turned off except for that. Now if I wanna record, always make sure you're back to the beginning of your, your animation, your timeline. Otherwise it'll start recording right there. You can always track it, drag it back. Just hit the record. Now if I wanted to select the mouth and the jaw, would just turn those on with green. And now check this out. And you can see that now I'm getting a very realistic mountain movement, kinda go inside, decide the lips are moving and even the upper cheek bones, the cheek, fleshy cheek is moving. In that cool. I mean, it's just like a digital puppet. Press MySpace key. Now let's select the cheeks a little bit more. And now let's select the eyebrows, the eyelids, the eyes, and the lower lids. And now we've got quite a bit selected. Press our preview button. And now the space button, Space key. And now check this out as I move my mouse around, my character is kinda following my mouse so I can get the eyes to move. Okay, let's just do a real quick test with that. Let's press record and then the space. Move the mouse around. Going for perfection, we're just going, we're just trying to see what the tool does, how it works. Ok, press the space key again. Now, go back to one beginning of the timeline and scroll down in here and you'll see that what we have down here under expression is we have a puppet clip. Now this is where all the magic happens. Press your play button. And now we're going to play back what we just recorded. That wild. Check that out. I mean, it's so intuitive and it's really fun. So you can really create some great facial animations just by using the face puppet. Now let's go back again. Lets, lets say we wanted to do something a little bit different. So let's hit the eraser button. And now let's say we just wanted to fine tune the eyebrows. So makes sure we're back at the beginning and make sure that check box here is blend data on next recording. So what it's gonna do now is it's going to play back our existing recording. And as we move our mouse to operate the eyebrows, it's going to record that on top of it. So let's go ahead and press the record button and then the space button, Space key. And now I'm moving the eyebrows up and down. I'm just doing it wacky just so we can see what we're doing here. And this is now blending both animations. The recorded one and now this new one. And we'll stop there. Now let's play this back. Check that out. We got eyebrows moving. You've got the other face expressions that we did before and it's all working beautifully. Go back to the beginning. Press the eraser key. And let's say we wanted to give it a little more mouth movement like this. So let's go back to the beginning. Make sure we're at the beginning of our timeline. Press record. Hit the space bar. Now I'm making her mouth open up again, just working at like a puppet. And it's blending everything that we already have there. Okay, and let's play this back. Now. Obviously this isn't a really great animation because we're just messing around with it just to show in an exaggerated way how these tools work, how they add layer upon layer upon layer. Okay? Now, let's say that you get something you've been working on it for a while, you get something you like and you want to save that. How do we save this animation for use, for later use or to put on a different character. We move this out of the way. What we do is we go into our content and we go into our animation tab down to motion plus now where it, where it says template, this is where all the built-in ones are. You can make your custom ones over here on this tab. So you go to motion plus. Motion plus. And I've already got some. Saved right here. But all we have to do is click the plus button right here. And it's gonna say motion plus two. Now you can name that whenever you want to name it. But basically what that's done is it's just save this animation that we've done. So if we go to this animation now the puppet clip and we deleted with our delete button. So now we have no animation on our character except for the eye blinks there. And we go to our saved animation here, left-click and drag onto our character. And just like magic, I clone has saved that and now apply the animation to our character. Beautiful. Like I know you're thinking right now, this is really a powerful tool and you're thinking of all the ways you can use this. I have found, and you may find a way that works better for you. But the way I like to do it is I like to let me bring up the face puppet again. I like to do solo, and I like to go in and do one thing at a time, like I'll do the eyebrows, I'll do the eye turning, I'll do the mouth moving, the smiling and things like that. The little, the little nuances of the character expressions. I like to blend that a pass at a time. I don't like to just select a whole bunch of areas of the face and then try and animate them all. Because it's it's hard to do it that way. And I don't get that I don't get the result I'm looking for. So that's the way I have found to do it, is just to do it one pass than another pass than another pass. Now if I had a wish list that I could get into real illusion. Illusion is I would wish that we could record separate passes and then edit each, each track separately. Because what it's doing is, let's say you do ten passes. All of those ten passes are going to be here in the motion, in the motion track that you've recorded, the expression track and there's no way to go in there and add it with a curve tool or anything like that. There's no way to go in there and manually tweak, tweak those. So you just have to be satisfied with what you have in this particular track. But you can save and you just do take after take till you get the one that you like. It's not unlike, you know, real movie making where you do a take and you're gonna do another take because that dialogue didn't sound good, and so on. And this is like, you know, real-time puppet hearing. And it's, it's very powerful and it doesn't require the use of any of the other tools like motion live and the iPhone live face that we'll get into later, that are really powerful tools. But if you don't have the means to get them right now, don't fear, but you can, because you can actually, with a little bit of practice, you can get that same result. So that's how we use the face puppet. Practice that and just don't be afraid of it. Delete things, go ahead and delete things, and then drag it right back on your character. See how it put it right here because I didn't go back to the beginning. And then here it is very easy to use once you get the hang of it. So go ahead and spend a little bit of time practicing that. And in the next video, we're going to add body motion with a thing called motion puppet right here. And you're going to love how this works. This is another fun, yet extremely powerful tool.
23. Toon Girl Motion Puppet Tool: Now we're going to have some fun with motion puppet. So what we wanna do with this tool is we want to keep the facial animation that we just recorded. And we want to add body animation to it because we can see that our character standing here and a t pose or shoes and whatever neutral pose. When we play it back, we have all the facial animation. We don't even have any head turning, which we could have done with the face puppet. But we're gonna do that with the motion puppet. So let's pause. Let's go back to the beginning. And let's open up the motion puppet, which is under our animation tab, the motion puppet. And this is going to open up and give us a lot of different options, have prerecorded animations. So over here on the left we can see there's different moves. There's idle. So if you just want an idle animation to put on here, you can do that. There's a mood, and this will give us different moods of the character. Move. If you want the character to walk around or stand, then walk. There's all kinds of different options. And the best thing to do is just try these as we get into this, I'll show you how to do that and then talk. So we've got mail talking and we've got female talking. It's a it's just a matter of selecting. And then just like we did before, once we select the particular like this one says argue, and then pressing the Preview button and then the Space key. And now we see that our Character is now got emotion like she's arguing along with our facial animation that we did before. So if she was doing a, an actual dialogue, it would be we would have the recording of our dialogue and then we're just adding the, the body motion to go along with it. And this is a really quick and effective way where you don't have to hand animate the whole thing. It's really fantastic. Also notice in here that we've got some presets in here. And we can lower the hips, raise the hips. We've got exaggeration controls set at the default of a 100. But if we scale this up to 200, she's going to be wu wei exaggerating. Their hands are flipping around. So that's not going to work. But you get the idea that you can even dial this down if you want it to be more subtle. All of this is under your control. Also the speed. Do you want to slow down the speed? So she's moving a little bit slower. No problem. So this gives you a tremendous amount of control. Right here with the motion puppet. I'm just gonna set these back to the default 100. And also if you've been noticing, it looks like her hands are going through the jacket or hands or kind of poke moving through her body. Those are things that you'll have to adjust and we'll go into how we do that with the edit motion layer in a little bit. But this is gonna get us like almost the way there. And then we can just make our fine tuning adjustments to make the animation Perfect. Let's stop there. Here's just a normal talk. Let's preview this one and see what that looks like. Say just a little bit different. The other neat thing about this is we can select and we can combine these, we can merge them so you can have with one form of talk, another form of talk. And then we can blend them together. And we'll do that in this video is well, OK, we'll hit the pause button. Now let's go back to the beginning of our timeline. And we'll stay on this one right here. We'll click record. We're all ready to record. We don't have to do anything with our mouse with, with this. It's all happening automatically for us. So all we have to do is press the Spacebar. And it's layering right on top of our previous facial animation that we did. Which is actually rather horrible. And it was just for a test. And once we get to the end of our clip, it's going to stop it. The spacebar again. It's moved to the front and now play it back. And now we have a really high-quality body animation to go along with our facial animation. And you also notice that her hair is moving with physics as well, and we haven't had to do anything at all for that. Okay, now let's look at what happens when we move these settings over here. See we can raise or lower the hips. Let me back up a little bit. If you wanted to lean back. They get rid of lean forward or lean back in the animation. See, think about all the time this is saving. Having to manually go in there and tweak everything. We've got a shoulder control if you want the shoulders up, shoulders down. Maybe just to fix something or make it look a little bit better. We can move the elbows. This is how we can fix the hands that are, that are going into the body. We can move the hands forward or back. We can do the elbows in or out. Move the elbows out so the elbows aren't gonna hit the body. Check that out. Extremely powerful. It can even go down here. We've got stiff neck or loose neck? You wanna? Loose neck? Her head's going to Bob, Bob around a little bit more. Or you want a really stiff neck? Move it over here. Static hips. If you don't want her hips to move at all, or you want them to move a little bit more and get that the setting here, no movement or very little movement. Or have it move, move more, sway, More or less. All of these very, very handy. It's maker. Lean forward a little bit more, raised her hips back up to where she's standing straight up again. Okay, so that gives you an idea of what you can do in the control you have over it. And then you just simply go and record it. If you wanted to make a change, you record right over the existing one. Now let's talk about the mask. If you wanted to mask something out. So you didn't want it to be effected by the animation. We didn't want her legs to move. Let's say she was sitting in a chair or something like that. We could just mask mask out the legs and then the legs wouldn't be moving at all. They would be how we had heard before if she was in a seated position. So masking is really a powerful tool as well. Or maybe you didn't want, you'd, you'd done a lot of head turning animation that you didn't want to be messed up. You can mask out the head and then the head wouldn't move along with this animation at all. Okay, now let's go back to the beginning of our timeline. And let's select a few different ones. And we'll start with this talk. And then we'll go over here and over here we'll select some different ones and then we'll combine them. So let's hit our record button. Space key. So now we're recording this one. Now let's pause. Now let's go over to this one and hit record in our space key. And now check that out. We've got a different motion here. Here, man, we're known. And now let's go to this one over here. Press the record and then our space bar. No man. No man, I'm 6'2. Okay. So let's go back and look at that. Now if you notice more playing this back. During the animations, when we switch animation like right here, we get a little bit of a too drastic of a movement. And then in the last one, we have the same thing. So what we need to do is bring our timeline up. We can see where the puppet clip is. This is our clip right here. And right here. This is the second one. And this is the third one. Okay, now I'm going to zoom in with the ALT key and my mouse wheel to get in here bigger. So we can see this better. Now all we need to do is select the second one here. It's hard to see on the video, I know, but right here there's a little extension line of a little green, green line. So we want to left mouse click and bring that over more. What this is gonna do is it's gonna blend the animations smooth ER, instead of it being so abrupt. So you can interactively just change that. And then we're gonna do the same thing with our last clip, is we're going to grab this and we're going to burning it over about twice as much as it was before. So now the hands go down a lot smoother than it did before. So let's play that now. We start with the first puppet clip. Here comes the second one. Here's the third one right there. We had a little bit of a stop there, so we need to kinda like fine tune that there. But that's easy to do by just sliding this around or resizing the clip to where it's at a different position during the clip. So there you have it. We have a very powerful way to take our existing facial animation and add it onto a body animation. And we have just a whole lot of them between, you know, the ones that are included with I clone. Plus there's ways to purchase motion capture animations and even put them in the motion puppet. It's not super easy. A lot of times it's just easier to put them in here and then drag the animation onto your character. You can do the same thing with MOOC app animation as we were doing here. This is just a really fast way to add some really high-quality body animation to your character. So there we have it. Motion puppet. Have fun with that. Drag and drop some animations on their delete them, save them if you want. And then again, the same way we could say this is by just going into here into our custom folder and then adding this ocean plus three. And now let's go into here and we'll just remove object animation. Now we have nothing. She just stayed in that pose. No animation except for blinking eyes. So all we need to do is drag and drop. And now we have our recorded animation and that cool, extremely powerful in such a time saver. Now in the next video, we're gonna go into how to edit the motion layer to really go in there and fine tune this particular animation.
24. Toon Girl Edit Motion Layer: The next thing we're going to do is we're going to edit our existing animation that we made with the motion puppet. So the first thing we want to do, let's go ahead and go back to the beginning. And we've got our animation playing here. And all looks good. But let's say that we want to make some adjustments to the arm positioning or the head turning and things like that. How would we do that? Well, that's where the edit motion layer comes into play. So we go to our Animation tab here, and we go to our edit motion layer. And this is going to bring up all of our controls. Now this doesn't work in real time like the other one did the motion puppet. So it will be, what we'll be doing is we'll be doing Keyframing and sliding forward in the timeline, setting a keyframe and so on. So let's say, let's make sure we're at the beginning of our timeline. Over here we have an IK puppet. So let's choose the left-hand. And we also have a mirror mode here, which we won't use right now in that slide forward in our, in our timeline was just scrub through to where we get right about here. And now from that position, let's bring the arm out. You can see it's inverse kinematics. So we can bring it out very easily like that. We also have FK mode if we wanted to not have IQ. And we could move the arm, move the hands, move any of the joints in this mode as well. But for now, let's just stick to the IK mode. Now we've just set a key frame, but where is it now, let's go into the timeline. Let's pull this up. And one of the things about the timeline is there's so much information in here, but it's a little bit hard to find an icon till you get used to where things are. And even now I'll forget where, where is that and I'll have to kinda go digging through the menus defined it. So we're looking for the Edit motion layer and all we have here is a motion layer. So where is the track for the Edit motion layer? While we go over here to the motion track and there's a little drop-down arrow. So we pick that and it'll say motion layer and we have to check that little box. So once we do that, scroll down a little bit and you'll see that we have now a motion layer. And if we take the arrow down, we can see that it's creating keyframes for torso, head, left arm, right arm and so on and so on and so on. We don't need that level of visibility yet. So let's just leave it there. And we can see that these little arrows here, these are our keyframes. The keyframes real powerful tool because we can slide these and we can move these really easy by just clicking with the left mouse button and moving it. Let's go forward. And let's say that I want her hand to go back to the original place right about now. We just go up here to our edit motion Layer window and we hit reset. And the hand's gonna go back to where it was in the beginning. So the program remembers where it was. Now let's say we want that hand to go back up again. Just make it real exaggerated. Way, way out here. And we've created another key frame right here. And we'll go forward a little bit. And let's hit the reset button and the hand goes back. So you can see now as we play back our animation, you can see the changes that we've made very easy to make, very powerful, very stable. So I really like it. It's a real powerful tool to take an existing, like a MMO cap animation, motion capture and change it to exactly how you want it to be. Now another thing that you can do is we can left click with the mouse button and drag across these keyframes. And now right-click. And we can do a copy paste or we can do control c and control v. Move forward a little bit and paste. And now we have our key frames with the arm moved in the same position. Pretty cool. So this is how you would do it. You've got all the different body parts you can do with the feet, the legs, the waste, the head if you want to turn the head. Let's go back to the beginning. You're not going to want to use the Move manipulator. You're going to want to use the rotate on the head. So let's scroll. I've got this in oils. Make some room here. Let's scroll ahead and let's say I want her looking in the opposite direction now. So I've got that. She's looking here. And now she went back going towards the original position. I'll say I still want her looking over there. So really easy to change. Your keyframes, head it your key frames. This is where this is useful if we go down here, now I can see the head key frames right here. And if I want to select those all and delete those, I can get rid of that movement that I just did. So she's not looking over there to the side anymore. All right. So that's how you would go and you would change and edit and revise the existing animation. Now, another thing I wanted to go over is let's select. Let's move really close here. Let's make some room down here. The hand let's wait till her hand kinda goes, goes up. Okay, here we go right here. So right about there on this key frame, let's say you want her hand to open and close? Well, all we need to do, let's get really close. So we can see this is we select the right hand, click on the poem. And we close like that. Move forward. As the hand moves down. Weekend, open it back up again. And as the hand starts to close again, we can open it back up. These controls are so powerful that you can do each finger. All you've to do is select, for example, the thumb. And I'm just clicking with the left mouse button in this black area to move the thumb. I can go to the middle joint and move. Let's get real closely. We can see what we're dealing. Middle joint, the tip. And it's creating a keyframe for each of these movements. You can also save these as hand gestures too in your library. So if you find something you like, you can have them ready to just drag and drop onto your character. So this is a really cool tool to animate the hands and the fingers without having to go do it individually in the viewport. Works really, really good. Okay, and then if we wanted to remove that particular animation and leave the rest, go down here and select all of these key frames in the motion layer and delete them all. And now we have our original unedited animation. So when you get something you like, remember what we do is we saved the animation by going over here into our content tab, over into the animation tab here, motion plus over in the custom tab. And then we just add the plus button here and name it whatever we want, and it'll save that revised animation. In the next video, we're going to cover the direct puppet. And that works in real time. And that's just a different tool that's part of your toolbox. And we'll cover how that works.
25. Toon Girl Direct Puppet Tool: Okay, now we're going to use the direct puppet. So let's go into our timeline and let's delete our current motion. So we've got our character just in a T-Pose with no animation whatsoever. So basically starting off with no animation, drag this down, give ourselves a little bit of room. I'm going to hit the F key. So we have a full body shot here. And now I want to go up to direct puppet, which is underneath the animation tab, direct puppet. And it's going to open up our controls here. Now this, like some of the other tools, is done in real time. So what we're gonna do is we're just gonna do a down and dirty sloppy animation just so we can see how the tools work. And then you'll be able to take more time doing the animation that you want to do. And also keep in mind once you have this animation, you can then go in there and use the Edit motion layer like we did in that in the previous video to fine tune your animation. So the first thing we wanna do is let's go over here to the t. And we've got the settings realistic. Shoulder, we want to be on move versus rotate. And we've got the preview button and we've got the record button. So let's just press the preview and then our spacebar. And as we drag our mouse down, you don't even need to use the left mouse button. We can see our character moving up and down. You can even make your character jump. You can move it to the side. And notice the hair is reacting with physics. So you just kinda play around. Bounce your character around a little bit, and press the spacebar again. Let's go back to the beginning of our timeline. And now let's just record an up and down movement. So let's press the record button and our spacebar. And let's go down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up. So that's the end of our animation. Let's go to the beginning and let's just play it back. And high clone has perfectly recorded our animation, just how we did it. Just like a marionette, kind of like a digital marionette. Ok, now we do the same thing. We use the same techniques with the, with the direct puppet. We layer on top of it. So now we, while we have the waste selected, the T right here, let's now go down to rotate screen-based. And what we're gonna do as we preview, it's going to play back the other animation. And what we wanna do is rotate our character. So like this is rotate as she's squatting down. You notice if you move down, she leans forward. So truly like a like a puppet, a marionette. Okay, so let's go back to the beginning. And again, this is just gonna be a sloppy animation. This takes practice to get it to work the way you want it to. But for now, just have fun with it. Press record. And I'm just moving my mouth. Mouse left to right. Okay. Okay. Now we see we've got the squat. We've got the rotating of the hips. Okay. Little wobbly feet there. Okay, back to the beginning of our timeline. Now what we wanna do is we want to get the arms move in a little bit too. So let's go to select the R up here, the shoulders. And we want to be rotating. And we want to mirror so we can do both arms at the same time. And we want to make them go up and down. So let's press preview to practice first and our space Key. Whoops. And it's a left to right movement. Back to the beginning. Let's record that. Very uncoordinated here. You get the idea though. Okay. Hopefully you're doing better than mine. Okay, back to the beginning. And another layer, we can just add the head and we would want the head to rotate as well. So let's just click preview. I'm gonna go closer so we can kind of see a little bit more. Hit record spacebar. Okay. So you can see that this is just another tool in your toolbox to be able to do animation. You can use this or you can combine it with, with the other tools. Just however you feel comfortable what religion has done is they've given us a whole bunch of powerful tools. And you'll find out which ones you like the best and which ones you're most comfortable using. Get rid of that. And let's go to the beginning. So let's say here, we're going to add it, our motion layer. Say I don't like where her arms are and I want to rotate them, them up, how we go into FK mode. And then at this particular juncture I could move, move her arms out. If I wanted to go and IK mode and operate the hand, which would then in turn move her body. I can do that as well. So and now I'm gonna go to reset. Her hand is too far back because I messed up. So all I have to do is bring it forward right up here. And I'm gonna have another keyframe right there. And now her arm went too far this way. So we try to reset key. And that worked fine. And if it's not where I want it, and just select the arm and move it there. Again down here. In order to find this track, we have to go to motion. In motion layer is checked off there. So I just didn't go down far enough. And here it is right here. Here's my new keys, corrective keys. So I would just do that with the head. The waste. There was a place in here where the feet came off the ground, which I don't like. So this is how you could easily put together a fairly quick animation and then revise it and fine tune in with the edit motion layer. Pretty cool. I really like this to all its fun. Okay, onward to the next video.
26. Lightning Cable for iPhone: Most people just use the Wi-Fi connection for their iPhone and live face app. But I highly recommend using a hard wired connection with a Cat5 network cable. Because what it will do is it will practically eliminate any kind of latency or lag as you're recording your facial animations. You can see here I just got mine was about 1899 at this time on Amazon. And it has a Cat5 plugin. And it also has a power plug-in. So you can have it connected to a power source as well as your Cat5 cable directly into your router so that you have no Wi-Fi lag and you're gonna get a much better response. So I highly recommend this to get this piece of equipment, hookup your iPhone or your iPad to it. And you're going to get much better results. And you're going to be a lot, have a lot happier with your animations.
27. Audacity Where to get and how to use: For the next section, we are going to need another software program if you don't already have it. This is a must have. You're gonna need to go and get Audacity. It's a free program and it's a very powerful sound editing program. The way you get it is you just go to Audacity team.org. Just go to that website and you'll be able to download Audacity right here. You check that out. There's lots of features that we'll be using. As we get into our lip-sync with ICOM, we will be doing double system sound, where we'll be recording our dialogue separately or at the same time as our live phase app. And we're going to need to sync them up later so that we have full control over the audio. So pick yourself up this copy here and also check out the website. There is also a manual which will cover all the things you would need to know in more detail than we're going to go into in this course for audacity. So go ahead and get that, download that and have that ready to go for the next part of the course. Okay, now let's jump into a Udacity and let's just get right into it and learn how to do a few things real quick with a fast start, we want to find out how to record an audio track or an audio sample. So with your program open and your microphone connected up to your computer, you'll be able to select your microphone right from here. And I'm using the Blue Snowball microphone right now. So make sure you have a microphone selected and your speakers setup for playback. Turn your speakers down when you're recording. And this big red button, the record button is what we want to do right now. So let's just do a testing 123 real quick, like we'll hit the record button. Testing 123. Testing 123. Press stop. And now we'll go back. And we will play this testing 123. Testing 123. Okay, that's how we record dialogue or any audio track. Now how do we get it out of here? We just go to File Export, Export As MP3 wave. We're going to use the WAV format because we want to import that into I clone. So we just select that. It's going to pull up our save window, give it a name. Test audio. It pulls up another box. So if you'd like, you can put in all your information in here to keep track of the year, the genre, you know what it's called and all that kinda stuff. And then just click OK. And you just export it that track and we can import it into I clung. Now, the next thing we wanna do, let's go ahead and add this little x here. We'll just go ahead and get rid of that so we can start fresh. Let's record a track that we can use in I clone to do lip-sync to. So what we're gonna do is we're going to actually be using our face app. This is one method that we're going to use is to use the the live face app for iPhone. And we're going to be lip sinking back to a prerecorded dialogue. You'll find yourself in this position sometimes Annual, then find yourself sometimes in the position of recording your dialog live while you're doing it with the iPhone as well. And we'll do that next. But we're just going to start with a simple things and move from there. So let's go ahead and we're gonna click record. I'm gonna wait so I can collect a little sample without any audio first, because we're going to use that so we can do a little noise reduction. And then we're going to just use our best Cartoon voice. And we're just going to say a simple line of dialogue. Hi, my name is Hector and I'm a funny looking guy. Ok, so do that just like that. And you're best funniest look and Cartoon voice, funny slogan, funny a sounding Cartoon voice. Just go ahead and do that. And when you have it completed, we are going to continue on to the next step. And what we're gonna do is we're going to normalize our audio. We're going to get it as loud as possible and we're going to reduce any background noise that we have in this particular clip. We're going to clean it up. Now with your audio recorded. The first thing we want to do is go sample a piece of this, this noise that we have here, this background sounds. So we just go ahead and before our eclipse starts, just click and drag with your left mouse and then go to Effect and to noise reduction right here. And we want to tell a Udacity to get a noise profile. Just select that and it's going to sample this piece. And now what we wanna do is select our actual sound clip. The whole thing like that, go to Effect and noise reduction. And I usually get a pretty good result with the default settings here. But first, go ahead and do a preview. High. Those just give you a little bit of a preview sound. I'm gonna go ahead and say OK. And if you notice that little squiggly lines along here before and after are now gone. If we play our clip, Hi, my name is Hector, and I'm a funny looking guy. Sounds really good, really crisp and clean. It took the little bit of background noise that I had. That would be any air conditioner, hom or any auto car kind of thing in the background and works pretty well for that. The next thing you can do to enhance your dialogue is select the piece of dialogue and go back up to effect and go to normalize. This is set it minus1 decimal. You can preview it. Hi, my name is Hector, and I'm a funny look. And so what that does is watch what? When I click OK, it just makes the audio as loud as they can possibly be. Just by going down to normalize. And we didn't really see a visual jump. But if you've recorded this dialog and it's a little softer, it's going to bump it up as loud as it can be without distorting it. I find that between the two things in Audacity, using the normalized and using the noise reduction, you're gonna get about 90 plus percent of the way. There was some good clean dialogue for use in your, in your animations. From there, we just go File Export. Export is wave. And I've got my audio files here. I'm going to call this a funny looking guy. And now I have this piece of dialogue ready to import into I clone, which we'll do next.
28. Quick Start To Animating with LIVE Face!: Okay, now we're gonna get a quick start with live face, the unbelievably cool iPhone app by real illusion in which we can, on the fly in real time, we can animate our character's facial, lip-sync and facial expressions. So let's just go over a few things real quick. Lack. First thing is as I've provided the complete the complete I clone project along with this course. It's in the resource section of this section. And also the character. So when you open up the project file, the character will be there, but there'll be a watermark on him. So the best thing to do is go over to the real illusion marketplace and then search for funny-looking guy, which is just what I'm calling him. And I put the price down to 0. So for the time being, for a limited time, limited time offer, the character will be there for you at no cost. So you'll be able to get the export where you'll be able to move the character into Unreal engine and so on by using the Export option. Now keep in mind that you have to have the full skin Jin premium plugin in order to have the skip back over here in order to have the really cool face paint and the scars and the bruising and everything like that. The trial version, at least while you're doing this. And if you don't, you just won't have the you won't have the facial pain on there. You'll have everything but that. So just wanted to make those comments about the project and let's get going. The first thing we wanna do is you should have your iPhone hooked up in like we talked about with the lightning cable. So you're hard wired, your hard wire connected into your router, into your router and modem. So you're not relying on a wireless connection which can sometimes interfere with the latency with a lag of your animation. I just found I wasn't happy with the wireless. Maybe it was my connection. I don't know. You can give it a try and see for yourself. It can be different in different situations and settings. But I found I like the iPhone hardware connected with a Cat5 cable, a network cable into my router. And then it's got, it gives me a really like almost tactile feedback when I'm, when I'm controlling, when I'm animating the face. So the first thing we wanna do is you've got your project opened up to the funny-looking guy. That's what the project is called. And we've got our character here, let's just press F So we can see the whole thing here. He's just in a T-Pose. So for the first thing we wanna do, let's get him into a kind of a different, a different pose. So we'll go to male. And I just want to get him into kind of like a standard standing pose. So we'll go down here. This one looks pretty good at it and I'll drag and drop this onto him. So now our character is just standing with his, with his hands down while we do the facial animation. Let's go zoom into our character. And let's set it up to where we can see him really good is face needs to be really close up. That looks pretty good right there. And now the next thing I wanna do is go over to my animation tab over here under Modify. And I'm going to scroll down to the very bottom where it says motion live. So we want to click on this. And it will open up a nice big window. I'll move my character's face. Silver. Can get pretty clutter-free. I have two big monitors so it makes it easier. So I use both my monitors. For this course. I'm having a drag windows in just to show you where everything is at. So we've got our iPhone connected and you've downloaded the live face from the app store. Real illusion called Live face, that's all installed on your phone. And the first thing you wanna do is your iPhone is connected up to the power and the Cat5 cable. And we want to open up, before we open up live face, you want to go into your phone settings and you want to turn on airplane mode. And the reason for this is we don't want anything interrupting our animation sessions such as a call or a text coming in. We want to be just using our phone for this specific purpose. So go into airplane mode and turn that on. Remember to turn it off when you're done or you won't be getting calls. Sometimes I forget and then people wonder why I'm not answered my phone. So once that's on, go ahead and open up live face. And you're going to have the interface right in front of you, where it's showing your, your face right in the window. If you tap on your face, it's gonna give you a wireframe over your face. Some people like to use that while they're animating and other people don't. It's kind of up to you. Now, the first thing we wanna do is we want to go and look at the top of the live face in the bar at the top where it says, please connect your client software and it gives us the IP address. Now the IP address It's giving me is 19 two dot 168, dot one, dot 228. So that's what it's giving me. Now. Up here under the gear list in your motion live tab, you're gonna see live face and you're gonna see connection. This is where I messed up a lot. So I really want to make a point of pointing this out to you because if you get the connection IP address wrong, it's not going to work. And so what I was doing is I was just putting that in there, deleting everything in here. And I didn't realize that there was a 99.. a semicolon and then a 999 at the end. So it wasn't working. Don't make that mistake. You need that. Semicolon 999 at the end of it, you have to have that. Otherwise it's not going to make the connection. It's a port number. So move over to here, where you're past the semicolon there. And then I back up and then I'm gonna type in 192168 dot one, dot 2.2.3. Yours is going to be different. It's not going to be mine. So if i cursor over, we can see that I still have my 99 in my semicolon right here. Without that, it will not work. And I was, it was so frustrating for me because I literally spent hours and hours go what is wrong? Why isn't this working? I'm searching all over the place. Simple operator error. So make sure that that stays on there. Now, we go over to Live face right here and there's a little button, click on that and it's going to turn solid green. So we've, we've made a connection now, but we're not quite there yet. We need to go down to our character list. And you should see funny looking guy down here. And the face is checked. But we're still not totally connected. We have to go over here to the little iPhone icon. If you hover over it, it says live face. Click on that. And then you have to move over here and you have to select the live face. Okay, so if that's not checked up, that's how you do it. That has to be checked off. Now we are connected. And if you look on your iPhone right now, you'll see that the black bar at the top has gone away and it just says live face. And you'll see all these cool little controls underneath your face that are moving around. Now the first thing we wanna do here, let's just run through really quick tests pass just so we know how these things work out. Either controls work. We want to set a 0 pose. So look straight into your camera, hover your mouse over here where it says, set 0, pose. Hold your phone up in front of your face. I use a little stand. It's kind of like a flexible stand that I can adjust in. It sits there really nice in front of my face. You can also do this if you don't have that, just hold the phone straight in front of your face. Looks straight into the live face app and then click on Set 0 pose. And that's telling I clone and live face to start with your face in that position. Now go down the preview tab. And this works much like some of the other controls you're familiar with, the direct puppet, phase puppet and all those things were using before. So we want to click on the preview tab and it's gonna say press Space key to preview. So now we want to press the Space key. And now I've got my mouth moving my eyebrows. If I look around, I have my my glasses on to be able to see the computer so my eyes aren't working as well as they normally do. If I take my glasses off. Then the napkin can register my eye movements a little more. So here we go like this. I can smile. Make my eyes really do. And I'm just previewing at this point. And we're not recording or anything like that. So I'm going to press the spacebar to stop. Go ahead and do that. And let's take a look at under here we have mask and we have strength. There is a global setting in here that you can crank up and that'll take all of the individual parts. And it'll, it'll make them all more pronounced. When I like to do though is I don't want to do all the global, But I do like to bump up the brow so that's more responsive. Sometimes the cheek so the cheeks will show more. I definitely crank up the mouth to about a 125 or so. Sometimes I'll do the jaw. It kind of depends on the character and how it's modeled. And the head rotate. I just leave that alone. And there's some settings under here we'll use when we, when we record is blend data on next recording, smooth head. You're turning your head. This is a neat control that'll smooth ahead and mirror. Okay, so after we've cranked these up a little bit more, we're going to go ahead and preview it again. So press the preview and the space bar y. Now open up your mouth. And you should get funny looking guy to be able to open up his Mao. Now, right here's a good place to tell you that. See if I'm talking normally right now, see how the character is not super animated, right? So one of the secrets are the tips that I can get. And a lot of people asked this and they're not getting the results they want. You have to overcome. You have to move your facial expressions around like, like you're a puppet yourself, or like you're a cartoon. So for example, I've to open my mouth really wide for that. You have to make your eyebrows go way up and down in your head movements here, you're basically doing performance art. So think of it that way that you have to infuse life into your character. You have to infuse the personality that character and see how he's barely moving is I'm just talking because I'm not performance acting with him right now. So you can kinda get the hang of that. But these global controls let watch if we crank this way up. I can almost break the mash. But so you can get a lot of emotion when you move your mouth for a while. And you've got to grow Bu Xiang Yao. Anyway, you get the idea. You've got a tremendous amount of flexibility and controls in here. So just play around with it. And that's how we do. Press there space key to stop our preview. Now, what we're gonna do next is what's called looping or ADR, automatic dialog replacement. Although we're going to be doing a kind of a poor man's low budget version of that. We're gonna be doing it ourselves. And that's where we bring in the audio and then we're going to perform and lip-sync to it. So remember what we did in Audacity. We're gonna go ahead and bring the funny guy dialogue in in the next video. And we'll be performing to that.
29. LIVE Face Lip Sync with existing dialogue track: We're ready to do our first performance animation. And for this we're gonna be using the looping technique. So the first thing we need to do is to import our sound. The dialogue that we recorded for funny looking guy in Audacity. So what we need to do is we need to go down here into our timeline under funny looking guy, little drop-down arrow here because all we're showing, I've kinda deleted some tracks because I want to remind you how to how to find things. Because trust me, you'll get lost as I did, because things are really well hidden in nested throughout here. So we go to this drop down arrow and we need the sound track. So that's the first thing we need to do. So go ahead and select the soundtrack and move into the timeline and right-click. And we're gonna get import. And we're going to import. And when I find it, I see it's called, I'm a funny looking guy. So I'm gonna select that and I'm gonna click open. And it's going to ask me if I want a voice track or a soundtrack. I'm going to keep it on the voice track here. Now what we need to do is we need to go back to funny looking guy here. We need to go up here to VCM or however you say that. Click that. And now we can see down here in our timeline, I'm a funny looking guy, and let's just drag it closer to the beginning here. And we can see our waveform for the audio as well. With the Alt key on my keyboard selected, I'm using the scroll mouse so that I can bring it better interview so I can see the entire track here. So let's play that back. Let's just put our playhead at the beginning here and let's press play. Hi, my name is Hector and I'm a funny looking guy. A good. There's our audio track and it sounds really good. And we follow along with the play head. And you can see where the waveforms are to kind of open and close your mouth as we do this, to loop the dialogue as if you were saying it. So let's try that. Let's get our phone. Bring mine in front of me now. We still gotta hooked up to live face, everything is still and we need to go back and click our buttons so we're fully connected again. This would be a good place to recalibrate. So you wanna do your set 0 pose again, looking directly into your iPhone app with the live face open and running. Set 0 posts. Ok. Press the preview and then the space bar. Just to make sure is Hector. And I'm a funny looking guy. Okay. This time we're going to record it. It's not going to be perfect because we're just learning how to use the controls. We just want to work our way through the process. Here. Very important is we need to go up here under our motion live tab and uncheck this box where it says record audio for vising track. Otherwise, we'll record right over our imported audio and we don't wanna do that. So make sure that's unchecked, otherwise you'll blast this out. So what we're gonna do now get your iPhone in your hand. Looking into your iPhone, we press record and then our spacebar and will be ready to lip-sync to this track. Hi, my name is Hector, and I'm a funny looking guy. Okay. Let's play that back. Hi. My name is Hector and I'm a funny looking guy. Okay. It wasn't very good, but the mouth opened and closed at approximately the right pause. You can see that this takes with this particular method. It takes a lot of practice. You have to be very familiar with each line of dialogue. So this wouldn't be the ideal way. But it is a way that you can take some high-quality dialogue tracks that have been prerecorded. And then animate to that. Let's try this again. Set my 0 pose again on the phone. Press the space bar. Hi, my name is Hector, and I'm a funny looking guy. I like that one better. Let's play it back and see what that one looks like. Hi. My name is Hector and I'm a funny looking guy. Okay. So you can see that what this is, it's just take after take after take, just like you would do in a real filming situation if you were doing a live action flick, you know, you're just going to have to do take after take. In the next video. We're going to do something that I think it's more fun because we're recording the audio and the animation at the same time. It's a little trickier if you're by yourself because you gotta start audacity and you've gotta start, I clone all the record buttons at the same time and then you've got to import the audio in. But it's a, it's a very effective way to do it. So we'll be doing that next.
30. LIVE Face LIVE Audio Record REVISED: Now we're going to do an animation recording. Live with are sound and our visuals are facial animation happening in real-time at the same time. So to do that first, let's clear out our timeline. Let's go ahead down here and get rid of are one that we were working on before or savior scene and different under a different name. If you want to keep this one, I'm just gonna go ahead and delete that and then delete our expression track. So we're back to an empty timeline. Remember he's blinking here. Remember how we can stop that if we want, we can just go over here to our Parameters tab. It's always hiding way at the top. Auto blink normal. We just select None. And now there won't be any automatic blinking in the program. It will be added through our life asap. In this situation, we're going to need audacity opens. So go ahead and open up your audacity program. I have mine right here in another tab. So it's ready to go. And what we're gonna do is we're going to be starting our sound first, we're gonna roll sound first. And then we're gonna go over here. And we will start our animation. And in this particular exercise, we're going to say the same thing we were saying before. Hi, my name is Hector and I'm a funny looking guy. And we're gonna do it three times. We're going to do it with three different voice inflections, okay? Same words, just different inflections. So we're gonna do three takes in the same recording. So that's our goal here, that's what we're going to strive for. So have your iPhone live face app all hooked up. I gotta get mine in front of me here and make sure that you are hooked up to your if you have it hooked up to the hardwired Cat5 cable. And we go over here to our Animation tab. I know this is repetitive for some of you, but I always like to go over this several times. Down to motion live. And this will open up our window. And then over here, make sure that we have the IP address that's showing in your life face. Mine is 19 two dot 168 dot one dot 2.2.3. And most important, remember, don't delete out the colon 999. Without that, it will not work because that's the port. So over here we click the live face button, it turns to green. And as long as this is checked, we're ready to go. If it's not check to go over here, click on it and then select live face. Without that, it won't work either. Okay, let's just test it out now. Let's hit the Preview button. Hold up your phone in front of your face, and set the 0 pose. Press the space key, spacebar key. And Josh, make sure that our character array should movie. Looking good. Okay? So that's looking great and we have everything set. Another thing is make sure that record audio for Vice same track is unchecked. We don't wanna do that right now. So leave that unchecked and going to go over to a Udacity. Now this is where it gets a little bit tricky because we have to start the recording here and audacity. And then we have to go back over here. And we have to start our record, hit the space bar button or spacebar key. Do our performance capture. When we're done there, we pause and we go over here and we stop. So that's a lot of moving around after you do it for awhile. It's no big deal, but initially it's kinda cumbersome and it's a little bit tricky. So just be aware of that. Don't be afraid of it. If you mess up, just start all over again. That's all. It's really easy. No harm, no foul here. Okay, so we have this set. We need to go into Audacity and make sure that we have a microphone selected, which nothing is showing here. So I'm going to reopen. Now that I've reopened my audacity, my microphone is showing up here. Microphone, Blue Snowball. Now another good thing to do is to use headphones, either your ear buds for your phone, or plug, plug some type of headphones into your speakers because you don't want to be recording over your speakers. You don't want to hear that coming out. So monitor through your speakers with headphones or earbuds. Okay, so we're going to be editing out a lot of the unnecessary stuff. So we just go ahead and hit record. And I'm just recording along. And here we go. Now I'm gonna go back over to I clone. And we're ready to go here. We're going to hit the record button. Ready to hit the spacebar key and do our first line of dialogue, which is again, it's going to be, Hi, my name is Hector in the Cartoon voice. And I'm a funny looking guy, and we're gonna do it three times with different voice inflection. So here we go. Hi, my name is Hector. I'm a funny looking guy. Hey, my name is Hector and I'm a funny-looking Gary. My name is Hector and Ama funny-looking gap. Alright. Now we go over to audacity and we hit stop k. Now over here in Audacity, we've gotta do some cleanup. So let's just start this. We go back to the beginning of our audio track right about here. I don't need any of the beginning stuff, so go ahead and click and drag. Oops. Hold it down all the way to the beginning. And then we press Delete. And this is the beginning of the dialogue. So I'm gonna go ahead and clean all this up to where all we have or the three dialogues. That the three Hi, my name is Hector. Now that we have our dialogue track edited down with all the junk, so to speak, cut out of it. We have just our three lines of dialogue here spoken in different inflections. While we're in Audacity. Let's go ahead and sample some of this noise. So select some of the blank spots, go to Effect. And then down to noise reduction, and then get noise profile. And now, starting at the beginning of your track, select the whole, the whole track. Go to Effect, and then go to noise reduction. And select OK, just leaving it with the defaults. And we'll see that noise in between. Our words have now disappeared. Okay, so just by doing that, and that's going to help our dialogue sounds so much better. So now we wanna do is we need to export the audio, export it as a WAV file. And I'm a funny looking guy, and we'll call this one. We just put a hey, hey, I'm a funny looking guy. So we know this is the one that we record is different from the other one. So I'll go ahead and save that. Now back over into I clone. We can go ahead and close down motion live for now. It's gonna say to you sure you want to disconnect the server? Yeah, cuz we can always just open it up again. And we need to we already have a soundtrack here from before. And we have our new expression clip right here. This is what we, we recorded, so we don't want to delete that. Hey, there it is, but we have no sound. We need to bring it in. So we go up here to funny-looking guy, this track, little drop-down arrow. And we check the sound, which will give us a track. Now down here at the very bottom. Moving over into the timeline, we right-click select import. It'll open up our window. And this is the one we want. Hey, I'm a funny looking guy. Now because my play heads here. I didn't move it to the beginning. It's going to bring it right in there. Remember we want a voice track, not just a soundtrack, so we apply. And here is our voice track right here. Says grab it and move it to the front. Okay, now we're going to have to do some adjustments. But first let's play it back and see what it sounds like. See how close we are. Hi, my name is Hector, and I'm a funny looking back, we can tell that our sound is way off. So what we need to do is we need to slide the audio. Usually it's forward. What we the easiest way to do it is to scrub and see where he starts to open his mouth for high. We want this play had to be right at the beginning of that sounds. So move this right at the beginning of the first word and that should get us pretty close. Hi, my name is Hector. And I'm a funny look and get slightly little, little bit more. Hi, my name is Hector and I'm a funny looking guy. Hey, my name is Hector. And I'm a funny look in Gary. My name is Hector. You mama funny looking guy. Arrived, we did it. So now we have three different takes to choose from. Pick the one you want, save them all whatever you want to do, whatever is best for your workflow. But this is how you do animating in real-time with the live face app right here in I clung. Now remember how did we save this? Because we don't want to lose our hard work. I mean, we're always going to be saving our project. Be sure to do that often. But we want to go over to our animation and then we go to motion plus, because this has audio as well as animation. And then we wanna go over to our custom and motion plus. Remember here how we had saved some before. We want to go ahead and just move back a little bit to the beginning. We want to go ahead and save this. And we'll call this a funny guy. Now this is gonna save this for us. So all that facial animation, the audio and everything is going to be saved for us right here in our custom tab. Another way to save is to go up here to the collect clip and you start, and you drag left-click and drag in this track, left-click all the way for the whole thing. And then on this track, you right-click and you go add motion plus to library. And it's going to come up here and say you want the motion facial animation. All the spring states, this is more for body animation. And you want all of this and all this stuff is already checked for us, the sound and all that kinda stuff. And then you click ok. And this will bring up your save window. For us to save it in the motion plus area. I prefer just doing it this way because it's it's easier. It saves some steps, but that's the process. If you want to just save a portion of the animation, like let's, let's say that you just decided you wanted the second take. He would just go down here. And in the clip, you go like this. And this is the only part of the animation that's gonna save. So you would do that. That's how you would do it. Add motion plus to library. Alright. Give yourself a huge pat on the back because what you've just gone through, this whole process is pretty advanced and it's highly technical. I know it's been boring. I try to make it not boring, but it's kinda hard because there's so many little details in here, but you've really come a long way. So practice doing this. Just review the video again if you need to walk through it a couple times because it is, it's got a lot of moving parts in here. But this is the basics of how you will do a facial animation. And then like before, to add the body animation to this facial animation, we would just go up to the motion puppet. And then we would go in here into the moods or the move or whichever one. And we would just select these, edit the various parameters that we have here, previewed and then record to add body animation to your really cool facial animation that you have. So that is the workflow for doing the live face recording audio in a double system sound way and then bringing the audio back into I clone, ready to sync up so that the lip-sync matches up. In the next video, we're going to cover very briefly how we can layer animations on top of this.
31. Fun with layering animation expressions: Okay, now we're going to have some fun. You're going to really love this. Because now we're going to layer similar expression over our existing live face animation that we did facial animation. So what we wanna do is we want to go over here to our Animation tab. And we want to open up the face key. And I've already, I have this selected member. We can click the eraser to get a clean face. And what we're gonna do is we're going to use the eyebrows to create some more expression for our character. So go over here and just select in green all of these eyebrows, including the middle part here. And then right above each eye as well. Because we want to be able to move like this where he's going to go up and down. So by making his eyes wide through the animation going up and down, we're gonna give him a lot more expression. So click the default key at the very beginning of the animation in the timeline. And that'll keep it right where it was. And then move, click and drag. We're just gonna scrub through. And when he starts talking like this, I want his eyes to go really badly. This whoo. And if you scroll down here under expression, tick the little arrow on the side and under the muscle track, here's where all the magic is going to happen. So we just placed a keyframe right here with his eyes really wide. And now I'm gonna move my whatever this thing is called. I'm going to move forward in the timeline and then drag down in the black area to make his eyes go down. And I've created automatically another keyframe. So as, as we move forward, just raise the eyebrows. You can go pretty wide without breaking the mesh or making it look bad. And then bring it down. Move forward. Me really wide there. Here you can bring it down a little bit. Why it again? So this is totally up to you. Year creating this, just go ahead and add these keyframes. And the nice thing about it is, let's go ahead and go back to one and let's play it. Hi, my name is Hector. And I'm a funny looking. Hey, my name is Hector. See how it makes him more expressive just by opening and closing his, his eyes. So you have total control over this. And also in the track and the muscle track you can delete by selecting a keyframe. You can delete it, or you can just simply click and drag and you can move these around. Let's say you get a cycle of of this i and eyebrow animation that you like. Just click and drag and select all of these. Right-click and copy, and then move your play head forward. Right-click paste. And now we have duplicated all of those eye movements are pretty cool. And this is where it gets really fun too, because you can really play around with it like a digital puppet with the base that you already have of the, you know, the great lip sync that you got from the live asap. Hi, my name is Hector and I'm a funny looking guy. Hey, my name is Hector and I'm a funny looking guy. My name is Hector and I'm a funny looking good. Okay. Now, the other thing that we can do here, you can, we can select the eyes and we can move the eyes in the same way if you'd like to add the high movements. Select the eyelids above and below. If you'd like to have more movement like this, which looks a little more realistic and animate in the same way. So you just go layer by layer. In order to do that. Another thing I find really helpful is to do some corrective. Like sometimes the mouth is open to much like there. And I may want to correct that by closing his mouth a little bit here. Sometimes his mouth is going into much. So I want to bring it bring it down. So you can very easily and intuitively do corrective to this ones like way, way, too much. So bring this one up like that in here as well. And just go through and scrub through your animation and fine tune it. Hi, my name is Hector, and I'm a funny looking guy. Hey, my name is Hector and I'm a funny looking guy. Okay, let's close this. And there we have it. And that's how we can layer different animations on top of our existing light face. You can also do expressions. Now be careful when you're doing this one because when you add a different expression and create a keyframe, it's going to do an additive animation, which means it's going to add to whatever you have existing. So it's really easy to do too much, you know, like it'll open your mouth and it could break your mesh or look ridiculous. So if you're going to use the facial expressions, use this dial right here so you can dial it down a bit. But very, very powerful. And you can also go into the modify and you can modify eyes, nose, mouth, all kinds of really good tools in here. My favorite is just to use this one that muscle and to hand animate because I feel like I have more intuitive control over that. And that's how we layer animations on top of our life face.
32. QUICK START to iClone to Unreal Engine via LIVE Link: Okay, now we're going to get off to a very quickstart. And so what I want you to do, I've created a project for you and I clone project called Alien hybrid UB04 live link dot i Project. And that will be in the resources section of the course. So look for that and download that and have that open already. It looks like what we're seeing right here. We've got the alien hybrid character that I created in character creator three, which is included in this course. And it will also be, you'll be able to go to the marketplace and actually export it or, or downloaded so you can own the character if you're just opening it up in this, of course, right here though, there will be a watermark across it. So it's better if you get it from the marketplace and I'll have that link for you as well. So the first thing we wanna do is open up this project. I wanted to point out a couple of things here. I already have a scene setup for you with an animation, and let's just play it through. It's very short, it's just 1400 frames. And this is the example file or the example animation that we're going to be sending over into Unreal engine. So we can just get the workflow down and see how the steps are done. So let me play this and let's watch this through. Greetings. My name is God, and I hail from the Palladium styles has to take me to the already there. Okay. That's the animation that we're going to send over to Unreal Engine. So in order to complete this part of the course and the tutorial, you have to make sure that you have installed the unreal live link plug-in. And then once it's installed, you'll get a tab over here that looks like this. Also over here under the unreliable link. We'll tell you where it's installed, the plugin folder. It'll tell you where to get the auto setup plugins that you also need. There's an online manual along with video tutorials if you get stuck on the installation part. Because I haven't covered that in this course. Just go to these video tutorials. If you have any issues and you'll, you'll be able to receive help there. So make sure this is all installed and ready to go. So in the next video, we're going to go into creating our Unreal Engine project file so that we can link the two together and send this character over.
33. Create Unreal Engine Project with Live Link and Auto Setup: Okay, now we're going to create our Unreal Engine project file. So open up your Epic Games launcher. And we need to open up, we'll be using for 0.25.3 at this particular time. Or you can use the latest version for when you're watching this. And go ahead and click on launch. And it's going to ask, do we want to select or create a new project? We want to create a new project. So lets select games and then click on Next. And we want to use the, let's just select the third person for our purposes here. Then select Next. We want desktop console selected, know starter content selected. We don't need that at this time. Over here we want blueprint, maximum quality, and ray tracing disabled for now, we can always turn that on. Select where you want your project to be located on your personal computer. And then we want to give it a name. And I'm gonna name this Dalian underscore, hybrid. Underscore I clone, alien underscore hybrid underscore I clone and create project. First thing, we're going to be opened up to this level, which is fine, but we want to create a new level. So let's go up to File New level. And we'll just do a default level. And we'll save this, save current as well. Just save it in the content folder here. And we'll call this alien underscore hybrid. Okay. Now we're ready to get our plugins installed. So there's a couple of things we need to do. We need to install the I clone livelihood plug-in. And then we also have to have the auto setup folders installed in our particular project. So we have to do that manually and we'll go into how that's done. So first thing we go to Edit plug-ins. And I have a bunch of them here already. I'm the only one we want to select right now is the high clone live link. And then I have to restart the project. So let's go ahead and do that now. Go back to our alien hybrid level. And now we have our I clone live link plug-in showing up here at the top, which we need. Now the other thing we need, we need the auto setup that you downloaded Also if you are following along before all the programs you needed to download, but we have to manually put those. We have to copy those folders and put them into our project in a certain way. Okay, this next part is really important to get right? Otherwise, this won't work and you won't be able to transfer the character with all of the automatic materials set up and all that through live link. So for your convenience, I've included the short video by real illusion so that you can watch it right here. So let's just watch this play through actually Creator and iPhone auto setup installation guide for unreal. Go to the download webpage. Download the free character creator and I cloned auto setup execution file. A browser pops up after the installation with three folders, each with different suffixes. Opened the folder in accordance with the unreal project we have. There is a read me text file in it that will guide you on installing the plugin and shaders. Copy and paste the plugins and content folders into the folder at the same directory level of our unreal project. Open our unreal project. You will see the CC Setup button on the toolbar. If you cannot find the button, go to Edit, plugins panel in project re illusion item, and then activate the character creator and I clone auto setup Enable box. Keep in mind that after you copy and paste the plug-in and content folder for the auto setup, you're going to have to Savior Unreal Engine Project and then reopen it. And then you'll notice that it shows up at the top of the menu right beside I clone live link. So it will then be active and ready to go. In the next video, we're going to combine the two and we're going to turn on the live link and I clone. And we're going to show how simple it is just to send it right across into Unreal Engine.
34. Transfer alien to unreal engine: Okay, now we are ready to send our character from I clone over to Unreal Engine. What I've done is I've set up the two programs in a tab rather than trying to squish them and couldn't get them quite small enough to show both on the same screen. So I have Unreal Engine over here, and I clone over here. And we'll just switch back and forth to watch how this is sending in in real time. So the first thing we wanna do is we wanna go to plug-ins unreal live link and make sure that's selected. And then you can drag it over here to a tab, or it will open up over here depending on where you're at in your ear interface. So we want to have unreal live links selected. And the first thing we wanna do is we want to transfer our character over to Unreal Engine. Now those of you who have done this manually before, no, you're gonna realize what a tremendous time savings this is. Because what this plugin is gonna do, it's gonna send our character over there with all of the high-quality skin materials I'm materials and everything that would take forever to set up manually one by one over and Unreal engine. This is gonna do it, it's going to compute, or this particular plugin is gonna do it for us. So I want to talk about the workflow of this course. Now you can set up everything and I clone your animations. You can set up your lighting, your camera moves, your animations, all of that right here in I clone. And then you can send all of that over two Unreal engine. As you can see here, we could send lights, we can send the camera, we can send props and everything. However, I have found, at least for me, the easiest way and the most direct way is to just send my character over there and then my animation, and then record the animation over into Unreal Engine. So that's what we're gonna be doing in this course. Because otherwise it's kind of like duplicating efforts have gone to spend all the time to set up your lights and cameras and animations and motion and all that. And I clone you might as well just render out your animation from here. But we wanna get over into Unreal engine so we can use all of the lighting and camera tools over there. So as far as the transfer goes, we have a link and we have a transfer. We want to be on the transfer tab. And we don't want to have any of these lights. We don't want to have the camera, we don't have any props. We just want to have our character selected. And then we're going to click the transfer file. And this is going to tell I clone to go ahead and send our character along with all of his materials, high-quality materials over to Unreal Engine. So let's go ahead and do this. I'm going to be speeding this up because it does take a few minutes for it to do this this auto setup. And I don't want to bore you with having to wait for this to happen in real time. So we'll click the transfer file that we can see here. All of the files are being automatically sent over. I'm gonna speed all this. Oh, okay, now we have our alien hybrid that has been transferred over to Unreal Engine. So there he is, right there. Let's go ahead and move some of these items out of our way. Select our character, press the F key. And there are characters in all its glory. The floor feeder through the floor so we can select our floor and take this off of snap. Who've our floor down? And there is our alien character with all of its textures intact. Totally setup for us, saved us a huge amount of time and frustration. Like I say, if you've had to do this manually, you know what a, what a huge time-saver and what an awesome tool this is. Now in the next video. We're going to hook up the live link so that the animation will play from I clone into Unreal Engine. And then we'll go into the steps of how to record this animation in Unreal Engine because that's really what we're after. It's one thing to play the animation and have it playing simultaneously from my clone to Unreal engine. But it does no good at all unless we can record that. So we need to record that animation and be able to use it whenever we want.
35. Live Link Connected and playing animation: Now we're ready to set up our live link between Unreal Engine and I clone. So to do that, we need to go up to our window. Down here we'll see live link. Select that and it'll open up the live link window. Click on the tab here, and just move this over to right next to details. This, we'll kind of get it out of the way and give us more room to work. From there, we need to add the source. So on this green button here where it says source, click on that. And we'll see I clone live link. It'll have a port number. Just leave that default and just select. Okay, so now we're ready and it's telling us that we're receiving ready to receive from my clone. So over and I clone, we need to go to our link and uncheck all of these. We don't need any props. We don't need the camera or anything like that. So we don't, we don't want to send anything over the live link except our character and the animation that's gonna come with our character. So we click Activate link, and it'll tell us link is activated. Go back over here until Unreal Engine will see a green light right here, a green dot that shows us that alien hybrid animation is checked. And we have the character already standing in the idle pose. Let's go back over here and we'll start the animation. I'm gonna shorten it a little bit, just so we have the dialogue parts. And we'll go to the beginning of the animation. And when I press Play, and we go back over to Unreal Engine, mommy. And I hail from the audience, dies. His DOM, Take me to your leader. Greetings. My name is God, and I hail from the plea. Aliens dies his down. Take me to your leader. Greetings. My name is God, and I hail from the audience. Dias, take me to the already it or K, I'm going to minimize that window, shrink it down so we can see it happening in real time with both of them. My name is guard and I hail from the audience diocese down. Take me to the already. Let's get this a little bit closer to our view. There we go. So we can see now our character is moving and precisely with the animation and I clone this is so cool. In real time. We're just sending this animation over into Unreal Engine. Exactly as it's playing in I clone, it's playing and Unreal engine. Now the only thing we're missing here is it doesn't send the audio over, so we're going to have to import the audio later and sync it up in Unreal Engine. Once we have a sequence made, we add that audio track and we'll do that in a little while. So this is how we get the live link happening and we get the animation plane. But now this is all fine and well. But how do we record this animation in Unreal Engine so that we can use it? Because otherwise we're just gonna, we're just playing the animation back will in the next video, we're going to use sequence recorder and we're gonna do just that. My name is God. And I hail from the Palladium style system.
36. Record Your Animation with Sequence Recorder: Now we're ready to actually record the animation into Unreal Engine. And for that, we need to record it in real time using sequence recorder. Not to be confused with sequencer, which is different. That's the timeline editing that this is called sequence recorder. So we need to go up to window and under cinematics, go over here and choose sequence recorder that will open up a window. Click and drag this over next to our place actors Taft. Reposition the windows to give yourself a little more room. And down here are some fairly advanced settings that we really don't need to use right now because we're not going to be our primary focus isn't to record a sequence with is we just want to record the animation and use that animation in our own sequence, if that makes sense. So the easiest way to do this and the most direct way is to click on our character. And you'll see over here it'll select CC live link blueprint. It may be called something different if you're still using the original transfer file. And then go over here to where it says add and click add. That's going to add our character into the sequence recorder. And it's going to tell us this is what we want to record. So what we're going to be doing is we are going to be pressing the record button. It's gonna give us a countdown. And after it starts recording, we're gonna go over here to I clone. And we're going to press play on our animation and get the animation going. And it will be recording over here in Unreal Engine. So we have to kinda do the back and forth thing again. So let's do that. Let's click record. We get our Countdown 4321. Now we're recording. We go over here to I clone and press record. Greetings, my name back along here into Unreal engine. We can see our character is talking right now to the lip-sync audio. When he finishes the animation, we just press stop. All. Go back over to I clone, press the pause button. And now over here, in Unreal Engine, we need to find that animation. So over here in our content tab, what Unreal Engine has done for us is it's created a folder called cinematics. So look for cinematics.
37. Record Your Animation With Sequence Recorder 2: So we want to go over here to our content browser and look for cinematics. And under cinematics, when we expand the era will see sequences, recorded sequence. And this is where we're going to find recorded animation and a sequence already set up for us. So double-click on that. And it will open up our sequence called recorded sequence and we can rename this and we will be renaming this in a little while. So let's just take a look at what we have here. We have our CSI live blueprint character that was sent over and recorded from I clone. And if we grab our play head, we can see that the animation starts right about here. So let's just go ahead and click Play. It looks pretty good. Okay, let's bring this back to the beginning. So we have our recorded animation right here, and we already have a sequencer setup for us. This is all done automatically by live link and Unreal engine. They just worked in tandem and say this a whole ton of time and work. So the one thing we're missing in here as we're missing the dialogue for the alien character. So let's go ahead and add that now. If you don't yet have it in Unreal Engine, just go to your content browser, put it where you want, maybe make a special folder for it, right-click. And then go up to import and then select it from where you saved the audio. Back in the sequencer. We need to add an audio tracks of click on the green button, it says Track and go up here to audio track. Select that. And the audio track is created for us. Then go over here to the audio and go up here where it says greetings, my name is gore RC or whatever you named the Audio File. And there is our dialogue track complete with waveform, which will be very, very helpful to us. What we wanna do next is we want to sync up the dialogue track to the animation, the facial animation. So just grab our playhead right about there where you see his mouth opening. And then we want to click and drag the audio track so that it's right in the beginning there. You can see right at the waveform, just use that as your visual clue. And then hit play. My name is God. And I hail from the jellybeans Style System. Thank me truly already. Okay, that looks like it's about dead on if it's not and you don't have it exactly right, just slide this back and forth. It's also helpful to turn off snapping if this is on by default. And you can also click and drag like this to make the timeline zoomed in more and bigger. So that's the way we set up the dialogue tracker. My name is God, and I hail from the Libyans styles has to take me to the already. Okay, that looks pretty good. Now I wanted to mention a couple of things as to look out for. You want to stay away from the animation's. There seems to be a glitch or some kind of a bug in these recorded animations. And let's take a look at one and you'll see what I mean. Let's get a closeup here. When we start the animation. When he starts talking, watch faces jittering all over the place. And then it kinda stops. And then it'll start jittering again. It's not usable and I don't know what the problem is. I'm sure it'll be fixed in an upcoming update of Unreal Engine. But for now, use the one that was included that was recorded with the sequence. The sequence are here because this one is fine, has no, it has no artifacts or anything to worry about. And I hail from the Indian style system. So that's how we get the animation in there and we get the audio track lined up so that we can do further scenes set up and animations as far as the camera and things like that. Remember the best thing to do is we will be using this sound in an editing program outside of Unreal Engine when we do further color grading and manipulation and will be sinking up the audio at that point also. So this is just to help us at this point in time when we're creating inside of Unreal Engine. Now how do we create an animation? From here, let's say we, we want this one cc lively blueprint, it's called. And we want to make this into a, its own animation sequence or its own animation asset. Very simply, we just select CC live link. So to create another animation asset or an animation sequence, we just select our character here, right-click. And this is gonna give us some options here we wanna go up to create animation assets, create animation sequence. So let's select that. And then let's just go up to content. So we can find it real easy english, slit, we'll name it something really, really easy, like greetings. And now if we open greetings Gorky. And let's zoom in here where we can see. Let's do a test run in the animation. Beautiful see we don't have that jittery errors, none of that funny stuff going on. We just have a nice clean facial animation. Now, we notice here this is a good place to cover how we can clean this up a little bit more. We noticed that there's there's no motion right up until about here. So if we want to eliminate all of those beginning frames, so in order to trim the frames where no motion is taking, we can do that right here in the animation editor. It's a good thing to do though, is to save your scene. Because sometimes Unreal Engine doesn't like this and it'll feel crash. So save your scene. And then right-click and select Remove frame 0 to frame 387. And it did it again. As you can see, it crashed on me again. So here we are opened up. Again. I'm sure this bug will be fixed, but right now it's really annoying. So the other work around for that, at least for the time being, is to go into sequencer. And then just scroll ahead to where the motion starts. And then click on the track at the beginning, and it'll turn into a double-headed arrow and then just shrink your track down and then move it up to the beginning. And now what I did is I also messed up my audio, which looks like my audio book got blasted out as well. So we're going to have to fix that again. Remember how we do that. We just go to track audio track, audio, greetings. My name is my name is go work. Back to the beginning here. Let me put on my headphones so I can hear this and sync it up. Close mouth opens up there and we need to slide this track so the waveform starts right where his mouth is opening up, attains. My name is GAR and I hail from the audience to take me to your leader. Okay, that looks pretty good. Greetings. My name is God, and I hail from the audience, Dies has down. Okay, looks pretty good. This recorded audio here was for something else I was testing out. It will actually record narration from your microphone right into the sequencer as well. So that could be a useful, a useful feature. So now we have this all linked up with our character. So it's in a usable form so we can use that in our sequencer. It's a good time to go up and save our scene. And now this gets us to the final stages of exporting our video. So to do that, we need to first of all, remember we need to add a camera. So if we go over here, we will add a camera and it'll add a cut camera, cut track up at the beginning as well. And we can see here that he's totally out of focus. So we go down to our camera into manual focus and just 0 that out. And then pull it, pull it up to around a 100 and looks like about a 128. Just wanna kinda frame him into kind of a close-up k. Now if you notice right here, the outline of his head is bumpy, looks like a low res mesh. And I have a complete video where we're going to cover and how to make that smooth. There's some settings that we need to adjust inside of Unreal engine in the Material Editor to get that. So don't worry about that right now. We're going to fix that. But that's, that's a major thing because it'll make the character look much better. Alrighty, so we've got that. We'll just leave it framed up like that. I'm not going to do too much with the camera settings. Put the cynic camera actor that we, we have our full clip here and then highlight this. So this is what we'll be exporting as our video. And then go to our render icon. And we're gonna go up here and we're gonna do a video sequence AVI with no audio. This is still experimental with the sub-mix and all that. And because like I said earlier, since we're gonna be doing the audio and sinking everything up in an editing program later. We, it's better not to mess with if you're just doing cinematics for now. Frames per second, frame set at 60 down here. So we'll just go ahead and leave it there. 1920 by 1080. Down here. Let's make sure that we have all of our cinematic engine scalability checked off and cinematic mode. Now I noticed, and this is kind of a bummer, but in 45 for some reason there's another bug that needs to be fixed in the movie preview window, as you'll see when we go to capture the movie and the window pops up, it's not going to be showing our true aspect ratio. It's just going to be showing a part of the frame, which is a little bit of a bummer, but it's actually recording the full frame as we'll see. So let's go ahead and capture. And we're going to save. And this is the window is talking about right here. So normally we would be seeing the full frame, but we're just getting edge of his head in here. So we'll just go ahead and let this capture our whole clip. We'll stop it there. And let's take a look at it. That looks pretty good. So we don't lose anything. But it is like I say, it's kind of a bummer not to see the full foramen we're capturing the video, but I'm sure that will be fixed in an update real soon. Bye, bye the epic guys. Okay, so that is how we get our animation recorded and then actually out as a video ready to be further edited. So we've gone through the whole process going from I clone into Unreal engine using sequence recorder to record the animation in real-time. And then had to go in there and add the audio dialogue track, sync it up, and had to create another animation asset from this one that we have here. And then how to export it into a video file for further editing. So in the next video we're going to cover how to smooth as head out so that his head isn't bumpy like that and his entire body will be able to be smoothed out. So it looks like a high res mesh. The same way he looked in high clone.
38. How to clean up & edit animation: Now we want to clean up our animation and edited so we don't have any no motion parts at the beginning of the animation. But before we do that, let's go over into our live link. And we'll turn this off. So we'll turn off the live link here will go over to I clone and we will deactivate the link. This way we're not using up computer resources. When we go over here back to our recorded sequence here of our animation. Now save your scene. Will name him, greetings. Underscore. Whoops. I am cork. And we'll just say that. Let's pull this back here. So now it's greetings, I am cork and showing up down here in our animations folder. So make sure to save, save all. Because Unreal Engine has a tendency to crash from time to time when we're editing these animations. That's why it's a good idea to turn off the live link. So what we wanna do is we want to go to the beginning of this animation. Scroll forward until we find the movement. Starts right about here. And then right click with your mouse and go remove frame 0 to 204. That's the part in the beginning. And now Unreal Engine has removed the beginning frames that had no motion at all. If you have anything in the end that you need to cut off, you would just place your playhead there right-click and you would go from frame 598 to 661 or whatever it shows up here from where you're at to the end of the frame. So this right here is a really powerful tool to really help you clean up the animation that you made with the live link. So don't worry about having to be super fast on the fly with your mouse, you know, and record and over here start to play and all that stuff, because you can clean it up very easily, very nicely right here in Unreal engine. In the next video, we're going to assemble a sequence where we have our alien animation and we bring in the audio from that we had recorded over and I clone. And we sync up the audio to our character's animation.
39. Create Sequence & Sync Up Dialogue Track: Now we're going to create a sequence, and we're gonna put our character in the sequence, sir and add the animation that we just added it. Then we're going to bring in the dialogue track and sink everything up. So we were using the alien hybrid or the CC lively blueprint this character here, go ahead and delete that out of the scene. And under our animations, we see greetings. I am gong to go ahead and drag that into the level, into our scene. And we want to create a sequence, a level sequence. So we're gonna go up here to cinematics, and we're going to add a level sequence. Let's go up here to the top and the contents so we can find it really easy. And we're going to call this alien underscore, hybrid underscore, sequence. And click Save. And this will open up for us down here. If it opened up here, just grab the tab and drag it down here next to the Content Browser. If you're not showing the controls for the video here, just go up to the queer says Perspective and choose cinematic viewport. And that'll get this to show up. And we need to add our character into our sequencer. So we select the character, go to the green track, had to sequencer and say add greetings, I am Gorky. So that adds him into the scene, but we still don't have the animation. So remember what we have to do is go down to the animation track, click the animation and go up here and add greetings. I am go work. And there we have our animation working. We don't have enough frames here. So let's go ahead and add, because the length of the animation was around 1400 frames. So let's add that down here. You can see that we've greatly increased it. It looks like our animation ends right about here. Okay, so far, so good. Over here is where we save our sequence. So click on this little Save icon here. Now the next thing we need to do because he doesn't have his dialogue track is we need to bring that into Unreal Engine and into our sequencer. So go to the track button again, and we want to add an audio track. So we've created an audio track here. So go back to the content tab, right-click. And then import asset. And then we need to find our audio files. And I'm looking for greetings. My name is dork. And there it is right there. Now that it's in Unreal engine, we can go back to the sequencer, go to where audio click on the button and there it is, right there. Greetings. My name is gone and we have a nice waveform to look at as well. C, we should be hearing our audio as we scrub through it. Okay, let's give us some room. So let's click here and let's bring our timeline up, make it a little bit bigger. Bringing our character says we're doing lip-sync. Let's bring our character really close to us, so we have a good close up. Greetings. My name is God, and I hail from the radiance dies down. Well, it looks like I got lucky and just brought it in at the right position, pretty close anyway. But if not, what we would do is just click and drag. It's better if you take off the snapping so you can get a real fine tune. And then by grabbing the timeline down at the bottom here, the timeline bar, we can zoom in so we can really get an accurate placement. So we have our animation down here, we have our character here, we have our audio here. And then it's just a matter of sliding the audio clip back and forth to get the right lip-sync. And you can scrub through the dialogue and find out where the mouth opens and where the beginning of the word is. And just slide your track back and forth until you get the lip-sync dead on. Greetings. My name is God, and I hail from the Palladium styles has down. Okay, So now we have our dialogue tracks linked up to our animation, just like we had in, in I clone. And we will be able to take our character or characters and set it up in our scene with the environment, setup our lighting or camera moves and everything like that. And then be ready to export our animation as a video. And just to remember how to do that, we need to create a new camera first of all. And then we have our camera here. And this will be just like a little review because for this course we're not going into all the camera's settings or anything like that. We covered those in the other courses. But we'll just set up our camera and move it in a little bit closer, frame up our subject matter. And go into the details tab and go down to focus settings. We have manual right now. We'll just go ahead and disabled. So everything is in focus just for simplicity right now. Now we're ready to render out our videos. So with our cameras selected here, want to go up to our camera cuts and had our camera there. Start from the beginning. And with it selected, just grew up through and make sure everything looks right. Okay, that's ready to go. So we hit the render button here. Choose a VI for a video file, or you can choose image sequence if you're gonna be doing compositing later on, we're not going to be exporting audio at this time because we import the audio in our editing program and sync it up there as well. This is just for us to have everything in here in Unreal Engine to set it up for the, the animation and rendering. So choose the size of our video down here. I usually will set this up to about 90 or 95 on the compression quality. Down here, cinematic engine scalability, those settings that we had before, cinematic mode and then capture movie. It's gonna ask us to save our project.
40. Smoothing iClone Character In Unreal Engine: In this video, we're going to cover how to get a smooth mesh inside of Unreal Engine after transferring, we're going from I clone seven over to unreal. Because as you can see here and I clone, we had this very nicely smooth, round head. Everything looks great. And then when we go over to Unreal Engine, either using live link connection or the FBX export and import. Either way, we get this faceted head. See here where it's very frustrating. Why is his head so fascinated and bumpy? So if we look here, we can turn it into a wireframe and zoom in. We can see just how this looks, doesn't look very good at all. So you get the point there of what we're trying to do. So how did we get this to smooth the mesh should be just a, an easy setting. And really there, there is, except it's hidden really well. So there's a couple things we need to do. First thing we need to do after transferring our character over from I clone into Unreal Engine is we need to find the master skin material, which is called RL HQ skin. That's what everything is based on and all the all the instances that we get for the head material, body material, material and so forth, is based on this very, very detailed, complex skin material, which is what gives us the realism of the skin. So unfortunately, what happens when we transfer the character over from I clone is it doesn't have the tessellation on by default. So what we need to do first of all, define that. Let's pull this up a little bit here. Need to go into CC shaders, character creators shaders, and then we need to go into skin shader. And here's where we'll see the RL HQ skin, the high-quality skin. So you want to double-click on that, and it will open this up. Now here's where the important thing that you must do in order for this to work. You've got a scroll down. Make sure you're clicked on the result node here. And then over here on the left, you want to scroll down all the way to where you see tessellation and see how this is turned on. No tessellation by default. Well, this needs to be turned on to Pn triangles. Once you do that, it's going to compile the shaders. But here's the most important step, and I forgot this at first, so it didn't work. You've got to click Apply. And then save. If you don't save the material, you're not going to be able to get the result. You're looking for it. It will not smooth the mesh out. So this takes a little bit of time to save this out. Ok, now the shaders have compiled, and as we see here, the head still looks bumpy, still looks faceted because we haven't completed the rest of the steps. Now what we need to do is we need to find the head material instance. So let's go over here into our digital details panel over here. Click on the hourglass, and it'll bring us up to the selection here. Double-click on that, and it will open up our instance for the skin head. Okay, and what we need to do is this is going to show up like this. We need to scroll down here. And under displacement, we need to find our tessellation level now, normally that's unchecked. So what we need to do is check this off and then go over here and put 1 in there. And I can go up to 2 or 3, but it's going to make your, your master very dense. I suggested as 1 to get it looking like it does over and High Club. So once you put in 1, you have to make sure to save the material. And now let's go back over to our head and check this out. Look at that beautiful curve with no fascinating. You see if I can zoom way in there. Oops. Check that out. Nice, beautiful round head with no faceting. Now you can also do this for the body, the arms, if you find out the fingers aren't as smooth as you'd like them to be. You can go to each body part and do the same thing with the instances. Once you've changed the master material. Over here. Everything else is based off of this, so you're good to go. That's how you go from a faceted, bumpy head into a nice smooth mesh inside of Unreal engine using the the real illusion character creator.
Michael Ricks, Animator, VFX Artist
