Family & Animation

Libertas Review : Digital Soul Makes Your Characters More Human

03 October, 2022

Erik Larson (Libertas)

Born in Chicago, Libertas started out with a passion for filmmaking at an early age, and since he’s had a desire to tell grand and fantastical stories featuring unflinching heroes on epic quests in lush and vibrant worlds, much like his Assassin’s Creed-inspired micro-short mucosa “Modern Assassin Training Session”.

Libertas admits to unchangingly dreaming worthier than his shoestring upkeep could afford. Even still, he loves creating notation and their costumes to see them come alive, expressly in his Youtube short films. Outside of his day job as the Manager of Videography and sole 3D generalist at his company, he spends his self-ruling time, once again, dreaming big and crafting new characters, costumes, and props for his digital actors who are instrumental in bringing his epic stories to life for the regulars polity and not just himself.

When I saw the trailer for Character Creator 4 (CC4), I immediately wanted to see just how good the new extended facial profile was going to be. Having worked as a videographer in a marketing department for over a decade, I have to say, I am suspicious whenever I see such impressive new features promoted in new products. I knew Reallusion was going to showcase this new extended facial profile on their weightier models, but I wanted to see how good it would work on a weft I had once made in CC3. So I chose Ashley, one of my digital actors that has been featured in several of my previous videos.

To start, I wanted to set a baseline. I used the squatter scale animation in CC4 on Reallusion’s weft avatar Camila—who you have probably seen in the trailers. I was immediately squandered yonder by the details in the vision and slight variations in the face. To me, these subtleties brought the weft to life. This showed me what was possible. But, could I get as good of results with my character?

I then created a new scene and imported Ashely. And as an spare baseline, I wanted to use her original facial profile, which is now tabbed “Traditional”. This would indulge me to see how much the “traditional” profile varies from the “extended facial profile.”

One of the wondrous things well-nigh using this facial scale animation is it allows you to see where your weft may need to retread their profile to worth for what I undeniability “facial anomalies.” For instance, Ashley’s vision never sealed all the way. I just worked virtually this in the past, but with CC4 I can update the facial profile using the Facial Profile Editor.

After converting Ashely to utilize the CC4 Extended Facial Profile, I opened up the editor and looked for the eye twinkle sliders. Using the misogynist expression tools, I was worldly-wise to modify this morph to retread for the anomaly. I then saved these changes and my weft no longer had issues shimmer her eyes.

With the changes made to the profile, I then ran the calibration test and reviewed the results.

I finger that while the differences can be subtle, they provide a big overall improvement.

The human squatter is so difficult to animate, considering of the small subtleties that we see daily and take for granted. And when they aren’t in the animations, we instinctively know something looks wrong. And that is why I like this new extended profile, considering these improved and expanded morphs aim to capture those subtleties, therefore, they add spare realism to the character.

My only circumspection would be that the neck now has morph shapes, so you will need to be cautious well-nigh how the neck interacts with suit items such as turtlenecks, as those are rigged to the armature and not the morph shapes.

Since my test showed such unconfined improvements, I wanted to take it to the next level and test out the Digital Souls Pack which has been ripened by Reallusion to fully utilize this new extended profile.

If you haven’t heard of this pack, Digital Soul is a set of facial animations focusing on weft expressions. Usable in both iClone 8 and Weft Creator 4, it comes with over 140 subtle animations wideness 9 variegated categories.

What I love well-nigh all of these are the subtle eye movements and expressions that bring your notation to life. I fully believe it is one of those “must have” packs because it has so many applications.

For me, I use volatility to tell visual stories. My notation are my digital actors. Therefore, I can see these expressions stuff perfect for reaction shots in my videos. Or, with the nice eye movements, they can hands be used as a wiring for a lip sync animation. Then you can remoter build upon them with the Squatter Key or Squatter Puppet tools, and in the end make a truly unique performance.

This can moreover save you a lot of time with preliminaries characters. Instead of manually stimulative every preliminaries weft (which let’s be honest, isn’t really your top priority), just add a few of these animations on the timeline and your preliminaries notation are now telling a little story of their own.

In the end, this pack does take wholesomeness of the new extended facial profile and I see it stuff such a useful and versatile tool to have in your volatility pipeline. If you would like to learn increasingly well-nigh it, trammels out this link to get a deeper insight into the animations it provides.