This new release gives animators the ability to create quick, high-quality PBR characters.
Company: Reallusion
Product: Character Creator 3
Price: Starting at $199
Website: reallusion.com
- Includes 500+ Content Assets
- GoZ, Polygon Reduction & OBJ/FBX export capability
- Perpetual License
- 14-Days Money Back Guarantee
Characters are often the hardest thing to get right on a project. Whether you’re working on a film, a videogame or a commercial piece, creating and editing believable characters can be time-intensive and costly, as well as a major challenge for your design team. Thankfully, the last several years has seen the arrival of professional-level applications that have promised to simplify the process. Reallusion’s Character Creator is among those tools and certainly one of the stronger entries.
Character Creator 3, which launched a few months ago, raises the stakes from previous iterations. Chief among its improvements is the ability to create quick, high-quality PBR characters.
Getting Started
Following the lead of other commercial tools, you can drag and drop clothing and accessories onto the characters and adjust sliders to alter characters shapes and forms to your liking. You can also create savable, customized sliders, which you can use on any other characters you later create.
Character Creator 3 might take some getting used to for first-time users. But after a not-too-steep learning curve, you will find yourself creating highly-believable, professional-grade characters from scratch in a reasonable amount of time, compared to the studio hours you were burning on lesser solutions or applications that aren’t a right fit for your project needs.
Of course, if you are like me and you prefer to author your characters in industry-recognized authorship software and use a separate tool for animation, you will find that this is where Character Creator excels. Reallusion has done a solid job of positioning itself as a solution that plays well with others.
Unity, Unreal & One-Click Export
In my testing of Character Creator 3, I found that the product handles import very well and with the Daz 3D transformer feature. It enables you to import Daz characters and content into Character Creator 3 with just one click.
The most critical benchmark in evaluating this new generation of character creation tools is what they let you do once you have your character ready to go. Again, as with import, Character Creator makes export to Unreal, Unity or whatever custom environment you’re working with, a lot easier than I have experienced in comparable tools.
Among the latest enhancements of Character Creator 3 that bears mentioning is the InstaLOD feature, which reduces the polygon count of the character you’re exporting, which is a neat, new time-saving feature.
Also, following the industry trend toward hyper-lifelike virtual humans, Character Creator 3 includes the Iray rendering plug-in, which is a photorealistic render engine created by Nvidia. Iray comes as an optional plug-in for Character Creator 3, depending on which bundle you buy. For anyone wanting to create amazing photorealistic stills of characters, this is a great new option.
Final Thoughts
Character Creator has come a long way in a short time. With the latest version, Reallusion has clearly been responding to the feedback of its community, as well as responding to broader industry trends.
For animators and filmmakers just entering the industry, Character Creator is an excellent way to produce quick, saleable work and Reallusion has a library of helpful tutorials. For game developers and more seasoned pros, it can be an excellent solution for gaining back time on a project that is in danger of running late or going overbudget.
Kevin Seid is a 3D artist and animator who has worked at both AAA and small studios, on projects for EA Games and NASA. For current projects and samples of his work, visit: www.animatemyart.com.