WEEK 8/9 - Adobe Fuse

Adobe Fuse

Getting back to where I left off I have decided to look into Adobe’s answer to the ‘build your own digital human’ Fuse. (Although it is important to note the programme is no longer being developed so is in a sort of limbo in its current state.)

Like with Headshot and Character Creator 3 Fuse allows you to choose from some pre-build models for different areas of the body. These can have some interesting results as not all the models were clearly designed to work with each other.

Fuse being used with similar body parts

Fuse being used with some interesting results.

It is also important to note that Fuse is still in Beta so can be a little unstable. After using the programme for an hour or so I have had to restart the programme multiple times after crashing. If this continues I may have to abort this endeavor.

Once you have a base model created you can then customise your character using sliders or by pulling at the mesh itself. There are a lot less option sliders compared to Reallusions Headshot plugin in Character Creator, which is a shame, but the programme still serves well to create quick characters.

Here you can see the programme in action:

Unfortunately due to the stability of the programme and the PC I am currently working from I was unable to video the texturing process. Again like with Character creator textures for clothes and body could be edited easily using sliders and colour palet pickers, there was also a decent range of pre-made clothing and hair to select from. After texturing my final model looked like this:

Once you have completed your character in Fuse, you can then import it straight into Mixamo. For the moment however, I will have to import an exported OBJ of my character into the browser as Fuse is not connecting to the programme automatically. I believe this is due to our University license not covering the use of Mixamo, so will look again at this once I am able to use my own License.

When entering your OBJ into Mixamo you are met with this screen:

Once you manually drag and drop the circles onto your rig, to show the programme where key joints should be located, the auto-rigger goes to work. The resulting rig is able to play any of the animations in the huge library of motion capture data found on the Mixamo website.

Here you can see that the quality of the rig is pretty impressive though of course there is room for improvement in the neck and clothing.

INSERT Mixamo_AUTORIG_ANIMATIONS (EXPORT FAILED)

Part 2:

By reinstalling Fuse with my own account I am now able to link my rig and Mixamo. By linking the two auto-rigger now works much better as the programme is designed just for this. I am also now able to generate facial blendshapes based on the ones found in fuse. (I am going to look again at this tomorrow to test if I can edit the blendshapes with the sliders)

Finally I can download my model into an FBX which I can then import into almost any programme. This could be my answer to creating a super quick custom rig.

Although definitely not as powerful a tool as Reallusions Headshot and Character creator, this is definitely a quick and easy alternative route I can take. My next step is to take this custom rig into iclone and set him up to be used with motion capture and facial capture data.