PART 6 Making Materials in CLIP STUDIO COORDINATE

Ok, I haven't played around with this very much, but I may be able to point you in the right direction regarding how you create 3D characters with facial expressions you can change.

First of all, in order to select the different expressions you have to create a 3D "character file" with Clip Studio Coordinate (CSC). The different facial expressions are created with a multi-layered PSD file. CSC is actually free, but has only been officially released in Japanese. See my info on how to apply the unofficial English translation to it and get the (Google auto-translated) version of the User Guide.







At a bare minimum you need to have layers for the expressions for Normal, Smile, Angry, and Sad. Each of these needs to have the following structure:

Expression (name of expression, Normal, Angry, etc.)
- eyes
-- eye_open
-- eye_close
-- eye_up
-- eye_down
-- eye_left
-- eye_right
- mouths
-- mouth_close
-- mouth_a
-- mouth_i
-- mouth_u
-- mouth_e
-- mouth_o
- base
base should be a layer with the same as JPG texture mapped to head model

Then turn set the default eye/mouth combo for each expression. You can create additional expression presets either by adding a new layer for each of them into the PSD file OR you can duplicate one of the base expressions in CSC and then customize the name and default eye/mouth settings.

When you import a face/head in Clip Studio Coordinate it will automatically create placeholders for each of these basic expressions (these placeholders cannot be deleted).

Then you need to IMPORT your face texture/expression PSD file with the button in Face->Expressions panel.




In CLIP Studio Paint each of the expression presets appears in the selection box when you click on the little "face" icon below a model on your canvas:




Note that if you import a face/head model that doesn’t have any textures mapped on it you won’t be able to import an expressions PSD file until you map something to the head model!

You can do this in CSC by clicking on the model in the “Face” panel, which “un-grays” the empty “m_face_uv” texture in the “Textures” panel. Click on it and it opens a file dialog asking where the JPG texture is to map to the head model. Once you do that, THEN you’ll be able to click the “Import” button for the expressions PSD file. The easier solution, though, is to just map an image to head model when you create it in your 3D modeling program. Head models can only have ONE texture file assigned to them in your modeling program. CSC will import models with multiple textures, and show them in the Textures panel, but will inform you it can only use ONE of them.  So best practice is to make sure your head model base texture is one image file.


If you want the nice little thumbnail images of each expression you have to (tediously) set each one in turn and use the little “Camera” button to take the thumbnail image. This makes it a lot easier to see what you're selecting if you want to customize the eye/mouth setting in the Tools palette once you're working in CLIP Studio Paint:




Once you’ve set up your character in CSC you save it in the Celsys proprietary “.c2fc” format. You can drag-and-drop this file into your canvas just like any other 3D model. If you want the model persistently available in your Materials palette, just go to “Register Image as Material” and assign it to the 3D->Character section.

Note: If you're on a Mac, dragging and dropping the model onto the canvas can be confusing because every time you click on the Finder window it will automatically hide Clip Studio Paint/Manga Studio. What you have to do is select it in the Finder, switch to CSP/MS and move the Canvas window so you can see the Finder window underneath, then drag and drop the already selected model file onto the canvas without actually switching focus to the Finder window.

PART 5

2 comments:

Nick Chrissis said...

Hiya! I've been experimenting with this stuff but for getting vehicles with moving parts in my library. I'm using the free functions in Modeler and i nearly got everything to work except one thing: my vehicles refuse to drop in another object's 3d space. The clip materials do this very nicely: you can drag a whole bunch of objects and characters onto the canvas and they will all be in the same perspective. But my stuff always creates a new 3d layer. It's super frustrating because it's like the last hurdle but i can't seem to figure out what's causing it :/

Did you encounter this with any of your character models?

OffWorld Girl said...

Yes, I've encountered this.

The default character models will occupy the same 3D space with other default models.
Models I created/modded will occupy the same 3D space with other models I created/modded.
*Some* of the third-party models from the Assets site will occupy the 3D space with the default models and/or my models.
The default models will not occupy the same 3D space as my models, they create a new layer instead.
My custom small objects will also not attach to the default models because they can't occupy the same 3D space.
Default small objects cannot be attached to my models because they can't occupy the same 3D space.

I thought it might just be incompatibility between my models in the old format and the default models in the new format. But you said you're making yours in Modeler, not Coordinate, so there must be something else going on. What that something is, however, I have no idea. :/