Blender/Cinema4D Worlflow

I'm looking to model in Cinema4D, but the rigging and animation in Blender are amazing for bipedal movement (with the automatic weighting and whatnot). I also like the clothing in C4D, but I don't know a good workflow between the two, if any exist. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

 

You can probably format shift between the two via Collada or FBX (Blender 2.69 has a limited built-in FBX importer and there's the BOS FBX importer you can download separately). Trouble will probably come in the form of unwillingly turning quads to tris and the fact that animations usually don't import right, if at all.

If you can manage to format shift the model with vertex weights, Blender allows .blend files to "link" other .blend files. So you could have a MyCharacter.blend containing the Armature (bones) and mesh which you import/export to Cinema4D and MyCharacter_Locomotion.blend containing only the animations created in Blender. This way, so long as your Armature stays the same, there's no risk of losing the animations.

By the way, Blender is pretty good at clothing and physics, too. It has the "ShrinkWrap" modifier to fit one mesh around another (it moves all vertices of the shrink-wrapped mesh towards the closest surface of the reference mesh), you can scale meshes along normals (to makes clothes thinner or thicker) and the "WeightTransfer" modifier can apply the character's vertex weights to the clothes, even if the clothes have an entirely different topology. And of course if can do cloth simulation in case you want to use baked animations for the clothes.

 

Oh, I didn't know there was good clothing support in Blender! Everything I ever read about making clothes involved copying the mesh to be clothed, deleting faces, scaling it up, and using the subdivide surface modifier and sculpting to make it look more like clothing. This may actually help my workflow tremendously because I could create characters in C4D and export to FBX to bring it into Blender, then clothe, rig, animate, and bake it all in Blender before exporting it for Unity. I'll have to Google the "ShrinkWrap" modifier, I imagine it works similarly to the C4D "Cloth" tag's "Dress-O-Matic"? Speaking of cloth, would the cloth renderer work well in Unity to simulate clothes? Or is there a way to fake clothing physics well enough in baked cloth? Thank you for your help!