MakeHuman -> Blender -> Cinema 4D Workflow

Hi all,

While I'm good at the programming side of things in Unity, the art side is new to me so feel free to toss in any tips or suggestions that might occur to you reading this!

I've been experimenting with MakeHuman as a way to get good looking humanoid character models without having a budget This weekend I finally got a nightly build of MakeHuman to export an .mhx file, and I got Blender 2.53 beta to import said model successfully. This is progress!

However, I don't really want to work in Blender. I own a copy of Cinema 4D 10.5 and I have a lot of training books and manuals for it, and a little bit of experience (enough to not be completely lost in it most of the time).

Now, I don't have much choice about going from MakeHuman->Blender, because there's a *LOT* of advantages to doing that instead of having MakeHuman export a mesh directly. The big one? It rigs the model for you and supplies IK data.

So, I would LIKE to take this rigged model out of Blender and get it into Cinema, but this has proven to be a big problem. Here's my results with various formats:

Collada: Cinema 4D doesn't support this, or at least, my 10.5 version doesn't. I was able to download a converter from Autodesk that turned the Collada file into an FBX, and I brought THAT into Cinema - with the best results of anything I tried. But I think I lost the rigging, and the scale was weird.

FBX: Blender's FBX export function appears to be broken, producing 64K FBX files consistently, no matter the options chosen, that imported to Cinema as empty (Only one object called "blender_root"). This is either because I'm doing something wrong, or because it's a beta release, and I don't know enough to be sure of either.

OBJ: This worked, but only for the mesh data, which is what I expected.

All formats: The scale was WAY off, every mesh I brought into Cinema was SO microscopic that I had a hard time even zooming in on it with the granularity on my mouse wheel. How would I address that?

So... long story short, I guess I'm looking for either someone who's worked with this, or general suggestions. Would Collada be my best bet (requiring a Cinema 4D upgrade), should I be able to get away with FBX? (perhaps needing a future Blender fix?) Something else?

Thanks for any inputs or insights!

 

Hey Wyldfire

Did you figure out how it works yet? Cause I have the same problem.
Gotta create an animation in 4d cinema, but do not have much experience with it. So I decided to use MakeHuman for to create a character quickly, but now I do not know how to get it working with skeleton in 4d Cinema.

So if you do know, I would be grateful if you could help me out here.