CC/iC Blender Tools: auto setup for Character Creator and iClone exports

The hours spent on import settings are the target

The readme states the problem plainly. Using Blender in the Character Creator pipeline can often feel like hitting a brick wall. Spending potentially hours having to get the import settings correct and setting up the shaders, often with hundreds of textures.

That is a specific and recognisable pain. A Character Creator or iClone character arrives as an FBX plus a directory of textures, and the mapping between what the exporter wrote and what Blender's Principled BSDF expects is not obvious. The skin, hair, eye and clothing materials each need their own shader graph, the normal map conventions differ between applications, and the base colour and opacity maps are frequently packed together.

The add-on's stated goal is to reduce that setup to a few seconds and to make use of as many of the exported textures as possible, so character artists can work at the highest quality possible in Blender. The emphasis on using as many of the textures as possible is the interesting part. Most import helpers take the easy path and drop maps the pipeline does not handle. This one is trying to reconstruct the full shader setup.

The audience is therefore narrow but well defined: character artists who move assets between Reallusion applications and Blender, and who do it often enough that a manual setup is not viable.

The project is a Blender add-on written in Python, licensed GPL-3.0, and the repository is structured as a Blender add-on rather than a general Python package. The top level listing shows the scale of it: files like importer.py, exporter.py, materials.py, shaders.py, hair.py, facerig.py, rigging.py, rigify_mapping_data.py, springbones.py, bakes, drivers, physics and rigid body modules, plus an hik/ subdirectory, textures/, presets/ and icons/. There is also a Blend Presets/ directory at the top level and a set of _LIB prefixed .blend files, which are library blend files holding the node group assets the add-on links into scenes.

Installing it as a zip through the add-on preferences

There is no pip install and no build step, because the delivery mechanism is a Blender add-on zip.

The procedure is: download the latest release, then in Blender go to the Edit menu and select Preferences, then the Add-ons section, click the Install button at the top of the preferences window, navigate to where you downloaded the zip, select the file and click Install Add-on. The add-on is then activated by ticking the checkbox next to it in that same Add-ons preferences panel.

Once activated, the functionality lives in a CC/iC Blender Tools tab in the tool menu to the right of the main viewport, and the readme notes that pressing N shows the tools if they are hidden. That detail matters, because an add-on that installs cleanly and then appears to be missing is a common first-run experience in Blender.

Updating is not an in-place operation. The readme tells you to remove the current version by following the remove instructions, and then to follow the installation instructions again for the new version. The remove procedure is the reverse of the install: go to Edit, then Preferences, then Add-ons, search all add-ons for the name, untick the checkbox to deactivate, and then click Remove.

That remove and reinstall cycle is worth understanding as a design consequence rather than an oversight. Blender add-ons are versioned against the Blender release they were built for, and this project tracks that closely. The changelog records the minimum Blender version moving with the add-on: version 2.4.3 states a minimum Blender version of 4.5, and the 2.4.5 preview entry is a fix for Blender 4.5 to 5.1 normal map nodes.

So the version of the add-on you install is effectively tied to the Blender version you run, and the correct upgrade path is a fresh install of the matching release rather than a patch over an older one.

The changelog reads like a compatibility ledger

The most informative part of the readme is the changelog, and reading it tells you what the add-on actually does.

The recurring themes are materials, rig conversion, motion and Blender version compatibility. In 2.4.4 the add-on detects a newly introduced object name duplication suffix on accessories, adds support for Vector Displacement maps, adds an option to preserve the rig name in Rigify exports for Unity generic rig matching, and fixes the Rigify export t-pose and shape key bake. The Unity remark is a tell: the add-on knows its users are heading into a game engine pipeline.

In 2.4.3 the minimum Blender version becomes 4.5, and the fixes are substantial: rigid body collider scale, a possible crash on import resetting shape key ranges, Rigify reparenting, conversion of the generic character, and export of the converted humanoid character with a null link id. The same release adds extra checks for mesh objects with shape keys, updates the mesh modify operation to retain mesh display settings, updates for iClone 8.74 Prop exports, and fixes to the RTX custom PBR shader type and the specular value on Traditional materials. It also adds a gamma correction parameter to the skin and hair shaders, updates the hair shader and the compositor.

That list is the clearest available description of what the add-on manages: PBR and traditional materials, skin and hair shaders, the compositor, rigid body colliders, shape keys, Rigify, face rig, motion sets and props.

The 2.4.2 entry is the one to read for motion, and it is dense. Morph export is updated for Blender 5.1, there are fixes to constraint driver setup with missing shape keys, to Blender 5.1 import operator changes, to the Blender 4.5 import fbx, to Blender 5 and later grease pencil layers, to Linux remote datalink compatibility and to axis angle bone rotation calculations. Then the motion sets and blending work: motion sets updated for lights and cameras, motion blending for light and camera motion sets, motion blending always generating a new motion so it is non destructive, and motion loading and blending refactoring the action's bone rotation mode if it differs from the rig bone and is not already keyframed for that rotation type. Motion blending now also blends scale, and the datalink pose and sequence write onto the current motion.

The 2.4.1 entry adds the mesh modify pipeline, which sends mesh only with no armature for exact replace mesh updates, used mainly for direct facial expression editing with the facial profile editor. It also adds animation import options and blending, with three named options for motion, pose and sequence imports: New to add a new motion, Replace to replace an existing one, and Overwrite to overwrite the keyframes of the existing animation. The frame import options are Start for frame 1, Current for the current frame in the scene, and Match for the same frames as in CC or iClone, with an offset of one for Blender.

The blending controls are per bone and per shape key, with bone masking and shape key masking, individually weighted, and blend mask presets that can be applied, removed and saved.

What the module list reveals about scope

The repository file names are a decent map of the feature surface, and a few of them point at capabilities the changelog only hints at.

springbones.py and the springbones-related changelog entries refer to Spring Rig Generation, with a fix to Blender 5 and later grease pencil layers in that area. Spring bones are the secondary motion system in Character Creator and iClone, and generating them in Blender is one of the harder parts of the pipeline.

hik/ is a subdirectory, and HIK in Reallusion terms is the HumanIK IK skeleton setup, so the add-on carries a mapping between the source rig and Blender's own rig.

rigify_mapping_data.py and rigging.py are about the Rigify conversion, and the changelog mentions fixing to bad vertex weights when skinning the Rigify face rig on subdivision surfaces, and rigify_mapping_data being a data file rather than code, which tells you the mapping is configuration you could inspect and adjust.

facerig.py and facerig_data.py are the face rig system, with a FaceRig collection that uses the Rigify Face collection and can be enabled or disabled with the Rigify UI controls, and rig drivers that add missing expression blendshapes.

proportion.py is worth a separate mention because it suggests the add-on is not only importing but also adjusting the character's proportions, which is a Blender specific operation that has no equivalent in the source application.

Then there is the export side. exporter.py exists, and the changelog talks about baking shape keys on export, exporting the converted character as a humanoid with a null link id, and the 2.4.4 option to preserve the rig name in Rigify exports for Unity generic rig matching. So the pipeline is round trip: import from CC or iClone, work in Blender, export back out to a game engine.

The colour space and image handling modules, colorspace.py, imageutils.py, normal.py and textures/ together with bake.py, are the reason the shader setup can be as close to automatic as the readme claims. Normal map conventions, colour space and texture baking are the parts that are tedious to get right by hand and easy to get wrong.

Where CC/iC Blender Tools is the wrong tool

There are three clear reasons to look elsewhere, and one where it is the only sensible option.

The first is a project that only needs to bring an FBX into Blender. Blender's own FBX importer handles geometry, and an add-on built around a specific export pipeline with its own shader conventions and rig mapping is not what you want for a one-off asset. The add-on's value comes from knowing exactly how Character Creator and iClone write their exports, and that knowledge is worthless for anything else.

The second is a team that cannot wait for the next release. The add-on tracks Blender releases closely. The changelog shows the minimum Blender version moving with the add-on, fixes for Blender 5.1 import operator changes, fixes for Blender 5 and later grease pencil layers, and a 2.4.5 preview whose only content is a fix for Blender 4.5 to 5.1 normal map nodes. A preview release as the newest tag, with a stable 2.4.4 behind it, is a reasonable thing to track but not a comfortable thing to depend on for a production deadline.

The third is a user who wants to change the pipeline. The add-on is opinionated about rig conventions, since it maps to Rigify and generates a face rig and spring rigs. Adjusting that means editing the add-on's Python in place, because the mapping data and the rig setup are the add-on's own rather than a configuration surface. That is normal for a pipeline tool of this kind and worth knowing before you start.

The case where it is right is a studio with an established Character Creator or iClone to Blender to game engine pipeline and a large library of characters already exported. Rebuilding the shader graph, the face rig and the spring bones by hand for every character is what the add-on removes, and at that volume nothing else does the same job in the same pipeline.

On the alternative, the difference in approach against a hand rolled import script is the domain knowledge rather than the code. A script you write yourself can call the FBX importer and set a few node values, and it will be exactly as good as the assumptions you encode. This add-on encodes several thousand lines of assumptions, drawn from shipping with the applications it bridges, about how Character Creator writes its textures, how iClone names its objects and props, and how its materials are constructed. That knowledge is the asset, and it is the thing you cannot easily rebuild.

The other alternative is the reverse pipeline, and it exists. The readme links the CC4 and CC5 Blender Pipeline Tool installed in CC4 and CC5, and the CC3 Blender Pipeline Tool installed in CC3. Those push the work back the other way, running Blender from inside Character Creator, and for a team that wants a single application rather than a bridge between two, that is the direction to look.

On the licence, the add-on is GPL-3.0, and the readme points to the LICENSE file. For a studio using it internally that is not a practical constraint, but if you intend to redistribute a character pipeline built on top of it, that is a question for someone qualified to read the terms, not for a review.

Editorial conclusion

CC/iC Blender Tools suits a character artist already working between Character Creator or iClone and Blender who wants the material and rig setup done for them rather than by hand, and it does not suit a Blender user who only needs an FBX import, since the add-on is built around a specific export pipeline and its own rig conventions. Before you adopt it, check that the add-on version you install matches the Blender version you run, since the changelog shows version requirements moving with each Blender release, and read the current changelog entry before updating, because the update procedure is remove then reinstall rather than an in place upgrade.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Issues
2. License: GPL-3.0
3. README
4. Releases
5. soupday/cc_blender_tools on GitHub