Update (Patreon)

     I decided to take advantage of the tail end of a Black Friday sale and dive head first into the Realusion pipeline. They had me at 50% off. With these new tools I will be able to easily edit animate and, most importantly, sync lips and facial expressions from live action video and audio into the 3D space. I will also be able to easily edit and sculpt my characters. I will also have an open pipeline from DAZ into this workspace and a fluid 2 way pipeline between this workspace and Blender. Hair and skin textures as well as all of my existing character meshes can port into CC4 and iClone easily. I will also be able to create 3D faces from 2D Stable diffusion generated images where they can be further customized. I had a lot of variety and customization in DAZ but this will 10x my options and give me the groundwork to create a potentially infinite assortment new characters easily. 

      It may be a while before I master these new tools or even use them in current projects, but the sale was too good to pass up. It will definitely happen in the next year. What I absolutely needed was the ability to accurately lip and face sync my characters. This can be done in Blender but at the moment, getting even close to similar results would take time and effort far beyond what I'll be able to accomplish in a few minutes in this platform. 

     Animating in iClone is supposedly a relative cinch for most tasks. It can even host full MOCAP capture when the time comes. A couple concerns I have are these. Will I be able to import the full DAZ rigs of my DAZ ladies? I'm not satisfied with 2 bones per foot. I have to imagine the answer is yes, even if those bones are hidden at first be default in iClone in favor of simpler rigging. 

       The other concern is that I know almost for certain that the genitalia models I've grafted onto my DAZ characters will likely not port well into Character Creator as they did for Blender. However, finding a workaround for this will likely be much easier than getting my characters to talk properly in Blender.