Iclone's Face Puppet In Blender! - Best Facial Animation Tool

by Alex Quill in Addons


Q: Don't you find "Best Facial Animation Tool" clickbaity?

I genuinely stand by this statement. I've been an animator for years; I've tried different methods, software, messed with mocap, etc. So far, iClone's Face Puppet is the most intuitive and efficient tool I've tried. Sadly, iClone can't compete with Blender as an animation software. I've made this addon to combiner the best of both worlds. If you need a fast, reliable and replicable method that produces great-looking results, this is THE addon for you. I initially created it for myself and now you have the chance to share the joy of using this awesome tool in Blender ^^

LIMITATIONS (please read thoroughly)

1. As for today, this addon supports most of iClone8's face puppet expressions. Here are the exceptions:

  • Any expressions that rotate the entire head (For instance the entirety of the '03 Face Head Turn' category). Reason being, those expressions look bad when transferred into Blender's shape keys and can look even worse when combined with armature poses. Expressions with slight head rotation are supported.
  • The entire '10 Mouth Mumble' category simply because the addon already includes the viseme shapes that can be controlled from the 'Lip Sync' panel.
  • CC4 Kevin and Camila expressions - so far the addon only supports the base set of CC4 extended expressions. You can however modify them the way you'd like.
  • Any redundant expressions (such as 'Eye Look', 'Brows Up').
  • Rarely used expression shapes such as nose tip movements - I can include those in the future if you guys will request them.

2. The addon only works with CC3/CC3+ characters with the CC4 extended facial profile. Custom facial profiles might or might not work properly with the addon. Potential issues might arise with the custom facial profiles not interacting with the iTalk file properly and/or lacking the required shape keys to be compatible with the wrinkles in Blender. The former issue might be fixed by manually tweaking the iTalk expressions, if needed.

Can I still use the addon if I only have Character Creator 4? (no iClone 8)

You indeed can! The only limitation you'll experience is that you won't be able to create custom facial expressions using iClone; Luckily though, you'll still be able to do it through Blender, as detailed in the addon documentation.

Sales 80+
Customer Ratings 4
Average Rating
Dev Fund Contributor
Published 10 months ago
Blender Version 4.2, 4.1, 4.0, 3.6
Extension Type Add-on
License GPL
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