Ever dreamt of creating incredibly lifelike digital characters that move and express with stunning realism? Reallusion just dropped Character Creator 5, and it’s a game-changer for artists, bringing Hollywood-level fidelity to your fingertips. Imagine crafting characters with unparalleled detail, from subtle expressions to perfect anatomical forms. What will you create first?
Reallusion has officially launched Character Creator 5 (CC5), marking a significant leap forward into the HD era of digital humans creation. This major upgrade revolutionizes the character design ecosystem, bridging the gap between game-ready 3D characters and film-quality rendering through its powerful subdivision workflow. The release introduces a suite of innovative features, including all-new HD Morphs, anatomically accurate human bases, the next-gen ActorMIXER PRO plugin, and an advanced HD facial animation system, empowering artists to create expressive, lifelike, and production-ready digital avatars with unprecedented fidelity.
At the core of CC5’s advancements is a robust HD character base, supporting up to 16 times more mesh detail with a single click subdivision. This allows existing users to seamlessly upgrade legacy characters to HD quality, unlocking enhanced facial profiles and animation capabilities. Paired with superior shaders, high-resolution eyes, an entirely new eyelash system, and full displacement map support, CC5 delivers cinema-quality visuals that exhibit real geometric depth, even during real-time editing. This ensures that whether for intricate film close-ups or optimized game development, CC5 offers the flexibility and detail required for any creative pipeline.
The system also introduces sophisticated HD Morphs, meticulously adding layers of anatomical detail without altering the character’s fundamental bone structure or main proportions. This innovative revamp allows for diverse character appearances from the same base mesh – whether portraying slimmer or fuller physiques, defining feminine curves or muscular forms, or even depicting the nuanced signs of graceful aging. With these capabilities, CC5 redefines the possibilities for instantaneous 3D character design, establishing itself as an indispensable creative hub for popular solutions like Blender and Maya.
Elevating believable character performance, CC5 brings a completely overhauled HD Expression Profile to the forefront of real-time animation. Each expression now drives an expanded set of blendshapes, enabling the precise capture of subtle emotional shifts and micro-expressions, from a knowing smirk to a furrowed brow or the delicate twitch of an eyelid. The newly introduced Corrective Expression System guarantees that all blended expressions remain anatomically accurate, preventing visual distortion while maintaining facial integrity, allowing artists finer control over emotional detail to enhance storytelling across various media, including film and games.
A revolutionary addition is ActorMIXER PRO, a character blender that facilitates the non-destructive mixing and matching of entire characters, facial features, and head shapes to forge unique appearances. It allows for combining stylized elements with realistic traits or recombining parts from different characters, all while preserving full rigging and animation compatibility. For professional artists, the ActorMIXER PRO plugin unlocks advanced features and the full ActorMIXER Core Library, enabling any character to be made “mixable” and offering one-click randomization for generating diverse digital personalities. This tool accelerates rapid prototyping and creative exploration without compromising control or quality.
CC5 significantly expands its ecosystem integration, offering automatic shader assignments and facial rig compatibility for streamlined character transfer and animation editing across leading platforms. For Blender users, the latest upgrade supports both Eevee and Cycles render engines, allowing adjustable material-based displacement maps. Unreal Engine developers benefit from optimized skeletons for UE4 and UE5, including bind poses tailored for MetaHuman and UEFN formats, ensuring precise motion retargeting and real-time gameplay control. This enables Character Creator 5 characters to swap directly with MetaHuman counterparts in Unreal Sequencer, unifying animation workflows within Unreal Engine for film production and game development.
Furthermore, CC5 integrates seamlessly with ZBrush via GoZ, enabling high-resolution sculpt data to be baked directly onto subdivided characters, converting sculpted detail into morphs while maintaining fidelity throughout the sculpt-to-animation process. The upgraded Face Tools now support wrinkle-to-displacement baking and textures, providing ZBrush users with powerful capabilities to enhance expression realism and fine-tune facial surface detail. These comprehensive integrations underscore CC5’s role as a central creative hub, facilitating advanced workflows and ensuring compatibility with industry-standard tools.
To celebrate its launch, Reallusion invites creators globally to join the “My CC5 Foray” event. This month-long celebration encourages participants to share their first CC5 character on the Reallusion Forum and Instagram using #MyFirstCC5, with weekly winners receiving exclusive HD Morph content. For those ready to dive into next-level character creation, the CC5 Deluxe package enhances workflows with ActorMIXER PRO, the full ActorMIXER Core Library, HD skins, and the HD Ultimate Morphs Pack, making it the ideal starter kit to instantly elevate creative potential to a professional level.
