Have been playing with CC3 for some time and it’s good, but still lacks some of the iClone features. iClone itself is affordable enough and I would grab it to add animation and lipsync functionalities to my pipeline, but unfortunately you cannot simply export things out of iClone the same way you do from CC3. You need 3DXchange software which - oh no! - costs more than iClone and CC3 together!
Accidentally I tried to open an iAvatar in CC and observed curious behavior. During the loading process, the loaded iAvatar model was rendered in the CC viewport and it seemed to load just fine… and then at the very end it displayed a popup saying that iAvatars are not supported in CC, and the almost completely loaded model reverted to the CC base. It felt somewhat artificially enforced limitation to me - the model was already visible, why then “not supported”?
It seems somewhat unusual approach to separate export/import functionality into a distinct (and so expensive) product, and it makes Reallusion ecosystem confusing for newcomers. IMHO, 3DXchange should be phased out and merged into iClone and CC. While there are some positive signs (FBX export integrated directly into iClone) but you are still required to have the Pipeline license for 3DXchange for it to work, and it seems that iClone doesn’t have those LOD and material optimization tools of CC when exporting. So yeah, it gets very messy and expensive when you want to get iClone things into a game engine.