I have been having a ton of FUN with CC3 because it finally allows me to bring my Poser and DS contents to iClone with relative ease. For many years iClone was suffering from poor visual quality, and that was true until version 5. We are now in version 7, and since version 6 it has started to bring a respectable collection of state-of-the-art new technologies we normally only find in high-end software. There is a high expectation for the arrival of the I-ray renderer for iClone, for that will definitely raise the bar for what can be done with it.
For those coming from DS, many of you have already been fiddling with iClone for years, taking advantage of the free 1-click Genesis conversion plugin. iClone has animation tools much superior to those from Poser and DS, to include an industry standard IK system comparable to Autodesk's Human IK. Even for those who only want static renders, iClone makes it much easier to create full-fledged environments to place your character at, as opposed to Poser/DS, which were basically meant to render characters only. Of course, it is possible to load 3D environments in Poser/DS, but the point is that iClone goes beyond that, supporting daylight and sky systems by default. The particle system makes it easier to include fire, smoke, fog, rain, falling leaves, and many other effects to your scenes - be them static or animated. Animated water from lakes, rivers, and seas are also supported.
Reallusion has recently added iClone support for the PopcornFX particles system that supports PBR animations in real-time. This is much more advanced particle system that provides means for you to create your own special effects to your scenes, all in beautiful PBR quality - in real-time. Another recently added 3rd party plugin was the FaceWare facial mocap system, which allows markerless facial capture in real-time with a regular single webcam. It can use desktop webcams, those embedded into your laptop, your smartphone, or head-mounted ones. It captures both lip and facial expressions for easy character animations with lip sync. If you have one of these Microsoft Kinect sensors (versions 1 or 2), you can capture full body as well. It supports more professional full body mocap systems if you can afford them.
The importance of CC3 in all this is that it connects Poser and DS contents to iClone. As a matter of fact, Dawn, Dusk, Baby Luna and the awesome HW gorilla are all already embedded into CC3 by default. You don't see them at first. What loads by default is the CC3 default figure with the female shape dialed up. If we reset the CC3 figure, it goes into a genderless shape, just like the beloved original Genesis was. For all of you DS users who complained about the figure gender split, the default CC3 figure is the all-in-one genderless solution, back to how Genesis originally was.
If you want to see, for instance, Dusk in CC3, just dial it up (as you would do in Poser/DS), and you get the Dusk shape. Mind you, this is the Dusk shape in a different figure, and if you purchase the Starter Pack at Reallusion, you get all the same functionality you get in Poser/DS, which includes clothing, hair, props, textures, poses and morphs. There is an option to purchase a 4-in-1 package that includes the Started Packs for Dawn, Dusk, Baby Luna and HW Gorilla. Early adopters get a substantial discount for as long as the promo runs.
Since the CC3 figure can assume these HW figures shapes, this can produce some outrageous experiments, such as mixing them up in any order, as well as mixing up morphs from the CC3 figure itself. We can import morphs from Poser/DS as well, so we can, potentially, mix up HW figure shapes with Genesis (all versions) and V4/M4 as well. Imagine the possibilities! The CC3 figure can also wear clothing from all these figures. I have already shown here in the HW galleries what appeared to be Dawn wearing her Superhero outfit, but in reality, that was the CC3 figure in iClone.
About that last part, CC3 only supports content conversions from DS at the moment, but I have quickly found a workflow to import my Poser contents as well, complete with materials and morphs. The Superhero outfit mentioned above never had a DS version, but I have used CC3 to have it converted all the same. And I did that using DS in the process, but without having to create a DS version for the outfit. I just use DS to create the proper FBX export file. Of course, the material overlays from the Superhero outfit won't work in DS or anywhere else, but for anyone who has already converted outfits from one program to another (Poser to DS, for instance) will know that materials need adjusting - nothing new here.
On the bright side, CC3 has an excellent material conversion right off the box. For example, DS users know that 3DL shaders won't work with I-ray, and also that MDL shaders won't work with 3DL. No matter which material you export from DS, CC3 will create shaders that will work with ALL rendering solutions from iClone. That includes the default render, real-time PBR render, and the upcoming I-ray render. I know I-ray is not available in iClone at the moment, but you can test these materials in CC3 with I-ray right now, so you will know what to expect. I-ray is promised for iClone in one of the coming updates, most likely still this year.
In the current CC3 version, we already have I-ray support as an optional plugin you can purchase if you want to. It already uses the latest and greatest AI (artificial intelligence) to speed up light ray casting, and most importantly, noise cleaning. Until now, this was only available at the rather expensive Octane render, but now I-ray is adopting it too. The advantage of this is that AI Denoising is significantly FASTER than procedural algorithms, using the latest and greatest neural networks technologies to accelerate 3D renders. This means we now need way less render samples to produce a noise-free render, while still using your regular GPU (no expensive RTX Tensor cores required!). I am not sure about the AI Denoiser from I-ray, but the one in Octane "learns" (Deep Learning) as it renders, making de-noising faster every time for the same scene. Very exciting tech!
There is much more to tell about CC3 and iClone 7, but this has become rather long as it is, so I will stop here.
