Even though the purpose of Poser/DS and iClone are more or less the same, there are essential differences in how things work. The most evident is that in Poser/DS we can keep manipulating the figure's morphs at any point, while in Reallusion programs, we can only reshape the figure in CC, and then animate/render them in iClone. This might come as a surprise to the unsuspecting Poser/DS user. It's like the morph dials are in a different program.
So the process would still be the same, except that we have to define the character first, instead of later. However, iClone has a button to resend the character back to CC at any time to edit the morphs. It's just that we, in Poser/DS, are used to being able to edit the morphs at any time, and with iClone that is done in another program. The integration between CC and iClone seems pretty seamless, though, but it's important to know that this is the way things work.
Once the character is in iClone, things are a bit different to pose it. In Poser/DS, we can click on a body part and pose it with either dials or with a direct manipulation gizmo. In iClone, we don't click the figure to select parts to pose, but instead there is a special panel where we can select the body part, and them use the usual gizmos to pose them directly on the figure. Clicking directly on the figure to select things is more convenient and intuitive, but it can also be confusing, especially in Poser, because we can select the clothing instead of the figure, or some parts can be very hard to select depending on the pose and camera position. Having that said, I find the iClone panel rather convenient to select body parts, because there is no doubt about what is being selected. I just wanted to point out that in iClone we don't select body parts directly on the figure, because that's how we think in Poser/DS.
Another major difference is that ANY hair and clothing can be turned dynamic in iClone, but it doesn't use the same methods we are used to in Poser/DS. That is, it doesn't use the usual cloth simulations. Instead, it uses either the Bullet physics engine, or the nVidia's PhysX engine (default). iClone can use physics to drive either bones, or the mesh itself to animate in real-time. It's a mix of soft and hard body dynamics, where one collides with the other. In either cases, we have to define primitives for the mesh to collide against. This is something completely new to Poser/DS, even though we could do the same in Poser with the built-in Bullet engine. The bottom line is that the dynamic cloth and hair do not collide with body figure's body, but instead against simpler objects of collision we define, size and place. The CC3 figure already ships with these collision objects, but depending on how we reshape it with morphs, we may have to adjust their size and position.
Dynamic cloth and hair is defined by a greyscale map that is created over the UV template, pretty much like we do when painting textures. White areas will become fully dynamic, grey areas define different degrees of "softness/hardness", and black areas become fully static. If you know how to paint a bump map, you know how to make dynamic cloth and hair in iClone. It's very simple, but tends to be finicky, requiring some experimentation to get things right. Even if we mess up on the greyscale map, iClone allows dynamically editing it with brightness/contrast sliders to make fine adjustments when necessary. If you know the Bullet and PhysX engines, all this will be animated in real-time. There is no waiting for things to calculate. In the Skyla/Type-6 character shown in the previous post above, I had no issues making the Genesis Aven hair dynamic by just painting a greyscale map. Of course, if the hair has 10 MAT zones, things can get more complicated, but the process is always the same.
One major thing in iClone is that all characters use a more advanced IK system we don't have in Poser/DS, which automatically detects feet and hands contact with things. Those can be enabled/disabled at any time. The most useful is feet contact with the floor. I believe this has the same functionality as the Autodesk Human IK used in 3DSMAX and Maya, which is an industry standard. Whether you are posing or animating the character, this is the most useful feature because we will never accidentally have the characters floating around or going through the floor. Forget having to spend hours adjusting the feet so they stand on the floor. In iClone, this happens automatically. Needless to say, this is a HUGE time saver if you make animations. Here again, I am pointing this out because it's something we don't have in Poser/DS. Poser actually has floor contact detection, but it will slow your scene to a crawl. In iClone it happens, you guessed it, in real-time.
So these are a few workflow differences between Poser/DS and iClone. Hope this will be useful to new users.
