This week I made
a new iClone animation with 3 characters: 2 made with Dawn in Poser (left and middle), and 1 using the native CC3 figure (right). The one on the left has "Body Type-2" and wears the "Treasure Hunter" outfit for V4 refit to Dawn. The middle one in front has "Body Type-6" and is wearing Dawn pants from Poser and a blouse from CC3. Clothing from Poser, DS or CC3 are pretty much interchangeable inside CC3.
Clothing initially "auto-fits" to the character shape, similar to how it is in Poser/DS, and it has built-in tools to fix distortions and pokethrus. It's similar to Poser's Morphing Tool, but better. It has features to support cloth layers with collision detection, similar to how it is in Marvelous Designer, but with conforming cloth instead of dynamic. If you are exporting characters from Poser or DS with CC3's Transformer, the clothing will already be on the figure, so this won't matter. In this case, you can save imported clothing to CC3's library for later use in other characters.
CC3 Transformer does a pretty good job auto-rigging imported Poser/DS figures, but my Body Type-2 and 6 have required a little thigh joint adjustment to pose properly. The nice thing about doing skeleton adjustments in CC3 is that we only need to do that on the base figure. All conforming clothing will auto-adjust to the changes. In Poser/DS, we would have to adjust the rigging on the clothing as well, which is a bummer. We can see in the render below that the thighs pose properly after the small adjustment.
BTW, the Ayaka character on the right was one of the very first 3rd party contents to be sold for Reallusion's Character Creator. She is a cute Anime-styled character with a high-quality leather outfit that is very detailed. She also comes with a Japanese school outfit. She is a mercenary assassin at night - hence the hooded leather suit.
I have built this set in iClone from scratch, populating the scene with a ground plane, patches of grass, scattered flowers, rocks, trees, and a skybox. The plants are industry standard "SpeedTrees", meaning they can be animated in real-time with configurable wind gusts that affect them as a whole. The grass, the flower bushes, and the trees all sway with the wind. You just configure how you want the wind to behave, and the rest is automatic. It's similar to how we can create wind forces in Poser, though we can't use SpeedTrees there.
SpeedTrees are so cool because they ship with a "gardening" tool that allows us to quickly populate the scene with plants and trees. We can still individually place trees and plants, but we can also randomly place hundreds of them with a few mouse clicks as well. Each plant is individually randomized to create variety, so they don't look all the same. When mass populating a scene using the "gardening" tool, we only have to set up the size of the "stamp" area, and how dense with plants it will be. Really simple and fun.
I have added the campfire and fog using the PopcornFX plugin particle effects. The fire automatically lits the scene, which is convenient and more realistic. The fog interacts with the light, making it glow at some parts, which is also realistic. The PopcornFX plugin for iClone offers a comprehensive amount of parameters that are well organized in categories, making it simple and powerful to control the particle effects. The only bummer is that I-ray won't render them, so here I had to use the default real-time PBR renderer.
iClone was originally created to edit animations, so it has a great set of timeline tools to fine-tune body and facial animations. It uses industry standard "Human IK", the same used by Autodesk, which makes animating characters a breeze when it comes to feet and hands contact with the ground. This is something we loath with in Poser/DS, where feet often goes through the ground, characters feet "float" around, and elbows and knees sometimes flip to the wrong side when posed or animated. "Human IK" saves us from all of that in iClone, making animations more fun, where feet and hands contact detection can be toggled on/off independently with a mouse click.
iClone has separate tools to animate body movement and facial expressions, and those can be added in layers. This makes it easier to animate characters, where I usually do the body motion first, and add facial animations later. Like it is in Poser, iClone supports automatic lip sync, but the timeline allows editing down to individual phonemes. There is also a "FaceWare" plugin that allows making facial motion capture in real-time with a single generic webcam. For body motion capture, iClone supports cheap Kinect 1.0 and 2.0 cameras, or the more expensive "Perception Neuron" full body suits from Noitom.
When it comes to dynamics, iClone works differently from Poser/DS. It supports both Bullet and nVidia's PhysX engine, where the latter has become the standard nowadays. As opposed to how it is in Poser/DS, everything is handled by the unified physics engine in real-time. This includes dynamic hair, dynamic cloth, spring dynamics, and particle systems. While in Poser/DS we have to paint weight maps to control dynamics directly on the model, in iClone we paint monochrome texture maps instead. The areas in black are 100% static, the ones in white are 100% dynamic, and the grey areas allow for different degrees of dynamic flexing. It can be rather tricky to get things right this way, but iClone has tools to dynamically adjust texture maps on the fly. However, this makes iClone dynamics dependent on MAT zones, which can be a bad thing. In Poser, dynamics are tied to body groups instead, which makes more sense but can be a problem as well. In this animation, I made full use of dynamic cloth, dynamic hair, spring dynamics and particle dynamics. Everything that could have motion was animated.
For rendering, we have the new real-time PBR renderer that supports DX11 tessellation, vector displacement, Substance dynamic materials, HDR, AO, Global Illumination, and the PopcornFX particle effects plugin (in addition to iClone's native particles). More recently, there is also the nVidia I-ray renderer plugin that already supports AI Denoiser, but that unfortunately doesn't support PopcornFX particles yet.
One could say that I-ray is not particularly good for rendering animations because it's not fast enough. However, Reallusion claims they have optimized it, making it faster than it is in other programs. I would rather they had adopted Octane's "Brigade" engine, which is already real-time at PBR quality, and is currently available as a free plugin for the Unity3D game engine. For everything else, we can always count on the default real-time PBR renderer, which does a pretty good job for general iClone rendering. That's what I've used for this animation, and I think it looks good considering it was rendered in real-time.
The last part of the animation was for me to compose the 1 minute-long music track that goes with it. I have settled for 120BPM to better fit the animation speed, so the dance matches the music tempo. Once the music and animation were done, I have combined everything in Adobe Animate to create the final composition. Thanks to Adobe Animate (former "Adobe Flash Professional") being so artist-friendly, it only took a single line of code to make the 2 animation sections to play in the proper order. The 2 animations and the music track all fit into a single 9MB file, which is not bad for a full motion web post. It will be really sad when Flash support is gone in 2020.
