• Welcome to the Community Forums at HiveWire 3D! Please note that the user name you choose for our forum will be displayed to the public. Our store was closed as January 4, 2021. You can find HiveWire 3D and Lisa's Botanicals products, as well as many of our Contributing Artists, at Renderosity. This thread lists where many are now selling their products. Renderosity is generously putting products which were purchased at HiveWire 3D and are now sold at their store into customer accounts by gifting them. This is not an overnight process so please be patient, if you have already emailed them about this. If you have NOT emailed them, please see the 2nd post in this thread for instructions on what you need to do

Ken1171

Esteemed
Contributing Artist
Today I have converted my Superhero outfit for Dawn to CC3 (forgot the cape!). I made a lot of mistakes and had to start over a couple of times, but I am getting the hang of it. The interesting part is that it doesn't have a DS version, so I've sent it to DS with completely invalid weight maps, and exported to FBX, preserving a few of the extra morphs. After conforming it to the CC3 figure and transferring the weight maps, it's already working! To make this work in DS, I would have to rig it again.

This is great news to Poser CAs, because I could get it from Poser to DS, then into CC3, and then to iClone with no rigging at all. In this case I have only used DS to export the FBX. And what's most, it seems to look better in iClone than it does in Poser, and the special outfit morphs I created in Poser were preserved and are working in iClone! LOL

This is a real-time PBR preview in iClone7, and I think it looks great. ^____^

Batgirl_1080.jpg
 

Rae134

Renowned
CV-BEE
Contributing Artist
Actually Ken your suit works fine in DS with auto-fit (I didn't do any extreme poses tho), its only the boot heals that don't want to morph from the high-heals to the shorter version. (I've even had it on Dusk in DS but he looked funny with the high-heals LOL)
 

Chris

HW3D President
Staff member
Co-Founder
Wow indeed! Way to go Ken. Your outfit looks awesome! I love it. The fact that you're figuring all this out and being a trail blazer and pioneer of sort is terrific. Kudos to you means kudos to everyone one that has created content only for Poser. This is quite magical what you're doing.

Keep it up.
 

Ken1171

Esteemed
Contributing Artist
Actually Ken your suit works fine in DS with auto-fit (I didn't do any extreme poses tho), its only the boot heals that don't want to morph from the high-heals to the shorter version. (I've even had it on Dusk in DS but he looked funny with the high-heals LOL)

What happens is that DS doesn't recognize ERCs created with the Dependency Editor. The flat soles morph is still there and working, but the master dial is disconnected. All you have to do to get it working in DS is to hook it back with an "ERC Freeze".

Wow indeed! Way to go Ken. Your outfit looks awesome! I love it. The fact that you're figuring all this out and being a trail blazer and pioneer of sort is terrific. Kudos to you means kudos to everyone one that has created content only for Poser. This is quite magical what you're doing.
Keep it up.

Thanks, Chris! I am thinking that if I only need DS to export to FBX, maybe there is a way to do it in Poser, since it also supports FBX. I just need to know what the specifics are with Reallusion. It would be great if Poser CAs could do it straight from Poser. So far my tests on that have failed because CC3 expects something specific, but I don't know what it is. Either way, DS is free, so using it to export to FBX is still feasible. It appears that CC3 will create its own weight maps, so all we need is a skeleton.

Ken, you ought to consider showcasing your beautiful renders and tests here:
Showcase Yourself - Show us what you got!

Oh cool, I didn't know of that thread. I will check it out,
 

Ken1171

Esteemed
Contributing Artist
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.

Render_1200a.jpg


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.

Render_1200g.jpg


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.
 

Miss B

Drawing Life 1 Pixel at a Time
CV-BEE
We don't have galleries that pertain to any one particular 3D software app, but you could always start a CC3/iClone album since you do a lot of renders using them, and I "think" you can make the gallery public so that others who are into CC3/iClone can post renders to it as well. You'd have to check that out, as I have only one album with only a few renders in it. I do most of my render postings here in the forum.
 

Ken1171

Esteemed
Contributing Artist
Thanks, Miss B! By "gallery", I actually meant a rendering thread dedicated to CC3/iClone. Maybe we will have one since HW is "officially" connected to Reallusion, selling their products there. Lisa said we would have CC3/iClone threads, but so far they are confined to 3D development only, no rendering threads.

But I understand what you've said about not having software-specific rendering threads. I have posted many of my iClone renders of Dawn at the Dawn Renders thread, but what if I use other characters, like in this case? BTW, we have to say "characters", because these are all the same figure in CC3. That includes Dawn, Dusk, Gorilla, Baby Luna, Genesis (all of them), V4/M4, and all of the characters in the images above - they are all made with the same CC3 base figure. A kind of ultra-Unimesh figure. :)
 

Miss B

Drawing Life 1 Pixel at a Time
CV-BEE
Ahhh, I see what you mean. You could ask Lisa again I suppose. She's been busy with a lot of other things, such as a couple of sales one right after the other, so it may have slipped her mind.
 
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