I accidentally posted this in the wishful content thread, so apologies for the double up.....

overall I'm really happy with the iC6 avatars.
They are realistic enough without being photorealistic. I don't want photorealistic, otherwise everything else in the scene has to be photorealistic or it looks mismatched.
The iC6 avatars have lots of detail and very customisable.
I love Character Creator, it really is amazing how many body and facial features you can manipulate to get it spot on.
Biggest let down for me on avatars is the facial animation, more specifically the mouth.


Here's my couple of wishes for RL
1. The lip movement, particularly 'W' type movements look all wrong - mouth goes all puckered and heart shaped, looks weird. Even with animation strength reduced, it looks....wrong.
And the smile is terrible. I avoid making my avatars smile because it looks scary, kind of like Sheldon from Big Bang trying to smile.... Still remind me of the old Sims avatars. Daz characters seem to have fairly good mouth/lip animation in comparison, so surely it's possible. Even if there was some way users could manipulate the individual animation points on the mouth to create and save a smile.

2. Character Creator - small request. Can we have individual control of left and right eyebrow heights please ? Seems to be separate controls for left & right on many other facial features, but not eyebrow height. Important feature for fine tuning a face! Not everyone's eyebrows are symmetrical!

3. Spring effect on female avatars!
I love the idea of spring effect, yeah not just boobs   but when enabled, the body seems to move with so much more realism/relaxed ie hips, abdomen etc. Takes the rigidity out of the avatars movement.
Yes BIG boobs it works well!  But my avatar is petite and she doesn't have a set of double D's!! She's got modest B-cups and little boobs don't work well with spring effect. As soon as I turn spring effect on, her breasts instantly turn from pert to saggy and deflated, even when standing still... And B-cups 'jiggle', not bounce like water balloons, which is not possible, even at the lowest settings there is far too much going on there lol So I've had to disable it. I'm not devastated that the breasts are no longer moving (I don't want them moving much anyway), but as said I like the other effects that the spring effect has on other parts of the body, which I can't use if spring effect is turned off.

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Here is your answer for better facial/viseme morphs. It takes a few minutes to set up, but really improves facial animation. It might not work with iClone 7 when it ships early next year, but is awesome with 6!



Use the mesh edit tool in CC for asymmetric brows. It is in the left-most tab of the modify panel. It works on the bodies, as well as the clothing. Another way to make the eyebrows different is to set a face-key in the iClone timeline at frame zero with one of them moved as you would like.

cool that looks good, I'll give it a go!
I have been using the face key as a compromise, but unfortunately it doesn't get saved with the avatar, you have to set it with every scene.

Oh and I figured out a solution to the spring effect problem.
I didn't realise you could edit the parameters in the spx file for the spring effect. Much better!
Somehow I missed that part in the manual

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Just wanted to say, I absolutely share your frustration with the Spring Bone system, I even started a thread about it.  The Spring Bones system in iClone is so basic right now it's such a shame, cause with a few modifications it would totally transform the realism of moving figures in iClone, especially, as you said, the females.  If you read the thread I'm about to point out, you'll see that there's a fun element going on regards "Jiggle" and 'Women", but the truth is, I genuinely want this stuff for the same reasons as you do, it just adds massively to the realism and there's not enough ways to control Spring Bones the way they currently have it, there's no way inside iClone to position or edit a Spring Bone's influence over the mesh it's deforming.

I don't know if you saw it, but here's the thread, it's even got 13 likes now, so if that were converted to Votes on the Feedback Tracker, it's popular, but whether it will be granted is anyone's guess.

There was a really nice GIF on one of the pages, but it had to be removed cause someone complained
https://forum.reallusion.com/276195/SAY-NO-TO-CARDBOARD-WOMEN

Spring bones can be assigned in 3DXchange (pro or pipeline). CC characters are set up with spring bones for the breasts, buttocks, and belly. But the buttocks and belly ones are not turned on. The spring editing panel in 3DX has a lot more settings than the sliders in iClone.

One that I find really valuable is the ability to set a spring to be "rotationial" instead of linear. It often has a more realistic result.

Cheers Rampa, and I know what you mean but it's not the same as being able to go into weight-painting mode, select a spring-bone (inside iClone), and just paint the influence with a brush and smoothing brush.  I mean just imagine how nice that would be to use in real terms, you could even have the figure doing a walk cycle while you edit the greyscale weightmap live on the figure.  No matter what part of the figure you want to soften, you basically just brush the softness onto it, live, that would be pretty damn cool to say the least!

I was playing with walk cycles the other day, making them look right based on the weight of the character.  I basically just had a women facing me head-on, walking on the spot.  I had the Spring Bones for the breasts switched on and I spent some time tweaking them to make it look natural.  I got her looking quite natural, but as soon as I decided to rotate her, and saw her from another angle, it wasn't so realistic.  Again, the first thing I found myself wanting is a way to edit the damn influence map of the Spring Bones, right there and then.  Those features you point out in 3DXchange, although they're not implemented in a convenient way, at least they indicate that if Reallusion wanted to add the suggested feature, they already have much of the codebase for that feature already written.  It would just be a matter of adapting it's use for inside iClone, and setting-up the greyscale weight-painting.

They really need greyscale weight-painting inside iClone anyway, due to the currently annoying situation of having to export maps just to edit cloth weights.  So there's another benefit, if they implemented it, the same greyscale weight-painting tools used for painting Spring Bone influence, could also be used for editing cloth dynamics - and even other things in the future