Hi Ken,

I'm glad you're okay.

Now to ruin the mood, I wonder you might be better off starting over again on this scene.  It sounds like there are numerous problems and it might take a lot of work to untangle them and get them all fixed.

Keyframes... Simple concept, but hard to explain in words.  I wonder if someone has a link to a good basic introduction to them.

Briefly, a keyframe is a particular time ("frame") in your video that contains specific information (it is "key").

You see the keyframes on the "timeline" display (if you have iClone "Pro" and press F3).

If your character is looking left at the 1-second time (Frame 60), and is looking right at the 2-second time (Frame 120), iClone figures out all the positions between those two points.  You don't manually control the avatar for all the frames between those two "key" frames.

Any time you move a prop, you manually place it in the new location at its current time, and iClone automatically creates a "keyframe" for the prop, forcing it to be in that location at that time.

I'm worried about you comment about choosing random numbers" for them.  They go in order, at the rate of 60 per second.  Can you describe more what you mean?

---

iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
Desktop (homebuilt) - Windows 10, Ryzen 9 3900x CPU, GTX 1080 GPU (8GB), 32GB RAM, Asus X570 Pro motherboard, 2TB SSD, terabytes of disk space, dual  monitors.
Laptop - Windows 10, MSI GS63VR STEALTH-252, 16GB RAM, GTX 1060 (6GB), 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD

Well here's a tutorial that might help a bit.



Sadly, iClone cannot be learned entirely by intuition. Some parts are tricky. Now that you have some movie making under your belt, it is probably a good idea to go back and review how some of the basics work. This will help make sure that you are not inadvertently making it harder on yourself or, as I sometimes do, develop bad habits that make everything ten times harder!

Thanks, Rampa.

I had to type and run, and didn't have time to round up a nice tutorial.  This should help Ken a lot.

(I still won't be surprised if he might be best off starting over again, so he doesn't keep running into one strange thing after another.)

---

iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
Desktop (homebuilt) - Windows 10, Ryzen 9 3900x CPU, GTX 1080 GPU (8GB), 32GB RAM, Asus X570 Pro motherboard, 2TB SSD, terabytes of disk space, dual  monitors.
Laptop - Windows 10, MSI GS63VR STEALTH-252, 16GB RAM, GTX 1060 (6GB), 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD

It might be a good idea to start over, just to make sure there are no gremlins hiding in the timeline.

I have been toying with this idea of taking problem scenes and opening them up for others in the forum to do as well, but requiring a tutorial so that everybody learns.

For instance, if you feel comfortable with it Ken, you could see if any other forum members would be interested in creating your scene. But it would be required that they provide a tutorial on how they did it, if they wish to take it on.

I also think that a more systematic approach may be helpful. For example, you mention that your characters walk in the basement.

I assume that the basement is at ground level in the scene (Z value is 0). When you right-click a character and select Move Forward, she will start walking at that level, even if you place it on a higher floor.

One solution is to add the house to the terrain, or, better, create a dummy plane (which can be invisible) at the level of the floor and add that to the terrain. Now if you place your characters at that floor level, they will stay there when walking.

I hope I got this right... 

---

The "basement" can also be an entirely separate project file.

That way you don't have two levels of terrain to worry about.  And with your computer issues, it would avoid the problem of having an "entire house" when all you see is a couple of walls in the basement.

Think of a real movie being filmed.  A "basement" is most likely a 2 or 3-walled set in a sound stage, where they have lots of room for lights, cameras, and crew.

I have a tendency to overload my sets, but here is an example of one I used.  I did not need an entire building for this scene.

.

---

iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
Desktop (homebuilt) - Windows 10, Ryzen 9 3900x CPU, GTX 1080 GPU (8GB), 32GB RAM, Asus X570 Pro motherboard, 2TB SSD, terabytes of disk space, dual  monitors.
Laptop - Windows 10, MSI GS63VR STEALTH-252, 16GB RAM, GTX 1060 (6GB), 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD