I think the export process should be rethought. Even if textures are shared, which is good, there is still the problem of duplicated geometry, which can add up as well with large scenes. I also wonder how animated (video) textures would be dealt with. I'm not sure if they actually work right now.

I really would like to know how this is organized in other plugins. I guess it could be tested with a Blender scene.

---

It could be improved a lot. I had 320,000 jpgs duplicated. Static mesh should also not be duplicated. Animated mesh exported per frame is ok since indigo doesn't support any kind of cache afaik. For animated textures and video inserts that could either be referenced directly on the harddrive or exported per frame. I'd rather have it referenced directly on the harddrive. The sketchup indigo works this way. It doesn't export any textures at all and only points directly to the texture files on hdd.

It could be improved A LOT, indeed. For now I'm not bothering with ICindigo until it evolves into a local IPR viewport, all 3rd-party plugin compatible. The export scene workflow as is, so tedious, it's faster to pack the scene up into FBX, import export via 3DX and shader-render elsewhere. IF 3DX packs the scene up properly for one's chosen ext renderer, that is.

For the long run, ideally IClone models its external renderer workflow design on its modestly-priced peers, and allow external renderer to make far better use of the iClone "mini viewport".

The IPR viewport should be un/dockable and has classic viewport options. For fast machines, it can become the main/ the only viewport to work in.
The Final viewport should be a floating window like typical plugins. Better still, dockable.

For the lower end machine, IPR render frames should be good enough for final. For high end machine, IPR acts as a typical preview render, when satisfied then use the final renderer.

Daz Studio, the best IPR Viewport of its class (near-real-time, ZERO shader transfer hassle; pause-able, render 3rd party instance hair and instances, via 3Delight a Renderman compliant engine; Viewport is full-featured so can act as a 2nd or the DEFAULT viewport; a FREE update)





OR4C Carrara Octane (near-real-time, more stable than Daz/Poser Octane, minimal shader rework, render native instances but not (WIP) procedural trees or strand hair)




Daz Studio Octane viewport design is also interesting



LuxCore Carrara IPR & Biased Renderer (near real-time, usable across all Carrara "rooms"; surprisingly fast OpenCL for AMD or Nvidia at 25-30sec per usable frame. Some shader rework needed, comes with solid LuxCore shader sets from trans to ref to SSS) Bridge to LuxusCore. Cheap alternative to Octane, current status beta test and free)




Hope that's enough ideas and inspiration for tighter, faster, more user-friendly iClone Indigo integration.

Cheers

  >>> Indie Generalist modeler-rigger-animator <<< Hardware: AlienWare i7-HK 32G GTX1080 2T-SSDs BenqSW320 Wacom-Intuous 3Dconnexion ||| Software: IC6 Pipeline - CTA3 Pipeline - ATK2 - Indigo ||| Zbrush4R8. Blender 2.79. DazStudio 4.9. Carrara. Poser. Octane.

I haven' tried daz ipr. I do have octane for lw. Needs a highend card, 980 or titans. Lightwave ipr is faster than octane in my experience. If Iclone indigo would improve the export process, I'm definitely going to use indigo than octane since Iclone scenes are time consuming to export one by one by fbx to another app.

Here's the bug in Iclone indigo for speedtree. The only workaround that works sometimes is to turn on/off the layer of the trees in a preview not the camview. Hope this gets fixed.

Yes we are.

I have passed your findings to the iClone team. Once I have more information I will update again.

Thanks for the great feedback.

                                                                

Peter
Forum Administrator

www.reallusion.com

Thanks Peter. I know RL would love to improve this. Iclone+Indigo has a lot of potential to attract archiviz market.

This scene had 27 gigs exported from Iclone




It only really needed 76mb of textures out of the 20gig duplicated textures
I edited the xml files to point to the 76mb textures.


It rendered fine with a lot less gigs. 7 gigs of mesh data and 76mb textures total. I'm sure it can still be reduced by eliminating static mesh but the names of the static mesh are random per frame so I couldn't do anything anymore.

Dear hattori kun,

Please uncheck Level of Detail in Preference, and render again to Indigo. See if Speed Trees still disappear. If they do, please give me your project so we can check. Thank you.


Soya

Thanks soyasu. I deleted the file already but if it comes up again I will try unchecking lod.

Soyasu I was able to find the file on a backup. Where do I send it?
Turning off LOD doesn't do the trick.

Hattori,

One way to do it is to upload the file to a service like https://www.wetransfer.com/

email the file to yourself, it will give you a download link - PM that link to Soyasu

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