Well, I am on my way to SIGGRAPH Vancouver and also towards my first opportunity to meet some of you as well as Reallusion Staff in person ...

I look forward to this event and I will try to summarize to the best I can the highlights of the show throughout the week in this thread.

For those who will meet me at the show, I have brought with ne a truckload of goodies for you in my suitcase ...

I sincerily hope to meet as many icloner's as I can.

Cheers!

Too bad cape could not make it...

I look forward to this 

Cheers!

Looking forward to hearing of the sheenanigans & seeing Posted Pics? 

Keep posted...

DISCUSSION WITH REALLUSOIN jAMES MARTIN & ICLONE 5 DEMO

Cap'tains Report here... 9/08/2011

First day at the convention was quite fruitful. Akznrdude and I met with John Martin from Reallusion. Yes! He does exist and is actually a very nice person

The proof is in the pudding to Gabe gracefully took a few Pics for you to enjoy These will be uploaded later this evening...

Ok let's start with a few bits and pieces of what we could dig into during our first exposure to IC5...

The REALLUSION boot was setup with a standalone Kinect Cam (about 150$) and one iC5 average Laptop, the kind of limited power laptop given to most Marketeers

The first step you do with this system is to go into a calibration mode for the camera.

The motion capture is activated from the "Device Mocap" button that is under the Character Animation Motion Tab with other controls for "Motion Puppet" and "Direct Puppet" buttons. I will speak about those two other buttons later.

Once the calibration mode is activated, there is a skeleton displayed in the iClone Viewport with an overlayed shadow that represents how the camera captures your body shape when you are standing in the motion capture zone. Simply step backwards until your shadow matches the skeleton and then the calibration is complete. This step is quite easy to do and takes about 30 seconds.

From then on, you can move your arms, legs and body anywhere within an area that represents about a 10 foot diameter circle and preview or record your animation segment. The performance was quite impressive. Motion capture works for arms, legs and body. the Head and hands are excluded from this capture but can be animated separately.

Geneally speaking, the system performed quite well but may display some jagginess for very fast movements or 360 like rotations. In any case, the system is very good for capturing everyday movements. I asked Akznrdude to do a backflip but we were not able to complete it during our testing !

More to come...

The motion puppet feature is activated using the new "Motion Puppet" button available from the Character Motion panel. IC5 comes with a series of preset scripts representing standard human IK motions LOOPS presets such as for Running or Walking toon style etc. The analogy of these Scripts would probably be the Crazytalk CTS scripts for facial animation but these new scripts are for Body animation.

So you can apply these motion loop scripts to a character Body and then use sliders in the Motion Puppet Panel to adjust the different parameters of the actual motion cycle. Using this feature, you can give an entire new style to your character walk or run etc... Once you have fine-tuned your character motion script, you can save your work as a new script for later use.

The typical use of this feature would be to accentuate the walk motion of a Toon character.

This feature will provide great time saving to the task of animating your character and also give you the ability to stylize your character moves.

THE DIRECT PUPPET FEATURE

The DIRECT Puppet feature is also activated using the new "Direct Puppet" button available from the Character Motion panel. the simplest way to describe this feature is to compare it to the current IC4 Facial Animation Puppetry. The Direct Puppet feature is to the body what the Facial Animation Puppetry is to the face.

When you activate this feature, you have a side panel representing a Human Body with nodes and IK constraints. You can activate or lock nodes from the Ik Chain and then animate the remaining skeleton parts by moving your mouse much in the same way as you would to do facial Animation by locking and activating certain parts of the face and then aminating the face using your mouse..

A sample use of this feature would be to have a character sitting in an electric chair, you would lock hands and feet from moving as they are chained to the chair, activate the other body nodes of the IK chain and then, vibrate your mouse to simulate the body going into heavy convulsion during the electric shock scene.

Quite effective !

This feature is an absolute killer! The Human IK part of the feature keeps your body parts together using Human inverse kinematic constraints and the range target part of the feature lets you define the range target Prop for a given body part.

For instance, you can create an animated bicycle Prop with spinning wheels and rotating Pedal gear, sit an iClone character on the Bike. Apply a range target constaint on each foot to have each foot locked to its respective pedal gear. When you activate the bicycle animation of rotating pedal gear, the character legs will follow the rotative motion of the pedal gear driving the motion of each foot via its range target constraint, i.e. the character will appear to be pedalling the bicycle along a path.

BETTER ROTATE GIZMO.

in IC5, when you select a character and activate the Rotate Gizmo, you can now simultaneously apply rotations on all 3 axis at the same time by cliking in the center of the proper handle and moving the mouse around. Because the character has a better IK chained constrained skeleton, moving the mouse around will give the sensation of Ragdoll physics applied to the character.

Well, you all saw the Ambient Occlusion Demonstration Video... But the killer app is going to be the arrival of the new "Toon Shadow" and "NPR" effects which i will gently baptize "THE PAUMANOK SUITE" for the purpose of this forum !!!

Toon shadow will give a toonish like rendering by accentuating the edges and applying toon like color filters while the NPR effect will give a Sketchy output, much like the kind of outputs what Paumanok has been so diligently pioneering.

These simple to use effect are all paramerized and can be adjusted to your liking but generally speaking, they allow for the artist to generate an entirely new animation rendering style upon a push of a single button, much like the effects and filters you fnd in Photoshop except these apply to the overall rendered video output. 

Quite Impressive !

I was not able to play in different terrain but my understanding of the feature is that it allows the user to apply IK effects to existing motion segments to give them another style.

So for instance, you already have a walk motion segment for a character and you use the Motion Puppet feature to modify the overall walk motion by changing the weight of the different nodes in the IK chain of the skeleton. An example of this is that you can change a normal human walk cycle into a Toon like walk cycle or create a limping character walk etc. but you raise a good point and I will try to more information on this feature ...

IC5 has a new MEDIA TAB which lets you see your Movies and Pictures, and Audio assets directly from the Scene management Panel (which was no the case in iC4). In the preferences panel, you can set a checkbox to tell iClone whether you want it to make a copy of those files or just manage a then with a link.

In iClone, there are 2 ways of animating a character. One is to tell the character to move in a given direction. This is when you get sliding feet. The other mode is to drag and drop a motion file onto the character in which case there are generally no sliding feet as long  consecutive motion files are cut at the right character position, i.e, the character starts from the same general posture between motion segments.

Hope this helps.

Cheers! 

Mass, bounciness and other physics properties such as if the prop transfer mass or not etc can be applied to Props. These properties are saved with the Prop and IC5 also comes with a series of presets that you can use and apply to existing props such as those settings for a Bouncing ball or a falling apple etc.

It is unclear at the moment if those Physics properties are part of the Dramascript for the prop or not. That would be interesting

But the most exciting thing was a new button on the toolbar to multiply objects. This button does not work for characters but it works for Props and also Props with Physics properties. This is different than copying a new instance of a prop, the group of objects you just created has its own physics properties. This is how you make a pile of barrels that get hit by a Car kind of thing...

From what I have seen in the iC5 demo vids and what you two are saying I just cant wait to try everything out.

Only downside is there is such a lot more to learn. Joking

The actual Motion puppet feature with sliders to adjust some of the motion parameters works on Clips provided with iC5, that is, you apply a Motion Puppet Clip to your character, e.g. Toon Walk or Talk and then you can adjust certain parameters to give the motion some specific behavior style.  

Currently, there are a few clips being demonstrated but we are told that the final version will have a lot more.

Also, althoug not demonstrated, I am led to believe that there will eventually be some Motion Pupet for props ?

Well, you will be very happy to ear that you can now have a real high resolution Reflection on a surface if you apply it a Mirror type material !!!

They have quite a few already but It is not yet finalized as to how many there will be in the Final release. For sure, you can apply a Motion Puppet Clip ot a character and then fine tune it to your liking and save the Clip as a new instance for later use. Also, I assume that if you Collect the recorded motion segment from the timeline, you will be able to save the end result as a new "baked" motion segment.  

This is a completely new feature added to the timeline editor. Key frames for RFingers, LFingers, ARMS, Torso, Legs, and Head are save ON A DIFFERENT timeline layer so you can refine them and do some fine tuning on them without affecting the keyframes of other body parts. !!!

This is a very big PLUS for refining motions!

You can now have a separate camera in the Viewport, i.e. Picture-on-Picture feature.

For instance, you can have a 1/4 size view of camera01 active in a corner of your Viewport while you position your assets with the Preview camera active for the remaining of the Viewport. This second viewpoint does not get rendered in your final output.  

If you remember, the direct Puppet Feature is to the Body what the Facial Animation Puppetry is to the face.

This Feature is part of the Edit Motion Layer panel. It has a Pose and a Reach Target TAB and each tab has some interesting checkboxes and radio buttons you can activate or select.

Among other things,

1) There is a Mirror Check Box (self explanatory)

2) There are Single & Screen Mode radio buttons ( I am not sure but I assume that in single mode, all is hidden in the viewport except the Character you apply puppetry on).

3) There are 2 Keying Mode checkboxes: "Body Parts" and "Full Body" . For instance, if you are in full body mode and you pull the hands of the puppet toward the floor, the legs will bend. If you are in Body Parts Only mode, then the legs wont bend.

4) You can also enable/disable whether transformation and/or rotations are keyed by activating the Move or Rotate checkboxes.

There are 2 new Hand & Foot Contact checkboxes that you can activate for Avatars. The status of these will impact how the IK works when animating the avatar.

e.g. If the hand contact is set and you are moving a character that has both hands on a table prop, the IK model will try to keep both hands in contact with the table at all times. 

The IK model  also take into account the Toes section of the skeleton, so if you are in the edit motion layer editor and try to pull the leg down towards the ground, if the Toe section is the first body part to hit the ground, it will bend to some extent until the entire foot is actually completely rested on the floor. 

Cheers@!

Many thanks Both, for Posting the encouraging detail.

I suppose, after all this hard work - It's off to sample the local hostelries? 

After a good week of hard labor, good wine and heavy meals, I am on my way back home to start a Diet

Cheers!