I thought since RL was so kind to include the panel for a future IC5 build ...

It may be nice to mention things I'd like to see for IC6 ...

Firstly for IC5 - i love all the new additions, it's a very ambitious upgrade and I give kudos to the team for taking it there ...it's leaps and bounds from the last versions and the only thing beyond the request for the panel I have ...is to tighten up what we have to be a flawless release.... imo ic5 is a staple of quality animation tools in an easy to use system - prior versions were nice but not enough to go beyond the sims ....being honest ..#justsayin
with the new upcoming panel and current animation features in ic5, we have the tools to do some amazing animations and create custom super interesting characters.....

Now ...on to IC6

Since IC5 focus was animation and physics.....I'd like to see IC6 go back to focusing on the Visual side of things .... and maybe an integrated / easier way to add spring effects to characters so we can have springing hair ....and maybe even add physics to clothing so we can have flowing clothes..... and maybe some sort of wind contraption so the flowing hair and clothes can blow in the wind, and we can have grass and oceans flowing in the wind!!

I have to agree with swoop about the occlusion culling - when i see how some of the new tech games coming out and how amazing they look in real time.....it makes me consider that iclone should look better than that....

another feature I'd like to see in IC6 - is baking - swoop is also correct in being able to handle UV's to get our movies to a higher level ...so it would be nice to be able to get our characters to look how we want with our custom texturing ....because that's an awesome feature ...but it would be nice to be able to consolidate all that stuff to one solid uv / texture so we can now have more resources to film more effectively, the more free resources we have the more space we have to make our sets more interesting with lots of detail!

Effects - the particle system is good ...but again, when I see what modern games are doing in real time .... Iclone needs to be equal or better.

basically, from studying all modern games .....iclone should be able to emulate what they can do in real times ......I won't talk about the cut scenes because most of the time those are maya / max / lightwave / cd4 renders ...so thats not a fair comparison.....what I am comparing is the quality in real time play......Iclone 6 needs to be better than the best realtime rendering games today imo. - so I am benchmarking my requests on game engines - not industrial level animation softwares.

I'll add more to the list as I find it, but for now ... in IC6 I want to be able to emulate what I see the dragons and magicians do in realtime game engines, but better! I want people to wish my videos was an mmo!! lol




update - just remembered another, a new art trend i'm finding is mixing 3D with 2D - looks amazing too - ( it's actually an old technique of using mattes, but now they are emphsizing the 2d...and not trying to make 2D look 3D, the beauty of that art is the actual contrast of 2D vs 3D ) would like to see some sort of bridge between cta and IC6 for this type of art ...I know it's really unnecessary ....because we can just transfer picture and video files between both programs ...but a formal bridge imo would be a way of creating a suite of products that is meant to cater to that style of art.

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"To define Tao is to defile it" - Lao Tzu

Ha, when THE DRAGON speaks, we listen. Because the Dragon is really pushing the new features of IC5/3DX5.

These are really fantastic ideas and I agree. Getting better physics into clothing and hair is extremely desirable to me.

Re: texturing, I recall people talking about displacement mapping. It sounds like a pretty important advance... is that right?


General Picture - animating now to life itself(tm)
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ya, displacement mapping would be awesome...until it eats up so many resources that you can only have one character in your scene .....so it's super important to find a way to consolidate ...what I'm basing my thinking on is how amazing these games look in real time.... thats not possible with so many things eating up resources in real time

another thing that influences my ideas is music workflow .... in music we do what is called bouncing .... basically when you have tons of tracks with tons of resource heavy plug ins you reach a saturation point that you simply can not make a mix sound better unless you print what you already like ...well the same applies to animation ......we add so much customization in real time to our scenes ....we would need a way to consolidate what we've done already to free up resources and continue to add more.

Edit - here's an example - say for instance you wanted to spend a week on just developing your environment ...added a ton of trees, houses from google warehouse, rocks, grass, you got the perfect hd lighting no holds barred....so much detail you started to see your computer slow down before you even added your multi uv HD texture characters ...animating them in such an environment would be a pain ...so....... you click a "Bake Scene" button ....this all becomes one mesh with one texture ....i know thats a tall order ...but would no doubt free up so much resources - the art quality output would increase dramatically simply because you you could add more. Not to mention become a great tool for making gaming environments. I so want to make huge lands like some of these games, but don't see how from the mass amount of items they have in game.

if i sound like i say anything worth reading, it's only because i really appreciate Iclone and everyone around it... ♪ ♫ ♬ ✌

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"To define Tao is to defile it" - Lao Tzu

in blender it's called "Join" you basically take all the meshes and join them..... then for bake ..just make a new uv and print.

I suppose the more expensive versions of it would include ray tracing ....but considering that iclone isn't about ray tracing -it may greatly simplify the process.


edit to respond to your edit lol - ya ...animating the mesh would be unreasonable. ....I'm thinking mainly environmental design and customized characters ...

for example .... most of my shorts tend to choke when I try to get into a lot of details. ...especially when I add like 5 ( bloated ) house meshes from googlewarehouse..

Making a scene like a community in a jungle is killer on resources from all the trees and bloated meshes from gw. so unless I go 3rd party ( rip out my hair from all the excessive tuts ) it will be impossible to go beyond a certain level of quality in scene. well, not impossible if i did all sorts of advanced time consuming techniques ...but thats not what Iclone is about.

and for the characters, your argument about the multiple uv issues is correct ....but I like the multi meshes for designing the characters to begin with ......so the best of both worlds would simply be to start with a G5 character .....go all out with HD textures ....then bake it to a final character you use for the movie.


I want to be able to compete with realtime gaming engines ....not high level 3D software.

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"To define Tao is to defile it" - Lao Tzu

well thats where the user has to commit to ideas before baking - keeping everything in some sort of real time mode is whats expensive.

as a director, make up your mind before you commit to a bake. give a little , take a little...you can't unbake ...only start over.

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"To define Tao is to defile it" - Lao Tzu

naw ...of course not!

again, comparing it to real time games - the environment is one big mesh ....and the characters are a bunch of little meshes.....

once you hit saturation point with characters - ie a battle scene - then you bounce any characters into a video matte if you need to go further.

my drive for this is that - iclone being a dedicated movie software, should look better than real time games that have mega sized lands and tons of characters....

we have most of it, except our resources get eaten up from the luxury of keeping all tweakable items ....tweakable in real time.

ps - i am half techie / half artist. .one reason I often go against your grain for technique, is not because I disagree with you..... it's because I already went there for music, spent way more than the cost of Max in time and money to learn them....and now that I'm at an advanced stage ....I only use a small amount of tools and have closets full of money and time that it took to get me here lol...... I simply don't want to go through that again ...and am using that experience to simplify my animation experience.....I want to spend more time being an artist than a techie in this 3D world. Trust me I can go far with 3D tools....but i'd rather have more time to go to have a drink with you and tell you why you are actually a noob in person lmao :p

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"To define Tao is to defile it" - Lao Tzu

dude, you have the brains and knowledge...make it happen.

close the door, shout at the top of your lungs about how we are all noobs, throw something around, i'll send you some records and cd's to break if you want.. ...and one day say "AHA" I know what will fix this .....and let us complain about what you did because we havent the slightest clue of the hell you went through to make an easy button.!!

simple.

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"To define Tao is to defile it" - Lao Tzu

here's some super advanced very high level insight ......it's free too...

sometimes people love something I made ....and it took me 10 minutes to make ...and I'm left slack jawed ...sometimes insulted because .....the song I took 6 months to make and tweaked for hours on end .....sucked tomatoes according to people.

moral of the story - they just wanna let out stress, not hear my lecture of the proper way to eq a song. the tracks they liked weren't even mastered, the equpment was roughly 2 million dollars sub par ... and the mix was crap because i screwed up on the bass and the music was distorting. go figgur.

-

the game torchlight 2 ....is sub par graphics according to todays standards ....it's about 60 million shy of diablo 3's production work ...it's going to get hacked to death and will gain a cult following.

thats why it's a winner. people will crack d3 for fame.....people will hack torchlight 2 because they love the game ....and the fans who dowloaded the cracks will faithfully buy t2 while d3 will become an ongoing joke.

ps - i think you will appreciate this article - http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/09/activisionblizzard-idUSL1E8G9HMG20120509

sure, I'm your grasshopper...I'm a noob! :p at first I hated it, but now it's the most beautiful thing in the world

Make it happen mr pro dude!! -smirk-

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"To define Tao is to defile it" - Lao Tzu

exactly, thats why we need you as a plug in!


creating art for consumers and creating tools that help artists, are not the same market.

ideas and tools are not synonymous - but they do compliment each other.

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"To define Tao is to defile it" - Lao Tzu

btw - i didn't mean to imply that you are a tool.

and i won't bring up the cliche' if the shoe fits....

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"To define Tao is to defile it" - Lao Tzu