YEAH iclone 5 is here and you still cant create characters, only modifying exsisting ones woooooo!

Make that a five point five star update :)



"Incompetence will always prevail so long as evil men stand by and do nothing."
-Martok2112

As a cranky old complainer about the wrong direction I felt iclone was going, today I feast on humble pie and congratulate Reallusion on the stellar 5.5 release.
Things I luv...
- Motion Plus! it's going to be a mocap killer for many users.
- H264, the renders are amazing and my editing using Corel Video Studio is super fast.
- 64 bit stability has been great... only a rare crash when I use some older content.

Anxious to see all the great new content by the modders especially in the area of Motion Plus.
Iclone 5.5 is a five star update.

Armstrong, that is some gorgeous work there. :)



"Incompetence will always prevail so long as evil men stand by and do nothing."
-Martok2112

Just a quick question. Anyone else have issues with flexible cloth 'stuttering' when you render a scene? I have a scene with a flag in it that is blown around in the wind. I went down to 5.4 and it was smooth flag like motion, in 5.5 it works smooth and it behaves like a flag until I render the scene. As it renders it starts stuttering and going back and forth like its stuck on two frames. From there, if i try to play the clip in the viewer again, the stuttering is on constantly.

Maybe something to look into for flexible cloth issues...



Alienware 15, i7 4710hq, GTX 970m, 16gb ram, 4k display, 1.5TB SSD raid.

Top marks for Reallusion re: making it incredibly easy to blend four textures and normal maps together and change hue, contrast and intensity to compliment its surrounding textures.

This is much better. :cool:

The other superior element to it is that definition stays now; no greasy smeared ground surfaces.

Armstrong.

Foggy thoughts and misted outlooks cleared with 5.5's "1 to ∞" value in Fog Setting.

Talking of Mist and Distance Haze.... as I inevitably do from time to time often from behind compressed temper... I'm pleased to say that with Iclones Mist control returning to 99,999 at the infinite balancing planes and "quick fixing" global smoothing as it were is a lot easier now.

For rough example...

Pushing the bases of distant mountains into white is a lot easier now as the planes "ground collision" seems to soften with the addition of a global mass of universal mist using the IClone system.

Above is mistless & fogless.

Above we see the massive difference of being able to infinitize the mists distance level away from the camera. A smooth overall which disappears as we approach the landmass. Mist planes cannot do this. But.... it's still not enough and we see the mountains as kind of flat still.

Above I've started to use very short depthless and "white transition x mountain width" controlled planes to isolate the fall off into white bases. So the planes drift from 0% - 20% to 35% - 0% opacity from core to edge in very low / short ovals.

 (ABOVE) Without the global IClone controlled mist the skies are too bold  but because I can now add a global degree of haze without having to worry about rebalancing the mountain specific planes it saves extortions of time by simply adding volume haze rather than plane haze.

 

Above Which is what I've done here at 3000 - 78555. I don't want to get into overkill regarding Misting out elements but this is a Chinese Garden and I need the mountains to look as they do in the Chinese Paintings traditionally so out of respect the effort wont be missed.

The westerner wouldn't bother with it, but the traditionalist might enjoy its observation.  So it stays.

 

And tooned (which is its first birth on screen which afterwards transitions into normal un-tooned mode) it makes me happy to see the above.
Each Mountain Range has its base-fog pulling the detail into white as mist which contrasts with the clouding above.

 

The above displaying one of the broad planes oblique to the lscape with the alpha threshold set to zero so's we can see its recessive curvature away from the lens. (which helps when there are many and AO being used.)

Probably doesn't mean much to many... :P but as with most peculiarities of animators, it means a lot to me. :cool:

Armstrong.

It looks great, martok. Thanks for that.
My goal is to achieve something like Borderlands look, what includes hand painted textures - and for that I don't have time right now, so I can only imagine what can be done with your skills and, let say, Wacom tablet. ( this second thing I have )
Here is closest I came to look I want - with NPR effect, not with toon shader because I don't want to loose ability to toy with lights. I put glow texture over every diffuse map to avoid too realistic shadowing, because I think somewhere in glow maps or self illuminated drawn textures department is key to toonish look I want.



Will see how it goes...
Thank you again for great examples. It will go to my Tutorials/examples folder immediately.


.

Animatom and Martok you're output is superb.

Animatom,

Here's something I did in just a matter of minutes....



If you think this looks ok, let me know. I didn't really do anything special, I just clicked on "Toon Mode" under Atmosphere. (I didn't click on the "Line Draw" mode under the content manager, because line mode tends to take away light shadings and makes the image appear less dynamic, unless that's what you're going for) :) In which case, clicking on "Line Draw" mode would look something like this:



As you can see...in "Line Art" mode, the lighting is brighter and a bit more universal...note how the Centurion at the lower right seems to have its shiny details sort of washed out, but it definitely looks more cartoon-like. Also, note the holographic table under the large image of the Gold Centurion.....if you compare, the "Toon Mode" version on top, there's a bit of shading going on on the underside of the table. In "Line Art" mode, the shading is gone, making for a flat, yet again, more cartoon-like render.

The reason the holographic Gold Centurion looks unaffected between the two pics is because images placed in the scene are not re-rendered. I had to shoot that image separately, and render it in Toon Mode in a different project so that it would translate as a Toon image here. If I had rendered the image without Toon Mode, it would not have gotten the Toon/Line Art renderings of the physical objects in the scene. As indictated in the following image:







"Incompetence will always prevail so long as evil men stand by and do nothing."
-Martok2112