Many times already it has been explained that the internal frame rate of iClone is 60 fps. iClone should probably make that invisible for some users to end this discussion....

I have used iClone since 1.52, and it has never bothered me. I've given up explaining the reason for the 60 fps; look for my posts elsewhere. I think in time, not in frames. That way it doesn't matter whether I render at 24 fps, 25 fps, or 30 fps; it always comes out right.

Back to rendering quality; I find that more interesting.

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Another users comment
https://forum.reallusion.com/Topic223248-36-1.aspx
"-Because the render is based on 30 fps and the project in 60fps , a one frame muzzle flash for exemple , is not rendered if it lights on on impaired frame."

This is why render to video is a bad idea. When the renderer crashes you have nothing.
Render to images has always been the norm. Problem is Iclone has wrong render output using images and only half is rendered compared to the Iclone timeline.

https://forum.reallusion.com/FindPost220535.aspx
Here's the issue.
Iclone renders only half of whatever is set on the project setting length.



Screengrabs explanation
1. Set length to 300 frames.
2. Character with frame 0 to 30 keys with a hold key at 30 so he won't move. At frame 31 he starts to reach up to frame 45 where he stops reaching.
3. Render it to frames images to harddisk. Fps doesn't matter here either when dealing with images. It shouldn't. It should just render whatever is on the timeline 1 is to 1 match.
4. Check the images. Instead of the hold keys from 0-30, the hold key is from 0-15. Instead of moving from 31-45, he moves from 16-23(no 22.5 ofcourse)
Iclone is basically rendering in nth frame=2.

Before I upgraded to iC6.1 a new MB and Win pro to go from 16 GB memory to 32 GB, R9-270X 2GB video card, to a R9-290X 8 GB card. I tried rendering a large mpg4 project and it crashed somewhere after a few minutes? I have 3 large 120mm fans pushing in air and 3 - 120mm pulling the air out. I also have a large heatsink with 2-120 mm fans (PWM) on the CPU in push pull configuration, and a auto-fan controller for 5 of the fans. I'm not overclocked so there is not heat problem in my setup. After a hard boot and no other programs running I was able to render the whole test video. I'm not 100% sure of my observations, but with iC 6.0 whenever I had a crash the project would always recover, with tC 6.1 I always get a failed recovery. It's really frustrating because sometimes I have to boot after a crash, because things are not moving smooth. I don't know if you tried this. But after you finish a project before you render, hard boot your computer, load your project, but don't run it and just render it to your output selection. It worked for me. I know IC 6.1 is still buggy, because I had one avatar made in iC5, and even when I put it into a project with nothing else. iClone 6.1 would crash. I sent it to Reallusion, and I was told to load the avatar in iC5, remove the accessories, and the accessory hair, and load them into iC 6.1 separately. Then in iC6.1, load the bare avatar then add the accessories and save the this new avatar in iC6.1; that seemed to work. So now since I'm having so much problems with my other avatars to just get them to do simple motions with twice the memory that I had in iC5, I'm going to strip them in iC5, and then add clothes and accessories and see what happens? Right now I'm crashing all the time. I remember in rendering in earlier versions of iClone, that I once had a avatar that once it came into the scene it caused the render engine to crash, I watched what frame it was happening at to find the culprit. If you're rendering is crashing at the same exact place (frame), it is not a usually heat problem but I something at the time or in that scene causing the problem.

Home built; ASRock X570 Pro 4, AMD Ryzen 9-5950X CPU, AMD RADEON RX6900XT, 16GB video card, 131GB of RAM.

Sigh, me too :)

The future will probably be kind of engines such as Brigade 3:

Brigade 3.0 preview - Real-time path tracing
Brigade 3 Real-time path traced Street View

If only Reallusion would license Brigade and replace their internal renderer engine with it :w00t:

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guy rabiller | GOETZIWOOD STUDIOS
"N.O.E." (Nations Of Earth) Sci-Fi TV Show, Showrunner.

Effectively, post-process is used a lot for CGI animation but I think it is the old way. Today , I think the futur will be all done in realtime with a first pass... Regarding what can UDK do with this all realtime engine:




I dream that one day iClone can do this :w00t:

1) Motion Blur
A way to improve a lot the final images is to recreate motion-blur from the rendered images, especially if your final fps is 24/25. This can be done in HitFilm for instance, which uses optical flow to track the motion of pixels. It does not work perfectly in every cases, but it is better to have it than not.

2) Color Grading
This is the 'Graal' of cinematography. Artists often try to have their final images directly at render time, while what's most important is to have proper lighting and color "informations". (similar to shooting films, perhaps you have seen how does look like a 'cine gamma' image - or whatever the actual used LUT - from a movie camera, those images look like washed out but contain everything needed for color grading, and the final "look" is done at color grading time).

Regarding the aliasing issues though, not much, there are some post-process antialiasing plugins and filters but they tend to blur the image unfortunately. Having proper antialiasing at render time is really the basis for proper cinematography (even before having proper linear workflow ;) ahem..)

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guy rabiller | GOETZIWOOD STUDIOS
"N.O.E." (Nations Of Earth) Sci-Fi TV Show, Showrunner.

Interesting. So that's new then in iClone 6 that you can actually render at 8192x4608. I'd seen the UHD setting, but hadn't tried to go above that.

We learn every day! :cool:

I used to output at 1280x720 (as target), but I'm now upping it to 1920x1080.

Is there anything post-processing-wise that could be done to the image sequences for further improvement?

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My advices on these issues:

- always render image sequences (you shouldn't have any audio sync issue if you set the same FPS at render time and when you create a avi, mov, etc.. from those images). I understand peoples want to see an immediate result by rendering directly to a video file, but if you render long sequences like you, then it is always a risk of having to redo it many times until it "doesn't crash" - and it is not always iClone specific, there may be codecs issues as well, as codecs can crash too).

- even with all the iClone "high" quality switches turned on, you wont get proper anti-aliasing of your images nor your shadows. That's just a fact. To have a decent quality, try to render at 8192xXXX, then resize those images after rendering to your original size (photoshop batch, etc..) then make your movie of it. You may be surprised how much more quality you can get from doing this. The default 3x3 super sampling is not enough (yet it is "super sampling", not "multi sampling", which is lower quality than multi sampling at the same rate because the samples are always "centered" in the pixel). Yet, 3x3, that is 9 samples, is not enough, 16 is considered a bare minimum - in general - so by rendering at 8192xXXX you get 5x5 that is 25 samples per pixel, which is much better.You should at least consider rendering at 4096 to have at least 4x4/16 samples per pixel. That is, if your final rendering is at ~2K (Full HD, ..). It will be slower to render of course, but try it at least once, just in order to see the gain in quality you cant get. Then you decide.

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guy rabiller | GOETZIWOOD STUDIOS
"N.O.E." (Nations Of Earth) Sci-Fi TV Show, Showrunner.