Hello:

Something that always bothered me about the character creation tools, especially when you are trying to create a team or group of dramatic characters, is the inability to get a more precise way to judge their height and general proportions to human "norms".  It would be great to have a standard male and female "guide" that can be toggled on and off so you can judge basic body dimensions -- especially height - and maybe even body proportions while you are creating and making adjustments to your characters.  Say the average male is 5' 10" and female 5' 6" -- you should be able to call up a colored grid with the general outline of the male and female character so you can see just how big or small the character you are creating is relative to the the norm.    For height, this grid can be vertical and show an outline in whatever the base position you intend on using will be (T Pose?) right behind or intersecting with the new characters vertical midline with the outline "glowing" or otherwise being easily apparent.  This can be done for the new character's depth as well when rotating to face the side.  Something like this should be easy to do and very useful.

Thanks!

Yes dimensions and measurements are important sometimes. In DAZ Studio there is this plugin called "Measure Metrics". Pretty cool stuff!

What I am proposing eliminates all this guess work and approximation -- or trying to compare sizes after the fact.  If you are building characters regularly, a vertical grid and a ghost representation that can be toggled on or off would be awesome.  It might even be cool that you can select different prototypical characters as your "templates" -- standard male and female and then some of your own, which you direct this feature to create the grid or ghost image from.  It would also allow greater accuracy in creating groups of characters or creating new members of character species that have various height ranges outside the human norm.  Another factor is keeping proportions with human norms as well.

What you could do and what I just did is creating a billboard with a grid. Billboard props come standard with iClone and have the property that they keep facing the camera, such that the grid will always be fully visible from the front even if you rotate the camera around your avatar for example.

The texture for the grid is a 32-bit PNG, so that only the grid lines will be showing (the rest is transparent). I enabled self-illumination of the texture, so that it remains clearly visible independent of the lighting. Here is Gwyn against the grid in two positions:

0 degree camera rotation:


45-degree camera rotation:

 
I used an 80 mm camera, which will help flatten the image somewhat. The grid is in 25cm intervals, but you can of course change that. The basic size of the billboard is 1x1 meter, so I resized to 2.5x5 meters (Z scale is 250%; X scale is 500%). The texture is 1024x512 and is attached (it should be 32-bit PNG). 

Position the billboard at (0, 0, 0) and the character as well for the rotation to be working correctly. For comparing multiple characters, align them along the X axis:



For accurate measurements, the characters should wear no shoes.

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Does the iClone Camera render the sides of a building it CANNOT see?
Does the cpu compute the sides of a building completely obscured by the building in front that makes it invisible to the camera wether any of it is rendered or not?
Does the camera try to render a building that appears 1m/m in the distance with as much processing attention/detail as the building ten feet in front of the camera?

I have not heard of talk about any of these three, I don't think.

Armstrong.

Why doesn't the algorithm take a "viewpoint" from the cameras xyz and centrally "look" outwards in the users desired camera direction. It's not so complicated that the "Obstructions" of an objects xyz will conflict with the cameras "view". That being the case the render should include ONLY those "Obstructions" as "Seen" from the cameras xyz.

When I used IMAGINE (That old 1994 "came on a single floppydisc on the front of a glossy mag" orange lines on a black BG GUI) it had such as system. I remember seeing a Mech walking and reading about how ONLY those sides facing the "Render point" I think they called it, rendered.

But this was in the days of TOYSTORY and way BEFORE Monsters INC.

It's high time ICLONE opted for UMBRA (http://umbra3d.com/ ) or similar technology.

Something that's blocked from view will not use resources for rendering.

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Actually, Animagic and Armstrong are right... But don't cry swoop. I think you're just talking about a really old version of iClone. I make things invisible in many scenes and they never appear in the rendering until I make them appear again when they are supposed to, and I've been doing it all year, since I first learned with iC5... also... just so you know, making props/avatars invisible when they are not needed also makes it faster to keep working.  Some of my island scene sets are over 3 million polys, so I really notice the difference in speed when I need them all, or not.  

btw, just so you know, there have been many things you've mentioned lately in different posts that seem to be problems from old versions of iClone - (e.g. I don't know which version you use, but in iC5, the eye maps really can be changed to look more real, and reflections in the eyes really are possible using the reflection map, and the reflections can be animated in two ways - by either keyframing the offset of the reflection map, or simply using a popvideo in the reflection map instead of a still shot... and if you're doing a really close zoom-in with eyes, then you can even make the reflections accurate using precise still shots or video of what you want the character to reflect - not just the reflection that would normally appear from any computer calculation... iC5 gives us great control over this if we really need it - which we nearly never do - but I didn't have time to correct you in that post though, sorry)...

... unless you are talking about some new glitches in iC6? Or else, could you please tell us which version you are referring to? 


And to answer the original post - yes, these scales are very easy to make yourself in iClone, so you don't need to do the extra step in 3DXchange that swoop suggests. Animagic's scale looks great. 

I also made this one, which might help you.


Just save it to your pc, then control-drag it into your scene as a prop... and just adjust opacity down if you need to see your character's size in relation to the background at the same time.

Or even faster - just load Chuck or one of the girls into your scene in the same position as your character (which is usually 0,0,0 when you're building them) and just adjust your new character using the standard male/female body as a guide. If you're using iC6, then you can even make the standard character semi-invisible (but I think Armstrong/Animagic are more experienced with that trick).

Either way, good luck!  








Anita, aka "Bleetz" the Toon Wrangler @ Tarampa Studios
SYS: Win 8.1,  64-bit, i7-4770 CPU @3.4GHz,  
32GB RAM, Intel(R)Graphics 4600 & nVIDIA GTX1060 TI 

Thanks for all of the advice and posting the grid.  I use a number of such scaled objects now, I have been using iClone for over 4 years now.  The suggestion I was making is that a grid overlay or similar tool be an integral part of the new character creation tool.  It would make this all much easier.  I really can't wait to see how well the new plug-in works in general.  It looks great so far.