Thanks for the supportive comments folks - i was going to write a lot more today but a heat wave hit the bay area (northern california) and it was just too hot in my room/office to do any work - so i only have a short section today

We are going to create the cabin scene along with some character animation. I did find a ship cabin that i will use for the movie but for the sake of this tutorial, i'll walk through making one

USING 3D BLOCKS
well i am not a proficient modeller, and am too lazy to learn other software, Sketchup for example, so i decided that I'll make use of the 3D BLOCKS that come standard with iCLONE. Think of it as LEGO blocks - position it, combine it with other objects and soon you'll have a set
Using 3D BLOCKs is most effective when paired with the right texture and lighting. So we'll talk a bit about textures and a couple of good habits to adopt

AnimaTechnica Good Habit #1: Texture harvesting - everytime you run into a texture, save it. At times when i see a nice floor pattern in the mall, or nice clouds in the sky, i take a picture for future use as textures

AnimaTechnica Good Habit #2: Create a folder of textures you've harvested - label them appropriately - tiles, floors, windows, doors, fabrics, metals etc..

Let's talk about iClone material controls - let's just focus on 3 things most commonly used in this scene



for our cabin we will use primarily the DIFFUSE map and the BUMP map

Think of the DIFFUSE map as essentially a decal or sticker you would apply to an object - the higher the resolution of this map, the better looking the texture but the bigger the file size.

The BUMP map simulates a 3D effect on your object - for example even if your object is flat, with a bump map it will look like it has bumps, dips etc..IMPORTANT - bump maps are most visible with the right lighting - too bright a light washes them out and you won't see the effect

OPACITY - simple concept anything black will become transparent, greay semi-transparent and white -opaque - you can use this to etch out shapes, holes in an object but note this is only good for medium shots, for close ups, it does not look good

one thing to note, if you load a gray scale image into the bump map, the lighter colors become bumps and darker colors are the dips

TILING - this refers to how many times you want the DIFFUSE map to be repeated. You can repeat the DIFFUSE map Horizontally or vertically

OK we've enough of the basics to do some damage

BUILDING THE CABIN

to build the cabin, we will use the 3D BLOCKS and most specifically the WALL and the FLOOR props.
1) Go to SET - PROPS - 3D BLOCKS - WALL AND FLOOR and drag the FLOOR into the workstage
Use the TRANSFORM controls to position it appropriately.



As before, i would go to images.google.com to look for wood textures - load this texture as DIFFUSE and also BUMP. Now CLICK on BUMP and adjust the SATURATION slider down to zero to make the BUMP picture gray

Once you have both DIFFUSE and BUMP maps loaded, click on SAVE MATERIAL to save both of these maps into one file. This way when you want to apply the same look to another object, you can then just reload this material file instead of going through and loading diffuse and bump separately

2) Load an AVATAR into the scene this will help us determine the right size cabin to build- use the XZY TRANSFORM controls on the MODIFY panel to resize the FLOOR to the appropriate size

3) Go back to the PROP section and this time, drag a WALL prop to the scene. go to MODIFY panel and click on LOAD MATERIAL and load the material we just saved in the previous step
Now go to UV SETTINGS and click on BOX - this applies the texture to all 4 sides



4) Repeat STEP 3 to bring in WALL PROPS to form the LEFT and RIGHT side of the cabin. Use the TRANSFORM controls to position them appropriately. You can use the Texture controls to change the orientation of the DIFFUSE map -




5) Repeat again and bring in WALL props,angle them slightly to form the roof of the cabin



6) Now go to PROP - 3D BLOCKS and select BOX_001. Resize this so it goes from floor
to ceiling. LOAD MATERIALS and apply it to the prop. At your discretion you can select a different texture. Do it again to form another column.



At this point the cabin looks pretty crappy but not to worry since we will be filming inside the cabin and not the outside. so now we'll zoom in to the interior and start decorating it.

DECORATING THE CABIN

Now that we have the basic cabin structure, we will now decorate it - we will build a table using 3D BLOCKS, build some windows, and also import some props from 3D Warehouse

7) Let's drag a WALL prop again, adjust position and rotation as needed - click DIFFUSE and load a new material for our table top. Now use 3D BLOCKS COLUMNs for the table's legs. Once you have assembled the parts, make sure you attach the prop parts to each other so the table becomes one prop rather than a collection of props



nice little table eh?

8) Let's add some windows, use the same WALL prop as before, resize to fit and change the DIFFUSE map. Go to images.google.com and search for a window image and use that



9) Now we can build more stuff or raid 3D warehouse and leech off other people's work



10) i want to add a touch of family for the captain so we will build a little picture frame



11) really straight forward, we will add a another...you guessed it WALL prop..resize and position it using the TRANSFORM controls. Now back to google to look for a picture frame i like.
i found one, added the photo of the captain's aunt and uncle. This will be your DIFFUSE map



12) Now load the frame photo into your photo editing software and turn it into a mask - basically make all parts of the frame white and holes black. This will be your OPACITY map.
Go back to iClone, and apply the DIFFUSE and OPACITY maps to the prop



don't expect to use this prop for closeups, should be good for medium to long shots only.




13) I'll build another prop- drag a 3D BLOCK - 3D SURFACE - PAPER_B prop to the workstage
and apply a DIFFUSE map using an old map of the world. Also add another 3D Warehouse prop in the form of a book


so now we are done with the set design, lets look at lighting. As you can see below, the image
is washed out, not too appealing. We 'll have to adjust the lighting.. as i said before I always turn AMBIENT lighting to BLACK (if i want to have that dark contrasty look)

14) Ok now i like using orange lights and pink lights - i usually position them at 45 degree angle from the character, orange on the left, pink on the right- this is what it looks like below - so as you can see, the previously drab looking cabin can be made to look decent

Sorry about the heat wave akn. Me . . . I'm sitting here in my balaclava and drinking Bovril. Your doing a great job. There seems no doubt there is a need for step by step tutorials which is proven by the amount of hits you have already received on this thread.

gizmo

Thank you so much for this - the information you're providing is incredibly helpful and instructive.

Outstanding work Gabe. Thanks for taking the time to write this extensive production diary. It really is essential reading for everyone to see how a iClone pro like yourself goes about creating a project from scratch.

I'll pin this so it always readily available.

                                                                

Peter
Forum Administrator

www.reallusion.com

Thanks Peter, I was hoping that this good piece of work would be pinned. Please ask RL to contract to produce more.

All arts is political, otherwise it would just be decoration. And all artists have something to say, otherwise they'd make shoes.

Earl of Oxford

ok ma-ladies and germs, we not got the scene we sorta like now we will work on animating the character. as you can see, i still have a default character in there - you can change this now to the desired character you want to use

SOME BASICs on EDITING MOTIONS
First we need to get a basic understanding of how iClone's timeline works
but first just so we are clear, let's make sure we are talking about the same things

the timeline below the workstage is what i call the playback timeline. You can use it for easy keyframing like we did with the ships motion. Works with props but not so great with character motion For that you need the MOTION TIMELINE which you can get by clicking on the SHOW TIMELINE icon (see below)



ANIMATECHNICA Tid Bit #1: FRAMES in iCLONE - the frame counter is displayed in the animation timeline, you can toggle this display to show the TIME by clicking on the clock face looking icon. You can also use this icon to set the maximum number of frames. For me i use the FRAME display. One thing to remember:

Time in seconds * 60 = # of clone frames
Number of Frames / 60 = time in seconds

so if you have a 3 minute song, you can set your total number of FRAMES to 180*60 = 10800 frames

Conversely if you had 2000 frames, you will render = 2000/60 = 33.3 seconds

ANIMATECHNICA Tid Bit #2 : Adging a keyframe means you are telling iClone to remember and lock down the character's position and pose at this point in time
iClone calculates what happens between keyframes
so if you set a keyframe at frame 0 and another one at frame 100, iClone calculates what happens between 0 and 100. Why is this important? well so if you apply a motion, the start of the motion becomes a keyframe and the pose of the character at preceding keyframe and this new one will be calculated by iClone. example if at key frame 0 my character is sitting down and at keyframe 100 my character is standing up, iclone calculates what happens in between so you see the character transition from one pose to another.