Dear Diary,

Gabe is freakin' awesome. That is all.




Seriously man, this is great thread...very informative with every thing explained to great detail. The screengrabs help tremondously, ...I can see this helping out beginners as well as seasoned iCloners...I haven't used the ocean in any of my iClone animations, so nice to know there is user-written info about it as well as the rest you catologed. Keep it up...if you have the time to do all that !

 

 

-Oliver

Hand UP!!!  Question from the dummy at the back.

If you are rendering at 30 fps, wouldn't your frames have to be 5,400?? for a 3 minute song, i.e. 180 seconds in three minutes x 30 = 5,400??

I know you are going to set me straight here, so I'l get my dunce cap ready.


Alley

yes good question Alley - that was my first impression as well but if you look closely, iClone renders double the frames - perhaps for interlacing purposes? - but never theless it is there

a simple test confirms this - render the default 2000 frames and you get 33 seconds of video

thanksfor the supportive comments O

gabe

Okay, I get it.

Alley

ok before we go on to animating the character and finishing up our scene, i was asked a question - how do you turn the cabin scene into daytime when AMBIENT light is black?

here's how i do it - keep AMBIENT light black...follow the instructions below and you get a daylight scene with contrasty shadows

also as you noticed in this picture, i populated the scenewith additional props from 3D xchange - carpet, map, flintlock pistol, desk lamp- my theory is a lot of details in a scene can drown out the imperfections as the eye gets distracted. I also positioned the orange point light under the lampshade as you can see

MOTION EDITING
now we will go into animation- here's our starting point - avatar standing in the cabin -
the way i envision the scene, the captain is sitting on his chair reading or writing on his journal.
He hears a knock on the door and stands up

some action items we need to do
1) captain look like he's breathing while sitting down
2) cabin is moving as if the ship was moving on the ocean
3) When the captain stand up, his chair gets pushed back a little

- here a video of what it looks like



FASTEN THE PROPS DOWN
1) looking at item 2 above, this means everything in the room should move along with the cabin - so to do this, click on each prop and link them to the floor of the cabin (easy way). Don't forget to link the avatar to the floor

2) After linking, go to the TIMELINE below the workstage and go to FRAME 0, click on the FLOOR prop, then ROTATE the floor slightly, repeat at about 1/4 the lenght of the timeline but rotate in different or opporiste direction as key frame 0, repeat for timeline positions around the 1/2, 3/4 and end of timeline

3) click PLAY in the animation controls and your cabin should be swaying to and fro


EDITING MOTION
First some basics- for editing motions, i typically use the EDIT MOTION LAYER which you can get by selecting AVATAR - ANIMATION - then clicking on the MOTION LAYER button on he left MODIFY section. I also use the ANIMATION TIMELINE as described previously



1) Making sure the avatar is breathing - first things first, the DEFAULT idle motion of iClone is the AVATAR standing up, arms to the side and breathing. It is much easier to modify this than animate a character breathing. So what we'll so is use this motion as our starting point, add a motion layer to position him sitting down, then animate the transition from sitting down to standing up

Start at KeyFrame 0 and follow the instructions below



Remember what i said about keyframes? It locks your avatar's position down in that specific time. So in the above procedure we added a keyframe at around the 400 mark. Why? Because we want iClone to remember the Avatar's pose at this point which is basically the character in a standing position. The idea is we will also set a keyframe where the avatar's sitting down pose ends and he starts to slowly stand up. But more on that later

2) Now we have a breathing avatar, now we need to make him sit -Go to the ANIMATION TIMELINE by clicking on the SHOW TIMELINE button below the workstage - click on FRAME 0
Follow the instructions in the picture

you just rotated the thighs as shown below, next step is rotate the lower legs. Make sure MIRROR is checked - this moves both the left and right limbs at the same time so it is much easier to position. Don't worry about the avatar body position at this point, we'll fix that later



3) After positioning the thighs, repeat the same procedure to position the lower legs and the arms



4) now we have a rough position, next we'll fine tune, exit motion layer for now, use the camera positioning controls to position the camera straight on, use the TRANSFORM controls to move the character into the right position on the chair near the desk. After positioning him, you can relaunch EDIT MOTION LAYER to fine tune the arm position



now that we are done, we have an avatar sitting and breathing - now we make him stand up. go to the ANIMATION TIMELINE. Notice the GRAY bar on the PERFORM row? This is the default motion we applied earlier. If you click on this bar it turns blue. Also notice the KEYFRAME we added earlier on the MOTION LAYER row. What we are going to do now is add a keyframe to lock in the avatar's SIT pose at around keyframe 360 - this is so that from frame 0 to frame 260, we want the character sitting down. then it start to stand up until it reaches its full upright pose at Frame 400



5) now that we cut the Default motion in half, let's move the right half so it starts around the keyframe 400. Notice a solid blue bar and a short outlined bar to its left. this blue outline represents the transition time so basically iClone will use keyframe 360 (sitting down) and then start to stand up when the blue outline starts - so the longer the blue outline (you can drag it), the longer the transition time, the smoother the motion. So what i do is move the fully standing blur bar motion to the right and stretch the blue outline



6) Ok we are done with this motion editing. Now to add a little more detail. When the avatar stands up, i want his chair to get pushed back a little so back to the TIMELINE we go - note i ended up tweaking the above so instead of the keyframes at 360 and 400 we were using earlier, i moved them to 410 and 450 - but same principle. Now see below for how to position the chair



ok now we are done with motion editing - next session we'll tackle camera

but [size=4]here's a video of what we've done so far[/size]

Fantastic Thread !

This is a great tutorial akznrdBerg...

P.S. Ak, I don't comment all your stuff because it is simply fantastic all the time so I fell into the routine...

Great Tutorial, keep it up !!!

Come and visit my store by clicking on the banner below.

thanks Guy - appreciate the comments

which reminds me of a story :

- Steven Spielberg was sitting in a bar in the late hours of one friday night. In one corner of the bar is this really old gentleman kept glaring at him, Spielberg tried to ignore the stare.

then suddenly the old guy walks up to Spielberg and punches him on the face.

Spielberg looked surprised "Why the hell did you do that?"
Old man glares at him "that's for sinking the Titanic"
Spielberg " wait a minute, i didn't sink the Titanic, an iceberg did"
Old man "iceberg, Spielberg - you're all the same to me"