Gabe!! You are so wonderful to do all this. Clean and simple to understand, I have been playing around with what you've posted and had some pretty decent results in a short amount of time.
You deserve the giant chocolate chip cookie award!!
moviechick

thanks moviechick - and please make that with macadamia nuts :)

Well, I followed the first part of the tutorial and would like to share my first effort on iClone, based on the first scene and some of the techniques you explained in the cabin scene tutorials. If I can do it, anybody can :D

Watch my very first movie

Sophia that is a beautiful scene - coupled with the sounds effects really brings the nice atmosphere to it

Thanks :) It's fun following your tutorial, right now I'm trying the cabin scene. I have a question though about the actor: I followed all the steps to make him sit down, then stand up, but my problem is when he stands up his waist never moves, he just stretches his legs so his feet stick through the floor. So I thought I'd just go to frame 400 a position him a bit northward, but now he starts hovering up right from frame 1, which looks ridiculous of course. What am I doing wrong?

ahh sophia you've discovered the curse of the missing keyframe :) what happens here is that iclone remembers your last key frame - most likely frame 1 when you added the first post motion so when you add the new motion at frame 400 it thinks it needs to transition the character from frame 1 to 400 so the character looks like it is drifting

here's what you need to do
let's say you have the character sitting up until frame 300 and you want him standing up at frame 400 -here at the steps

1) before adding the the standing up pose, motion, go to the animation timeline, click on the motion layer and add a key frame at 300. This tells i clone to start what ever motion, position you will add will start from this keyframe

2) now go to frame 400 and add the standing up motion - also at this time you can correct the position so his feet are touching the ground - click play to see what happens. most likely you will see the character sitting down then abruptly get up. To smooth out this transition, go to animation timeline, click on perform and you should see a blue bar that represents the standing up pose/motion. you will also see a blue outline to the left of the blue bar - this is the transition length , make it longer and extend it to the left to frame 300 so it smoothly transitions

3) now you can go back and jump into some frames between 300 and 400 to fine tune the character position so his feet stays on the ground. When I'm lazy (as is often the case) i move my camera angle so i don't see the feet but rather just the waist up but it still conveys the motion of getting up

Hehe thanks, I got it. I added another quick&dirty (I think) which was on frame 300 I shifted him z+1, so that at least he remains seated before he starts moving up :)

This is excellent!

So many Programmes' Manuals just list "How to's", in random order. Although iclone 3's Manual's, On-line & Downloaded Tutorials "How To's" are very detailed, IMO, they fall into that bracket. 

Time & time again the beginner will say ".........Yes, but where do I start?".

I, like several other Video Editors & 2D Animators in the Pinnacle Studio & Video Friends  Forums, have been encouraged to embrace 3D Animating with iClone, having seen the amazingly life-like Pinhead Project Productions, produced by iCloners.

Since I now have iClone PRO 3.2, I have the answer to my question & will be following your Tutorial (Which I've only chaced-upon today), adapting it to the Content I already have.

Thankyou very much for taking the time & trouble to Post.:)

    

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      REALLUSION FORUM ANNUAL PINHEAD COMMUNITY PROJECTS.

       New Pinhead Website & Project to be announced in September 2015

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thanks for the comments folks
so my next scene involves the deck of the ship - the captain barking out orders. I want the deck to look like its populated with a lot of people - but the problem is if you have too many characters in one scene, iClone (more likely your PC) starts slowing down, gets sluggish and non responsive - so how do we solve this problem?

The BILLBOARD PROP
if you look at SET - PROPS you will see the BILLBOARD prop. The BILLBOARD prop is basically a plane that always faces the camera so no matter what angle you look at it, it ways faces you

The PREPARING BILLBOARD AVATAR
Notice the BILLBOARD prop has 0 polys so it is ideal to use as a proxy for a real avatar

1) to create the BILLBOARD prop, follow the steps below



in step 7 above, why did we change the background color to BLACK? well because it blends better to the background, you can leave it white but the edges will stick out in a dark setting so i always opt for black. So we have two pictures we've exported - one with black background and another with white background - the white one will be used to create the opacity map - it is much easier to do this if the background is pure white

Additional tip - you can change the face, or the pose and export 2 files for each change (1 black, 1 white background)

2) Open up your photo editing software and convert the picture with the white background to an OPACITY map (i.e. the avatar white and the background black)



3) you should now have an opacity map that looks like this one



ASSEMBLING the BILLBOARD AVATAR
4) now lets go back to the scene - we will import the set (in my case the Galleon) and one avatar so we can judge the sizing of the billboard prop

Follow the instructions below


5) Use the Modify controls and import the DIIFFUSE map (picture with black background) and OPACITY map (the map we created at step 2 above)




6) use the MODIFY - TRANSFORM controls to position the prop near the real avatar and resize the prop to match the real one


7) once resized, save the prop under the CUSTOM _ BILLBOARD tab and name it CREW1

8) Now import the prop as many times as you want and position them appropriately in the scene. As mentioned before, if you prepare props of different faces, poses, it works more effectively. In the scene below we are only using tow real avatars others are BILLBOARD props

Adjust the set lighting as needed. Note these props do cast shadows as well

Additional Hint - if you want to save time, you can merge the Billboard props so you can import a bunch at a time next time you want a crowd scene




Here's an example of how i used merged billboard prop to create this 'army'

just a little update here - for my movie, i needed to create some costumes for the character - so we will cover clone cloth and texture editing next session..stay tuned