jarretttowe (5/12/2016)
Can the environment be one piece? Jarretttowe,
My best advice to you is to Model your scenes in whatever application you choose to render them in. In your case, I would suggest that you use Cinema 4D or Blender because you already have C4D, and Blender is available for free. I say this because doing it in Iclone if you're not going to render it in Iclone is cause for a lot of unnecessary headaches of jumping back and forth between animations. If you have a reason to do it in Iclone --it would make sense to complete the scene in the app you're using for the final render, and import only the things that are necessary into Iclone to do whatever animation work you're going to do, and then send only the animation back to your final render application. If at all possible, use low poly objects as proxies to animate with and import/export as little as possible.
Cinema 4D has way too much under the hood to not take advantage of, but if you're doing everything in Iclone, then each time you change something or re-arrange something you're going to have to re-export whatever it is you changed in order for everything to be right when you take it into another application. It is far less time consuming to send FBX animations back and forth than it is to send objects, maps, and lighting. Even better still is that Cinema 4D and Blender offer a far more in depth set of animation tools then you would have in Iclone, so whenever possible you're going to want to take advantage of them. For instance: If I am just using Iclone because of say the Kinect Animation plugin, I could take the animation clips I create out of Iclone into Motionbuilder and massage them till I'm satisfied. I could then bring the FBX animation back into Iclone and save it as a motion clip, or do the same in my home animation application. The less you have to do in Iclone, the faster your pipeline is going to get.
My advice to you is to pick the application you're going to use, export everything you are using in Iclone now that you can, and re-set it up in that application so that it matches. Once that's done --do only the things you need to do in Iclone and export only that. It's a one time headache, but you will be far better off that way. Right off the top of my head, I would use Cinema because like Iclone, you can have your own library of assets that you can re-use more easily and efficiently with C4D's library and Catalog systems --which you can customize completely. You can do a lot with Poser, but the interface is not stellar and in a lot of instances it's counter intuitive. The interface is very much like Poser/DAZ except it's well thought out and functional. A lot of people use Blender, but I was not very keen on their interface and the obscure user controls, but Cycles does make an attractive draw for production. As for Reality,
It will give you a very high quality still image, but a lot of people routinely talk about leaving it rendering a single image for 40 hours or more. It's a progressive renderer and not built for speed. DAZ/Iray is easy to get a good render out of, but all of it's other tools for animating leave a lot to be desired but it will more than get the job done if you're only doing a single image.
I am assuming you are talking about an animation project, but my opinion would only change slightly if it came to a still image. I did not mention Maya too much because if you get into using Maya/Motionbuilder/Max/Mudbox then you're going to move into a whole new jungle. Autodesk's products are way cool, but they're not without their detractors like the learning curve and it's easy to get distracted by all the capabilities and integration features. Right now I'm into Maya/Motionbuilder/Mental Ray but I can already see that it's a major learning commitment. Autodesk is top of the line but it demands a lot, too.