It's great they keep improving Iclone, and I guess these new features are what
people want, but what about machinima? What about a real time or almost / just
about/ real time animation software?

There are already lots of programs out there that can render a nice static
realistic architecture scene.

Just sayin.....

Um, the new features are for real time, albeit with the necessary hardware, but still, just sayin'.

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My system: i7 3770 Gtx1060 6GB

Didn't understand the question..... Iclone is a software of realtime animation.
What is machinima for you?

I made this with Iclone and it was realtime....

Machinima (/məˈʃiːnᵻmə/ or /məˈʃɪnᵻmə/) is the use of real-time computer graphics engines to create a cinematic production. Most often video games are used to generate the computer animation. Machinima-based artists, sometimes called machinimists or machinimators, are often fan laborers, by virtue of their re-use of copyrighted materials (see below). Machinima offers to provide an archive of gaming performance and access to the look and feel of software and hardware that may already have become unavailable or even obsolete; for game studies, "machinima’s gestures grant access to gaming’s historical conditions of possibility and how machinima offers links to a comparative horizon that informs, changes, and fully participates in videogame culture.

Wikipedia link

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My system: i7 3770 Gtx1060 6GB

I get that the rendering is not instant in iClone for many users, myself included, but it is a far shot from trying to render Poser Firefly animation at 30 seconds or more a frame, all the while needing to pare down everything and do some compositing in a video editor just to get what iClone gives me at the highest quality settings in 4 seconds per frame. Once I upgrade my video card, even with 7's additions, I expect it will go down at least a bit. Now, I started animating by drawing on cellophane frame by frame, so forgive me if I can care less if iClone is not acceptable  to hard core machinima purists :) 

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My system: i7 3770 Gtx1060 6GB

IMO iClone never was Machinema.
the latter is repurposing a video game to tell a story.
Its a 3D animation suite.
If I use Skyrim, the SIMs, GTA etc to tell my story its machinema.
Rendering characters in another software even realtime and even Skyrim and Witcher mesh as I have is 3D animation.

100% concur.

On a related note...

Even my GTX 1080 does not render a moderate scene in real-time.  However, I can preview in real-time (40 to 60 fps).  If a person is really obsessed with the real-time aspect of iClone, I suppose you *could* use a screen capture utility to record your preview session.

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iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
Desktop (homebuilt) - Windows 10, Ryzen 9 3900x CPU, GTX 1080 GPU (8GB), 32GB RAM, Asus X570 Pro motherboard, 2TB SSD, terabytes of disk space, dual  monitors.
Laptop - Windows 10, MSI GS63VR STEALTH-252, 16GB RAM, GTX 1060 (6GB), 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD

I would hazard a guess that the OP suspects that iClone will no longer use a real-time engine, and is calling the use of a real-time engine machinima. The real-time aspect of iClone has to do with the preview in the editing window. The "rendering", or exporting of a movie is not in real-time. This allows for a constant, locked in, frame rate something that machinima does not offer. Games generally (I think always) only output in realtime and at whatever framerate the GPU can manage. This means that older/lesser GPU's may very well not be able to maintain a consistent frame rate.

So, iClone never was machinima, but is based on the same idea of using a real-time engine for much of what it does.

The "hardcore" machinima concept was never particularly relevant for iClone, as it involves recording the animation in real-time as if you are recording game-play. So there is nothing that iClone is moving away from.

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The origin of iClone is definitely machinima in my opinion and for me it´s still machinima even though the output is not real-time, but basically it doesn´t matter what it is.