Kelleytoons (6/17/2017)
Sorry if this might be a bit OT here, but can you folks who have gone this route explain to me (or show me -- that would be great) why you would bother? Assuming, that is, you will be doing your rendering in iClone.
Kelleytoons, I can give you my perspective if you like. I have a lot of time and money invested in DAZ before I started to do anything with iClone. I actually calculated it out over time and my first purchase with DAZ in 2010. All totalled, it's more than a couple of thousand dollars in my case and I'm sure that I'm not alone in those dollar figures. The thing is with all that time and money invested, a lot of us have become attached to the figures we spend so much time with posing and rendering and well --we want to see them at their best. It's a widely held belief that DAZ's animation tools just aren't up to snuff and for the most part I agree. In fact, if they ever improved the DAZ studio animation tools, a lot of us might go back to it for animation because we wouldn't have to convert every asset and we could get all that detail with very little effort. But it seems that DAZ isn't interested in that so we're stuck looking for other solutions to get our characters moving.
iClone provides that and more and for a lot of us it's enough just to be able to see the figures we've grown attached to live and breathe for us. Take Mike for example:
Mike is a character of mine and I have built her in V4, Genesis, Genesis 2 and Genesis 3. She has a backstory and is very near and dear to me. Just getting to see her in iClone had me on cloud 9 for six months but I want to give her the best that I can. But with the limitations of DAZ there were few options and a lot of trial and error. But with 3dxchange and iClone I can work out the animation and then bring it back into DAZ so that I can compile a high quality output. It's not about render time for me at this point but with the Octane plugin, I can get it down to about 20 seconds or so per frame with my setup. If I was doing a toon render, which is something that I love then I would more than probably do the render in iClone because I feel the toon render in iClone is superior to DAZ but if I want to go for realism, then I would render the final output in DAZ or maybe Carrara or maybe Cinema 4d or Modo. Most of us are getting used to moving back and forth between applications but I suppose it comes down to what the intent is on the user end.
I am not down on the CC characters but the DAZ geometry in it's native app is more detailed. If you take the right approach, you don't have to lose any of that detail. I am now getting my feet wet in alembic export from DAZ and MDD from the Animate2 plugin for DAZ. I am working out a workflow where I set the scene up in DAZ and then I set up a very low poly proxy scene that I export to iClone. I export the DAZ figure in the scene and animate it in iClone before exporting the BVH back to DAZ where I can either render the scene or export the alembic to another application. I want the extra detail and this pipeline is a way to achieve the best result with a minimum of frustration. I'm not at home right now, but I will try to put together an example in the next week or so, so you can see exactly what I'm talking about.
I have it in my head that if I am not going to be doing any special effects, then I'll do the final result in DAZ. If I want to add fire or fog or something, then I'll do it in Cinema 4d or Modo with Octane render because I can achieve a consistent result whether I use DAZ or Cinema 4d. I just bought a 4TB drive to store alembic/MDD files. To me, the final result is just as important as the workflow so if it looks good in iClone, why not take advantage of Octane and the Redspec Shaders?
Hell... Now I'm interested myself to see how this might turn out.