Hello all... I have a question and appreciate it if someone can answer it.  I have Iclone 6.2 and mainly do toon work (or trying to do ) . So I am not tempted to upgrade to Iclone 7, as I don't do nor like PBR characters.  But I think that a better renderer like Indigo would greatly enhance my scenes.  So my question is... upgrading to Iclone 7 would improve my renderings? Is Indigo or a better renderer included in iClone 7?  Or would be better to stick to iClone 6 and buy the Indigo renderer?
Thank you very much in advance.

Martin

The Indigo renderer has its problems in that it is OK for stills but not very suitable for animation. Also, if you are after a toon look, it wouldn't be very useful to have a photo-realistic renderer in my opinion.. 

PBR is just a shader which gives an improved render look, so it's not limited to specific characters, and for a realistic look the improvement is substantial.

I have done one movie with a toon look in iClone 6 in the form of an animated comic book (so the panels are stills, but the page turns are animated). I think it looks pretty good and shows what you can accomplish in iClone 6.



There are other members that have created comic books with iClone with very nice results.

So for the moment I think you are fine with just iClone 6. I usually don't do toon work, so I couldn't say yet if iClone 7 will give a major improvement. Perhaps others with more experience can chime in.

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Indigo is "not suitable for animation" mostly because it requires a huge amount of storage space (every 3d object and texture is stored separately for every frame) and a huge amount of time (with the current indigo beta you can get by with spending about 5 minutes per frame - so over six days of rendering per minute of animation, if you are at 30 frames per second).

I don't know how well Indigo works for toon. Indigo is made for photorealism.

- Keith

I support the previous replies.

In addition to what they said, you don't have to use the PBR shader if you really don't want to.  You can specify to use the legacy shader if you want.

I think you'll be quite happy with iC7.  Even for "toon" looks, you still want nice lighting, good shadows, and things like that.  There are many new "creative control" capabilities in iC7, including the "coming soon" Curve Editor.

I say, "Go for it."
If in doubt, evaluate a trial version installation of iC7.  Just keep in mind that when you do buy iC7, you will delete the trial and then do an installation of the purchased version (you don't just "unlock" the trial).

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iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
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Just have to say, cool execution of that movie, Ani -- love the page turns and overall comic look.  

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Alienware Aurora R16, Win 11, i9-149000KF, 3.20GHz CPU, 64GB RAM, RTX 4090 (24GB), Samsung 870 Pro 8TB, Gen3 MVNe M-2 SSD, 4TBx2, 39" Alienware Widescreen Monitor
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

Thank you all for the valuable opinions. Nice work animagic!  I am mainly focused on developing cartoon video clips for kids. It is clear that Indigo definitely will add to any kind of rendering, being still or animated, toon or realistic. But as per your comments, for animation is more suitable for a company with a decent server farm than for the average one-computer-only-guy.  I will try-out IC7.