This is one place where a lot of iClone animators (filmmakers) are at a disadvantage.  If you see non-professional video on YouTube, you expect it to be short and you expect it to jump right into the action.  A good movie will often take 5 minutes to set the mood and establish a feel for the movie.  The opening credits sequence can be as long as most of the videos we make.  Sadly, a typical YouTube viewer will be likely to stop watching after 30 seconds if nothing interesting has happened yet.

I confess to having that bias myself.  If I sit down to watch a DVD, I am prepared to watch a 2-hour movie.  But if I click on a YouTube link... my expectation is more like 5 to 10 minutes of run time in most cases.

So fair or not, in addition to the sheer amount of work that goes into making a long iClone project, it can be hard to prepare your audience to sit down for a longer, more patient (and better) film.

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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.
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Yes, you have summed up exactly what I was referring to when I started this thread.

Now, you *can* tell a story without people -- it's very, very difficult, but it can be done.  But it's a bit like trying to play tennis with one hand tied behind you -- you are creating an almost impossible task for yourself needlessly.  People are what we identify with, and their actions and how they overcome (or not) difficulties are what storytelling is all about.  You can do this as well without sophisticated tools, and certainly without dialog or even facial expressions, but all those things help greatly (which is why almost 99% of all movies have some dialog and ALL of them have some facial expressions).

Animation has the advantage that, as long as we don't dip too far into the uncanny valley, folks are willing to "cut some slack" in regards to how your characters look and behave.  They will attribute feelings and emotions to them you don't show (this also happens even with live action -- we are great at assuming we understand things that aren't even there, which results in many different interpretations of the same film).  But the more realistic your character gets, the more the audience will expect them to behave realistically.

The number one mistake I see people making in animations is rushing things -- whether it's an action scene or (even more importantly) a scene meant to convey an emotion, the viewer needs time to understand what's going on, and you need to set it up.  It's what was mentioned either in this or Dennis' corner thread about needed some frame of reference: if you just show something without enough TIME for folks to process, then you aren't doing it right.

This is especially true of the opening of anything -- later on, when things get hot and heavy you can speed things up.  But when you start, taking even 10 or 15 seconds (an eternity in a shot) to linger on a character's face, or show the environment they are in, will go a LONG way towards letting the viewer get immersed in the world you are creating.  I want to see SLOWER animations, not faster -- doesn't mean the action has to be slow, but the editing shouldn't all be "Transformers" paced.

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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

Hi,

An interesting thing happened tonight; I got a system up and running for personal chats and meetings, similar to webinars that Reallusion hosts, if anyone is interested. :)

iClone Certified Director and makes miserable Westerns.

I've had to move projects from earlier versions of iClone as well, with mixed results because of slight differences in the animation engine or by using the newer characters. 

I use the Pinhead projects to do something fairly quick (reusing sets and such), but other projects take longer, because of the way I work. Creating sets takes time, for example. I don't mind that. I also tend to mull things over. Some projects are a bit beyond my technical skills, so they will have to wait. It is an idea, though, to intersperse short projects with longer ones.

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I think this might be a little off topic but I think it is also related to the topic to a fair degree, so.....

Here is my first attempt 3 years ago at what I was saying above.
After putting this on UTUBE I felt guilty putting it there because its not my story so I never posted any more of them. I published it back then to help the person who I bought all his harry potter characters from.
Saved me a lot of time buying his characters.

Anyway, I cut the story up into projects and I used this one to help me determine 2 main things.
1) Is it effective to use 2D images instead of 3D modelling for backgrounds in a scene?
    I think under certain circumstances it is definitely effective. The only 3D models in this are the characters, everything else are 2D images

2) How to get the characters looking at each other as they talk easily and effectively.
    Here, I added a cube for each character to look at and then all I needed to do was go to a frame and move the cube to where I wanted the character to look
    Made animating the head movements very easy and movements of the character they were looking at didn't make their head move unexpectedly.

I used the scene as part of a long video much later. But while I was creating that it was the whole project I was making and nothing else was considered.
Well honestly, not thinking about the long video while working on each individual project is something I have to work hard to keep out of my head so I can just focus on the project I'm working on and what I am trying to learn.
But I make myself do it and I find it works for me.




i7-3770 3.4GHz CPU 16 GB Ram   
GeForce GTX1080 TI 11GB
Windows 10 Pro 64bit

Do you have a link to any of your HP stuff?  My wife and I are kind of fanatics about him, and I wouldn't mind seeing what you've done.

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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

On the point of working 2 or 3 minute videos is more likely to get completed, yes I totally agree.

However the way I see things is that I can turn a longer story into many individual 2 or 3 minute projects
I actually do that with my favourite Harry Potter fan fiction stories that I want to turn into videos for personal watching.
I start by breaking the story text up into many files for potential iclone projects. I look for specific scenes/events in the story and I then treat each one of those as its own unique project.
That way I can work on any part of the story I feel like working on because I'm not thinking about making the whole story.
Rather I think about what I need to improve my capabilities for (improve my scene creation, improve my character animation, improve my texturing, work with particles etc). and then look for something in the projects that I can use for improving that.
 
Eventually I end up with enough short projects that I can use their outputs in my video editing software to work on putting the whole story together. In iClone I treat them all as a single 2 to 3 or maybe even a 5 to 10 minute project.
It is only in my video editing software where I work on them all as part of single story. I may need to go back to some of the iClone projects to adjust its output so it fits the story in my video editor better but I find that not too bad.

Not suggesting this is how anyone else should do it, I know and accept that i'm not an expert. 
Just stating how I do it and posting it as something for new users to see and possibly help them to develop their own methods.

i7-3770 3.4GHz CPU 16 GB Ram   
GeForce GTX1080 TI 11GB
Windows 10 Pro 64bit

Pixtim:
 "...the constant technical evolution ... when we do a project alone, it spreads rapidly over time. Software evolves all the time ... when you work on a project a little important, the technical and visual solutions that you have chosen at the beginning are not so good after one or two years ... so you start again your bases ... and it takes more time ... and the technical solutions are still evolving ... and finally you can not stand your project and you make another ..."

I agree with both you and Kelley on this. I'm doing a project now that I started in IC5 then moved into IC6  which, except for the lighting enhancements, wasn't a big leap forward, and now onto IC7. I expect to have to go back and redo some special effects but, other than that, I don't expect any crazy changes. I'm somewhat blissful in my ignorance of all the things Iclone is capable of, but then I'm producing an animated comic book and not Citizen Kane. I'll be experimenting of course and I will discover new ways to approach my video making efforts, but I'm confident that my basic style will not change because of new features. I'm All-In with Iclone at this point so "Onward into the fog!". :P

:cool: pete



http://www.youtube.com/user/peterblood50?feature=mhee

Agreed Ben, I do the same thing - render, re-render till it's right.  Even if it's only one little detail, I'll do it again until it's right.  As for the pic (we all know what film it's from, yeah?  It's pretty famous...) you can see that the child is oblivious, the father is nervous and wants to stay apart from what's happening (physically and emotionally), the lawyer dude is slick and also oblivious (and very assured, in control), and the mother is stoic and doing what she thinks is right, ever if she does look like a Whistler painting.  I'm not sure about Orson's lighting on this one, seems awfully bright, but that could just be to reflect the amount of snow outside.  The point is that every frame is a painting.  Take any good film and pause it on a random frame - it will look good.  That's how you make a good film, work them frames :)


My YouTube Animations