Dear Mr Wildstar,

You have shown me what I want, The Unity 5 lighting demo, its photo relaistic or as good as.

The next bits gonna be real hard for me, how was that done, how long did it take to render, how easy is it to do the stuff iclone does in Unity.

These might be hard questions and I do not aspire to be able to do it myself as I am still struggling with iclone so I really do need to stick with that for now, but fuck me........ thats real good.

Maybe iclone can do that but I have never seen it done.

Any info you can give would be helpful for my future plans but I am a niovice, I don't understand a lot, so maybe its impossible?????  I don't care I like impossible!!!! It keeps me honest innit

IRAY render times may be helped if Reallusion is able to add cloud based rendering services.

"*The Development Team is looking into cloud-based rendering service, but we can't promise anything at this moment."

This was posted with the original IRAY post https://forum.reallusion.com/374900/Iray-Plugin-for-iClone-7-and-Character-Creator-3
Has anyone heard of any updates about this?

EDIT: Looked into the prices and they are kind of insane especially if you don't want it to take forever to render a scene.

Using a render farm is only practical if you are doing commercial work where you and pass the render farm cost's onto the client who is demanding that level of final quality.

RAG DOLL COLLISION ANIMATIONS FOR ICLONE 8 & 7
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Ghost Origins

My latest Feature length film created with Iclone.

My IMDB listing
Anabran Abdhul Quarnain - IMDb

This whole thread has been real interesting for me.  I have learnt the limitations of iclone, somewhat, and I have learnt that to do what want requires a team of people using current technology as everything is rather complicated if you want to produce quality gear whether it be stylised art or photrealism.  However regarding photprealism the link below is real interesting and is possibly the answer for me, photorealism without a team of 200 people taking 18 months to produce a 20 minute segment at a cost of million, path tracing and Optane 4, whateever that is.  Will this be available cheap within 5 years?  Who cares, I'm patient as I'm real old but dont give a shit no more so we shall see.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrF4k6wJ-do

Optane 4, whateever that is

Octane 4 is a top rendering engine.    Now available in Unity,  and in 21,  yep- count em 21,  3D and graphic apps.
Available as a convenient plugin.    It's known industry wide.  I've requested it to be made available to Iclone 7.

But more support from this forum would help.

Tell me what to do or who to pester.  I've liked iclone from the get go even though I had horrendous problems with reliabilty until 7.2 I think.  I think its better than previz and used with skill its TV quality but if they want to take it to the next level it needs to be more reliable and easier to use in terms of getting high ouput quality.  I have now hit a glass ceiling or whatever because I don't have the broad range of skills required to do what I want and don't have the time to aquire them given other commitments and most importantly interests.  I don't regret buying iclone as I have gained an understanding of how to produce videos and what the difficulties are which I would never have got any other way.  However given what I have said I am not sure if I can progress any further for the moment.  Better renders would not solve my problem as there are no alternatives to having decent skills but it would mean iclone could produce better quality quicker than other programmes which is what I want, maybe in collaboration with others.  Anyway enough of my insignificant problems, tell me how to support your position regarding improvement of quality, if you fancy?

Hi,

suggestions I would make are:

1.  Post to the support tracker.   There's a selection for suggestions.   

{ dont know if you can keep posting, over time,  to remind people  }

2.  Keep talking it up in forum posts.  The majority of folks here don't seem too experienced in general 3D.   If they were
they would know more about rendering options, and certainly Octane.   They would be more likely to be pursuing it also. 
There's a groundswell here crying for better rendering.   But I don't think they know the options.   So help educate.

hope that helps.

IMO this should be the overall moral of the thread. It was an interesting question but ultimately andrew's words are wise. 
I watched a video today that was animated with Iclone but rendered externally, with what I'm not sure but Iray seems likely.
The render quality looked okay to good. Certainly better than what Iclone can produce render quality wise. But that's where the good stuff ended.

The animation was really bad, worse than marionettes, facial animation non existent, lip sync awful, cinematography basic at best, depth of field either missing in most shots or misused, and worst of all, I couldn't understand a word of what any character was saying. Put short, it was a complete mess. Not to mention that when you have a high quality render people actually expect higher quality body and facial animation.

The render quality did not make my viewing experience even a little bit less painful.

Rendering is one of the last steps in this process. Before then there's a whole world of stuff that matters way more. Without grasping those skills Iray can't be a game changer, no matter how fast any of us can get it to render. After something good has actually been made through Iclone, yes, it's possible to say rendering makes a difference. But as I've said before, I can count the number of times I've seen such an Iclone video on one hand and still have fingers to spare.

You know what would be a game changer? 5% of the Iclone community making a push to improve their craft. Though I rarely notice threads or posts encouraging such a thing.

RAG DOLL COLLISION ANIMATIONS FOR ICLONE 8 & 7
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ghost Origins

My latest Feature length film created with Iclone.

My IMDB listing
Anabran Abdhul Quarnain - IMDb

I agree with most of what you said.  Nice rendering is good to have, but it will not save a bad video.

To your last point, I have seen a lot of discussion about the "art" of making movies, but usually those conversations are buried in other threads and scattered around the forum.  A while ago we had a sizable campaign to start one or two new forum sections, and one would be about "making movies" where the focus would not be on iClone technical issues, but rather, lighting, camera angles, script, color grading, sets and environment.... but Reallusion has not yet acted on those suggestions that were enthusiatically supported by many users.

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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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