Hi all. I have decided to start a thread detailing my pain and suffering and results in learning to use Blender with iClone in the coming year. I hope you learn something from my struggles! And if you have suggestions, I would love to hear them. For my initial post, I have two images.
The mountain temple image is a 720p - 8 second render on a moderately powered computer.
The mouse image is a 4k 25 second render on the same computer.
This render engine is powerful, but learning to get the most out of it is going to take some work. Many thanks to IllusionLab for his initial thread that lit this fire in my head.

I should have noted above: these scenes are not my work, but are the free files supplied by Blender to play with the engine.

Gulp...Yeah, I need to get into Blender too...
I just absolutely detest the UI.  I hate the UI for Unity as well.
But, Good luck!  How do you like the Eevee engine.

Nice rendering, I love it.
But beware, Blender is free in charges but not free with learning cost. It's will crash you on some days.
Where you're lacking brilliant tool & powerful timeline to support your motion work.

Personally, I'm prefer to unity, because I fell " Totally Freedom" that I have never been experienced.
Yes, freedom for everything (Include UI).

I would like to hear about what the struggles were. And if it's about 3DXchange I am extra interested :  -  )

The IClone Blender path can be a real nightmare.  Both require a lot of study and concentration, and neither are particularly intuitive (although Blender's interface is absurd).  However, Blender is amazingly powerful, particularly considering it is free.  I've spent months on tutorials, and have just scratched the surface.  These are some images from animations I've been working on.  The characters are Iclone, and the rest is Blender.  The compositing of characters into Blender images was done in After Effects 5.




Regarding the merging of Blender and Iclone -- you have basic choices: Generate the backgrounds in Blender and match it in Iclone (what I'm doing because it is easiest and I have access to After effects),or bake your Blender objects and try to get them into Iclone.  This can be a disaster, but is often necessary.  In the last frame, for example, the bed and the character are both Iclone renders matched to a Blender background.  The shadow of the bed is cast by a bed in Blender which was rendered as a separate later then deleted out of the frame.  To get a pipeline going from Blender to Iclone you have to learn to optimise your meshes (decimating them), baking their textures, then exporting them to 3DXchange, and then to Iclone.  Each stage requires a lot of study, because none of the programs mesh exactly as they should.  It can be very frustrating (even with the extensive tutorials out there on Youtube) and considering the fiasco of the 7.3 upgrade (literally five weeks wasted) I am personally considering abandoning the entire process.

Good Luck!

--Bex.

Hey Bex! .... thanks heaps for your insights. In a wierd sort of way, I'm 'encouraged' by your findings, simply because I was feeling somewhat of a 'failure' for not pushing ahead myself with blender at this time. 'Time' is the key point - as you've mentioned - but hey - for anyone able to do the blender approach - well great ! - hopefully your extra effort will truly be worthwhile. I'm keen to keep an ear to Jarret's thread here - and I certainly wish him (and any others) the very best and every success for sure .... 

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Please be patient with me ..... I don't always 'get it' the first time 'round - not even the 2nd time!   - yikes! ... 

● MSI GT72VR Laptop, i7 7700HQ 4-Core 3.8 GHz 16GB RAM; Nvidia 1070, 8GB Vram ● iClone-7.93 ● 3DXChange Pipeline 7.81 ● CC-3 Pipeline 3.44 ● Live Face ● HeadShot ● Brekel Pro-Body ● Popcorn FX ● iRAY ● Kinect V2 ● DaVinci Resolve17 ● Mixcraft 8.1

Another option, for those who own 3DXchange Pipeline, is to export animated characters as Alembic. Blender can import Alembic. That gives you the advantage of all cloth and spring effects being baked into the mesh that is exported.

Hey Rampa, does the facial animation (by faceware or live face) saved in alembic work well?


     

All of the  original animation will be baked into an Alembic cache for rendering in an external application
you biggest challenge with an alembic to blender workflow is getting the scale right.

and of course manually applying the maps via blender texture nodes.

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