I've posted my fair share of constructive criticism and feedback on how to improve iClone over the years
However, I have to say iClone 7x has been by far the most stable and user friendly version overall.
It could also be in part that after 10 or so years, I am finally getting my head around it all, and I now have a good gaming laptop that is actually well above the minimum requirement spec.
But I think it's largely to do with the software evolving into something really good since iC2 (where I started out). I sometime look back to where I started this hobby, and it just makes me appreciate how good we have it now with iClone. iClone now allows me let my imagination run wild.
A bit of history about me in regards to this hobby for those interested!.
I remember starting out my dream of animating my own stories and characters with my parents Apple IIe where I used BASIC to code my animations and had to resort to creating very basic 16x16 pixel block 'shape tables' in binary code, which I then had to reference the 6502C Assembly Language code via 'CALL/PEEK/POKE' subroutines from the BASIC coding as the BASIC interpreter was far too slow to animate. Needless to say any animations I created were far from impressive and extremely labour intensive even for a 10 second animation. It wasn't overly encouraging.
Several years later, I purchased my own Amiga 500 which was a dream machine for people like me after being so restricted with a largely business orientated Apple IIe personal computer which was designed to run word processors, spreadsheets, never designed as a games machine. Anyone familiar with the Amiga and software back then, might remember the programing software 'AMOS', which was very much aimed at coding games/animation. Back then our avatars were called 'sprites' and limited in resolution (about 270 lines high and 64 lines wide, up to 15 colours). It was a very big step forward for me, opened so many new possibilities, but obviously by iClone standards, it was still extremely limited and labour intensive, so I really was still limited in achieving in animating stories. But I still loved the fact that now I could create my own characters (that actually had enough detail to appear like at least like a cartoon character) and scenes, adding sampled stereo sound effects etc. Later I upgraded to an Amiga 1200 with more processing power, sound and low and behold a built in hard drive! I loved it, it was cutting edge back software back then for amateur animation, but it's only when I look back now just how far we have come with iClone. Stuff I dreamed of doing back then, I can now do and relatively easily. I have created an avatar in CC2/3 that now bears a very close resemblance to the real life person I have based it on. I can create scenes with relative ease. Back in my AMOS days I couldn't just download props, I had to virtually create them in the scene. There were no set avatar motions (eg walk, run etc) in AMOS, you had to manually animate each frame, no time lines. No cameras, no special effects like smoke, explosions etc and of course it was only 2D animation vs 3D animation we now take for granted in iClone.
So move forward to iClone and for once it's primarily me, my time and learning curve that is the limitation to what I can achieve, rather than the software. The potential to create what I want is there, I just need to build my experience and knowledge. I have spent considerable time creating a one avatar that I wanted to closely resemble a particular, real life person. It's literally taken me years of fine tuning to get the character where I wanted it, but Character Creator provided me all the tools to do it. And I now sit in amazment how real this character has become. I can animate all the mannerisms, personality - bring it to life! (just need the RL to introduce an 'auto breathe' feature!) .
Anyway, in a nutshell, I love iClone/Character Creator. Of course there is always room for improvement, in particular some tools that aren't very predictable in behaviour and/or simply don't do what they are supposed to do. But honestly for me, what you can achieve in this animation software, is incredible, well beyond my abilities and that's the way I like it. Emphasis is now on me, to learn how to fully exploit iClone's tools to achieve my animation goals. Well done RL on creating and continuing to improve such incredible software that is accessible to the average animation hobbyist.
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Edited
6 Years Ago by
Darren01