Hi,
I want to start with 3D animation and everything that is involved and I am checking out the different softwares.
I really like the first impression of iclone.
I also checked out blender.

What is the reason to spend money for iClone, when I can have blender for free.

Please make me buy iClone!

Thank you

Thomas

We don't have to "make" you buy anything -- buy what you want.

For character animation there isn't anything close to iClone.  For other -- there are lots of 3D packages out there, and some are far better than iClone at doing specific things.  But if you want to animate characters, you can't do it anywhere else as easily and quickly.

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Alienware Aurora R12, Win 10, i9-119000KF, 3.5GHz CPU, 128GB RAM, RTX 3090 (24GB), Samsung 960 Pro 4TB M-2 SSD, TB+ Disk space
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

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

Coming from a longtime Maya user, I find iclone to be a breath of fresh air, and the next step for those lone wolf types who want to do everything themselves. Traditional 3d softwares like Blender, Maya, and 3dsMax are so GRANULAR. Every single polygon and keyframe must be accounted for. Not only do you have to build these assets from scratch, but you need to engineer your own production pipeline so it all works sustainably and with modularity. It's too much work and experimentation for one person.

The entire reallusion pipeline is figured out. It's quite genius, I think, that you have ONE topology to base all your characters off of so it's easy to fix EVERYTHING down the road. The same UVs, the same rig, the same animations, the same morphs- it's all modular and sustainable like a world where everything is recyclable with few landfills. Not only that, but Reallusion products are WAY more stable than autodesk. I cannot tell you how how many goddamn times Maya will crash on you just to tweak a mesh with a sculpting tool. Stuff like that rarely happens with iclone.

What you trade off for simplicity, you lose in modularity. This can be annoying. You have very little control over materials for instance. Everything is pretty much a phong shader. The Iclone toon shader is more like  a weird blanket compositing filter for the scene, than something you can control per character. But at least you can export from iclone and port it to other tools.

I think the best analogy to choose between the two: do you want to make a movie using a box of GI Joes, or a cube of clay?

Which is better iClone or Blender?????
I think its an impossible question to answer because I believe it is entirely dependant on individual people.
I have seen people make videos with Blender some hate it and some love it. I have seen people make videos with iClone some hate it and some love it

I have tried making video's with Blender and I hate it in comparison to making them with iClone. iClone almost totally suits how I do things.
iClone does enable us to make models but only to a limited degree, its not really a modelling software although it is improving its capabilities.
I use Blender for making models that don't come by default with iClone or I haven't bought from iClone store or marketplace. But anything to do with making video's I for one will most likely never be moving away from iClone.

Suggestion
Download the trial version of iclone and seriously check it out and also do some searching for video tutorials for Blender and try doing some there too.
Which you end up preferring will be your own workflow preference. I for one certainly see iClone is much easier to work with for making videos. 


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

The idea that iClone is more expensive than "free" software is ridiculous. If you go the blender route, you'll spend weeks trying to do something you can do in iClone in a day. Time is money. Iclone is a bargain because its GUI and pipeline saves you time. Enough time, in fact, that you can, with iClone, create your own studio. I recently had a discussion with one of the top real-time animators--a guy with experience with Unreal/Unity, Lumberyard, etc. He was fascinated by the iClone approach because he could see how it could save so much time. Using iClone, I've been able to enter and win multiple film festivals working in my spare time. As somebody who's been doing animation since 1965 and computer animation since the early 1980s, it's 100% clear to me that iClone is the most powerful single-person-studio animation tool ever developed. There's nothing like it anywhere.

That being said, I sure would love to have motion-blur...

Geoffrey James
Intel Core i9-9980XE 18 Cores @ 4.5GHz, 128GB @ 3000MHZ, 2 NVIDIA® TITAN RTX, 512GB SSD, 2TB SSD, 10TB HDD, 1200 Watt PS, Viewsonic 43" 4K. 

+1.  Sigh.

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Alienware Aurora R12, Win 10, i9-119000KF, 3.5GHz CPU, 128GB RAM, RTX 3090 (24GB), Samsung 960 Pro 4TB M-2 SSD, TB+ Disk space
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

Why not both.
I don't like Blender for all the add-ons you have to get and some have no support and Blender has no teachable manual and it's difficult to find good help online for some queries. 
But what I do like is using both, I make content in Blender and then use iClone to stage and animate characters.
 

What makes iClone remarkable is it's many, many "Scripted Tools" that takes the pain away from animation.
Physics, Constraints, Camera enhancements, Curve Editor and much, much more.

Such as, Lip Sync.... You add audio and text... the iclone speech engine animates "For you."
Good audio produces very nice results with minimal clean up.

If you advanced 3d animation skill and know how to "Script 3d Tools"... stick with Blender.
Easier said than done.

If you don't have required "Advanced Animation Skill"... Produces animated clips super fast with iClone, CC and 3dxchange.
...because Blender, Maya, Max, Houdini and many others "WILL" produce Fast and Accurate results.
"IF"... you can script the tools to speed up the entire process... Like iClone does.

Thank you for all these elaborate answers.
They helped me a lot.
Even I have not yet decided.
Of course using both tools would be the best solution ... but they are both not easy to control and unfortunatelly both totally different in their interfaces.

Two additional questions:
1. How easy and stable is it to import content from blender to iClone (rigging, file formats, other contents ...)
2. What does the price of iClone buy you? Is it a lifetime price or do you have to pay again for each new version? How many additional plugins you need for a real start?

Thank you