Hello all, I'm Lysander and I work for Parnassian Studios, an indie game development studio based out of Austin, Texas. I'm primarily a software engineer, with nearly a decade of .NET development experience in C#, but I've also sporadically done professional 2D art (mostly UX- interfaces, logos, and iconography, both rastor and vector, and a bit of character illustration work) and 3D modeling and animation (primarily with Maya LT). My university degree was extremely generalized (Multimedia), ironically unrelated to my eventual primary career as a programmer, and I've since taken up hundreds of side-projects for just about every facet of computer graphics, so I'm a bit of a 'jack of all trades' at this point.

I'm relatively new to Reallusion software, having run trials for earlier versions of iClone but never progressing beyond that- I didn't find it particularly useful for any game development pipelines, already owning and being proficient in Maya, nor have I had any interest in other software Reallusion has made since. I'm currently trying out Character Creator's Pipeline version though, and actually I'm quite impressed with it. Software for generating model variance quickly in projects is something I definitely see a lot of value in, and I've previously dabbled with Mixamo (later Adobe) Fuse, MakeHuman, Bastioni Labs, Morph3D, and UMA and think CC is likely the most professional and versatile option available. It's not without its problems, of course, which I'll no doubt be detailing in the Suggestions sub-forum soon, but with Adobe assassinating Fuse immediately on buying them out, Bastioni Labs drying up due to lack of funding, MakeHuman's looking really 'bleh' and the process being anything but simple for real productions, Morph3D being completely unusable due to terrible programming and predatory management practices, and UMA being so overly complicated (community developed, so there's no real sense of direction or professionalism) it's a full-time job just to get it working for a project, CC really does seem to be the only viable option on the market right now.

That said, while I'm not really on the fence about whether or not to purchase the software, I am on the fence about the timing. We're not in full-time production mode right now on the game dev side, and I'd rather not fork out the money only to not use the software until the next major version release, and having to pay for it again. I have zero qualms about the pricing structure, it's exceedingly fair, but I simply don't have the time at the moment to make full use of it. Also, the fact that the 'character designer' and 'content creator' (me) are two different people is somewhat of an issue- I'd like my partner to be able to work the sliders for the base mesh for characters, but I'm going to be the one making and implementing hair and clothing, and given his extremely light usage of the application in just doing slider manipulation, I'd really like to be able to avoid buying two versions of the application. If there's some way to have him use a free or cheaper version of the application just for creating slider configurations, with the left of the process left up to me, that would be ideal, and yet I'm not really seeing any easy solutions for such a scenario in the FAQs or anything.

Well, all of that will be discussed in more detail in the appropriate forums- for now, I just wanted to introduce myself and say "hey", and get a feel for what kind of community might exist here and what to expect from other developers and the product staff.

Cheers!

Hi... Welcome to the forum. 

Thanks for sharing a bit about yourself and your future plans. We have a great little community here so feel free to ask any questions you may have in the relevant product forums. 

                                                                

Peter
Forum Administrator

www.reallusion.com

Hi Lysander,

You are allowed to install Reallusion products on a desktop computer and a laptop, it would be best to be a gaming laptop with NVIDIA graphics.  My little Acer Gaming laptop with a GTX1050TI out performs my big Dell Gaming desktop computer's GTX745, so it doesn't need to be a major expensive one.

That way you and your coworker could work on the different parts, but you will need to share your member login information with him/her for that to work.  Some members here use a network drive for storage and that might be a possibility your case as well, I have no idea how to set that up but it just seems like something to look into.

Hope this helps.


Dell XPS 8900, Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700 CPU @ 3.40GHz, 3408 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s), 16 GB RAM, - 4 GB GeForce GTX 745, NVIDIA compatible.
Acer Aspire V Nitro Laptop,  2.5GHz Intel Core i5-7300HQ processor with 6MB cache,  256GB solid state drive, 16GB Ram,  4 GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti graphics.