So, I just bought a whole slew of stuff from the shop (Big thank you, to the Wife! 8D), but I to maximize my purchase, I skipped 3DXchange Pipeline and the curve control plugin, instead going for PopcornFX, CC Pipeline, the Essential Morphs, Headshot and the iRay Plugin.

I'm a traditional animator, though. I'm used to using control curves and though I've been watching a lot of videos on it, using the Puppet and Motion Layer controls still feel kludgy to me. Is there a way I can manipulate an Actor in the preview camera, by just selecting the individual body parts or using control curves, like I would in Maya or Max? Yes, you can use the Bone Edit box in the Motion Layer, but it's sometimes hard to select the bones.

In theory, I was thinking of parenting dummies to each of the bones, with a transparent image box, but you'd have to manually add each dummy to each bone, in order to create a controller, which is a lot of work. In addition, this would have to be per Actor, which is again, a lot of work.

I'm trying to find a simpler solution. 

I'd save yourself any headache and get the curve editor. I've started animating back in iClone now it has one.

Reallusion Tutorials and Tips: https://www.youtube.com/@3DPixl 

Well that sucks. I just blew all this cash on upgrades, some of which, like iRay and PopcornFX, apparently are no longer supported, but I have to shell out another 100-200$ bucks for a plugin that's a standard on every other animation software out there? That's ridiculous. LMAO. The whole purpose of using iClone was to do game modeling and animation in one product. I mistakenly bought PopcornFX, thinking I could export the effects, but it doesn't support iRay and I can't export effects. It seems iRay is dead in the water now, with the default renderer getting new improvements and the 2 2080s I have in the Beast can't even be used to their maximum potential. I want to be able to move my body parts, real-time using control curves, just like I would do in Max, Maya, C4D and Blender, with a curve editor to smooth things out. This isn't the 90s....Let's leave the "Puppet Controls" to Poser and move forward.

I don't mind using motion clips, but some characters require their own animations and I don't want to have to export a model from CC3 to rig in Maya (HumanIK control rigs blow), just to make motion clips for a single character.

Hi...

I'm not sure where you heard that Iray and PopcornFX are no longer supported but that is incorrect. PopcornFX works as it always has with the built in iClone renderer. It has never worked with Iray. Iray is also not "dead in the water" as you suggest and can produce incredible results from both iClone and Character Creator.

It is also worth remembering that we had many versions of iClone before the Curve Editor plugin was even released and users still animated their characters and produced some amazing works. The Curve Editor is a great addition but it is certainly not essential to animate in iClone. iClone includes by default some great animation tools which can produce really good results. 

So really I think it's a little early to be writing off iClone before you have even had time to learn the basics let alone learn the more advanced animation tools. I would give it some time and see how you get on. You can always add the Curve Editor later if you still feel you can't animate without it.


                                                                

Peter
Forum Administrator

www.reallusion.com

Whoa, Peter. Hold up a second. I'm NOT bashing iClone. In fact, your software suite is almost the All-In-One package for indie game development. It's why I chose it, when my wife wanted me to get back into my profession.

1. I love the PopcornFX plugin. I have experience using PopcornFX for Unity and honestly, I like using your setup than the PFX Editor or the Unity Editors, especially with the sequencer. The downside is, it's not iRay compatible, which means I can't use emission meshes or billboard and I can't export the effects to use in the Game Pipeline. I'm not sure your reasoning for not allowing effects exports, but as an indie developer, if I could create all my animations, effects, characters, etc in the same program, it would vastly speed up my pipeline.

2. I love the iRay plugin, but the fact that my 2080 RTXs can't render at full speed is a problem. The fact that PopcornFX isn't iRay compatible is also a problem. Since I do all my painting in Substance Painter, having the iRay plugin in both, gives me WYSIWYG between programs.

3. Ask any Animator and they'll tell you that a graph editor is a necessity, not an "add-on." I've made probably close to a thousand animations, if not more in the past 20 years and I don't think a single one wasn't cleaned up using a curve editor. The issue I'm having with animating in iClone is that having to click a joint on a pop up panel, then move to the preview screen slows me down, when I'm used to just grabbing a control and animating in real time. Also, with control curves, I could do foot rolls, bends and stretches, etc - something I haven't figured out how to do in iClone yet. I don't want to have to export a CC character to import to Maya, so I can build a custom rig, just to animate.

Seriously, Peter, I'm not bashing iClone and I apologize if I came across as that. It was not my intent. I'm not a fan of the animation process in iClone and was looking for what's considered a standard in 3D animation, which was animating with a control rig, directly in iclone.

It'd be nice of Reallusion plugins for iClone were more compatible with each other. Sucks having to figure out a work around to combine Iray and popcorn fx.