@animagic. Agree completely. I'm focusing on making a single 45 minute episode in a series of 5 episodes.

Nathan

@ultimativity: That is a very useful summary.

An animated film is a film after all, and requires knowledge of many aspects of filmmaking, especially if you are a one man/woman operation as most of us are.

My advice would be just to make that first short film. It will most likely not be perfect, but then you have at least something to improve upon. It is great to have ambitious goals. However, it will take time to acquire the skills to make them a reality.

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For lighting, I found Blender Guru's series helpful; available for free on youtube. 
If you are making films; the question you need to consider is what type film are you making? The example you showed in your OP is more of a blockbuster type with wide views and expansive scenes. UE excels at these sorts of scenes and has the programming to display them in RT since games require them.  If, on the other hand you are making a character based story with tight shots and close ups of character reactions and conversations, iClone is perfectly adequate at this point to provide quality animation.
For quality animation there are 3 components that matter, imo. 
1. Lighting is most important because, cameras, like our eyes, simply record light and light bouncing. Volumetric lights are supposed to be shipped with iClone 8, along with some other lighting features. This is great. Yet non-essential now for non-blockbuster type character films. iClone has the tools currently to create cinematic shots, including DOF, SSS, and shaped lights. HDR and tone mapping also aid in this.
2. Human skin and hair materials are critical to photorealism. Most of the films I see made in iClone, and other 3D animations feature a noticable disparity between the realism of props, buildings, furniture, etc and humans. Look at most of humans and they appear plastic, or at best like game avatars, standing next to hyperreal desks and light fixtures. Prior to realistic human skin the only solution was to dial back realism on the props and scene. Now, with the new skin system and SSS, humans can look as real as their surroundings. The new wrinkle system is astounding. Hair still needs work.
3. Camera work is a feature of quality animation that many artists seem to take for granted. Again, many of the films I see in 3D don't use the correct shots to convey their story. (I do see many "cool" shots, as well as unmotivated sequences of the same shot, which I suspect are used in an attempt to keep viewers' attention because the filmmaker doesn't know what else to do.) Similarly, I have seen many multi-character conversations from a Medium shot when medium close or close up would have been much more effective. Uncertain whether the filmmakers are so proud of the scenes they've created that they can't bear not to constantly show them or the filmmaker doesn't understand visual storytelling. Anyway,  I have found the videos on Studio Binder immensely helpful in understanding camera work - location, shots, movement, motivation.  I am editing this post to point out that I have seen some fantastic iClone feature length films as of late and they might be a great point of reference for what is possible inside iClone.

All of this is for naught, if you don't have a powerful enough rig. Professional workstations feature Threadripper processors and Titan gpus, perhaps several of them and the actual rendering is done on a farm. These are the types of machines rendering the video in your OP. With the release of the new RTX 3090, (24Gb Vram) an adequate workstation is more affordable. E.g. a Titan was selling at $2500 and the new RTX 3090, with just as much Vram, will sell at $1500.

Anyway, this is what I see. For my current, character based series, I am using iClone. For my next, blockbuster series, I will use either UE or Blender.



Nathan

Is there good realistic lighting tutorials for iclone? I find if I just have one character I can use the presets in CC3.3 specifically made for a single character. But what if I want the entire scene to look like that and light up multiple characters?

Thanks! Keep in mind, I still consider myself an intermediate IClone user, I am in no way an expert. I learn something new every time I load up the program.

To answer your questions. You're going to get better quality and performance in Unreal. Unreal can render x10 what you could do in IClone. I mean you could have 50 characters on the screen if you wanted, and Unreal wouldn't break a sweat. However, you do lose some functionality by going the Unreal route. For one, price, you have to have an export license for everything you want to use in Unreal from IClone. There are also other features, that you lose such as sets, particle effects, etc that don't carry over either. Also you lose some manipulation of IClone characters.

Personally, I think that IClone has enough visual quality to make decent looking animated films and it's a lot easier to use than Unreal. I am all for visual improvements, and flares, godrays, etc. will be a nice addition. IClone provides me with everything I need to make a great film. I like Character Creator and making characters and sending them into IClone. Animating in IClone is very nice as well, being able to manipulate everything. The biggest problem for me is performance in IClone. Because at the end of the day, I spend more time at a snails pace, waiting for undo's or moving objects, and rendering out scenes to test the performance of the motion, because the FPS is at 2-4 and I can't tell if a character's motion is moving too fast or not.

Everyone wants to make quality like the video you showed, but the problem is those scenes took a team of people to make. IClone fits well with 1 person or small teams being able to do everything yourself.

The only thing missing is the performance aspect, for me.

As far as lighting goes - play around with everything in every scene. Sometimes you may want to use IBL, other times not. Disable the starting lights that come with each scene, and then add a directional light if outside, or point lights if inside. Add lights to every light source in your scene. Lighting should take almost half of your time spent on your scene IMO. I play around with the lighting more often than I do animating everything. Try out all the LUT filter effects, combine a few together. Turn on HDR, and Tone map. Maybe you want the tone map, maybe not. Every scene is different so the best thing you can do is just spend as much time as you can playing around to see what you can create. It's also good to have somewhat of an idea of the look you're going for ahead of time.


IMDB: James Muia
Aviticus Dragon on YouTube

Computer Specs:
Intel® Core™ i7-7820X Processor (8x 4.30GHz/11MB L3 Cache)
Corsair Hydro Series H115i 280mm
Liquid CPU CoolerASUS ROG STRIX X299-E Gaming Motherboard
32 GB DDR4-3200 GSKILL Ripjaws V Memory
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti - 11GB - EVGA FTW3

@mrl: If it is a consolation: I had a few of my movies selected for festivals, and others have been successful too. 

You can experiment with LUT too to get a specific look. Some use Hitfilm for post processing.

So there are many ways to further enhance your renders from iClone. Unfortunately, information about this is scattered all over the place...:unsure:

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Thanks everyone for all the good information.

I was naively presuming that all that would be required to render with another tool (Unreal/Blender) would be to export the project from iClone, open it in the other software, tweak a thing or two, and render it out.  Clearly this is not the case.

It sounds like, even using iClone/CC3, that exporting and rendering in UE4 would be no small task in and of itself and would definitely noticeably increase the amount of time I spend creating videos, which means that, for me at this time, it's not a viable option.

That's disappointing, but I'm glad I finally know for sure.  Now I know to focus my time on figuring out how to make iClone look as good as possible.


Mirror Valley
*Tales of the Strange and Unusual*
Mirror Valley on Youtube

There is not much point in comparing ray-trace rendering with a non-ray-trace renderer like iClone. One is not necessary better than the other. It all depends what you are looking for to fit your story.

As has been pointed out already, lighting is very important and a lot of users don't take the time to explore all the lighting possibilities in iClone.

I myself just discovered that you can make point lights directional with IES files. I've used that to create local enhancements to lighting to make a character's eyes more lively, for instance.

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my lack of experience with iclone is telling me that the iclone render is not up to par with unreal realtime raytracing. I have tried making it looked realistic like unreal, it turned out very decent with slow render time. The shadow flicker is meh. Maybe there is a way to get rid of it.


Vimeo made it low rez. The color rendition should be somewhat the some.

If you're looking into Unreal, make sure you can render with real time raytracing. It will require a RTX card however, keep in mind. 

I would build a set in Unreal and try out a few renders as well to see what you can do. There's a lot of control in what can do, but be sure to know your camera, lighting, and post process settings for the best look. 

iClone Certified Director and makes miserable Westerns.