Just want to throw this suggestion out there for any iclone plug-in developers looking for ideas for new plugins.
Reallusion recently released its Cartoon Animator to After Effects Plug-in which is great but I think they're missing an opportunity to promote the Cartoon Animator to iClone 7 workflow that many of us CA4 users have experimented with over the years. Currently it's a manual process to export files from CA4 and then import them into iClone one element at a time.
The AE CA4 export option exports everything from a CA4 project as PNG files, and sequential PNG files if an object is animated. It also exports a JSON file that tells the AE Plug-in how to reconstruct the CA project in AE for further post production.
I don't know a great deal about python scripting but how hard would it be to make a plug-in that takes the JSON file and reconstructs the CA4 project in iClone 7's environment? This would allow iClone 7 to be used for post production effects as well as make it easier to combine 2D animation with 3D animation etc.
We know CA4 content can be brought into iClone manually. (I'm not overly sure about bringing in sequential PNG's - normally I'd import animated elements as PopVideo files to maintain transparency). It would be so good to have a plug-in, and I'm sure the data produced with the AE export option makes the idea plausible.
If any developer wants to take up the challenge to make this, I'm sure quite a few CA users would be happy to purchase such a plug-in. I certainly would.
- TET
Animation and Video Life
The Lazy Animator - Tutorials for Cartoon Animator