Greetings to our users,
Thank you for your long-term support and we wish everything has been going well for you, thus far.
This year starts off with the introduction of
AccuLips and new facial capabilities of ExpressionPlusfor
iClone 7.9 in March.
Smart Hair shader with Smart Hair component design was also introduced with
Character Creator 3.4, elevating visual quality. In April, Character Creator rose up to become the best digital human solution for the
NVIDIA Omniverse platform, in a bid to fulfill the demands in media/entertainment, architecture, engineering/construction, games, and machinima. In June, full
Blender Character Pipeline and
iClone MetaHuman Live Link are introduced to bring out quality character / animation to Blender and Unreal Engine. All of these updates originate from our ambition to serve professional—and hassle free—digital human and character animation solutions to the world. And this is just the beginning!
Expect to see updates to ActorCore, Omniverse plugin, Unity Auto Setup, and iClone 8 / Character Creator 4 work-in-progress for the second half of 2021!
Expression-ready Low-poly Characters Available in ActorCore
ActorCore supports over 1,300 mocap motions, and soon will be upgraded to support quality low-poly characters for use in 3D crowd scenes for game, film, business/training, media/entertainment, architecture, engineering and construction, etc.
All characters are compatible with ActorCore motions with support for facial animation. Poly count ranges from 7K to 10K quads with a single 4K resolution material.
AI Driven Facial Animation for Character Creator
NVIDIA Omniverse Audio2Face AI-powered applications can generate expressive facial animations from an audio source. With the Character Creator Omniverse plugin, users will be able to export Audio2Face-ready characters, for fast animation in Omniverse.
iClone Animation Comes to Omniverse
Followed by Character Creator, iClone Omniverse Connector will be released in the second half of 2021. Take advantage of Omniverse real-time raytrace render and creative collaboration. For Omniverse users, iClone is the must-have tool for generating full character animation including lip-syncing, facial expressions, and body motion.
Open Source of Unity Auto Setup
We provide open source for developers to quickly customize this tool for their projects, which doesn’t mean that Reallusion will stop updating the Unity Auto Setup plugin. Reallusion will continue updating it and sharing source codes to the community in early July. More information will be revealed on this
sub-forum.
UPDATE (July 14th): The source code has now been released. Please find it in the post below.
iClone 8 and Character Creator 4 are on the Road!
iClone 8 and Character Creator 4 work-in-progress will be shown in the fourth quarter. The following post will share the roadmap ahead along with relevant technical breakthroughs. For sales related inquiries and specific launch date, please wait for further notices from Reallusion.
iClone 8
Embedded Motion Matching mechanism and motion library makes animation creation simpler than ever, while Motion Editing empowers professional editing - flexible and effective!
Here are some examples:
- Motion Direction Control: Supports manual motion clip redirection and pivot reassignment for motion alignment.
- Bi-directional Motion Blending for Smooth Motion Transition: Remove mechanical and sudden transitions between two blended motions by defining the blend range to fade out / in the overlapped portions of the two adjoining clips.
- Animation Layer (Multiple Animation Layer Compositing): Supports reliable, flexible and effective motion part editing.
- Hand Key Motion: Reliable and easy to control.
Visual Enhancement has been introduced before (ref.
What to Expect in 2020), and the functions will be more mature and sophisticated in the final product.
Last but not least, the software architecture of iClone 8 has been optimized, and more new features will be introduced to handle big-scale projects. For example:
- Support for GPU computation for character animations.
- Hidden objects will not be processed in the background.
- Support isolating object(s) - a quick way to isolate selected objects for editing.
- Collection Manager will be introduced to freely categorize objects in Scene Manager, so users can quickly and easily show / hide defined groups.
- The merge project feature supports merging objects across different projects, which will benefit collaboration, and facilitates working with existing projects.
Hotkey Manager is one of the usability enhancements slated for iClone 8. More information will be provided in the fourth quarter of 2021.
Character Creator 4
More freedom with character creation!
Any rigged character can be imported, characterized, optimized in Character Creator, and exported to iClone and other tools for full-body animation (including expressions) - not limited to biped characters. Moreover, create custom facial expression data for any character to create vivid facial expressions with personality. The long-awaited wrinkle system will be released for Character Creator 4, but the specific version has yet to be decided.
The Reallusion Team