Update: Link to entry 2 "We're Living Together" further down this thread: https://forum.reallusion.com/FindPost495802.aspx

Hey Everyone. Here's my work in progress for "Craz33" a remake of Seal's "Crazy". 


I did two versions, and put it up for voting on Linkedin. Surprisingly the topic became a hit, and between comments on the post itself:
Linkedin Discussion on Craz33...
...and private messages, I got some good feedback.
Happy to note a number of visits came from Xsens, Technicolor, Dneg, Hotstar (OTT service like netflix) and others. 
I chose the second version in the video above, after collecting feedback. It's uploading to youtube right now.
Some couldn't believe it was entirely hand animated. Well, now they know it's iclone that made it possible.

Here's a work in progress screen grab of acculips syncing. It's good; gets you at least 90% of the way there. I'm really impressed with it.

I had to time a few visemes. One thing I couldn't figure out was how to "delete" blank viseme blocks in the acculips scrolling editor or rearranging word-blocks on the acculips timeline editor (can't seem to drag a wordblock after an existing one).

The Challenge: Rendered in Stock iclone 7
After seeing  Netflix's Resident Evil trailer, I set it on myself as a personal challenge to render out everything in iclone.
Pumped up all the settings on high and even on a stock Nvidia 2070, it rendered out at around 2-4 seconds per frame. Amazing. This is what gave the luxury of experimenting with so many iterations, and the ability to layer take after take of face puppetery with the mouse and the new exPlus muscle movements.

The Singer:
The "singer" is me, modeled on iclone's Caleb. 



 

The final video is now processed on Youtube: This will be my entry.


If luck favors, I might be able to get an iphone/mocap gear.
I've got an idea swirling around my head on using a mocap suit with iclone for something other than traditional body animation. 

Nice, camera a bit wild... 


Toystorylab on Vimeo :     Crassitudes (my "Alter Ego") on Youtube: 

Haha! Thanks.  There's a bit of "strategic tromboning" going on, to mitigate the uncanny valley for Digital human cinematography -- in this case done, because I didn't have any facial capture kit, so main features were hand animated.

If we don't get a reply email from Reallusion, and the entry is not put up yet on the main Entries page, is there someway to follow up?
**edit** Just got it up on the entries page along with a slew of good entries. Love what iclone is doing for Realtime filmmaking, and rapid iteration possible with it's smooth interface.

I'm attempting a second entry - this time rendered in Unity. 
Quite blown away at how good Unity with it's HDRP (hi def render pipleline) and the excellent porting of CC3 characters by @Victor.Soupday is (https://forum.reallusion.com/488356/Unity-Auto-Setup?PageIndex=1)



The animations - both camera path and character animation exported as FBX from iclone worked out of the box, well in Unity.
All I kept in mind was to match some settings for FOV and Depth of field.

While I'm not happy about how RL / Unity abandoned their pioneering work before Unreal came onto the scene, I still feel the intuitiveness of an iclone to unity pipeline, even via this save-and-import-via-fbx method allows for great results to artists/filmmakers who don't like the bloat of the UE interface and the spaghetti-meatball 'blueprints'

Will post the video here once it's uploaded to youtube.

Here's the video. Hope you like entry 2.

I'm grateful for some excellent feedback received via facebook, which motivated me to rework some aspects of the characters head.
while I'm still not satisfied with the CC3 shaven head look, which looks unnaturally smooth (didn't notice this until it was pointed out) -- I feel one area that RL/ iclone can address is this
- Vellus hair (peach fuzz)
- A proper hair card "scalp" for buzzed, shaved look.

The first comment in the picture below was in response to my posting "Say what you want, but I feel that CC3 with HDRP (and polished by Deckard Render) is a few notches ahead in the DigitalHuman (near) realtime rendering dept. down to the subtle sss on the ears.  I'm tired of the proliferation of 'waxy' skin Metahumans. It's like a mass drive to animate Madam Tussauds. "

Overall, this contest has fueled a passion in me to explore #adultanimation for short stories (along the lines of Netflix's resident evil series)

Entry 2: "We're Living Together" 

I'm using this same WIP thread for entry number 2 (technically it's entry 3) but I got an email from iclone saying my previous 2nd entry was similar to the first - indeed it was, but was rendered in higher fidelity using the CC3 to Unity workflow/pipeline. That older entry 2 video is a couple of posts up this thread

"We're Living Together"
Below is the WIP video 


The story behind the video:

I was toying with creating a 'graphic novel format' version of the impressive Emirates "we're on top of the world" video, and adding my digital double singing Final Countdown - just to see what the final outcome would look like.

Iclone, indeed shocks me. This is a suite of tools that allows film/video/animation to be produced on a desktop.
Sure, I had to use AE to do background removal and camera tracking, but the entire compositing was done in iClone, including the Fog particle effect.

As luck would have it... my main computer miserably failed at Zero hour - with a "USB device over voltage detected" error that won't let me boot into even Bios. (tried all the remedies on the net - i'm guessing it's an RMA situation)...

Anyway - I gutted the HDD out of the desktop and luckily it had the one test render I'd done via iclone - which is what I'm now going to use as the final.
The main iclone project however, is on the C drive which is an Nvme SSD and I don't have on hand an external device to slot it into. I did connect the HDD to my laptop which is how I rescued the rendered video.



The Workflow:

Mocap:  I own an Oculus Quest - so used it as the base mocap system using the innovative GLYCON 3D software.  It was a rough mocap, but gave a great base to work from for cleanup in iClone.
It exports in FBX, which I imported in 3DXchange and then assigned my CC3 model to it via export to 3DXchange from iclone. The resulting animation mapped perfectly as Glycon bases its mocap on the Mixamo rig format.
Below: Glycon 3D explained:


In Aftereffects I toyed with a combination of camera tracking and background removal and used either an old script (fbx export from Ae)  or the trial version of the FBX to AE plugin. I can't remember which is it that worked. However the camera track was exported from AE as an FBX and it mapped well to iclone camera.  I think I had to remember the FOV and camera back settings though.

The particle fog is from iclone.  I made an HDRI map from one of the still images inside photoshop by following tutorials on how to create HDRIs from multiple exposures and save as EXR. Below is a jpeg version of the Exr used. 
This is so that the lighting would somewhat match on the character - even though the final render used iClones Toon shader


I had planned to render just the character and particle fog as a png stream in iclone and do compositing in AE. But actually iclone itself offered a good compositing solution using the video as background and allowed to take advantage of iclones lights and the fog "add to atmosphere" setting that made it look more realistic.

Face performance  Animation:
The main lipsync is all Acculips, using the "singing" setting. Although I did have to type out the lyrics differently for better enunciation and lip movement - for instance "We're leaving together..." the first line in the song - i had to type as "We are Leeving to get her" . But not such a big deal as the acculips/iclone system works.  Yes - I'd like to see more granular control in the interface of acculips within iclone. (IMO) it's very primitive and causes some frustration right now - i'll leave that for another post.

There was no iphone mocap used (I don't own an iphone) everything was multiple takes with the mouse and face-puppet in layered "mixed" takes.
The Ex-facial expression sets are just great.  I'm sure with iphone mocap, it would be 5x better.

I downloaded a trail of Curve Editor - again, imo, reallusion should include this as a core feature/plugin for free. It is important, to have and if made part of the core iclone, would send a good signal to the community about the intent of Reallusion's commitment to democratizing animated filmmaking to indies.

Overall, this turned out to be an interesting exercise.
Iclone with it's intuitive workflow - and features such as reach effectors, rapid keyframing, mocap cleanup and even mouse driven cinematography- is great toolkit in itself that every indie (as well as studio) filmmaker should have.