Hello,




What I did as a workaround is to use the Eyes reflection texture channel, with a little picture with a constant color. This way it looks like a constant color in the eyes, not affected by illumination. Perhaps in your case you could use this workaround to adjust the illumination of your eyes textures ?




Just the depth pass. This pass is then used in post, with correction ( to adjust its near/far effect ) with either a solid color, or an animated clip ( an animated actual fog but I didn't used that in this case ). I just used the iClone fog to create the depth pass not the fog itself, even if it is a bit confusing because this depth pass is used to create the fog ;)

This depth pass can have many other uses, for instance depth of field. I didn't do that here, but I certainly will in the future. The problem with the iClone DOF is that it is very ruff, and even if you set a nearly infinite range you can still see a harsh 'halo' around every objects, even if nothing is blurred, so I prefer to avoid it, except for extremes effects perhaps.




I use a Softimage|XSI plugin from RE:Vision Effects wich is called ReelSmart Motion Blur and is used in the compositing part, the 'FXTree', of XSI. Albeit this plugin is available for other softwares as well ( After Effects, Combustion, Fusion, Nuke, etc.. ).

I know well this plugin because when I was head of R&D at 'LaMaison' ( a french VFX company ) we helped RE:Vision to port their tools to XSI and we actualy coded this XSI plugin.




Not in this case.




I'm very glad you find it inspirational and this is exactly my intention, and to point to the fact that a tool can always be pushed harder than it's known results, albeit always with a lot more work.

I'm jumping on the occasion to add this :

One may have the feeling that I'm perhaps 'jaded' ( not sure if this is the right word ) and that what I'm showing on in this thread is easy for me.

Well, technicaly, for me, it's easy yes, regarding the procedures. I have no merit though, because I'm 'just a professional' who know this kind of stuff from quite some time now.

It doesn't mean it doesn't require a lot of work though. I guess patience come with experience as well, and it is certainly the key to achieve this and a lot of other things.

It's a long process to prepare your characters and sets to create all the needed versions. You have to go through all the surfaces and materials, change everything several times, eventualy create a second set of UVs, bake ambient occlusion, etc.. Fortunately, this is a one time job. Once you have all your versions, then you can use them on an unlimited number of shots and rendering can be done relatively quickly then.

Also, I'm not showing this kind of rendering thinking everybody should do this. I don't despise work done with iClone because it does not have a 'film look', not at all. It's just the way I intend to go when it comes to rendering, but as kurzal pointed it earlier, ultimately, what's important is the script and performances. The rest is 'cherry on the cake', but it happens I'm at a point where I'm as much concerned by the cake as by the cherry ( I hope this is the right english expression ;) ).

Lastly, lets hope the iClone developers are as much inspired as you are and will help us push the limits by working on the right features.

Cheers,
Guy.

--
guy rabiller | GOETZIWOOD STUDIOS
"N.O.E." (Nations Of Earth) Sci-Fi TV Show, Showrunner.

Yes.

I didn't mention that I have previously tried the same trick, and under the right ambient lighting conditions it works for me. I used partial opacity to enable the eyes to show through.

General Picture - animating now to life itself(tm)
Member of Content Wizards

Holly sh!tting COW!!!!!!

Guy that was absolutely stunning and the best thing I have ever seen done with iClone.  No disrespect to the great directors, actors, musicians, script writers and the like, but visually this floors everything done in iClone to date :w00t:

Yes there are a few shadding questions and anti-aliasing issues but my GOD....WOW!!!!!

Brilliant, just brilliant!!!!!!

___________________________________________________________

Score Variations

Capemedia UK Limited's Website

Oh, I almost missed this one... (You should post in the showcase yourself thread!) 

Amazing work Guy !

Come and visit my store by clicking on the banner below.

Hey guys, thanks a lot !




You are right, I posted here first as this started as an experiment to see if it was doable with iClone but you are right, I'll continue in the "Showcase Yourself" forum.

I'll create a thread for the movie I'm trying to do for the Sci-Fi contest.

( -> [RADFAC] Sci-Fi - Remember.. )

Cheers,
Guy.



--
guy rabiller | GOETZIWOOD STUDIOS
"N.O.E." (Nations Of Earth) Sci-Fi TV Show, Showrunner.

Amazing results guy. so are you saying use various atmosphere settings, rendering out each of this passes separately....them composite those renders together in a third party app such as after effects. Then if thats what your saying, which blending mode do you arrive at as being best for this task. Again, my hats off impressive rendering for Iclone. Might you consider a video tutorial on YouTube?
Thanks
Steven

Hello Steven, thanks.




I'm not just using several atmosphere settings, I have first to prepare several versions of each asset used in a scene. Check this post for more informations :
Post50670




You can check this post where I sumarize the blending modes in an animated gif:
Post50623

And here for more informations :
Post50752




When I'll time, sure. Check this post for more informations :
Post51107


Feel free to ask for more informations if you find those unclear.

Thanks again.

Cheers,
Guy.

--
guy rabiller | GOETZIWOOD STUDIOS
"N.O.E." (Nations Of Earth) Sci-Fi TV Show, Showrunner.

Hi Guy,

I just dropped by to say a heartfelt thanks. Your work is very inspiring. I split your animated gif into frames and tried to get them into Blender and then use the compositing tool to make a basic pipeline. I quickly gave up (Blender is very hard to learn).

Now I'm trying to make shapes in Sketchup and import them into iclone - I think this pipeline will be easier. I don't want to go through each material and manually turn off textures, etc. I'm hoping I can do this in Sketchup somehow and then import the different passes into iclone.

Did you turn off the various attributes globally in XSI for each pass before you imported the meshes into iclone?

Thanks

Hello,



No, I only use XSI to create the second set of UVs for baking an ambient occlusion map per object, wich means in this case there is only one material or surface for the entier object, constant white.

For Daz3d objects, I export them from DazStudio in *.obj then import them directly through 3DXchange. I import them also into XSI to create the second set of UVs and bake the aoc map. For object I'm creating from scratch into XSI, I export 2 versions, one for the usual maps with a first set of UVs, one for the aoc map with a second set of UVs, unique uvs.

I don't set the materials in XSI because I have no real way to see how it will look into iClone. This could be possible, eventualy, but I would have to create realtime XSI shaders that would replicate iClone rendering. I did that a while ago for the game Supreme Commander, but it was easy because the sources of the shaders were available into the game install directory. ;) The compiled iClone shaders are embedded into the iClone executable so I can't retrieve the sources, and recreating thoses realtime shaders would take some times.

I don't deal with material settings from 3DXchange either, for a very specific reason :

There is no 'session' you can save/load in 3DXchange, wich means if you import an *.obj file into 3DXchange, then start setting materials, then if 3DXchange crashes, you loose everything and you have to redo it all again. This happened to me several times, so I gave up settings materials there. I just smooth the normals, set pivots if needed then export to iClone.

Then in iClone I set the materials. Here I can save a project so if iClone crashes for any reason while I'm setting materials, I don't have to redo it all again. ;)

I create a 'full' version with all material settings and textures channels, then I create the different versions needed for each pass from there, by removing textures and setting the right attributes for each version.

I always use external textures, for memory efficiency.

Cheers,
Guy.

--
guy rabiller | GOETZIWOOD STUDIOS
"N.O.E." (Nations Of Earth) Sci-Fi TV Show, Showrunner.

Thanks very much for your reply Guy,



Unfortunately this is about all I understand :) And that took me about 24 hours of thinking before I understood it. :P

do I understand you properly - you move all preloaded content out of the default directories and start iclone with very little default content. I guess this gives you better performance?

I'll keep at it - I'm keen to understand what you do and produce similar results myself.

thanks again.