I've been using iclone for a couple years now on and off but mostly to pitch ideas to my boss - who is very visual. He responds much better to a 10 minute animation then a two paragraph bit of text. So most of my animations have been really rough as I'm simply trying to convey an idea. 

But I wanted to more fully explore how well Iclone might work for storytelling - or my kind of storytelling - and the Waiting for Godot video pasted below is the result. There's still foot sliding and jitters and little problems everywhere but I loved working on it. I thought about trying to learn Unreal or Omniverse as they seem better rendering platforms - but I still feel like I don't fully understand how to do Iclone yet.  Things like baking animations and smoothing values and curves and so much more still elude me :)  Anyway - I did use my phone and Live Faced the characters - and I did experiment with Plask to convert video to mocap, but it was so messy (foot sliding is my enemy!).  This was rendered in Iclone and some bits were made with Blender (the 3d fonts and some little things here and there). I'm probably overexplaining but just laying the tools on the table. Long time lurker, first time caller. 

Pretty cool video. I liked the characters and the sets and stark lighting. The initial closeups give it a theatrical feel but the long shots towards the end change things around. Was kinda curious if the volumetric lighting woulda been useful on a linked spotlight for the helmets. Where is the audio from?

Hey thanks for watching! I did use volumetric spots for the helmets. Each helmet had two lights - one spot to serve as a faint light cone etc and a point light to light the faces.  But - yeah I might have fiddled the volumetry down to invisibility.  I wrote the script and did the voices - except for the female voice at the end - which was generated by the Replica text to voice software. 

The voice work is very good!  I thought it may have come from movie or audio work.  The writing is very good as well.  Impressive.

Oh thank you :) I write for a living and have been doing voice work for a long while - so this is kind of an experiment.  To sort of "see" what a made up story might look like... 

The animation is very good - what I saw, at least.  However, I've always had a problem with this play and like the original (best described as a play "in which nothing happens for five acts") I couldn't make it through.  So - not everyone's cup of tea.

However - and while it sounds contradictory I do mean it - it's great that someone is doing something beyond the usual space shoot-em-ups.  I also like the cartoon characters - WAY too many people are looking for photo real and it's not what iClone (or even most 3D software) does best.  This shows the strength of our tools and you are to be commended (just because *I* don't like it doesn't mean anything - like those space battle animations, I'm not the target audience here).

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Alienware Aurora R16, Win 11, i9-149000KF, 3.20GHz CPU, 64GB RAM, RTX 4090 (24GB), Samsung 870 Pro 8TB, Gen3 MVNe M-2 SSD, 4TBx2, 39" Alienware Widescreen Monitor
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

That's very fair of you Kelleytoons - thanks for giving it a shot. And you're right. It's super nichey and might not be the tea anyone wants to drink ha ha.  But to a certain I wanted to see what "nothing" looked like. To see if a conversation without much action could hold up as an iclone animation...

You did a great job - this might well be something to enter into a contest (it will certainly stand out beyond those usual shoot-em-ups).

The other thing it did is encourage ME to continue with iClone's renderer.  I am THIS close to trying Unreal but at my age I'm not sure I want to deal with that complexity.

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Alienware Aurora R16, Win 11, i9-149000KF, 3.20GHz CPU, 64GB RAM, RTX 4090 (24GB), Samsung 870 Pro 8TB, Gen3 MVNe M-2 SSD, 4TBx2, 39" Alienware Widescreen Monitor
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

I thoroughly enjoyed watching this.

Ty Kg6! And good luck Kelley! I actually love how Iclone looks when you turn off all the lights and then light scenes with point lights and spots.