OK, I'm spending way too much money on all this

I just gave in to the voices in my head and bought Rock Band, I have plans for this in our band videos. Just doing a quick test with Evan and a guitar and I see the guitar sinking into his body on guitar solo animations

I'm still very much a newbie with iClone, so is this something I need to deal with through collision detection or just hands on timeline editing?

Thanks

Edit to add:

Weirder. If I reset animation and do a perform, then the guitar bounces all around for the animation while the actor stays stationery. If I then remove the accessory and re-add it, it either works again or iClone throws an exception performing the animation.

OK, so here's the deal. We purchase iClone and several content packs for something in the rough ballpark of $500. At that point, we have in effect just hired a group of virtual programmers, character designers, background designers, FX designers, mocap studios, and, above all, animators to produce the guts of an animated short. That's roughly hundreds of thousands of dollars of professional animation horsepower, in a neat little box, accessible 24/7, 365.

But it's not perfect, and never will be. Specifically, there IS no collision detection in iClone 4. It's just a placeholder in the user-interface, waiting for the day when a bunch of math geniuses manage to debug it enough for it to be usable.

Until then, we can get just the tiniest taste of what has been traditionally the herculean demands of animation: we can set a very few keyframes to compensate for animation imperfections.

It's not a lot to ask, once you really appreciate the incredible bargain you've been granted. And I've been in this forum long enough to realize that precious few users do appreciate that.

And to top it off, consider this: setting a few keyframes to correct an animation wasn't even possible with iClone until version 4. As late as iClone 3, if you wanted to correct an animation, you had to manually set EVERY frame, as if you were doing stop-motion animation. The fact that it was quite tedious was the trivial part; what was much worse is that it was incredibly difficult to do it right. (And finally, that explains why I wanted to blow my stack when people said iClone 4 was a trivial improvement over iClone 3--those folks obviously didn't know what they were talking about.)

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

Thanks for replying; I was kind of expecting it would need me to tweak the animations and positioning; and for the record I'm blown away by what all these products make available.

Since posting, I've found some more worrying problems with the pack; the bass player's hands are in completely wrong positions - the right arm juts through the instrument and the left hand is several virtual inches below the neck. Also, the drummer sit on seat animation completely hangs iClone. I've raised a support ticket on this as something is definitely going wrong here; I have a feeling it's because I installed some trial versions in Backstage a couple of days ago to test this pack out and wonder if there's a conflict of some sort going on.

Hopefully, this will get sorted as I have great plans for a video for our band and if I can choose which of the kids to sell, I'll be needing the Dream Girl and Stage Magician packs to really pull it off

Okay, so I just want to make sure I understand this correctly. When you attach the guitar to the actor and then give the actor a "Guitar Motion" (body, arms and hands moving all over the place), the guitar itself will not follow ANY of the animation except for basic X,Y,Z movement because it's parented to the actor?

If the actor raises his arm that's supposed to be on the neck of the guitar, the guitar neck will not follow the hand?

I've only just begun to really use iClone4 Pro (even though I've had it for awhile) and I wanted to make a rock video, editing it in Sony Vegas. But this guitar movement (or lack of) is a real obstacle.

Could anyone give me some suggestions for a work around. Even though I own Poser, Vue, Daz Studio, and a few others, animation is not my strong suit. So my question is can the guitar be edited manually in the timeline to follow the action of the actor?

Thanks for any suggestions,
Lee

Hi Lee,

Since my post, I've had some helpful suggestions about this and so far I'm working on this basis:

The instruments and actors are aligned in a general position and they do move together; by messing around it seems to me that if I go into the modify panel for the instrument and go to the linked section, click the browse button for body part (it starts at bone root, I leave that but change the option to follow direction and rotation, this seems to keep the movement better aligned). Then in the timeline I'm going to modify the positions of the instrument and player hands/arms to tweak the animation sequence.

There are two pitfalls that I'm seeing:
1. If I click on Reset Animation for the project, then animations (from right click perform) only apply to the instruments and the actors no longer move. If I right click an actor and remove animations, they stay linked correctly
2. If I use the right click perform to seat the drummer, he then slides forward into the kit. However if I position the drummer and use the Sit Down animation from the animation panel, all is fine.

For work flow, I'm going to use iClone to generate short clips when close to the actors and then take this collection of clips into Movie Edit and/or Muvee to bring it all together with the soundtrack for the final video. Apart from managing the project, this looks to be a better way for performance while constructing the footage.

Like you, I've been doing work in Vue and Poser for quite a while but steered away from animation in those programs because it was too daunting; iClone is really opening up animation for me, and as it's early days I'm still learning how it works and how best to use it, but it's got fantastic potential.

If you want, we can compare notes as we both get to grips with this.

Hi Roobarb,
Thanks for the reply. I'll give your suggestions a try and see what kind of results I get. I'll let you know.

And at some point I would like to compare notes and see what kind of techniques/workflow you are using to create your scenes. I've literally spent less than a couple of hours working on this and am really only beginning to feel my way through it.

When I first got iClone I printed off the manual, I'll have to see if I can find it somewhere in the disaster area that is my office!

Lee

Hey Lee,

I tried this: put an actor on stage with a guitar accessory and applied the animation "guitar start"; I figured use that to get the initial playing position. However, after doing this, I added guitar allegro animation and the actor moved without the guitar. So I undid that and used the right click perform action. iClone crashed (I have had this happen a few times with this set).

Restarted and added in the actor and guitar. This time I did the right click perform (I didn't worry about setting the position and rotation on the guitar). Then I scrubbed through the animation making adjustments to the actor's left hand; each time it was out of position, I moved it in by using Edit Motion Layer. When this animation clip plays back, the actor's left hand stays "connected" to the guitar. So this works for building the animation stages; more attention to detail will obviously mean a more accurate animation.

I'm going to work on this in this order:
Tidy up the guitar position (to avoid it sinking in to the actor's body)
Add hand animations (before adjusting hand positions
Adjust hand and arm positions
Once I've got a tidy animation clip, I'll save it out and then go on to other actors/animations to save them out.

Edit to add:
I tried using Collect Clip to save a custom animation, but this doesn't really work as only the actor can have this, not the instrument, so reloading the animation just moves the actor not the instrument. So I guess these corrected animations would have to be saved out as individual projects so they stay complete.

Now this is frustrating.
Add an actor, add an accessory - I used Evan, added a guitar. Apply the guitar idle animation to Evan, then try right click perform on the guitar. Guaranteed crash everytime.

Now, I really need to work this particular project but this pack seems to be riddled with bugs. I'm almost tempted to go Anime and use the Jam Band for this and ditch Rock Band altogether.

If a product does not work correctly, it should be discontinued until it is fixed. I don't care how cheap IClone is or anything else.

Thats just the way it is!!

I don't have the Subject Pack.

However, in full frontal view, if you deliberately move the guitar on the y axis into the player's body, so that it completely disappears & then move it  out of the player's body, so that the guitar just completely appears & no further. IMO, you'll get a more precise position to start with, after presumably Linking & not Attaching the Guitar. 

Rotate the Player for further views & adjustments, remembering to be at frame 1 at all times.    

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