I;ve been having fun with the rock band add on with iClone - and the Character creator!  Sure, the hands don't always stick to where you want them but using the edit in motion and slowly moving through they can be re-aligned.  I have two so far - note these are not official videos but the music is used with permission!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPX9A8Z0qYI  and  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7loyCnKvUk

Yeah I tried doing this. I still have other problems, like if I reset the animation. the guitar and actor no longer animate together, the instrument and actor positions are way out on preset animations and the animations crash iClone. I've also seen a crosstalk issue where instruments and actors that are not linked animate together.

£90 for this set, I expected better.

Thanks for the handy info. :P

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

Dude, you really need to stop smoking crack and posting immediately afterwards.  For some reason, you remind me of an iClone version of an oompa-loompa - you're post are somewhat entertaining but often make no sense and by the time I've finished reading them, I'm already wishing that I could get those 30 seconds of my life back.

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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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!!

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.

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.

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! :D

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.