Blender and iclone workflow?


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By thagreatbelow - 5 Years Ago
Hello all

I've been learning blender for the last 2 months, and I'm loving it so far. I have all kinds of ideas I want to achieve, and one of them is using motion capture, so I purchased 3dxchange pipeline and iclone 7 to help me bring assets into iclone to edit them, and export them back out to blender. Unfortunately this process has not been a smooth one, and I'm sure it's mostly due to blender. I realize that Blender is free, and not even close to industry standard, so not very widely supported, or I should probably say, blender doesn't support everybody else. I'm just wondering if anybody can recommend me a workflow to achieve this? Are there any other fellow iclone/blender users on this forum that can share their wisdom? 

I made a separate post about my specific FBX issues, so I won't go into them here, but I'm having a nightmare of a time trying to get an FBX armature into iclone from blender (I've tried auto rig pro FBX export, and "better FBX exporter" export. Are there any magic addons, or plugins or some feature set that works for you guys that I could try? 

Thanks in advance for any advice and time spent reading this post! 
By wires - 5 Years Ago
Don't underestimate the power of Blender, it is being used by a large number of "big name" companies to produce content for both games and animated films.

Have a read through the posts in this thread to see if it helps you sort out any of your issues.
By AutoDidact - 5 Years Ago
Hi 
I too am migrating to a new pipeline where Iclone will be the primary Character  motionbuilding tool and Blender 2.81 EEVEE will be the final rendering environment .
I will be following this thread with interest.
Sadly I have no solution to your specific Dilemma, as I am using Daz figures with retargeted Iclone motion and exporting them from Daz studio to Blender as pre-animated FBX files.
(Sample test renders)

While  there are some lingering issues with the varying
quality  of the lipsync , I am certain they can be addressed on the Daz studio side of the pipeline.
However even when you( hopefully) get your Blender native Armatures manually mapped to accept Imotion data in 3DX, the challenge will be getting that Iclone animated figure ( or its Motion Data), back into blender for rendering in some repeatable fashion.
My Iclone animated Daz Characters export to blender fine.
 However I am desperately seeking a means to Apply NEW motion data to them in Blender without have to completely re-export  the same Character from Daz studio as FBX and redo all of my BSDF shaders each time.
Blender has a (highly undesirable) manual retargeting method for body motion but We really need a means to
retarget externally created bone and blend shaped based animation  in Blender for body & facial animation.
Also ,before anyone suggests Point cache methods like Alembic or .obj /MDD....
My early tests have resulted in Blender crashing immediatley with Alembic files beyond a certain size limit and frame number From Iclone.
And while  .obj/MDD from Daz studio technically works fine in Blender 2.81 
Sadly Blender loads all of the MDD data  directly into the .blend file instead of "streaming" it externally as Lightwave3D does.
This results in an unacceptably Huge Slow down in blenders performance
when a Massive .MDDanimation data file  is applied to a character mesh in Blender.
I hope we can get the retargeting issue resolved in blender and please report any breakthroughs you have with your  pipeline.
 
   
   
By ruscular - 5 Years Ago
Im using lightwave 2019 for my workflow and basically a beginner in Iclone. So far i manage to animate in Iclone with Daz character and export the FBX and convert it back to BVH in webanimate from Ikinema and then apply the new BVH to the Daz character and export it to lightwave for render. However now that I have PopcornFX, I will be looking at rendering it to Iclone 7. depending what I need. I can do ocean in Lightwave, and particle explosion in Iclone.
By thagreatbelow - 5 Years Ago
Not easily, but yes. I'm still working out all the kinks, and so far I've only gotten the blender into clone part working, but if you own 3dxchange pipeline, then you're supposed to be able to export the files from iclone into Blender as FBX, or BVH, or whatever file format you think will suit your needs best. 
By AutoDidact - 5 Years Ago
ruscular (2/2/2020)
Im using lightwave 2019 for my workflow and basically a beginner in Iclone. So far i manage to animate in Iclone with Daz character and export the FBX and convert it back to BVH in webanimate from Ikinema and then apply the new BVH to the Daz character and export it to lightwave for render. However now that I have PopcornFX, I will be looking at rendering it to Iclone 7. depending what I need. I can do ocean in Lightwave, and particle explosion in Iclone.




You can do oceans and better /faster smoke&fire in Blender 2.82 as well as fluid simulation with the new ultra  fast, particle based Mantaflow solver in blender. 😋
By AutoDidact - 5 Years Ago
thagreatbelow (2/2/2020)
Hello all

rt. Are there any magic addons, or plugins or some feature set that works for you guys that I could try? 

Thanks in advance for any advice and time spent reading this post! 


HI I just bought this physical atmosphere plugin for Blender 2.83
It makes outdoor rendering so much easier!!!