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By Peter_914185 - 6 Years Ago
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Hi all,
I'm new to Iclone and Reallusion (haven't purchased yet) so thought the best place to start would be here.
I'm looking at bring my characters to live in real time live streams on my YouTube channel. At the moment I've been using mo-cap data and rendering using Maya but this is time consuming and obviously isn't real time. So I'm thinking that using something like Nueron perception with Iclone and it's facial capture would be a good way to achieve my goal. However I have some questions.
1: A lot of people seem to be using Iclone along with UE4 to achieve real time rendering. I don't mind doing this but it just seems like another piece of software I have to learn and that can possibly go wrong. What's the advantages of adding UE4 to the pipeline, is it simply for it's advanced rendering capabilities? I've seen some rendering from Iclone and it seems pretty good and supports things like HDR images so can I get away with just using Iclone to do my real time rendering?
2: I want to be able to comp my virtual characters into real environments. I'm going to use locked of cameras to keep things simple but can Iclone comp characters over live footage? Basically does it output an alpha?
3: Looking through the store I've notice another cool package called Character creator. What's drawn me to this is the ability to animate facial expressions from Zbrush. Is this software easy to use and can it be then added to my mo-cap character using Iclone?
4: The facial mobcap in Iclone seems great but does it just work with blend shapes. Some of my characters are rigid bound as they're hard surface puppets. Can I just connect simple controls to move say the eyes, mouth and head?
5: There seems to be a lot of options when it comes to packages. Can some recommend which set of packages they think I'll need given the above information?
I think that's all my main concerns at the moment.
Thank you in advance.
Peter
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By doubblesixx - 6 Years Ago
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Hi Peter.
I purchased the pipeline setup a while back( IClone, CC3, 3D exhange) and have been hard at work getting the pieces togehter and can give you a perspective at least as the tools have some caveats that may or may not break the vision you have.
Keyframe animaton in iClone leaves a little bit to wish for as it has a sort of tedious way of handling the flipping of poses, i luckily found a 3'rd party plugin for this that solved this in a flash but imo a tool of this caliber should already have this built-in.. there are some other caveats i'm not particularly fond of and don't know if it's going to be adressed but apart from the annoyances that makes keyframe animation taking a lot longer to achieve, this tools really shines when it comes to the "middle-ground" where you cut and paste snippets together and make complete scenes, adding clips and removing keyframes, adding gestures on an override track, use the smart functions for hand-placing on static objects e.t.c
I cleaned and adjusted a couple of 100 ready made animations last week that had foot sliding, twitchy fingers, hands and arms cutting into the character mesh e.t.c and this is dead easy to do and was actually really fun and then bake it down into the animation again.. I was about to try and clean some tedious mocaps i have but this is a completely different can of worms.. will leave that for a rainy day when i feel extra bored... If your mocaps are clean and doesn't have too much errors i'm pretty confident this is the tool for you.
At current time i have found that lip-sync audio in iClone 7 is heard around 8 - 12 frames early of the visual representation of the audiofile on the audiotrack and for me this is enough to be thrown off by.. ... i don't know if this is going to be adressed or not, so just have that in mind if such a thing is important to you
Using Livelink is probably best if you plan to work in Unreal to make your scenes otherwise i think you can do everything in iCLone.. I think though that Unreal has a couple of aces up the sleeve in more area's than 1 so using Livelink could probably enchance the endproduct.. Also it's pretty easy to qualify for the livelink plug-in by purchasing a couple of RL products so maybe this should be seen as a bonus and decide later if you want to go that route.. UNreal is free so there is no rush either
Character creator 3 is where you "build your characters" , put cloting on them, Change their hair, change their skintone, bodyprofile ( fat, thin, tall, short), change eyecolor e.t.c.. in here you can't import your own characters in that sense but you can modify the RL characters in a 3'rd party application like Blender, Maya, 3DsMax or Zbrush and by that keep getting new characters very fast... To import your own characters thought you'd probably need the 3DXchange tool too.. there is a pipeline version of this tool so you might need to read up on what you need depending on your requirements
I don't have any insight into mocap tools and what you might need but hopefully someone else could fill you in in that regard and i can't really say how easy or hard it would be to comp into a real environemt either, it's a little bit beyond the area i work in
I would probably say the Pipeline version of each software in combination with iClone is a good start.. 3D xchange pipeline is nice to have if you find an oddball somehwere you want to import
but again.. it's probably dependent on where you'r get your characters and animations
My Current setup is iCLone, CC3 pipeline, 3DxChange pipeline, Zbrush, Marvelous designer, Substance painter and what i enjoy most is the - convenience - it gives when shipping things back and forth between the applications and as a final stage into Unreal..
EDIT:
I saw now that you had more questions about features i haven't used yet so hopefully soneone else can chime in about that.. Morphtargets is not an area i need right now and have no particular good answers there
Hope this helps a bit on the way
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By Peter_914185 - 6 Years Ago
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Hi Doubblesixx,
Thank you for taking the time to answer some of my questions, I really appreciate it. Good to know you can hand keyframe as well although in theory I should just be using Iclone for my live stream animations, although that leads me to another question. At the moment I use Maya and in Maya you can have animation layers that allow you to offset portion and rotation of your mocap. So for example if an arm is penetrating the body of the character you can go in and add a layer, rotate the arm more so it avoids this. Is this possible if Iclone but in real time. So for example, I import a some mocap. Import one of my characters and see that I need to rotate the arms out a little more to stop them from cutting through the characters waist. Can I add an animation layer and Iclone will incorporate this into the live performance?
Thanks again for your help.
Peter
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By animagic - 6 Years Ago
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To add to the answers you already got:
There is no need to add UE to the pipeline as that will not give you real-time rendering. In my mind it will just complicate things, especially if you are just beginning. I use iClone to make movies and do without it.
Also, I have not found the delay in lip-syncing that doubblesixx mentions. The quality could be improved and this has been announced for an upcoming release
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By doubblesixx - 6 Years Ago
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@Peter: If you import an animation you have 2 gesture tracks that can override whatever the "baked" animatio is doing and 1 motion track to input new keyframes on.. You can live animate to a certain degreeby using Direct or Face-puppet functions in ICLone, there are also a few videos showinfg how mocap tools vwork in conjunction, but i can't elaborate more on the mocap stuff
There are tools in Iclone to bake keyframes down to an imported clip and there are tools to "Sample" these back to the motiontrack for removing certain keyframes on certain bones, copy and pasting certain bones but this "live-editing" you're after is a little beyond me i'm afraid..
You mean to import a mocap and then re-edit this in realtime and save this into the clip? I know to 100% this is possible by "Sampling" the animation to the motion-layer and remove things, or edit the track with new correcting keyframes and bake it down into the clip but.. realtime i'm not so sure.. you should possibly post a question to support about this.
Also there are a lot of viideos made by RL you should check out as many things are covered either in whole or in part.. referring to videos and asking specifics would be alot easier to answer to fill in any blanks
Cheers
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By Peter_914185 - 6 Years Ago
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Thank you for the great replies guys. It sounds like Iclone/3Dxchange will be good enough for what I'm trying to achieve. I'll ask support to see if they can clarify on way to offset animations on the fly.
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By Peter_914185 - 6 Years Ago
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Thank you for the great replies guys. It sounds like Iclone/3Dxchange will be good enough for what I'm trying to achieve. I'll ask support to see if they can clarify on way to offset animations on the fly.
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