Last night's webinar Kai confirmed what a lot of us have suspected for a while -- RL is discontinuing 3DXChange (I'm not sure *exactly* how he put it, but "transitioning out of 3DXChange" probably comes closest).

Clearly it was one of the oddities of the roadmap in that XChange wasn't mentioned.  And with CC3 taking over the heavy lifting of importing OBJ clothing it was clear that the redheaded stepchild's days were numbered.  It explains a lot, including why they've never updated the interface or even tried to recompile for 64bit.

My two concerns were/are how the characterization of non-standard figures would be handled, and how props/scenery would come into the ecosystem.  I suspect the former will be handled by CC3, even though it raises the spectre of having avatars inside of it that aren't "compatible" (but that was going to happen anyway -- the preview video shows that during a downresing of avatars they will no longer be editable inside of CC3 and won't really be CC3 format anymore).  I would hope they can clearly differentiate between what is canon and what isn't (perhaps a red lined screen when you have a non-standard character in place?).

The latter almost surely will be handled by iClone, which is probably where it should have been anyway.  Importing OBJ/FBX directly into iClone makes a whole lot of sense, although it also means (most likely) we won't see it until version 8 (and they most likely will charge a lot more for it, making up the loss of XChange in their profit flow).  I don't mind that at all, however.

The other thing dropped by Kai was that they were working on supporting dForce.  For those of you unfamiliar with it, Daz has a sort of physics cloth called dForce that has appeared on more and more items, allowing for a lot more natural cloth posing.  Having that come in properly weighted into CC3 would be pretty nice, although folks shouldn't get TOO excited (for one thing the amount of dForce clothing is relatively small -- perhaps about 25% of the new stuff coming in is so conformed, and it only hit relatively recently, so not a lot of older clothing has it.  Also, it's relatively easy to weight it yourself, given the way it's constructed.  Here's an example of a dForce outfit I weighted in less than a minute or two:



And everything in that scene, apart from the CC Base Female PBR avatar, was brought in from Daz (including hair and scenery).

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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

Intruiging.... If 3Dxchange ends how will we de for retargeting skeleton and facial expression for creatures or non humanoides characters ?....

I think that's going to have to go into CC3.  They are going to charge a decent price for that program, so it's going to do a lot more than what the free one does now, that's for sure.

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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

How will we get props into iclone? 

I think Craig,  (if I'm understanding correctly), that it's 'likely' that props will be handled directly by iClone itself ......
Steve.

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Please be patient with me ..... I don't always 'get it' the first time 'round - not even the 2nd time!   - yikes! ... 

● MSI GT72VR Laptop, i7 7700HQ 4-Core 3.8 GHz 16GB RAM; Nvidia 1070, 8GB Vram ● iClone-7.93 ● 3DXChange Pipeline 7.81 ● CC-3 Pipeline 3.44 ● Live Face ● HeadShot ● Brekel Pro-Body ● Popcorn FX ● iRAY ● Kinect V2 ● DaVinci Resolve17 ● Mixcraft 8.1

I suppose. Everytime RL gets rid of a software package and incorporates it into another they charge a hefty price. I have the original version of iClone and it seems like every time I learn the product they change it and charge for the changes. I know it is getting better but... 

There are features in 3dXchange I really like. I hope they do not get rid of them when RL puts importing capabilities into iClone 8.

Craig

I know how you feel Craig ....
I've often experienced changes that have left me preferring an earlier version of something. When you get to our age, 'change' is not as easily adjusted to.
I like to tread a well worn path - so that the 'tools' become 2nd nature - and so they really should. The less that's between 'thought' and 'realized vision' - the better....

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Please be patient with me ..... I don't always 'get it' the first time 'round - not even the 2nd time!   - yikes! ... 

● MSI GT72VR Laptop, i7 7700HQ 4-Core 3.8 GHz 16GB RAM; Nvidia 1070, 8GB Vram ● iClone-7.93 ● 3DXChange Pipeline 7.81 ● CC-3 Pipeline 3.44 ● Live Face ● HeadShot ● Brekel Pro-Body ● Popcorn FX ● iRAY ● Kinect V2 ● DaVinci Resolve17 ● Mixcraft 8.1

I welcome the death of 3dx, may you rest in bits you enormous pain in the ass

The main problem I had with 3dxChange was that it could not handle larger files. I installed this http://www.ntcore.com/4gb_patch.php and it changed everything. Well almost. At least I could import big files without it crashing.

Craig

Interesting information. When 3DXchange was first released, shortly after iClone 2, in 2007 it was considered by almost every user to be one of the greatest advancements in the then early history of iClone. Before 3DXchange users had limited possibilities for getting assets into iClone, we could either purchase available content, or buy and learn MAX. 

3DXchange opened up a whole new world to us by giving us the option of using purchased or free assets from all over the place, the most popular sources at the time being the SketchUp warehouse and Turbo Squid. Nobody was asking to export anything out of iClone, the main use of iClone was making animated movies and with this newly available tool that could make almost unlimited assets available we thought that we had arrived at the peak of perfection at a price well below anything available at the time on the market.

The ability to import models from SketchUp was for me about the best thing that ever happened. I was working as a Video Technician for a large event rental company, and a lot of our customers were Booth builders for Trade Fairs - and guess what, most of them were using SketchUp for their design work. I started doing animated renders from drawings provided by a few of these companies and they were amazed at the results. They finally were able to present their customers with a video showing variations of a proposed Booth, including lighting.

Since version 2 iClone has improved so much that the work that I am completing for customers is keeping me very busy. Gone are the days of making 6 renders of a scene and stitching them together just because I only had a few lights to work with. With the last 2 versions of iClone I have been able to do "walk trough's" in one render per scene.

All of this has only been possible due to the availability of 3DXchange. I admit that I have had my difficulties with large file conversion, but breaking the "problem" files down in SketchUp before import to 3DXchange has solved that issue. The availability of PBR in iClone and its absence in 3DXchange hasn't really been a problem for me at present, mostly due to the fact that SketchUp doesn't do PBR in the first place.

I like having 3DXchange as a separate program for conversion - mostly because of the fact that I only do conversion from a file to iClone, and don't use it for export. I also like having Character Creator as a separate program - it's main purpose of creating characters is best used outside of iClone. I only use it for character creation/modification and not for animation or accessory addition.

I really do hope that iClone doesn't become too bloated with features to make if difficult, if not impossible, to use for it's main purpose - animation.

End of sermon.


Gerry

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System: Win 10 Pro (21H2), Asus X99-E WS, CPU i7-5930K -3,5 GHz, 32 GB DDR4 2666-16 RAM, NVidia GTX 1080 Ti GPU - 11 GB VRAM(Driver Studio-536.99), Samsung 850 Pro 512 GB SSD, 6 TB HD storage.