Hi,

As I wrote in the developer forum, I've been away from iClone for quite some time now, and I had to abort my iClone projects for professional and personal reasons.

So obviously I couldn't complete this projet in time, and I wanted to apology to all of those who were following this thread expecting to see 'something' at the end.

As I'm now involved into a new professional project related to iClone, I took this opportunity to upgrade to iClone5 and I'm very pleased to see that Reallusion licensed HumanIK from Autodesk. This brings iClone to a all new level regarding animation capabilities.

Regarding rendering nothing really new (for realistic rendering, my concern), except the Ambient Occlusion feature wich has been, unfortunately, wrongly integrated, making it unusable. Ambient Occlusion, hence the name 'ambient' should be combined with the ambient term of the light equation, and certainly not with the 'diffuse' term, wich is unfortunately the case with the current iClone implémentation.

The good thing is that it is still usable to create ambient occlusion passes in a multi-passes rendering approach without resorting to create texture baking for each asset in an external software, albeit the iClone ambient occlusion is actualy screen ambient occlusion, so less quality than regular ao. But it's still better that nothing;)

That said, I apology again for not being able to complete the project presented in this thread, but I'll continue posting experiments in a near future, including iClone <-> Softimage pipeline tools I'll present into the developer forum thread.

Cheers,
Guy.

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guy rabiller | GOETZIWOOD STUDIOS
"N.O.E." (Nations Of Earth) Sci-Fi TV Show, Showrunner.

Thanks a lot for your comments and feedbacks !

As expected the second shot was faster to create as I'm using already prepared assets this time. It serves the same purpose of the first shot, introducing the mood and location.

This shot is in fact a Camera Switcher shot, wich has 8 cuts, so this is 8 shots in one. Here are a few samples :







The reason I used camera switcher is that I had to some extent synchronize some cuts with some rythm elements from the music ( This movie is in fact more a musical clip with a message than a true storytelling ).

Using the camera switcher allowed me to place the cuts precisely where I wanted, except that when I exported avi tests there was some offset with the sound.

It's not a big deal as the final image/audio synchronization will be done in an editing software, but at least I have the right timing already in the cuts rythm. So no issue encountered for this shot.

I'm going for Sequence 2 now, where I'll use the UrbanFuture3 set already prepared. However I have to prepare some characters for a small crowd.

Cheers,
Guy.

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guy rabiller | GOETZIWOOD STUDIOS
"N.O.E." (Nations Of Earth) Sci-Fi TV Show, Showrunner.

Trying to put my eyes back into my head :w00t:

Hey Guy-

Really fascinating watching you go through this production. Thanks for sharing it with us and in particular - thanks for talking about the fog limitations. I am just now getting into working with atmospheres so I found this very useful.

Cathy :hehe:

Just click on the graphic to go there.

the first two (recent) screenshots look very realistic, but the last one of the wide shot of the city does a look a bit cartoonish and out of place with some of your other shots.

I'm a big fan of this thread and the insight being provided. While the skill and experience to replicate are well beyond me, it's thoroughly enjoyable to see iclone used in this production pipeline. I can't wait to see the end result

WOLF'S TRADING POST IS OPEN COME IN FOR A VISIT

"May you one day see what my eyes have seen...and be better for it" - Wolf
www.wolfzonedigital.com

Very nice. Great to see these postings. I've never understood the fog limits either but I'm just glad we have it at all. Bigger scenes (camera distortion as you mention), image planes and such do give an unexpected result with the various fx but I bet you've worked around it very nicely with your personal skill set. No software in the world makes up for skill. Bravo.

And EXTREMELY inspiring to see in the iClone engine no matter what other software you are using. Most iClone users now understand what a production pipeline is and this type of work demonstrates how well it can done.

--------------------------------------------------
I LIVE to anymate, irritate and machinamate. Not necessarily in that order.

Hello,

I've completed the first shot of the openning sequence :







Color grading may evolve a bit once final editing will be completed.

I've encountered two issues for this shot : one regarding camera projection precision, the other one regarding the fog limits.

I've splitted the scene in two area, one for the near Greeble City Blocks, the second for the far Dystopia City Blocks. Both city blocks are from Daz3d that I've imported into iClone through 3DXchange. I've created ambient occlusion maps for each block, for wich I had to create a second set of UVs through Softimage|XSI.

I've processed 20 Greeble blocks and 111 Dystopia blocks. Not all blocks are used in this shot, but at least now I've them all available if needed.

The scene area is pretty big, it extends to ~70000 units from the center of the world, the second area starting at ~40000 units.

The first issue I had was a camera projection precision error. This was expected, actualy. When you get this kind of error, the geometry start flicking randomly. The simple workaround for this is to fine tune the camera range. This setting is not only usefull to 'see through' objects or limit the far visibility, but also for this kind of precision error. So I've setted the near range to ~2000 and the far range to ~7000 ( you have to divide by 10 for this setting, not sure why, this sounds to me as a consistency issue regarding units ). This way, no more flicking, problem solved.

The second issue I had was the odd limit to 20000 units for the Fog far limit.. Not sure why such an arbitrary limit, but I've discovered it while setting up the depth pass. I was screwed because the last blocks were at ~70000 units.. To solve this kind of problem, you usualy have to scale the entier scene, except in iClone, you can't scale the camera.. So I had to create a dummy object, tranfer the animation of the camera to this dummy object, parent this dummy object under the parent of all the city blocks. Then I removed all camera animation ( transform only ) and link the camera to the dummy object. After that, I could scale the global dummy object by 10 and I was set with a nice Fog gradient from black ( near ) to white ( far ).

I've also discovered that the Fog works per surface ! Not even per pixel or per vertex, but per surface, which means if you have a big flat box with other objects on top, the flat box will have a constant fog level while the other objects will have their own fog level. In the case of the depth path, this is an issue because you can have a surface nearer than some other objects more white than those objects, wich is wrong. I've managed to split some objects but not all. This is a surprising issue, nowadays any realtime engine use at least per vertex fog if not per pixel.

As expected I've spent a lot of time preparing the assets, nearly 2 weeks, and did the shot itself in two days ( including setup, animation, rendering and compositing ). Now that I've those assets ready, the next shots of the openning sequence will be faster to create.

Cheers,
Guy.

--
guy rabiller | GOETZIWOOD STUDIOS
"N.O.E." (Nations Of Earth) Sci-Fi TV Show, Showrunner.

Hello,

Well I guess Stuckon3d summarized pretty well what I'm doing.

Regarding this approach defeating the purpose of what iClone is all about, I tend to agree but, like you said, this is because iClone does not offer me yet the features needed to achieve the look I want.

But there are two things to considere:

First, iClone can render in realtime up to a point. When you have a scene with nearly 2 millions of polygons and 4k textures, iClone wont render the scene in realtime but more like 0.5 fps in my case. So, 'realtime rendering' in this case is all relative. In this case, either you render directly or use the multi-passes approach is not relevant, because in any way, you can't do realtime rendering.

Second, what I'm doing could be achieved in realtime ( scene size aside ) with the proper features. If you take a look at the UDK ( the Unreal Engine ), this engine is able to do post effects, color grading, etc.. in realtime. You set up a compositing/effect tree then the process is done at render time and in realtime. But UDK use linear workflow and G-Buffers. iClone does not.

What I'm saying is that iClone, despite all its qualities, is far from beeing a 'state-of-the-art' realtime renderer engine yet ( compared to AAA game engines ), and there is a lot of room for improvements.

Mainwhile, I think it's ok to use workarounds to be able to achive the look we want.

Ultimately, a Director ( isn't what we all want to be ? ) shouldn't be a slave of the tools he uses. Machinima or not. A Director should pushes his tools as far as he can, and like martok2112 said, this way we can squeeze a lot more out of iClone than what it is suposed to be possible.

And in fact, it is very exciting to try to create near production quality rendering out of a $200 tool. ;)

Cheers,
Guy.

--
guy rabiller | GOETZIWOOD STUDIOS
"N.O.E." (Nations Of Earth) Sci-Fi TV Show, Showrunner.

This looks amazing. Great work