To all the makers of tutorials with an annoying music track and no actual speech instruction.
Please! Please! Please!
You might as well give us a braille version as well.
That way... we could at least touch the bumps on our screens to try and figure out what you are trying to get across.
These are great tutorials by the way!
So come on it's 2010 and talkies have been around a hundred years.
I certainly hope Iclone 5 continues to supply the audio features in the program.

:cool:

Case in point.

The most important item in moviemaking is the camera.
For without the camera and it's mastery there is no movie.
Sadly though, there are only 2 or 3 teaser tutorials on the camera and one very good one that demonstrates Camera Switcher is mute.

What's with the camera in iclone?
Why the lack of useful instruction?
I see movie after iclone movie created with fluid and intentional camera moves and I am in awe.

The woman or man who tackles camera instruction using a hands on for dummies
" I'll show you how it's done approach" will get rich off the newbies rushing to buy it.
The newbie community needs more than vague general 3 to 6 min camera tutorials.

Is the camera mystque due to the fact that so many have gone through bootcamp movie making in the "Movies or Sims" and have found their own grooves in figuring out cameras and feel awkward or embarrassed to share their technique.
I don't believe that's the case but it's frustrating as hell waiting for the key to the puzzle to be revealed.
All our great iclone moviemakers seem to be like the wizard of Oz...
operating behind the curtain!

To the ones arriving on the iclone scene like myself with no gaming or 3D background perhaps a Virtual Camera rig that allows the user to operate the camera in a more real world setup might alleviate some of the problem.

I have been studying the instructional Hollywood Camera Work DVDs for awhile now,
and they use a virtual dolly & track that cameras can be attached to and the results are stellar. I realize their camera rig is for Maya but could not something like this be created by Reallusion for iclone?

Yes iclone is a 3D environment but wouldn't it be great if we had tracks with Dolly & cane props that allowed us to block our set and shoot in conventional style.

I stumbled across an iclone forum post recently that suggests linking or attaching a camera to a ball. Great idea and hopefully something that turns on a light at Reallusion to create more camera helpers/tools.

Use Lamp (Lamp Animation Starter Kit) as a dolly! Just attach camera to a lamp's shade.
Here's example



Not so bad, isn't it? :D

BTW, thank you for your question! It made me think and come up with such a thing. Now I'll use it. Very convenient :D

--------
Igor

THAT is a stroke of genius, Kurzal!

- Ron T.

:D

Wow Kurzal!
Super & Brilliant.
I've just spent the day downloading & trying to rig something from Google wharehouse
and your creation just made me throw mine in the dumpster.

And that's what my original post was intended for.
Deep down my intent was not to be sarcastic and did not want to offend or ridicule the iclone community, just wanted to remind everybody that there is a wealth of information & talent out there that gets put away and never shared.

Kurzal, what I really like about your rig is the arc and pivot around the character.
Also the movement of the lamp arm.

To do this did you first create a path for the lamp to travel?
Did you then make separate incremental adjustments of the arm raising, lowering & rotating?

This is so fluid. Right up there with that Maya rig I mentioned.
Thanks for sharing.

A camera move that I really want to replicate is the handoff.
Where the camera arcs/pivots after the move on character 1 to reveal and track a 2nd character.
This new "KurzalKrane" will do the trick very nicely!

Yes, everything is the same as in real life. First - the planning (create the path and attach a lamp to it). After that I set up 2 (start/finish) keys (postures), because the lamp is just a regular Actor. And finally the program does the rest.


I have Hollywood Camera Work DVDs too :) Great tutorials! Perhaps that is why everything turned out so well? :D

--------
Igor

Hi Cloneguy,
I totally agree with you at the importance of camera work, but you really need to learn to free yourself from physical restraints, that is the beauty of 3d. Adding models to simulate camera rigs is just going to limit you on the possibilities of what the 3d world of iclone or any other 3d package for that matter has to offer you. What Kursal did with the lamp was neat, but you could just as easily attach the camera to the path and tell the camera to have a look-at point/target and you would not only get the same results but smoother. This way you will not only be dealing with less keyframes, but less objects, skeleton rigs which bloats the software, and makes it slower.
You just need to remember that paths can be created on 3 dimensions and not restricted only to be plotted on the ground. If for some reason you need to create a compound movement in which you had to have an up and down movement while doing an upward orbit, you can create a secondary pivot point by attaching a very simple object,( like a cube) to the path and then linking the camera to that cube. My point here is simple, keep things simple, don't bring in unnecessary objects if you can avoid it, and free yourself from the physical world.

Cheers,

Stuckon3d





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Hello Stuckon3d,

Yes I totally agree with embracing the 3d world but there is an almost total lack of iclone camera training for that world.
It's like handing a guitar to 100 people with no instructions and after a year 5 to 10 individuals will be playing fluently while the other 90 will be floundering unable to play until they are shown the chords and progressions.
With iclone there are some users through their natural gift/ability that soar with the eagles in moviemaking while the majority (myself included) need the roadmap to produce anything worthwhile.
Don't tell me to flap my wings... show me how to flap them.
In my reference to a Rig model, my intent was more for dramatic scenes requiring more real world camera moves for the 3d challenged (like me ;))

As for you Stuckon3d, you rule in the 3D world and I am in awe of your work.
But how does the average or new iclone user get admitted to that world without training when the training does not even exist.
"Here's the airplane Billy... now you go figure it out"
I wonder how many airline pilots got trained that way.

To Kurzal's credit he heard the cries of a drowning soul and threw me a lifeline.
Heck I would build the Titanic version of a dolly or rub 2 sticks together all day long if I thought it would get me a step closer to learning those damn cameras.

Now for the bigger question:

Am I the only guy in iclonville struggling with cameras?
The existing tutorials show you how to add them and frame but nothing as to step by step using them in actual scene.

For the strugglers, wouldn't it be great if someone came forward and demonstrated how they blocked, set up the cameras & recorded their 1 to 2 minute scene from scratch.
At present we see the end result of peoples efforts, but nothing in the way of how they actually did it.

In my case it's waiting & searching for that aha! light to come on.
Something that gives the understanding and creates the means to abandon the crutches (dolly's, crane's, rigs).

Have a good one!

I feel your pain cloneguy, so what ill do is for part four of my free intro class ill talk about that for a few minutes, the thing is picking a good camera angle and flow of cuts for your movie is not an iclone thing but more of a director thing. So my blocking method may not be someone else optimal method for making their movies. Ideally you will want to storyboard your movie first, which it can be done in iclone easy, and then create a shot by shot scene in iclone. ;)

cheers,

Stuckon3d



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