The Future of iClone – Thoughts from an Indie Filmmaker
After spending several days reviewing and thinking about the new AI Studio update, I wanted to share some thoughts on iClone’s current direction and where I personally hope Reallusion focuses its future development.
First, I want to say that I understand why many users are excited about the recent AI developments. There is a lot of impressive technology being introduced, and I genuinely appreciate Reallusion continuing to push innovation forward.
However, speaking as someone who has used iClone and CC for several years as part of a serious indie CGI film production pipeline, I find myself increasingly concerned that Reallusion may be drifting away from what originally made iClone such a valuable tool.
What sold me on iClone was never the idea of a fully automated end-to-end filmmaking solution. What sold me was this:
- Fast and flexible character animation
- Tight integration with Character Creator
- Rapid iteration for cinematic storytelling
- The ability to integrate with other specialized tools such as Unreal Engine, Resolve, Blender, and external asset pipelines
I want to maintain artistic control over my productions:
- I want to build and customize my own sets
- I want full control over scene lighting
- I want to choose the rendering pipeline that best fits my project
- I want the freedom to combine tools instead of being locked into a single ecosystem
Because of that, I personally have little interest in AI systems that attempt to automate the creative side of filmmaking.
What I desperately need instead is AI assistance with the technical grind of animation production.
That is where I believe Reallusion has an enormous opportunity.
Where AI Could Truly Transform iClone
1. Animation Cleanup and Refinement
This is, in my opinion, the single most important area for AI integration.
Examples:
- Fixing foot sliding automatically
- Smoothing root motion transitions between clips
- Correcting stair movement and uneven terrain interaction
- Improving hand positioning and gesture cleanup
- Stabilizing motion after baking layered animations
- Automatically refining body weight and balance
These are the kinds of repetitive, time-consuming tasks that consume enormous amounts of production time.
One feature that would be incredibly powerful:
- defining two keyframes and allowing an AI assistant to intelligently animate the motion between them based on a text description or emotional intent.
2. Animation Blending and Interpolation
Animation blending in iClone can still become frustratingly manual, especially when mixing clips generated through different workflows.
AI-assisted blending could help:
- merge multiple performances naturally
- preserve body weight and momentum
- create style variations (limp, shuffle, exhaustion, hesitation, etc.)
- add subtle behavioral quirks to characters automatically
For example:
- habitual eye twitches
- facial grimaces
- nervous gestures
- idle behaviors
These are the small details that make characters feel alive.
3. Lip Sync Improvements
This is another area where AI could dramatically reduce workload.
AccuLips was a great addition, but compared to recent advances in AI-driven facial animation, the system now feels overdue for another major evolution.
Tasks that currently take hours could potentially become much faster:
- phoneme refinement
- emotional facial timing
- subtle mouth corrections
- more natural transitions
And there is also a very practical workflow issue:
AccuLips still does not support WAV audio directly.
Because of this, I currently must:
- convert dialogue to MP3 for iClone,
- animate using the MP3,
- export the resulting audio,
- then manually replace or splice it with the original WAV files later for final production quality.
That process becomes extremely tedious on large productions.
As such, I am very excited to see what is coming with the next release of AccuLips!
4. Motion Director and Crowd Systems
Motion Director and Crowd Simulation are promising systems, but they still require a large amount of manual work.
AI assistance here could help with:
- path planning
- collision avoidance
- natural idle behaviors
- reactive movement
- group coordination
- automated environmental interaction
5. Unreal Engine Pipeline Stability
This is a major one for filmmakers using Unreal Engine.
Preparing an iClone scene for transfer to Unreal can become extremely fragile and time-consuming:
- baking constraints
- managing sequencers
- verifying transfer settings
- handling repeated transfers
- troubleshooting Live Link issues
- dealing with transfer errors such as “Wait for the previous operation to complete”
What I would love to see is:
- dramatically improved transfer reliability,
- smarter transfer management,
- automated troubleshooting,
- and ultimately a much more seamless bridge between iClone and Unreal.
Personally, I believe Reallusion’s greatest strength is not competing with Unreal or Blender as a renderer.
Its greatest strength is enabling rapid character animation and cinematic iteration.
That is why I use it.
Final Thoughts
I’m not opposed to AI integration in iClone.
Quite the opposite. I simply believe the most valuable role for AI is not replacing the filmmaker — but assisting the filmmaker. I don’t need an AI movie generator.
What I need is an intelligent animation collaborator:
- something that helps solve technical friction,
- accelerates iteration,
- improves motion quality,
- and frees me to focus on storytelling, cinematography, pacing, atmosphere, and performance.
That, in my opinion, is where iClone could become truly extraordinary.