How to get the most realistic results out of iClone's native render engine?

[Delphoi_Studio]

I believe the native render engine of iClone has potential in producing pretty nice renders but it’s also quite difficult to achieve this in my experience. To be fair in most render engines it requires some work to make a render look good. But in iClone’s case as I understand it it’s not meant to be used as the final step if someone want to create realistic looking renders. However, I think there are a lot of advantages of not having to use another software for final renders.

I’ve started using Blender last year for my final renders and as I learnt using it, having a more realistic render engine is not the only benefit of implementing another software in my workflow. There are a lot of tools there that can enhance my scenes in a way I wasn’t able to before.

Regardless of this, I would still prefer having iClone’s render engine as an option for certain projects, since it is much faster. Both the workflow - not having to export my scene and setting it up in Blender -, and also the rendering itself. Blender does have a “realtime” engine which got a huge upgrade recently but honestly it still needs some impovements to be really reliable in my opinion (or I just need to learn how to use it better - but the point remains, it takes a lot of time to set it up).

A while ago I made some tests trying to recreate Blender’s Cycles engine’s render results in iClone, I will attach an example of it here:

Of course there is some post-work on this image but I do post-work on my Cycles renders too. Of course it’s not the same level of realism but I think it looks pretty good (at least compared to what I can produce usually in iClone).

Currently I can’t really produce consistently realistic/good looking renders with iClone, only when I try to recreate the look of a render from another engine. But without this reference it’s difficult to achieve anything similar to this, it usually looks much less realistic for me.

So I don’t have any specific or more professional tips on achieving good results other than setting everything to the highest quality possible - bu even that is not a guaranty that it will produce something good-looking.

So the whole reason I wanted to open this discussion is for us to share tips with each other on how to achieve more realistic or at least good-looking results with the native renderer.
What worked well for me so far is using good hdri’s and closed environments, especially if I make a scene where the character is in place so I can use all kinds of light sources creatively. In big open environments however it feels really difficult to produce good results.

PS. I have tried Unreal and Omniverse as alternatives for quick scene setup in a higher quality renderer but for me at least it didn’t seem that simple, I’ve run into a lot of issues with characters and especially in the case of Omniverse I think you need a pretty strong machine to use it with ease.

[0oseven]

On first glance at your renders the Iclone one hit me as the better one.
I see some light in the eyes of the cycles render but that should easily be achieved in Iclone or CC.
I have agonised over the same questions but if I remove from the equation the quest for perfection then Iclone does a very good job.Much depends on lighting setups anyway.
I have wasted so much time trying to learn other “solutions” which has slowed down my thoroughly learning Iclone and CC. Need to focus on whats actually important to animation.

Story - got to be interesting,
Animation - needs to be smooth
Facial and Lypsinc - lots of attention needed.DONT forget the eyes !
Overall Scene appearance - appealing
Elements of movie making - Pace,mood, emotion , scene cuts, editing etc etc.
That’s my dollarsworth whic I hope helps !!!

[Delphoi_Studio]

These are really good points. If all these elements you mentioned are good, the “graphics level” of the render tend to lose its importance, since it already looks so well-made and professional that it just looks like a choice of style.

It’s weird, I agree that at first glance the iClone one maybe even looks better. But the longer I look at the Cycles render, the more I get this life-like precision of light scattering. Even though, I tried to mimick it with the iClone one, there is a difference. But it could be due to the color space too, Agx gives a more photoreal feel to renders.

I would somewhat modify my question though, the goal is not necessarily photorealism, it’s more like achieving a “good-looking” result. Like the kind of render that has less videogamey feel to it and somewhat of a CG feel, if you know what I mean. And it’s also a combination of this somewhat more “realistic” and still good-looking style. Because on occasions I can achieve this but without any consistency, especially throughout different type of scenes (for example, outside scene with sun and there is a lot of movements across the scene where it would look weird to have a bunch of close light sources moving with the characters).

[Chuffinmonkey]

I agree with your points. I’m somewhat obssesed at the moment with achieving, as you say, a more CG feel rather than video gamey look. Anything in daylight is so hard to achieve but I feel I might be getting somewhere with night time scenes. Maybe it’s time I bit the bullet and started animating with blender and just use CC4 for charater creating but it is so much smoother to use Iclone. Just a shame about the renders.

[Delphoi_Studio]

I can recommend trying out Blender, it has a lot of benefits but it’s still far from a perfect solution. Eevee the real time engine now has ray tracing and in certain scenarios it can look really good but it’s not an easy task to get consistency with it. You can make really good looking renders when it comes to objects but I rarely see people rendering human characters and that’s the part where it looks less realistic/CG for me. But sometimes it works, just in really specific scenes with a lot of set up - so in the end of the day, the same issue we have with iClone’s renderer.

Cycles also needs proper set up to look good. But it’s easier to achieve with it and then it can look really realistic/CG. The problem with Cycles is that it’s really slow. Especially when it comes to human characters because you can get away with lower sample counts when it comes to objects and places but with human characters you need the details to come out, it makes a big difference. And especially with animation because if you don’t want your scenes to look extremely noisy, you need pretty high sample counts (you can also use Optix denoiser but it has the same problem, washing away a lot of details if it’s not high enough). The other denoiser option preserves details better but doesn’t work well with animation, I had to learn this the hard way.

I am thinking about using render farms for this reason.
By the way, really nice render, I didn’t register that it’s from iClone upon first looking at it.

[Chuffinmonkey]

I did dabble with Blender about a year ago, I was struggling with the intro to a short film so created the space/planet intro - https://youtu.be/dKAksw5YUuA?si=8rroYD0pdAJnbKTq but I really struggled with camara and lighting. As you say the renders in Cycles are so slow.

Are there any render farms that can render Iclone? I’m not entirely shure how they work!

Thanks for the compliment much appreciated, I spend a silly amount of time trying to get each shot looking the best it can. Do you have anything online? The full short film the render is from is here if you have time. Your feedback will be very much welcomed. https://youtu.be/ejVEtbPmZtk?si=mQtjKOLgbMRI7bZn

[Delphoi_Studio]

I don’t know of any render farm that offers iClone rendering. I only found an archive page from iRender but it looks like they are not doing it anymore. I’m not entirely sure about how they work either. As far as I can tell the pricing is kinda based on how quickly you want your renders done. If you are okay with it being rendered on lower cards and having low priority, it’s cheaper. Which is okay with me, I just want to be able to work on other things while they are rendering my scenes.

I can tell you’ve put a lot of work into your films, honestly there is not much I can “critique” about them, especially with iClone I think you pretty much visually maxed out what you could from the engine’s capabilities. I see you are aiming for a cinematic style too, that’s good to see, there’s not a lot of solo projects like this out there (at least that I’m aware of), it’s good to know that I am not the only one getting myself into these large, more serious film projects. I think your editing, timing, atmosphere building are really on point. Only thing I can say from my own failures that so much depends on maximising texture sizes, mesh qualities, the more detailed things are, the better they look. But you already do this, so it’s not much of an advice, just a general conclusion.

The only things I have online now that were rendered in iClone are pretty old now (I mean the scenes themselves were made much before even the uploads). There are a lot of things I don’t like about them and would do differently, I used a lot of color grading and effects on them in post to try to enhance them but in some ways it just made them look more broken. But anyway, if you are interested, I have these two short trailers for the two bigger projects I am working on the last years:
Heir Trailer
Aversum Trailer

[Warped_Reality_VFX]

Hello. From my modest perspective and experience with Iclone, I tend to lean towards photorealism for my renders.
Iclone can give decent renders in this area with a little help from the end user a few areas that can help is
Make sure you set your materials for the shader type you choose. I often use both in the same scene. The lighting interacts very differently, and the shader settings will need to be tweaked to work well together to compensate for light interaction.
If this is your goal then lighting accuracy is important Iclone is essentially a game engine using rasterization plus VXGI and depending on your background and the renders and other tools you are used to using, such as 3DSMax, Iray from my past background.
Iclone does not produce physically correct lighting. An example of this is when one object blocks the light of other objects, a process known as light occlusion. Here are some examples and workarounds to help fake this characteristic.
All images Iclone native render.

The first image normal render.

The second picture Iray rendered inside Iclone.

The Third image shader effect in the blend channel is a black image that can be fine-tuned for different results.
Fake method.

The Fourth image.
The exclude effect method.

The fifth image has no global illumination and a bounce light added

A spot shadow is also used but not always needed.
also studying lighting techniques can go a long way.
I hope this gives you some ideas to help achieve the render your after.
Here are a few of my readers using these methods all from the native renderer.

Best Wishes.
Kevin L.
Warped Reality VFX.

[Delphoi_Studio]

These are really great renders, they don’t have this feel to it iClone renders usually have. Somehow it feels like the light particules themselves are much smaller and produce a more photorealistic, accurate representation of light bouncing. Thank you for your advice, I will experiment with these principles in mind. Really clever method with the blend texture, I wouldn’t have thought of that it could have this effect.

Do you have a more general advice when it comes to outside scenes with direct light sources?

For me that’s when the characters look the most cartoonish because I cannot really use close light sources - or at least I don’t know how to without it looking like an obviously artificial light source.

[Cary_B]

Thanks for the tips, Warped_Reality. I have been playing with lighting in Iclone for a few years without really understanding what I’m doing. Some good suggestions here, and very nice renders.