Having spent a lot of money on all the products, I am very disappointed that the rendering engine is never upgraded and you can never get it to render like it is advertised. I even bought the Iray render engine which likes to crash all the time and even when you get a render from that it is awful compared to Daz3d renders on stills.
I also do not understand why I am told I should use Blender Unreal or some other outside render engine when I have paid for IClone/CC4?
So as the title says, when will the render engine be updated to produce some good renders for animation, like you get on all the promo adverts, or is it false advertising?
2 Likes
Hi…
The iClone 8 render engine works exactly as advertised and you should be able to get excellent results using it.
If your renders are not good it is most likely that you haven’t setup the scene to get the best results. Good lighting and the use of visual effects and cameras are essential to getting good renders.
One thing to check as a first step is that your render settings are correct. If you have everything set on low then you will not get good results.
So open Preferences in iClone (CTRL+P) and make sure your Real-time Render Settings are set to High and your Max Texture Size is at least 4096 x 4096. Note: Having a good graphics card with plenty of dedicated video ram is also very important.
Once you have your basic settings right, please refer to the Visual and Lighting tutorials HERE. These will help you improve your renders.
3 Likes
Exporting to Blender, UE5 or even Omniverse (which is like a superior version Daz Iray with modern RTX support), is FREE and Reallusion has dedicated export pipeline tools to facilitate your scene export to those external apps.
Daz studio still uses the Dumb ,brute force
Version of the still image path tracer from NIVIDIA with no RTX card support.
As you have Iclone/CC4 you have the option of creating animation in iclone and exporting bespoke BVH out to Daz studio for using on Daz genesis to render in Iray.
Thanks for the reply, I have done all preferences to those specifications, but it seems that you only get a nice render animation with just a black background in CC4 and not Iclone, also adding any of content lights to an Iclone scene just deletes the scene and seems to only work with a background screen added to it.
How do you stop it from deleting the scene?
Why do any lights you create also have no effect on the scene?
I will take a look at those links you gave me.
In response to the other reply.
*I paid for the plugin for Unreal, but it is just too complicated and time consuming to actually see any end product with it. Plus the cc3 models just remain static as the animations never worked in Unreal and that’s if I could get the figure to actually not be invisible *
*The advertisement for it showed a seamless transfer of scene animations and all props, I have to say I have never got anything to work in Unreal and adding a prop to just a single figure scene never showed up in Unreal *
I accept I basically took a massive financial loss in buying that plugin.
Yes I put tickets in for it, but never got any credible reply that resolved my problem as it would never create a project in Unreal for me to send them as that’s all they kept asking for?
I also found the tutorials for this plugin leaves you in no mans land, as it only deals with the IClone side and not the Unreal one.
Hey Wyrmaster,
Perhaps I’m wrong, but based purely on what you posted, I think it is important to prepare yourself for the learning curve for iClone, CC4 and Unreal Engine. And, yes the learning curve for UE5 is unfortunately higher than the Reallusion products.
Remember that these are merely tools, the final result will always come down to the artist.
The quality of your characters, set, animations, and final lighting and atmosphere will ultimately determine the final render result.
You will, for example, get much better results having a purpose build background set (made up of props and 3D walls, etc) rather than a simple background image or Black background (depending of course on what you want to achieve) To get the exact result you picture may require a personalized lighting set up rather than using one from the Reallusion toolbox.
Also, If done properly (and I did a tutorial series for beginners on youtube) exporting to Unreal Engine is not difficult, once you understand the basics.
My challenge to you is to immerse yourself in tutorials, practice relentlessly, and experiment until you achieve the results you desire.
Yes, mastering these tools takes time and effort, but the payoff is well worth it.
Even the stunning examples in Reallusion’s marketing videos were created by artists who’ve put in the time to fully understand the software.
You got this, Wyrmaster!
Good luck, and have fun exploring the incredible world of iClone, CC4, and Unreal Engine.
Hallo zusammen,
ich bin ja bekannter Maßen mit Reallusion auch nie ganz unkritisch umgegangen. Allerdings muss ich sagen, dass das Rendering mit Blick auf das Preis-Leistungs-Verhältnis aus meiner Sicht gut ist. Klar erreiche ich mit anderen Programmen, wie z.B. Cinema 4D (nutze ich selbst) mit Redshift deutlich realistischere Bilder. Allerdings muss man auch in diesen Programmen eine Vielzahl von Einstellungen vornehmen, um das zu erreichen. Da nimmt einem Iclone und der CC schon eine Menge Einstellungen ab.
Vielleicht wäre es hilfreich, wenn Du das Ganze einmal mit einem Beispiel illustrierst, damit wir uns einmal einen Eindruck machen können.
Und was genau soll denn bei der Render-Engine aktualisiert werden?
Die Plugins von Unreal und Omniverse funktionieren bei mir so, wie es in den Anleitungen beschrieben wird. Aber auch da wird man sich neuerlich mit den Rendereinstellungen beschäftigen müssen, was die Komplexität neuerlich erhöhen dürfte. Und letztendlich zwingt einem ja keiner, die beiden Alternativen zu nutzen.
Viele Grüße
Peter
1 Like
Just to relate here from a noobie perspective and having tested Unreal, Omniverse and Unity rendering as a noobie. Of all, Omniverse is probably the most straightforward. My choice of renderer would be Unity - somehow it is very easy for me to get in and get my head around it (being a mediocre ex-programmer).
Of course Unity inferior to Unreal and Omniverse - it is only significantly better than CC4/Iclone. I just needed the workflow speed.
I also learned that once you got comfortable outside of CC4/Iclone with either Unreal, Unity, Omniverse, Blender etc then you realise probably these are better tool to do most of the stuff (camera, lighting, rendering) and leave the initial character creation to CC4 and (some…) animation to Iclone.
It is a shame that CC4/Iclone require additional workflow for better rendering. I would have gladly paid for a rendering plugin (like previous iRay).
2 Likes
The previous attempts at render plugins where costly and never usable for animation. The one before Iray (I forgot the name) was the worst, as the company who made it was not interested in animation. Iray was slightly better, but there are a number of things that did not work that were never resolved. So RL tried, but it just didn’t work out. I use the iClone renderer with post-processing in After Effects to get the look I’m after, so even I use more than one program, but that doesn’t bother me. I don’t expect my animation program to spew out complete movies.
Possibly down the road there will be an AI solution where you can just select the look and have your desired result that way.
1 Like
The previous attempts at render plugins where costly and never usable for animation. The one before Iray (I forgot the name) was the worst, as the company who made it was not interested in animation.
That was “indigo” a brute force path/ray tracer originally designed for architectural stills like Iray was
neither has native motion blur as no thought was ever given to them being used for animation rendering.
Possibly down the road there will be an AI solution where you can just select the look and have your desired result that way.
That is my Dream
AI can already “Re-Style” single images
but cannot do it with perfect fidelity
over a series of frames.
I made this video where I took single still from my past animated films and re-styled them with AI
hopefully we will soon have the ability to just run an entire image sequence from Iclone
though an AI and choose a style
Pixar, UE5 cinematic,Comic/toon etc.
Nice restyling, thanks for showing.
Going back to the previous question, regardless of how expensive it is to integrate a render engine into Iclone, if Unreal and Blender can use good render engines and they are free to use, Realilusion can easily implement a good choice of render engine into their software.
1 Like
To be fair Blender and UE5 operate on different business models than Reallusion.
While we certainly appreciate RL’s long standing policy of offering perpetual licenses for the core software we have already seen that they are willing to go the subscription route for new addon features like the advanced Accupose features similar to cascadure.
Perhaps they will develop a more advanced internal engine and offer access to it
for a monthly fee the way Daz is doing for the more advanced features of Daz studio. 
Perpetual Internal Ominiverse render engine Plugin.
2 Likes
That would be great!
With no hard to follow instructions or having to open up folders and allow access to your machine from NVIDIA
As long as it does not make most, or all of the content you’ve bought unusable or unstable.
Why are you talking about “monthly fee” all the time? I dont see anything good in that.
1 Like
I hate subscription based software
But the reality ,as I see it, is this.
Iclone 8 has improved render options but many people have become spoiled by seeing quality like Unreal engine.
creating a new internal engine
(that will please modern users expecting UE5 quality) will have huge development costs and will likely break material compatibility with most of the legacy content being sold in the Reallusion marketplace.
So it won’t foment new sales of content until vendors adopt the new material system
(if ever)
thus it will have to run along side the legacy render engine which will give the vendors little reason to redo all of their content for the new engine if the old one is still active.
Notice how almost no one ever creates a new internal render engine from scratch.
Daz licensed Iray from NIVIDIA and before that, used 3Delight from Illumination Research
Poser’s “superfly” is just a crippled fork of Blenders open source cycles.
and the Major 3DCC’s (except Houdini) are all using engines acquired from third parties
Arnold, Redshift, Vray ,Corona, octane.
The only way Reallusion could recoup the cost of a UE5 quality internal render engine would be to dramatically raise the base cost of Iclone (driving away potential new buyers)
or charge a monthly fee for it, as they are doing with the new Accupose library system
Yep.
Also, I’d rather Reallusion spend their resources on improving the core competences of iClone and CC, i.e. character creation and animation and leave the development of render engines to other companies with deeper pockets and more expertise in that regard.
(Personally, I’d much prefer for Reallusion to develop animation tools for animals and other non-humanoid creatures similar to those available for humanoid characters (e.g. the puppet tools, AccuPose, MotionDirector – can you imagine art directing a horse and rider moving over an uneven landscape with automatic ground collisions using a game controller ? I’d consider that sweet.)
Besides, for me there would be no point in a better internal render engine in iClone (even if there were no additional monthly fees or the like) because RL products are early in my pipeline. Since I’m not going to finalize projects in iClone anyway (for reasons having only marginally to do with the quality of the its internal render engine), there would be no point in my “investing” time and/or money in any improved internal render engine for iClone, the same way I’m not spending any time on learning Unity, Unreal Engine, or Blender’s Cycles. (I also think it doubtful that those who have made UE, Omniverse, etc. work for them would necessarily want to switch back.)
So, with the things being what they are, you have the following options:
a) Try to make the best of the available iClone render engine, plus perhaps some post product work.
b) Use an external render/game engine for iClone output.
c) Finalize all your stuff in a 3DCC other than iClone and select one of the engines that either come with that 3DCC or are available from third parties. (My preferred option, obviously.)
d) Hold you breath and wait for significant improvements in iClone’s render engine which, for the reasons mentioned by @AutoDidact, are unlikely to materialize anytime soon.
Mit würde es ja schon vollkommen ausreichen, wenn Iclone endlich mehr als eine Grafikkarte akzeptieren würde. Ansonsten bin ich Eurer Meinung. Eine eigene Renderengine mit dem Ziel zu entwickeln, mit den großen mithalten zu können, ist viel zu teuer. Ich habe bereits vor Jahren gesagt, dass ich Reallusion eher als Zulieferer für die Großen sehe.
Viele Grüße
Peter
You mean support for rendering on multiple GPUs at the same time?
I understand that rendering images is a task that can more easily be made to work on more (CPU) cores or devices than some others tasks, but I don’t think it is a trivial thing to implement either. So, again, you are talking about investing development time and resources which RL could put to other use.
Also, I’m not sure how many iClone users have machines with more than one dedicated GPU (I’m not talking about those built into some CPUs but the ones on a separate card). With the big boys taking up so much space, getting more than one (e.g. an RTX4090) onto a normal motherboard and into a “normal” PC case is a challenge.
What is more, trying to render an image on different model GPUs (e.g. combining an iGPU with an RTX card, or using an AMD with an nVidia card) can also cause problems and is probably not a good idea. The system I run iClone on has two identical RTX2080Ti (same blower-type model, same vendor) and (for Redshift in C4D) that works more or less (sometimes there are quirks); iClone does not use two GPUs, of course, but this machine was not specced for iClone.
Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. I do think that this will be useful. Especially because Iclone 8 is a real-time renderer and the workload will increase in the future. I can’t judge whether the effort required to implement something like this is so high.
I myself run 2 Titan RTX cards in my computer and have had really good experiences with them in C4D. Especially as it significantly reduces the load on the CPU.
Best regards
Peter
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)