Wyrmaster I really feel your pain! Sometimes the built-in iClone renderer can be a bit disappointing. But overall you should be getting the same results in iClone that you see in Character Creator, which can be really great in my opinion. It just requires using the right lighting setups etc in iClone and settings etc.
Please consider also making screen recordings and sharing them (with voiceover), so we can all see the issues you’re having and advise. It’s difficult to know what’s going wrong for some of the things you mention. But there’s many people here who are keen to help! Reallusion has a wonderful community.
I think the greatest strength of iclone is the animation tools and its pipeline to other programs. Compared to Epic or Blender, Reallusion is fairly small, I speculate that if they try to drift away from their greatest advantage and try to constantly play catch up… they would end up like Antics3D or Moviestorm. It’s harsh and pessimistic, but iclone is an incredible blocking and animation tool that has greater uses as a pipeline than just a rendering tool.
It takes time to learn unreal engine, took me six months to learn a system, and I’m still experimenting with new ideas and the tools inside the program years later. Once you’re familiar with unreal engine or blender, you see the best potential that iclone can provide. Give it time, build a set and learn to light first, then work your way through the sequencer and movie render queue.
Although I am a Blender/Maya user who only needs iclone ( still using version7)for blocking in base layer animation.
I do understand why many Iclone users do not wish to endure the vicissitudes of learning another program like Blender and certainly not UE5
( I hate the UE5 interface & cumbersome workflow
and will never use it myself)
Iclone is advertised as a complete animated filmmaking solution so I do understand why someone who has bought all of the products that @Wyrmaster has, might not want to hear that these are just expensive studio tools for Blender or UE5 & Unity.
Sure. But they don’t say “high-end” or “Hollywood-like” filmmaking solution. You need to manage your expectations before purchase.
Before I started to use iClone myself, I always regarded it as an inexpensive hobbyists’ tool, more something to play around with for fun rather than a serious tool for commercial/professional work. And, I suppose, in the beginning it was. Just as the first versions of Blender were probably regarded as little more than a joke by the “established” big 3DCC programs. Both Blender and iClone have come a long way.
(NB: To be clear, I’m a hobbyist myself; I’m just talking about my “impression” of these products in the 3D world and not belittling anything.)
There is also something that some people tend to forget or not take into consideration enough. We have become used to “free” or low-cost software that is as (or almost as) powerful as programs costing several thousands of dollars but companies/organizations that create such “free” or low-cost software need to make money, or they go under. Who in this forum is willing to work a full-time job for “free” on a long-term basis (I’m not talking about volunteering a few hours a months/year)? Probably not too many. We all need to pay the bills and that is also true for companies like RL.
The companies behind UE and Unity make their money with games. If they had to make a living with selling these games engines directly to consumers, these engines would probably cost several hundred dollars each.
I understand that the Blender foundation takes in donations (also from well-known companies) and relies on people donating their time. Most commercial companies cannot work like that.
What I’m saying is, given that RL needs to make money, they have to be careful where to put their resources and at what price point they make their product available to customers. How many in this forum would still be iClone users if the software were priced at, say 2,500 USD (buyout) or 800 dollars a year in subscription fees, but had a render engine comparable to UE in quality?
At that price expectations would rise and move from
“better render engine” to demanding cloth and hair like C4D or Maya and similar particle smoke effects etc.
From my observation of the various online 3DCC & game engine communities, Reallusion (much like Daz) has made effectively Zero broad market acceptance even as a stand alone animation tool.
So even today most people prefer say within their chosen ecosystem comfort bubbles
Sure there are a few high profile Blender projects they have showcased that used Iclone/CC3-4 but sometimes I wonder about the future of the Reallusion ecosystem with more and more advanced low cost character animation features becoming available inside game engines like UE5
All of the commercial retail 3DCC packages with “world class” render engines just bake the cost into the base price or are subscription based where you are literally renting the entire program including access the “world class” render engine.
of course freeware apps like Daz or open source apps like Blender have a different funding model
and even the “free” Iray in Daz studio is way outdated and does not even support modern RTX cards for realtime path tracing like omniverse.
Thanks, I’ve come away from using Iclone now, and accept I’ve wasted a lot of money on the whole set up, I’ve never got so frustrated with a software and wish I had never bought any of it.
The two things that killed IClone for me, was buying the Unreal plugin which was very expensive and more than Iclone/CC4 together, it is not seamless as advertised and the animations in Iclone do not sync at all in Unreal, whether it has got any better I don’t know and as I mentioned earlier, there is no videos of what to do once your scene from Iclone is in Unreal and before anyone says it is down to Unreal, I think the extortionate price you have to pay for this plugin, they should make a more detailed video, than just throwing folders together and loading a figure and a single prop into it and leave it at that!
The second is the quality of its rendering, yes I have seen CC4’s rendering and the videos people have made using IBL, everything is in the dark with lights being shone on the faces.
However I would like to see how reallusion created the Hair building promos, that is first class rendering, as is the hair movement, none of that happens in Iclone8, so it must be done in a different render engine!
If I do decide to give Iclone a whirl this weekend I’ll upload some pictures.
This is the bit that has me confused.
I remember the UE setup/live link was initially very expensive but later made free and previous buyers were even compensated or something. did they start charging for it again??
I’ve had a few videos in the past that discuss importing iClone animations into the Unreal Engine and I am currently working on a new video regarding the Unreal Live Link transfer at the moment.
I hold private lessons time to time and one recommendation I always make is to get to know the Unreal Engine and spend time to build a set, create a level sequence, and experiment. Bringing in animations and blocking is fairly easy, but there is lot more going on than just importing and hitting the render button.
I never got compensated, I had quite a few tough luck reply tickets from some woman there, I missed the refund date by 10 days, and was annoyed that they were giving it away for free, they were not interested in my case. I mean you cannot even evaluate such an expensive hard to use plugin in 30 days, when you are just a hobbyist, plus I could not even get it to work on any scenes I had made in Iclone as it just kept hanging.
This severely dented my trust in reallusion and feel so ripped off by them
I fully understand that, yes Unreal is a different application, and I will need to go deeper into it, but the Promo showed you an IClone scene fully transferred into Unreal and the animation from Iclone actually driving the Unreal replica, that never happened for me at all, even just a figure would not move and that is if it was even visible. I just feel gutted that I fell for such an advert and wasted 700 dollars on plugin that never worked.
I believe you transfered the character into the Unreal Engine and it imports into a skeletal mesh. You can import various animations into the character as long as it is the same character and apply it to the sequencer. You can also select bake all animations to sequencer when you transfer and it will create a level sequence for you.
Wow I had no idea people purchased the Unreal plugin - I’m so sorry you spent that money, and understand the frustration. I haven’t heard of anyone paying for it before!
All 3D animation is intensely frustrating, no matter what software you use honestly. I use Maya mostly for work stuff these days, but am also using blender and cascadeur and many others. But I honestly find iClone a pleasure to use because it’s comparatively so easy compared to full DCCs. It sounds like you’ve had a terrible time with iClone though and I’m so sorry for that.
And yes please share screen recordings if you have the chance. It really helps us all to help!
This is my step by step guide when it comes to importing characters. Hopefully it should help.
Unreal Engine is complicated and reallusion advertised the live link as an easy way to make amazing renders and such, but it’s much more complex. Live Link isn’t exactly broken but it has a learning curve.
There are courses that go through this process for thousands of dollars that help people. I hold tutoring services myself to help too. Go in with the expectation that it will take time and a lot of commitment, but once you get through that and you have a system in place… it is worth it.
Thanks I picked it up from the other thread, however the animations and start placement in Iclone never appeared, but it was so much more easy to follow than reallusions.
However, I did not buy the the live link because it can put the figures into Unreal, I bought it because it advertised a seamless link between working in Iclone and Unreal, in other words you are animating in Iclone with the scene you have built and what you do in Iclone is supposed to be mirrored in Unreal, so no need to build anything in Unreal.
The promo was a basic lie, because you can’t do it at all, I feel such an idiot to be suckered into buying that link on the pretext that I could create it all in Iclone and just send the whole scene over to Unreal and then work out how to render it out there, but no, it never loads up a scene and just hangs and hangs doing nothing.
For 700 dollars I guessed it was worth it if you could do as the promo said, but it is not worth 50 dollars and then to find out everyone got it for free.
Sorry to recap this same story, but I am totally devastated at paying out so much money for something that does not work.
Yes I tried to load the scene with your method and it just hung for an hour and I gave up!
So you’re bringing in everything, props and set. Makes sense. Ton of data all at once.
Hear me out. I know you want to bring everything in and hit render, but I think it’s best to get out of that process and mindset because it’s just causing problems and you are limiting yourself greatly to what can be done.
I always design a set in unreal engine first because it’s much more efficient. There are a wider variety of tools and models plus it’s often cheaper and easier to work with. Once you start looking at tools like brushify and ultra dynamic sky. You won’t look back at iclone for set design.
Use iclone live link to bring in parts of the set where your characters in iclone can interact like if they need to walk through a landscape or basic blocking purposes. Iclone is best at animation and blocking and its live link tool is great at that. It’s very efficient and you can do a very quick animation sequence compared to only unreal engine. That is where it should be advertised, but it not as flashy and hard to sell. After animation is done, just transfer only character to unreal. The live link does the whole process for you. Afterwards, I make a new sequencer where I line up character animation along with lights and camera all inside unreal engine. I started making my own visual effects too with chaos and Niagara , that itself is worth looking into.
Don’t give up. Just take a step back, take a deep breath, and look at it from a different mindset. We have two powerful programs that have tremendous value together. Don’t think of unreal as render extension. That is your production tool and iclone is there for animation.
