I’ve been noticing that iClone tends to slow down or even crash when working with bigger scenes or multiple SubD characters, especially when applying motions to several at once. I’m using a high-end PC that handles Unreal scenes much heavier than this without any issues, but iClone’s CPU/GPU usage rarely goes above 40–50%.
Is there any way to make iClone take better advantage of system hardware (RAM, GPU, CPU cores)? Or are there optimization settings I might be missing for larger projects?
Would love to hear how others are handling this, or if Reallusion has plans to improve performance scaling for high-end systems.
I have the same problem as you. From my point of view, my system is already very well equipped (2xTitan RTX, 128GB RAM). But that doesn’t matter to Iclone. It still only addresses one graphics card.
I also think that this is not easy for Reallusion to implement. Programming rendering software is expensive and there are plenty of alternatives. Therefore, I assume that they see themselves more as a supplier for programmes or want to establish themselves as such, which have significantly better rendering programmes. Hence, ultimately, the interface to Blender, Maya, Omnivese and even Unreal.
Therefore, rendering in Iclone will ultimately only be suitable for small scenes. I tested it myself with a 5GB scene. Rendering time in Iclone was 30 minutes, rendering time after exporting the scene from Iclone to Omniverse was 9 minutes.
What you can try is to increase the priority of the programme for the system (Windows). You can do this via the Task Manager. But of course, that doesn’t solve the underlying problem.
There’s a reason I prefer to invest in and use Reallusion’s products and plugins instead of switching to Unreal, Blender, or other free alternatives. Being told to learn and use software I don’t enjoy just to get better rendering results than the software I already support and spend thousands on feels like being told to go across the street to use the neighbor’s oven, when what I really want is a better oven in my own house.
Reallusion has grown a lot — especially with CC5 and the push toward more realistic workflows. At this stage, it feels reasonable to expect stronger native rendering performance from iClone itself, without having to rely on external pipelines.
Of course, I understand it’s not a simple feature to implement — but given how many users prefer to stay entirely within the Reallusion ecosystem, I hope this becomes a real priority.
I agree with you. I would also like to work exclusively within the Reallusion ecosystem. But in my opinion, it simply has too many shortcomings. This starts with simpler things. For example:
- Hair dynamics: as far as I know, I still can’t define a body as a collision object here. I have to go through a cumbersome process involving individual collision shapes. This doesn’t work either.
- Dynamics for liquids are also rather poor.
- No clone objects. I can’t create clone objects, which would significantly reduce the rendering time.
Other programmes are simply much more advanced in this respect and have a corresponding advantage.
They can’t even manage to programme the forum properly. The reply function is still broken for me when I use Microsoft Edge.
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RTX Render: Cinematic Quality, Coming as a Free Update
Looks like here it is "
RTX Render is coming to iClone and Character Creator as a
free update. Developed in collaboration with
Nvidia, it brings path-traced rendering at near real-time speeds, harnessing
RTX GPUs and
DLSS to deliver exceptional clarity and performance without sacrificing speed."
Looking forward to this I have fought to try using the other programs for years to render my scenes and it worked once and twice until updates and constant mismatching caused issues and I gave up. Hopefully this helps a lot
I’m also pleased to see that things seem to be moving forward with rendering at Reallusion. Above all, I’m keen to see whether it will then be possible to render using more than one graphics card. However, I’m still wondering whether Iclone 9 will finally introduce a proper material system. At the moment, it’s still very basic. But the announcements definitely show steps in the right direction.
As for rendering outside the Reallusion ecosystem, I’ve found a suitable workflow for myself. I create the avatars in CC5, export them to Iclone 8 and do the animations there. I then export this as an FBX file into Cinema 4D. A special plugin adjusts the material accordingly, and I then render the scene with Redshift in Cinema 4D. Here’s my first attempt:
https://youtu.be/cMxrLrNqwY4?si=enZ3TiSf4R-BK21D
Great to hear you found a workflow. I have yet to get one working outside of iclone yet. How long did that take to set up and render looking good.
Setting up the scene took an hour. Exporting the individual characters took about 10 minutes. I used this tool for that:
https://youtu.be/yXY3bKlikU4?si=1qFyH4S0vhr-ec7I
The rendering itself took 28 hours. I used the Redshift renderer for this.
Where do you want to export and render the whole thing?
I’d completely forgotten about that. The system uses two Titan RTX graphics cards. So I’m really looking forward to the RTX update.
Do I get this right? You rendered 28 hours for that 10 second clip??
Sorry, but If so, this is insane…
The same Quality would render maybe 20 seconds or less in Unreal 
Personally, I always find it difficult to compare the rendering of projects between System A and System B if I don’t know the basic parameters. I’ve just had a quick look. The scene itself is relatively small at 1.2 GB. There are a total of around 14,950,000 polygons. The high number is mainly due to the characters. I’m not familiar with the Unreal renderer. But if we take your statement at face value, that means the render engine only needs around 0.1 seconds per frame to produce a physically accurate rendering with all the necessary elements – such as shadows, reflections, and so on. If that’s the case, that’s an outstanding figure.
In this scene, there was the added complication that the clothing mesh was causing issues. It wasn’t transferred cleanly here. I had to compensate for that with a simulation tag for clothing, which worked quite well. That drastically increased the rendering time.
I had taken a look at Unreal once and then decided against it. The limitations in terms of simulation capabilities and the associated customisation options were simply too great for me personally. But, ultimately, everyone has to decide that for themselves.
I once had a scene that was 5 GB in size and did a render comparison between Cinema 4D, Omniverse and Iclone. However, I only rendered a single image just for fun.
At the time, Cinema 4D and Omniverse were roughly equally fast, taking about 8 minutes. Iclone, on the other hand, took 30 minutes.
Ultimately, that’s also the reason why I’m curious to see how it will work with the RTX engine in Iclone.
