You are correct of course
and this is just my own unscientific anecdotal observation but
I would argue that Iclone/CC4 interest/usage in the Autodesk community in general is just as low as it is for the C4D Community based on my anecdotal observation as participant in the online Autodesk communities.
We don’t actually have a true “pipeline”tool from Iclone/CC4 to Maya just generic FBX export from CC4 and
a Characterization preset to convert the CC4 rigging to the defualt Maya human IK control rig.
No material conversion to the Arnold render engine etc.
Just looking at economics of potential buyers
if you compare C4D, Maya and Max
They have chosen to make a complete pipeline tool for the most expensive of the three.
Autodesk Max is $1945 per year(no discounts)
and has very powerful legacy Character rigging & animation tools for film/TV and games.
thus no real need for Iclone/CC4
Maya is fully featured already
has very powerful legacy Character rigging , Dynamic cloth , hair and animation tools for film/TV and games.
its the default software being taught in the animation schools, thus no real need for Iclone/CC4.
And can be had for $299 a year for us guys making less than $100,000.
Maxon One is just under $1300 annually
and frankly has very weak native Character rigging/animation /general retargeting tools.
From marketing perspective, After Blender and the FREE game engines
It makes more sense to target the C4D community
with complete pipeline solutions than it does to chase after Autodesk user who have good reasons to ignore Reallusion entirely
I needed to retarget motion data from an iClone character to an iClone character that was already in C4D because I didn’t want to recreate the beard for every new scene with this character. I imported the new iClone character, made it invisible, then used a combination of the C4D Retarget tag and copying and pasting the morphs from the new character to the existing one. I could make adjustments to the character’s movents in C4D by adjusting the joints in the new “control” character. The caveat is that the new iClone character has to be the exact same mesh as the one in C4D. You can have added items, like the beard and cloth, but the iClone base meshes need to be the same.
Clever workaround Tim!!
Indeed having to import re-import
another copy from CC4 when for a new animation is not really a burden if you are not actually producing full length animations with characters in multiple scenes
But if you are it is really time saving
to not have to do so when possible.
Here is an old clip from my 92 minute marvel Fan film, Ray traced in C4D R11.5
Excluding “Galactus” himself (who is a legacy Poser character imported & animated via the old “interposer pro plugin for C4D)
Every other figure in this movie is a Daz Genesis 1,2 or 3 and the only way to get a Daz genesis figure into my old C4D 11.5, back then, was via the old .obj+MDD method which was a sort of early pre-curser to Alembic.
I only had to export and texture a figure in C4D one time as a.obj followed by exporting
a.MDD point cache of his Iclone 6 animation retargeted to a Daz genesis figure in Daz studio.
After a scene was rendered I only need to export a different .MDD with the new animation from DS and overwrite the old .MDD linked in C4D and the character would update in C4D and perform the new animation.
Obviously if I changed the original mesh in DS
( new clothes etc,) only then would a full
re-export to C4D be required.
Thanks! And agreed–it’s only worth it for repeating characters with hair or cloth. Most of my characters are using card hair still, so I just export them as is and copy and paste the textures.
Ah, yes, MDD–I used that for a while as well, too, so long ago I can’t even remember the name of the plugin I used. It actually worked pretty great, but like so many of these 3rd party plugins it went the way of the dinosaur. Overall, I’m really pleased with the iClone pipeline. It would be nice if it was a bit more integrated with C4D, but I have to say that every time I use it I think I find something new to like about it.
Well, Maxon One (which I don’t have) comprises other software that is not strictly speaking C4D, so the price comparison is a bit off. The only thing about Maxon One vs the C4D-only license I somewhat care about is the additional content in the Asset Browser that is not available with the regular C4D licenses that I have. The problem is that, because I have no use for the other software that is included in the pack (some of which requires third-party software such as Adobe AE which I also don’t use), I’m not really willing to pay a few hundred bucks extra just for the Asset Browser goodies. In fact, I’m pretty p.o. at Maxon for make those available only in Maxon One.
I get that. The thing is I don’t know how to do the re-targeting in C4D.
I don’t change the body meshes of the CC characters I import into C4D, so that would be no problem.
Sure, I may put the character into a SubDiv surface to get a smoother collider body for the cloth sims and use RS tessellation at render time of course, but the underlying mesh remains the same.
I have never had a character with a beard made of C4D hair yet. The only C4D hair was on top of the head and for that no facial morphs need to be considered.
Ah, thanks for bringing up Maxon–it made me look at the pricing again and I guess Redshift is now included. I have Maxon one, since before you needed to buy Redshift separately, and by the time you got C4D and Redshift, you might as well buy the whole package, but I have never used any of the other programs from Maxon One, so I may covert over to just C4D–save me a couple hundred bucks!
If you’re curious about retargeting, here are the basic instructions:
The C4D including RS pack was still considerably less than Maxon One when RS was not part of the standard C4D license (otherwise I might have opted for the “full package”).
Thank you. I need to study this more carefully. For the target tag to work, you would need to keep the source joint hierarchy in the project file, correct?
As far as I know, the characters need to be the same, down the last polygon for this to work, except the source character with the animation keyframes doesn’t need any textures, tho it doesn’t hurt or help if they are there since you make the source character invisible and non-rendering, so you don’t see it (I should have stated that earlier). I will add that I ran into a slight issue with this character in that when I parented a prop into the character’s hand in C4D (the pincers & horseshoe) it had to be parented to the source character, and it didn’t sync exactly with the target character (there is a little play if you look closely) tho that may have been an issue with some resizing of the character, but I don’t really know, so we may have come full circle on this thread with two characters not syncing exactly in C4D LOL. The beard, on the other hand (so to speak) was fine, since it was parented to the target mesh. The one other thing I do is that I animate where the character’s eyes are pointing in C4D, so that requires deleting the keyframes on the eyes (do that first), putting each eye in the target character into a null, adjusting the axes of the null to make the blue Z axis pointing forward*, then add a Rigging/Constraint/Aim tag, and have it point at an empty null as a target.
*Tho, now that I’m explaining it, I probably could just adjust the axis in the Constraint tag, and skip the step of changing the axis–funny the things you realize when you try to describe something LOL.
I guess I’ll have to experiment a little with this re-targeting to see what if any benefits it has for my workflow (being female, most of characters don’t have beards that need to be transferred; the question of transferring C4D hairdos is more pertinent ).
Well, if the difference in price had only been a hundred bucks or so, I would have gone for Maxon One as well. But it was–and is–more, especially when you have more than one license.
Yes, in my former life, I used to teach adults and on more than one occasion I noticed that I had not fully understood the subject matter myself until I tried to explain it to others. After I discovered this, I would then try to get the “students” to explain it back to me to make sure that they had gotten it (sort of like a teaching aid).
Well, well, well
A Houdini user has made her own CC4 pipeline tool for Houdini
and is “campaigning” to get it officially adopted by Reallusion.
I Hope she is successful.
Quote:
“but the shaders were a bit off until now I’ve recently been in collaboration with the devs at Reallusion and they helped me create an HDA( "Houdini Digital Asset,”) that will bring a seamless integration process between
Houdini and real Illusions iclone”
Perhaps they are planning to make it compatible with the FREE Houdini Apprentice version which could potentially lure
users in that demographic into the Reallusion content ecosystem.
Any form of RL-Houdini connection would be great. There is a long-time request to enable Alembic imports of Houdini simulations into iClone, but going the other way (as proposed) may be easier.
).