My iClone renderings were among the best, if not the best, native results in the software’s history (prior to my Omniverse transition). Despite this, I still encourage Reallusion to improve rendering. Your point about “putting in work” is ironic, considering iClone is marketed as a user-friendly solution, avoiding complex plugins and exports – precisely the problem AI aims to solve by reducing workload.
Reallusion is a commercial software company they have to make money or go out of business
you seem to think Reallusion is only focused on grabbing money from its users but over time
Iclone ,with every major plugin, is still cheaper than any Maxon or Autodesk product even the $298 dollar per year Maya indie that I have.
Similar to other Big Tech companies, the company seems to prioritize profit over user satisfaction, leaving many customers frustrated. Why introduce a feature like soft body and rigid body simulation and then abandon its continous development? Forcing users to purchase expensive alternatives like Marvelous Designer is unfair to long-time iClone customers who purchased the software expecting continued updates.
RL can hardly be considered a Big Tech company with about 200 employees or less.
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I decided not to further engage in a certain discussion as my comments are being misconstrued.
Why introduce a feature like soft body and rigid body simulation and then abandon its continuous development?
Because market conditions change overtime and companies often re-assess their priorities on where they will try to compete.
Sometimes other companies emerge with purpose built software that is so much better than the native tools in other packages that ,it makes no sense to try to compete.
I have been in 3D since the mid 1990’s
back then every 3D software had their own render engine
but eventually stand alone purpose built render engines like Maxwell, Vray ,Arnold, Redshift, octane became so good that the major 3DCC’s basically halted development on their internal render engines and leased & bridged or outright bought one of those high quality engines.
(except Blender)
Many 3DCC’s have similarly stagnated major development of their internal sculpting and texture painting tools since the advent and dominance of ZBrush and substance painter
because they saw the pro industry preferred those tools.
CG artists of today have accepted the reality of multi application pipelines.
It is my observation that Reallusion has narrowed its focus on down to two major areas of the 3D market
Trying to become an affordable alternative to the uber expensive Autodesk Motionbuilder with iclone & timecode
and trying to dominate the 3D character creation market with CC5.
And the new features of Cartoon animator 5 makes it very competitive with the more expensive MOHO pro 2D animation software
That said, Reallusion’s biggest competitve threat right now is yet another purpose built software called Cascaduer.
It has gained a really strong foothold in the indie game dev space as it is only $300 USD
It has an AI assisted secondary motion system
that no one else has.
Character Ragdoll physics
Mocap retargeting and clean up.
So again it is a tough market right now so Reallusion has to choose carefully where it deploys its resources.
What you are forgetting is that, for us old-time iClone users, is that export of any kind requires a more expensive asset category. So for me to even export to ‘free’ solutions will cost me hundreds of $, if not more, just to be able to see my krappy (wouldn’t let me type the ‘c’) assets rendered in a better engine (if they will even render at all, which is not the case for speed trees and some other assets).
I agree with BennyDee – WHY should we have to learn multiple s/w packages? Minimum h/w for recent RL products is more than enough to support improved render methods.
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What you are forgetting is that, for us old-time iClone users, is that export of any kind requires a more expensive asset category. So for me to even export to ‘free’ solutions will cost me hundreds of $, if not more, just to be able to see my krappy (wouldn’t let me type the ‘c’) assets rendered in a better engine (if they will even render at all, which is not the case for speed trees and some other assets).
Typically a completely new render engine is going to have its own new & more advanced material system so people using really old content with shaders compiled for the old DX9-10 engine of Iclone 5-7 cannot reasonably expect such backward compatibility.
Minimum h/w for recent RL products is more than enough to support improved render methods.
It does not matter what the hardware requirements are
for Iclone itself.
what matters is the cost vs benefit of creating a new render engine from scratch.
The harsh business reality as I see it, is this;
The only people who would benefit from a new render engine in Iclone are the existing users who utterly refuse to use the FREE pipeline export tools to render in FREE external engines
(UE5, Omniverse, Blender ,Unity)
That is not growth in the user base which is always the goal
for any business.
A static user base is by default a shrinking one because people move onto other things people die etc
No new people will buy into the Reallusion eco-system and grow the user base just for the new render engine
Not from Daz because they have Iray for FREE
Not from Blender because they have Cycles/EEVEE for FREE
Not from C4D because they already have Redshift
(and optionally Vray,Corona,octane)
Not from Maya because we have Arnold
Not from Max because they have Vray as well.
Reallusion is trying to attract NEW users into the eco system with vast motion libraries from Actorcore
Mocap retargeting via Iclone
and prefab characters and content via the new CC5.
The fact that they moved on to a more advanced CC5 before Iclone 9 should tell you alot about their current strategic
priorities.
I am one of those old-time iClone users (from version 1.58) and I have seen a steadily improvement of both the look of the characters, the lighting system, the materials, and indeed the render engine with various new features in iClone 8.
And what kind of look would a new render engine offer? Photo-realism, a look like for example Ghost in the Shell (like 3D Anime), a sketch look, a painterly look? There are so many desirable looks for animation of which photo-realism is only one and not even the most prevailing. A much better idea would be an AI-based system where the user can select a look based on a specific example. That would be worth the effort.
If I look at my older movies, they are still watchable because of the story, but I would now be able to make them look much better with the latest Clone version. It’s just not worth it to go back so I leave things as they are.
Exceptions are a few recent short films that I ported from iClone 7 to iClone 8 and the effort was worth it.
What would be far more beneficial to me would be a better clothing system as the current Confirm approach is a hit and more often a miss. MetaTailer would have been a solution but as it is, it is far too costly. So perhaps RL could negotiate a much better deal.
Nvidia provides raytracing kits, making implementation affordable. iClone could integrate Omniverse for streamlined rendering, avoiding file exports and multi-window workflows. Major iClone updates require corresponding rendering engine updates. If Reallusion ceases engine updates, they should discontinue rendering support. Neglecting features like physics through lack of updates is unacceptable. C4D and Blender users, prefer their existing workflow. However, unlike the visually limitless and free Blender, iClone suffers from significant visual limitations. Ignoring these limitations and user feedback hinders community growth, a crucial element in software like Blender’s success.
Nvidia provides raytracing kits, making implementation affordable.
Those ray tracing kits may be affordable but they appear to require special “RTX Neural shaders” which would make all existing Reallusion store content as well as content imported from Daz unusable unless RL builds some complex shader conversion system if even possible .
iClone could integrate Omniverse for streamlined rendering, avoiding file exports and multi-window workflows.
The entire selling point of Omniverse is the USD format that everyone can use it from their preferred software package,
this requires EXPORT to USD
You literally have the export your created characters from CC4 to Iclone how is exporting to omniverse, to render , any harder?
And what kind of look would a new render engine offer? Photo-realism, a look like for example Ghost in the Shell (like 3D Anime), a sketch look, a painterly look? There are so many desirable looks for animation of which photo-realism is only one and not even the most prevailing.
I personally would liked to see improvement to the NPR toon engine in Iclone .
The current one is actually decent but more shading style controls would be nice though
i dont know what you mean but iray did not require export from iclone it was just running it . what are you talking about lol
Right, Iray is a stand alone slow, brute force path tracer
that was Plugged into iclone just as it is in Daz studio.
No realtime RTX support for animation.
Reallusion did not own it or control it’s development
so a simple driver update could easily break it.
It was a disaster. 
Daz has had to rush out a literal Public alpha build of the next version of Daz studio with the latest Iray version because the version of Iray in the current
stable version of Daz studio 4.X ,wont work with the new 5 series GPU’s from NIVIDIA
Now ask yourself why Reallusion dropped Iray support in favor of the modern USD export based Omniverse system that you are using now. 
Correct. As far as I’m concerned, iClone is a tool to animate humanoid characters and to export the results to other software (C4D in my case).
I could be wrong, of course, but I don’t think Reallusion has the financial and human resources required to re-do the soft-cloth physics, particles system, etc. to bring it more in line with what other 3DCC can do in addition to all the other stuff they have/want to work on.
And, frankly, I don’t even want them to do it. As @AutoDidact said, I don’t need iClone for any of that. And I don’t see iClone getting so much more powerful and turn into a full-featured 3DCC that it would make sense for me to ditch C4D and do “everything” in iClone.
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but I don’t think Reallusion has the financial and human resources required to re-do the soft-cloth physics, particles system, etc. to bring it more in line with what other 3DCC can do in addition to all the other stuff they have/want to work on.
And even if they somehow did they would have to become a subscription based software to recoup the development costs
or make the perpetual version price in the thousands which would alienate the current user base and still would not attract users from Maya ,Houdini, C4D or Blender due to their entrenched habits and their eco system comfort bubbles.
Well, I can obviously only speak for myself, but as far as I’m concerned, it is not so much a question of “eco system comfort bubble”. I’m fine with adding additional tools to my pipeline if it makes sense to me. So I added iClone/CC to my tool kit a few years ago and MD recently. I might also pick up Cascadeur once I get back into animating stuff (I’m currently on a self-imposed time-out with regard to producing 3D related stuff).
I’m fine with adding additional tools to my pipeline if it makes sense to me.
I would imagine that for most people it only “makes sense”
if those third party tools add something that is severely lacking inside your main software such as Character creation rigging and animation tools in C4D.
This has been a long standing complaint in the C4D community
Causing many to just leave for Autodesk or Blender
and most of those that remain are frankly not Character animators and are not even interested in the current Character animation tools of the Reallusion eco system never mind some new render engine or cloth physics etc.
I might also pick up Cascadeur once I get back into animating stuff
As I said before, Cascadure is the most serious competitor against Iclone, in attracting actual animators from other programs because it is an affordable, pure stand alone, real time character animation tool that indie game devs
(who’s final destination is UE5 or Unity) ,
seem to really love
In my opinion, comparing Iclone with the C4D I use is completely pointless. Apart from the rendering engine, there are significantly more differences. Here are some examples:
- Particle system,
- physics,
- hair,
- liquids,
- instances.
Catching up on all this would probably be far too much for Reallusion’s budget.
I don’t think that will be any different with the other programmes such as Maya.
Reallusion should therefore focus on positioning itself as a provider of animations and programming the associated interfaces properly. After all, the current export function is nothing more than generating an FBX file. It doesn’t matter whether I specify C4D or Maya as the target software. This is also logical, as FBX is the general exchange format. This means that I always need to post-process the materials.
This works much better with the export function in Ominverste. I didn’t have to edit anything here and it worked really well.
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Sure. However, as far as I know, there is no software that “does it all” (without any addons/plugins); and it’s probably not reasonable to expect any 3DCC to do that, either. At least not at a price point still manageable for a hobbyist.
Maybe so. However, I would have to start my learning curve at zero in any other 3DCC and I don’t want to do that. If I did, I’d probably consider Blender (mainly because I could run it on a multitude of machines without additional expense) but, as I said before, Blender does not seem to agree with me (or vice versa).
The thing is, I only spend limited time with 3D, don’t make any money of that, and thus—at my age—I’m more or less stuck in my ways having some much “invested” in C4D.
I don’t even want to learn another render engine or render environment such as UE or Omniverse. Another reason why I’m not interested in a new render engine in iClone if that means additional learning.
The little time I’m willing (or disciplined enough) to devote to 3D, I’d rather spend creating something than learning new stuff that I may never need or use.
Are you talking about exporting to Omniverse from iClone or C4D? Or both? Since my projects are finalized in C4D anyway, I don’t really care whether iClone has a better export function for Omniverse. And unless Omniverse renders a lot faster than Redshift, I don’t care about Omniverse in any case.
Reallusion should therefore focus on positioning itself as a provider of animations and programming the associated interfaces properly. After all, the current export function is nothing more than generating an FBX file. It doesn’t matter whether I specify C4D or Maya as the target software.
I agree and ,to my mind, it does matter which programs and user demographics they target in their marketing and feature priorities.
Marketing to C4D users makes perfect sense as C4D’ native character animation tools are very weak particularly when they sort out an apparent partnership with the creator of the CC4D tools plugins.
Now, while it is Nice that the upcoming CC5 will actually convert to proper Arnold shaders when importing Characters to Maya.
My personal opinion, as a Maya user ,is that Reallusion is wasting their time trying to get Maya users to buy into the Reallusion ecosystem because Iclone/CC4-5 does literally nothing that is not already available in an Autotdesk based pipeline.
If you look at the short video below, you cansee you could have removed Iclone from the equation completely and gotten the same result with just the Motionbuilder and Maya.
IMHO the better strategy would be to implement a joint control morph system for the next generation of CC avatars and market heavily towards Daz studio users, many of whom are very disgruntled ATM ,with Daz’s New subscription version and the new DS2025 build that breaks compatibility with All of the existing third party plugins that made the software actually usable.