Depth
of Options
If you are very creative, there are very few things that
iClone1.5 can't do. You can combine your
avatar with 3D dragons or have them explore 3D castles
or do erotic dances. You can link preprogrammed motion
strings with handcrafted movements using Motion Editor.
You name it, you can pretty much do it, with a few exceptions
that we'll get into later.
As
we mentioned before, iClone is designed to allow
you to create 3D machinima, animated internet avatars,
and animated films. In order to do this, you must first
create an avatar, which can be one of the ten pre-included
characters in the package, or it can be created from mapping
your face from a photo and putting your head on the body
of one of the pre-included avatars. Facial mapping uses
a very basic version of CrazyTalk, where you can
take a picture of yourself and place hinge points on the
photo so that the program can extrude that photo into
the 3D realm. (With that said, even though iClone
includes this basic version of CrazyTalk for face
mapping, it is fairly limited and doesn't yield optimal
results on most photos, unless you have been very careful
in your original subject placement and photography. As
such, for better face modeling and lip sync, especially
for photos that need to be finessed, you really want to
use CrazyTalk 4 to import faces and set up their
motion masks. This also gives you more control of facial
movement and conveyed emotion, as CrazyTalk's options
in this regard are for more encompassing than iClone's.
For more information on CrazyTalk, you
can read our review of CrazyTalk4 here.)
You
can then import your voice in either CrazyTalk
or iClone to give your new character a script to
speak from as you set up the rest of the animation for
your piece. Unfortunately, you can't control anything
but the volume of this imported voice, as it can't even
be accessed in the timeline. As such, you'll have to make
sure that you time out your recording in your audio program
ahead of time, so that your speech starts when you want
it to and not just at the beginning of the sound clip.
iClone will take care of lip-synching to the spoken
word, which works fairly decently although it's not perfect.
(Again, if you import the script and speech out of CrazyTalk,
it will be cleaner and look nicer.)
Once
you have your face and your dialogue in, you select a
body or combination of body parts you would like to be
your body. You can choose a from four basic body types:
Plump (wider arms, hips, belly, and chest), Strong (wider
arms & chest), Average, and Skinny (Average stretched
taller). There are two other body types that are less
common and that many filmmakers probably won't use: Cartoon
(which makes your avatar look like they're from Final
Fantasy IX) and Miniature (which turns your avatar into
a stocky little person). And, while you can create key
frames for most other elements of animation, you can't
do so for body type or avatar, so there will be no films
in which you have a character that gains weight, loses
weight, gets turned into a dwarf, or gets turned into
a woman. You'll need a different software for that or
some creative editing after the fact.
With
that said, once you have matched your head and body, the
program will cause the overall skin color of the body
to conform to your face, which is a nice touch. After
that, you can accessorize your character with watches,
hats, and gun belts. Unfortunately, the selection for
accessories is really minimal and many of them don't have
much versatility. For example, you can put a gun holster
on your characters left thigh, but if you try to put it
on their right thigh it's hinged out into space. This
means you have to rotate it precisely to get it on the
right thigh. Unfortunately, once you do that, you realize
the pistol butt is now sticking out the wrong way. Similarly,
there is a pull-down menu with a whole slew of other options
for placing the holster on everything from the ankle to
the waist to the throat. However, these options are simply anchor points for the accessory and the accessory must be resized and rotated to actually fit in the appropriate place.
Unfortunately, you can't resize individual parts of the accessory, but must resize the entire thing. This means that the gun belt will support a mini-pistol when you resize it to fit on your character's wrist and will support a hand-canon when you make it big enough to fit on their waist. It's very strange that
they even put these options in for these accessories if
they were clearly not going to work well. Hopefully, future
versions of the program will only offer options for accessories
that make sense and are pre-arranged. (A simple 'Free
placement' option could be allowed for folks who want
to place swords on thighs or backs or wish to resize the accessories for additional placement posibilities.)
Once
you're accessorized, now you just need to place your character
in an environment, which can range from 3D areas like
rooms and castles to simple 2D backdrops set up like a
stage play. Once you have him or her where you want them,
you can put props all around them, from couches and loveseats
to robots and modern sculptures. While each of these props
can be moved along the timeline, some of them, like robots
and dragons, actually have movement sequences that you
can activate by 'Right-Clicking' in the timeline, which
is a nice feature, although it does take some trial and
error to get the hang of.
If
there are not enough props for you, you can actually import
props from programs like 3D Studio Max and Poser,
although most 3D designers who have 3DS Max aren't
going to need this program. Still it gives folks the ability
to download stuff from 3DS Max sites, Poser
sites, and the like. Additionally, you can now texture
map items that are in the software and which you import,
which is a nice way to put new paintings in or to cover
shapes in the software. You can even retexture
the skins and costumes of the avatar body parts, if you import a texture into the 'Diffuse' area for the body part you want retextured.
Once
you've got everything the way you want it, it's time for
the actual animation. As we mentioned before, you animate
your character's body movements in the Motion Editor,
with a variety of pre-programmed motions available that
can be linked with a range of still poses. Each of these
poses can be adjusted to become the exact one you want
and the program creates 3D 'tween' frames between linked
poses and actions or between poses and other poses. (If
you have access to .BVH motion capture data, you can also
import that into iClone, for more realistic 3D
motion.)
When
you're satisfied with your avatar's motion, you can go
back into the main part of iClone to use the timeline
to change your character's position on the 3D grid (so
that the walking motion actually takes them someplace),
change the motion and placement of the props, adjust lighting,
and move the cameras around. New to 1.5 is the
inclusion of common camera moves, like Dolly & Crane
and Circle Dolly. These moves are very nice by themselves
but have a bit of trouble linking with key framed camera
movements. As such, you can only use one moving preset
per scene and you must fit in key framed camera moves
inside that move or after it concludes. Again, a little
complicated to explain, but suffice it to say this aspect
of the program could use some polishing for future versions.
And
finally, when you're done with everything, just like with
Reallusion's CrazyTalk franchise, iClone
will let you kick out videos of your production in everything
from full frame, full motion .avi's to low frame-rate,
mini movies for iPod and mobile devices. While the export
for web and iPod is fairly rapid, the export for full
screen .AVI is a little slower than a full effects render
in After Effects, so be prepared for some pretty
significant waits if you don't have an extremely powerful
computer.
While
the timeline is a big improvement over iClone1.0,
there are some very strange things that can't be done.
For example, you can't transition between lenses in the
middle of a scene, which means you have to save different
versions of the same scene if you want to use a 35mm lens
and a 200 mm lens in the same sequence. This results in
each type of shot having to be saved as a separate scene
and exported out as separate .AVI's that are then imported
into your preferred editing program to be cut together,
which is similar to actually shooting separate shots in
the real world but yields a rather hackneyed workflow
in the 3D realm.
Finally,
the biggest issue for iClone1.5 is not
showcasing the biggest improved feature it sports clearly!
The biggest issue folks had with 1.0 was the inability
to have multiple characters in a single scene. Well, 1.5
has remedied that issue, but you would never know it by
simply using the program. With virtually everything in
the program able to be learned by trial and error, the
fact that this isn't even alluded to in the menus is a
glaring oversight. (Especially, since, like I mentioned
before, the help menu hasn't been updated since 1.0
as of this publishing.) I literally used this software
for fifteen hours without discovering any ability to put
multiple characters in the same scene. When I finally
tracked it down through the new online manual, I found
that it required pressing Ctrl-F7, to pull up a strange
character menu that will let you select other characters
for your timeline. I understand that this is a new feature,
but requiring a non-listed key command that has no reference
in the menus to pull up an arcane option panel feels like
a video game hack, and not a real feature. Hopefully 2.0
will streamline this into the normal work flow better. (I talked with John C. Martin at Reallusion and found out that I actually got it pretty close to right. 1.5 uses a beta version of the multiple avatar timeline option. This beta version is activated with the strange key command to give users an an easter egg of what will be fully featured and GUI-supported in version 2.0.)
