iClone 6 PRO Full Bundle for 126$

Hermit Crab

Hi all,

I apologise in advance if I don't stay long on this visit!

Yesterday - very late at night - I spoke about a period of heated exchanges on the Reallusion forums. I must add that my own experience of those forums has been a delight. Normally everyone there is friendly and helpful and I've had great encouragement whenever I posted anything. Please don't be put off!

Regarding Iclone, in case any clarification is needed:

With iclone you can buy Standard or Pro. Pro is pretty much essential. The current version is 6 - released last December. Further improvements have been promised for iclone6 and are still being developed.

Reallusion seem committed to providing much better motion capture for iclone and seem to be working with both Kinect and Perception Neuron. (My knowledge of this is vague, unfortunately).

3dXchange comes in Standard, Pro and Pipeline versions. Today version 6 of these has been released.

The only version of 3dXchange which allows exporting from iclone to other software is Pipeline - and it is expensive to buy (for me anyway! - I only have Pro). The standard version is too limited for the needs of most people. But with the release of 6, the whole thing needs to be checked out afresh for new features and improvements.

Reallusion allows its own content to be exported from iclone (using Pipeline) for free but other content bought from vendors needs a licence. In practice you pay a higher price for content if you want to be able to export it. Not all content even has a licence (I believe) - this is at the vendor's discretion.

In previous versions of iclone, the native characters were dressed in Clone Cloth. Clone Cloth was simply a set of clothing meshes worn by the characters. The user could edit a template of the cloth for use in the various texture channels. So long trousers (for example) could have their transparency edited to become shorts. This is one reason why I looked upon iclone as a good prototyping tool. Quick costumes could be made and viewed in animations. Later I could look to model them properly for Carrara (if I had nine lives).

The new characters which come with iclone 6 are clothed in the same way. The figure in Bigh's animation could be edited to be wearing a shorter skirt by editing the texture of the transparency channel.

The figures in iclone6 are interim versions, I believe.

Iclone has excellent soft-body and hard-body (bullet?) physics. It also uses PhysX for cloth.

I haven't played at all with the new PhysX cloth in iclone6 but I understand that there is a texture channel which can be edited. From black to white, through different shades of grey, the cloth will have different levels of flexibility. That's about all I know about it. Others might be able to say how clothing brought from DAZ fits in with this method.

As for going from iclone back to DAZ or Carrara ........I really don't know.

On another topic - the video posted above, done by Mark (SmallWonderStudio) is a work in progress for a local school's production of the Wizard of Oz. He is going to have his scenery projected as a background to the actors on stage. His other iclone work is fantastic.

nicstt

Havos said:

Jonstark said:

nicstt said:

Is it possible to not use the renderer, but export the posed figured to render in daz using iray? Learning yet another render doesn't appeal. I really like the dynamic cloth features though. Daz sucks at supporting that, Or maybe just export the dynamic cloth once its posed back to daz?

This is exactly why I'm interested in iclone, though not to render in DS/Iray but rather in Carrara/Octane. I know Argus over on the Carrara forums has mentioned he exports from iclone to render in Carrara all the time without problems, so theoretically I think it's very feasible (I don't know any reason why the exact same principle wouldn't apply to DS/Iray). However I believe to get the feature to export out of iclone after setting up the clothing and figure physics requires the most expensive version of Iclone, which is not offered here as the Daz store (I'd love to be wrong about this though) which means it would be very pricey to get.

I really do think the ability to partially change conforming clothing into dynamic in certain regions, along with the speed and quality of the cloth sim, makes iclone very very attractive. Theoretically I'd very much like to add it to my animation pipeline, exporting into Carrara and adding dynamic strand hair that's been physics simulated, then rendering finally in Octane, but I'm not sure I'm enough off a high roller to afford to set that up. :)

Edit: Just realized I'm partially wrong, looks like to export what's needed is 3dxchange Pipeline (not to be confused with 3dxchange standard or 3dxchange pro) and there is a bundle here at the Daz store that includes that, so.... ( Now I'm really wishing I had jumped on this yesterday so I could stack discounts :) )

Edit2: No, I looked closer and realized that the 3dxchange Pipeline bundle in the Daz store is for Iclone 5, not Iclone 6, so I guess I was wrong...

If you go to real Illusions site there are only two versions of iClone for sale, the standard and the pro, both of which are also available here.

I was also confused about what was the difference between the Animation pipeline and 3dxchange. Seems odd if the pipeline was separate it was not included in the full bundle for iClone 6. I think a new version of 3dxchange is imminent, and maybe that is true of the pipeline too. I am not sure why they need two separate products for import/export.

I've dropped the bundle I saved for a gfx card on the 3dexchange pipeline bundle from them. I now need to save up for a gfx card again, but no worries. :) I'm expecting to be able to do what I want, but not thrilled on another learning curve. /sigh