Jay Versluis
patreon
My first iClone UE Animation π
🕑 Added 2023-09-28 23:36:53 +0000 UTCHello supporters π
I was going to post a couple of early access video about Daz Studio, but sadly after an hour of editing we had a power cut and Premiere didn't store any auto saves. I thought perhaps it's a sign to call it a day and switch over to my laptop. It only has UE and iClone installed, and I thought I'd show you this rather unremarkable animation instead.
While it won't win me any Michael Eisner awards, I'm still super excited about it: I've made it with a combination of iClone and Unreal Engine, in a process that was shockingly quick and worked on my first attempt. With this workflow, I'll be able to use iClone as an animation front end for UE. It allows me to animate native UE characters, iClone/CC characters and also Daz characters.
I'll have to investigate the full options of course, but so far I've been able to apply stock animations, blend them together and adjust them with additional keyframes. Next I'll look into something that lets me animate background characters within a pre-defined region with simple behaviour and my game controller.
I've only bought iClone last month when it was on sale and have been spending a few hours every weekend to get accustomed to its ways. While following this novel concept called a "written documentation" I was able to send an iClone native character over to UE, then apply an animation to him and record his motions via the Live Link integration (all on my laptop). I used a native UE set for the background, sent the floor and chair over to iClone as proxy objects so I could get the positions right, then render everything out in UE.
This concept also works with much larger sets, foliage, landscapes, lights and cameras. While UE has a lot of animation tools built-in, they're often extreme overkill for what I need and insanely complex to understand. I don't mind complexity, but it adds up on larger projects - and as the saying goes, less is more. The iClone workflow opens the door to more exciting character animations in the future.
And Speaking of animations, this Saturday my special guest on the Daz+ Pro Artist stream will be none other than Dartanbeck! We met on the Carrara forums many moons ago and kept in touch, he's a self taught animator and has some nice workflow tips up his sleeve. Join me from 4pm EST (watch your email for a link from Daz).
I'll get those videos edited over the weekend I'm sure (unless I get distracted by iClone experiments that is). π
Comments
Jay Versluis
I really like it, and although it's daunting to learn yet another 3D app (or rather two, if we include Character Creator), I'm excited to see what else this can bring to my projects. I find the timeline interface fairly intuitive, now I need to understand how we're supposed to use all those cool animation features like Motion Director. That one's next on my list. Speaking of sheep, I want to see if I can make the UE version of the sheep work in iClone as a quadruped test. I have some wolves that I need to animate, do you think iClone can handle that? I'm sure it can, it's just a matter of figuring out how π€©
Brian Cramer
So cool, Jay. I'm so happy you like iClone. I would have felt really bad if you were like, "This software is crap! Brian has been lying to us!" Congratulations on proving out the workflow. Think of all the fun things you can do with the sheep, now. π
