Want an animation program that makes creating as simple as clicking and dragging your mouse? Well that is what you get with iClone4. There is so much automation and so many scripted animations that moving characters around requires minimal effort and looks very natural. If you don’t like what’s provided, you can always directly manipulate nearly every aspect of your creation.
Please note, this is a review only, click here to go to the official website.
iClone4 by Reallusion is a 3D animation tool that does a good job of taking you away from the nuts and bolts and lets you instead focus on creativity. You start with an empty stage that looks like a grid in perspective stretching off into the distance. Anything you want to appear on this stage, you literally just drag in. It will appear where ever you drop it and once there, you can start adjusting its position, direction, and (in the case of a person or animal) its pose.
Let’s start with a character, or avatar as its called. iClone 4 supplies a few samples, but offers the ability to build avatars yourself on top of a basic skeleton. You can link and position any object to any bone and they will move as one. A very cool feature is the ability to map any face onto the avatar. Fancy yourself as the star of the show, well after going through the wizard, you can be centre stage.
As mentioned earlier, there are a lot of scripted animations to try. To use these all you need do is literally just drag the animation onto the avatar. If you don’t like the scipted animations you can directly control the movement of every bone in the skeleton, and every muscle in the face. You also only have to set the key frames for such animation and the software will automatically smooth the motion out for you.
Heaps of control over the setting your avatar is in. You can select a 2D backdrop, or a sky, or terrain, or a complete 3D environment and also atmosphere and particle effects. You can drag 3D objects into the scene as props. With 3Ds Max, you can create your own props or use objects from the Google 3D Warehouse. Additionally, there a number of freebies you can use in the Reallusion forums. Moving props is even easier than moving avatars.
Lights, Camera, Audio. You have total control over spotlights, point lighting, directional lighting, and ambient light. Settings include range, shadows, falloff, angle, and color. A neat feature is to instruct a spotlight to “look at” an avatar. As the avatar moves around the set, the spotlight will automatically follow, you can also set the camera to do the same. Also there’s the length of your camera lens and the depth of field.. This way you can simulate the over-the-shoulder camera angle used by many games. Just make sure you’re using the Preview camera before moving your point of view to make adjustments to the scene or you will have to reset your camera tracking.
For the audio side of things iClone 4 lets you import mp3 or wav files for sound effects, background music, and dialog. Dialog can also be recorded directly, or input as Text-To-Speech. I was really impressed when the software made my avatar’s mouth move to the words. It wasn’t 100% perfect, but to improve on that you need to get CrazyTalk.
Changes to your masterpiece, can be watched by using the time controls at the bottom, or with the timeline function included with iClone4 Pro. There are five modes of display. In order of increasing quality, they are: Wireframe, Smooth Shading, Quick Shading, Vertex Shading and Pixel Shading. No matter how you view it in the editor, the final render will be done with Pixel Shading and optional anti-aliasing and 3D stereography. You can export your video to wmv, avi, mp4, rm, or flv. In the last case iClone 4 will even offer to generate a web page and player for your flash video.
For the sheer ease of use and creative scope you get with iClone4 I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Click here to go to the Official Website.
