Crafting a Cinematic Game Teaser using iClone 8 & Character Creator 4 - Loïc Bramoullé

london we presents you this evening's main entertainment in one corner an underpaid seamstress with a pension for violence [Music] so don't you dare blink i'm louis van gaal art and film director from france and here i will break down the process i used to create the nightmare hunter short film for reelusion using their character creator 4 and iclone 8 tool sets along all the tools i traditionally use like blender 3d coat and after effects but first for presentation here's a quick peek at my usual work [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] the first step was to quickly explore a few different options directly with storyboards as it's a simple way to define nearly all aspects of a film at once the narration setting characters action lighting and the mood this is the most critical part as the there's these little sketches made in a few minutes will determine the wall film produced over the course of a couple months so after testing a few different settings and combining them we locked on on a victorian setting with a hunter and it's monstrous prey my idea was to change myself and see how far a character from cc4 could be pushed toward the nearly non anthropomorphic one with a long face and still be able to receive facial motion capture from iphone 8. the second step for pre-production was getting a more precise idea of the final look and style of the characters and environment i did these two characters to have some elements to play with and end up ended up mixing them to keep the most interesting parts at that stage i already did some tests directly in 3d for the environment because i i needed to find a technical solution to produce it fast so i couldn't rely on designing everything from scratch in 2d so i bought some assets online that i painted over directly in 3d and modified some free pbr texture in photoshop and blender to merge everything in a similar graphic novel style [Music] to create the characters i started from basic ones in character creator tweaking the basin to me thanks to the morph bank and adding some basic reference clauses i used the headshot plugin and a more precise concept art to define a first version of the face i then exported to blender thanks to the cc3 addon [Music] from there i also used 3d code to model and texture everything to export back your character check that all custom objects that you created are correctly skinned onto your armature you can then select the armature and click export in the blender addon in character creator instead of the usual import you can go to plugins blender auto setup import from blender you will be able to check if each object is recognized correctly and change its type if it's not for example here i can say the jacket is actually part of the clothes if some custom metals you added are missing some textures you can simply select the mesh go to the material tab and fix any issue easily for example setting the materials to bbr and assigning your roughness texture [Music] in iclone i used the motion life plugin to connect to knighton's perception neuron 3 mocap suit and recorded the motion capture directly on the characters [Music] the added support for the space mouse is great news for anyone wanting to speed up their workflow as moving around in 3d can be really important during animation so the six degrees of freedom of the space mouse gives you the feeling of being physically present inside the 3d scene as you move around effortlessly and here i'm using a space mouse so i'm able to control the camera directly in 3d and i can position it wherever i want without touching the keyboard or mouse [Music] the majority of the work is then to edit and polish this capture with iclone toolset to make it match exactly our needs a good example of that is the second shot of the film where i couldn't match the 3d stairs during motion capture in my living room so i edited them in thanks to the motion direction control animation layers and motion correction motion direction control can be accessed by right clicking on the clip or via the toolbar in on the timeline you can then place your animation in the 3d space and break your clip to assign a different direction on each part iclone 8 features also a new bi-directional fade between clips that allows for smooth and natural transition between them [Music] another handy new feature of iclone 8 is the motion correction that allows you to select some limbs and print their contact points in the 3d space so you can then transform move and rotate these footprints to adjust the exact location where the contact happens with the ground pay attention to the threshold setting higher values will detect more contacts and lock the contacts for longer but you can always access the timing of this contact in the reach target section of your character animation in the timeline clicking on each tip allows to activate fade in or out for the snapping to be smoother the motion modifier function just below the two others in the right click menu allows to shift the overall posture of the clip for the shot 4 i was able to quickly mock up the action using pre-made motion capture clips from actor core that features a wide range of commonly useful and high quality motions the ability in iclone 8 with motion direction control to transform a wall animation clip in relation to other ones is also really handy to quickly assemble a custom sequence of actions you can automatically assign a limb that will be snapped onto its position in the previous clip so they blend perfectly or adjust its orientation to suit your environment this process also allowed me to work on body and facial independently so i left the facial animation for once the body animation was nearly there and used an ipad and motion life to motion capture a facial performance with lip sync while listening to the voice to be synchronized to edit the facial animation you can open the face key menu here controls are separated into different categories face where you can edit the head rotation and have an overall control on the expression then you have the eyes mouth and tongue where you can have a much thinner control over precise moth for example changing the eyes direction but the most important thing here is to polish the lip sync from the motion capture with the jaw control here and mouth open and close just below the objective here is to accentuate and add character to the performance so we can listen to the recorded voice and detect the moments where the lips should be closed where specific mouth shape should be more accentuated like the o and the m sound that we can produce by selecting the corresponding mouse type here and then moving the lips into that shape breaking the symmetry with the split lips option can go a long way to break the uncanny valley and add something more imperfect and human to the character [Music] don't you expression blink once the animation was mostly there i started to light the things to see how the film will finally look the main light source is a powerful monthly moonlight with cloud shadows that i painted as vertex color on the plane in the sky so i was able to very precisely paint where the light will hit the character or not to improve the readability and add depth to the mood the secondary lights are fires burning in the environment which allowed me to add the strong warm spotlights to contrast with the cold moon light and strongly cut the character from the background [Music] once the first shots were lighted i started to prepare the scene the things for rendering adding a duplicated linked scene for each shot to render volumetrics in eevee while the main scene was rendering in cycles all passes including cryptomat and denoised data into two xlr sequences that i then denoised into inside another scene this allows to reduce the render time dramatically as the gpu does not have to wait the cpu to denoise each frame and the noise is not done on the final image as this adds a lot of blur but on each render pass that's used to recompose it the beauty render so i so i can start the compositing in after effects from the same image that i see in blender except it was rendered much faster as even with low sample count the passes denoising managed to get a crisp final final composite some shots were only 14 seconds per frame for example to render them i also render everything in full hd so as i will be upscaling it to to 4k thanks to topaz video at the very end after the compositing one thing uh adding a lot to the overall impression in compositing is exporting the 3d camera and some empty null objects from blender with the export the gs6 addon and importing that we with file run script in after effects to then be able to add 3d planes of painted fog or clouds masked with the z depth this allows to improve readability to controlling where the eye should look and adds a lot of mood and style as there is not only 3d volumetric frog but also then hand painted one that can be animated to simulate wind finally i did another scene for each shot in my blender file where i linked the characters in a few objects around them so i could simulate raindrops and particles setting the collection with all the object scenes in hold out so only the raindrops were visible character creator 4 and iclone 8 reveal themselves as great additions to my pipeline for their flexibility and ease of use from helping with pre-visualization by being able to create a wide variety of body shapes and bashing animation and motion capture clips together without the usual hassle of retargeting different animation sources that are at different positions in the 3d world to spin up greatly final character creation by skipping a lot of the repetitive technical tasks like topology uvs amateur skinning facial blend shape sculpting while sting still building being able to fully customize all all of this with traditional industry standard tools to keep a full control over the the design and the other direction of your project the new features of character creator will be a big help in streamlining facial expression customization for anthropomorphic characters and the increased number of morphs compatible with facial motion capture are definitely adding a lot of fidelity and control to character expressions for the body animation the new features of iclone 8 allows to more comfortably reach what you need by blending clips and animating over the results non-destructively thanks to animation layers so that's about it thanks london we presents you this evening's main entertainment in one corner an underpaid exchange dress with a penchant for virus [Music] this will be over quickly so don't you dare blink you

Channel: Reallusion

Views: 42,147

Keywords: iClone, iClone 8, animation software, 3D software, Reallusion, 3D character creation, character animation, facial animation, professional animation, motion curve editor, real-time animation, animation retargeting, motion capture, mocap, mocap animations, mocap motions, LIVE FACE, iPhone mocap, 3D character creator, create your own character, 3D hair, audio lipsync, lipsync animation, digital human shader, blender animation, blender, eevee, blender artist, Loïc Bramoullé

Id: dMW4eSjd5Pw

Length: 15min 0sec (900 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 05 2022