Filmmaker Producer combines Character Creator and iClone pipelines with Houdini Redshift

my family was from ireland charlie i'm glad it's you my father used to say lie down with dogs and you'll wake up with fleas my father always told me to follow my gut it won't let you down son it's your best weapon but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do [Music] [Music] my late father also said charles you didn't start trouble it was there when you got here hi i'm eric from gypsy productions and welcome to the behind the scenes of red hand which is a new animated web series that we're producing to promote an irish whiskey brand and trust me i'm not known gypsy is not known for its animated skills normally we shoot on this but storytelling is storytelling no matter what process we use when our client came to us they originally wanted something similar to a web series pilot that i produced last year a period piece based in the 1930s but one very important difference they wanted it animated the original concept called for voiceover during the animation sequences but this soon changed into actual dialogue between the characters and at this point i like to think about where the days when i started animating on super 8 you know frame by frame but uh real illusions products character creator 3 iclone 3d exchange etc have really made this process achievable and relatively simple as with any project we start with the script and the story and we develop our characters then i took inspiration uh from you know basic film noir look uh peaky blinders on the waterfront casablanca boardwalk empire and road to prediction now these are what we use to create the the actual look and the feel of what we wanted visually for the workflow i used character creator and then that went to iclone 7 then exported out as fbx and 3d exchange modeling like the sets and some of the animation was done in cinema 4d for example the car rigging the car chase scene that's coming up in it i did in cinema 4d because cinemas built-in tools for this are are pretty amazing but the the majority of the digital content creation uh was done inside a houdini well you know because literally you can create anything inside of houdini now real illusions character creator 3 is the solution we came up to uh with for building these characters and is it's honestly it's just like holding a casting call but uh without all the drama and i i never really used this program previously and it took me about a week or so to really get the feel of it and really to see its true power i could design the perfect character do the wardrobe the learning curve isn't really steep to get the basics uh it's not like maya or houdini where you can really easily get lost in the technical aspects and all the while forgetting the artistic side but as with a lot of this software as you create and you get towards the end you find out wow i wish i would have known this uh in the beginning because it can uh it can do some really amazing things the characters were then exported to iclone 7 via real illusions 3d exchange for animation it's an easy workflow using some basic tools inside the program and a couple others i'll talk about in just a second the dialogue was a piece of cake with aculips tommy greybeck is the voice actor for the main character charlie o'malley we simply let him do his thing crazy talented guy by the way we recorded his lines imported the way files into aculips added animations expressions and i don't have a mocap suit so i used mocaps from real illusions actor core which is another add-on uh great stuff and some of the more complex uh fight moves i got from mocap online the animations along with all of the textures and materials were exported out of iclone as fbx to houdini and i'm going to tell you there what is exported out of iclone as far as the textures that you can use it's really truly amazing the sets and the actual modeling of the red hand whiskey bottle were modeled inside a cinema 4d and exported as objs or sometimes olympics to houdini and i know i could have done the rendering in iclone but at this point i'm really not familiar enough with the render engine inside of iclone so houdini then allowed me to create all of the volumes and simulations necessary for the look and feel that we wanted and like i said nothing comes close to what you can create and simulate inside houdini the factory and the city sets are from kit bash which is another great product telling a story by creating everything digitally is very similar to how you would do it with live actors but there are some very stark differences you can't shoot digitally for coverage you know wide over the shoulder close-up and then throw it all in the edit and see what you get because the render times just wouldn't allow it you have to remember that trimming a couple seconds off of an edit of something shot live is pretty standard but remember with digital it takes sometimes 10 minutes per frame to render out your digital creation and so at 24 frames a second that's 240 minutes of render time that's basically wasted but i can create any location i want no permits no fees no insurance imagine as a dp having access to unlimited lighting and grip where golden hour can be 24 hours a day imagine never smashing your hand on another c stand or combo stand i know that there's nothing that can replace being on set the camaraderie the fun there's not there's really nothing like it but when you create something digitally like red hand your filmmaking and storytelling skills are going to grow exponentially the amount of visualization that you have to have and patience and and diligence to see it through and everybody has access to this software like character creator three iclone houdini any of it it's there the community is there to help you too that's i've never met a bunch of people that are willing to help somebody out answer questions they're everywhere and in the end just remember the whole thing's an adventure and i thank you for watching [Music] you

Channel: Reallusion

Views: 500

Keywords: iClone, animation software, real-time animation, 3D software, Reallusion, character animation, facial animation, professional animation, 3D character creator, create your own character, game character, royalty free 3D characters, Character Base, character generator, Character Creator, Houdini Redshift, Houdini, Redshift, Eric Andresen, Gypsy Productions

Id: WNM2GEiADZI

Length: 8min 39sec (519 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 20 2021