How I created a short film in 3D using #Reallusion #iclone and #charactercreator

foreign maker based in Auckland New Zealand Last year me and my team were the recipients of an epic games filmmaking Grant which gave us the budget to create a fully animated short film called chengbing now there are a couple of important things to know here the first is that even though I have plenty of experience in filmmaking in the real world my experience in the world of 3D animation is quite limited secondly this short film had a fairly strict deadline that we had to deliver to which meant we had to be able to turn shots around very quickly that's where real illusion software became invaluable specifically Character Creator and iclone the streamlined and intuitive method of building our actors inside character creator meant that I could have our entire cast up and ready to go in just a couple of days something that would have been previously impossible someone of my 3D skill level when building the characters we knew we wanted our little girl to be in a Chong sum and after a quick search on the real illusion content store we found one that worked nicely all we had to do was tweak the textures in Photoshop a little to make it more colorful the dress applied nicely to the character with minimal editing as you can see she started out bold and character creator with her hair applied as a separate groom and unreal Grooms can give amazing results but they can be quite a drain on the system and sometimes give unpredictable results in lighting I also probably went a little overboard on the hair physics having only just discovered their potential if I were to do it again I may take more advantage of CC haircuts which can give similar results for a fraction of the processor cost in fact all of the short-haired characters in this film used haircuts and worked great I've recently been playing with a new hair Builder pack and I've been very pleased with the results [Music] the CC Auto setup plugins meant that these characters could be easily imported into unreal with all their textures and costumes intact ready for their close-ups but as brilliant as character creator was the real Lifesaver for this dialogue heavy short film was the aculips feature in iclone the engine the ritual ends at sanzela but he's not done yet not only did our film have a lot of dialogue but it was also spoken in four separate languages hey and the eclipse tool worked brilliantly for all of them because of the way it works non-chinese speakers could simply type in what the words phonetically sounded like and the results speak for themselves once again the real illusion software made the impossible possible extra add-ons tools and content such as the digital Soul collection of motion captured Expressions served as excellent bass animations which could then be enhanced through the easy to use and very fun face puppet tools I've also since started capturing facial performances through my iPhone which also works extremely well there is a bunch of stuff that I would do differently on this film now due to both real illusion coming out with cool new features that weren't available at the time or me simply not knowing about a feature and only discovering it afterwards the coolest of the cool new features is the wrinkle pack which adds so much more subtle expression to characters than was available before just look at the differences in our old man lead with and without the wrinkled back foreign I've gone on to use the wrinkle pack in other Productions as well an example of me only discovering a solution to a problem after the film was finished was this shot of our characters holding hands while walking I spent ages keyframing pretty much every hand position and unreal and I still wasn't happy with the finished product only afterwards did I discover the reach Target tool this would have allowed me to lock one character's hand onto the other and made that entire sequence a breeze combined with the lookout feature which I also discovered later are invaluable tools for streamlining and enriching the animation process and I will certainly be making more use of them moving forward as a person who fully admits to being stronger creatively then technically I found the real illusion software packages really suit my way of working they're simple to get your head around intuitive in the way they work and most importantly fun I look forward to using them again with all their newest features for our next short film

Channel: AFK Academy

Views: 11,896

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Id: Xva2xzmPG_k

Length: 4min 32sec (272 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 14 2023