I’ve been a Poser user for several years and lately I’ve been feeling hamstrung by the interface, the huge system overhead and the program’s inconsistency when it comes to animation and the program’s general instability. When you’re just trying to get a handle on animation and visual story telling, having to fight the application half the time is a real obstacle.
I’ve heard of a consumer-level program called iClone made by Reallusion which is tailored specifically to the machinima crowd. In a nutshell, machinima (machine cinema) is a form of amateur filmmaking which utilizes existing real time 3D game engines for the visuals. The immensely successful Red vs. Blue series based on HALO is one such example.
iClone has all the features that you’d need to put together your own production and allows regular folk to make their own CG films without having to invest in thousands of dollars in production applications and hardware and spend hundreds of hours rendering. Keeping the production pipeline contained in one application also greatly simplifies the production process.
It’s by no means a Hollywood studio class application, but it seems well suited and well equipped for the amateur. The base application is just $99 USD so it won’t break the bank.
I’ll be taking a closer look at iClone over the next little while. Given my frustrations with animating in Poser, I may just take the plunge.
Tags: computer animation, iclone, machinima, poser, reallusion
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Heh, it probably couldn’t be any worse if what you say about Poser is that it is that flakey. Poser being a MetaCreations product originally probably has same or similar flakeiness as Carrara had. I tried to do just simple animation in Carrara and it was almost impossible. Undo was not your friend and was more prone to cause complete catastrophy than save from a bad situation. C. was ok for stills but even then I found it had some short comings. The thing I find with a lot of these programs is that they can be unpredicatable. Not just in behaviour and stability but also in rendering. It gets a bit too frustrating sometimes when you have to make test render after test render, tweaking the parameters along the way, just to get something ‘close’ to what you want or find out that what you want is no way possible without some third party product.
The problem with Poser is that consequent versions were built upon code that was ported over from the Mac. Over the years, they just continued adding layer after layer on top of the old code, which is something like 10 years old.
I’m just guessing here but I think they can’t add or change things to a significant degree because of that aged code based. When they have added new features, they are buggy, inefficient and half-hearted.
It’s hit and miss when you utilize some of Poser’s more advanced rendering features like ambient occlusion, image based lighting and high dynamic range lighting. Their interface design uses cryptic, non-standard values which doesn’t help things. E.g. Poser units. What the hell are Poser units?!
You waste a lot of time doing trial-and-error rendering just to see what sort of an effect turning a dial or changing a value does.
Poser’s animation system exemplifies unpredictability. For example, inverse kinematics (IK) can be a time saver but you dare not turn it on and off in the middle of an animation sequence. The limbs fly off and twist and twirl between keyframes.
So you either animate with it on all the time, or off all the time and neither way is convenient during the animation process.
I tried the iClone demo for a little while but it’s at version 2.1 which isn’t the best version to showcase what it can do. It lacks some essential features. I was surprised to find that it has nothing like an IK function but there might be something like it in version 2.5.
I found their facial animation features to be lacking since it revolves entirely around blending canned facial expressions and doesn’t allow you to directly manipulate facial morphs or even something as simple as eye movements. It’s ridiculous since those are essential in creating engaging characters. I think for more detailed facial animation, you need to purchase their Crazy Talk application.
I’m starting to find a lot of extra costs involved here.
$99 for iClone, $50 for 3DXchange, $149 for CrazyTalk. :-/ Granted, there’s nothing comparable within that price range but $300+ is still quite a bit to spend on machinima quality animation. *grumble*
CrazyTalk might be icing on the cake though. Just getting iClone and 3DXchange might be good enough as that will give me animation and external 3D content import capabilities.
I wish there was an application that was a combination of Poser and iClone; the detailed character control of Poser but with the real-time 3D engine, updated technology and stability of iClone.
I’m sort of not surprised with the limitations you are pointing out. I.E. Facial expressions. Most FPS game engines aren’t concerned with that either. Or at least not to the extent that you would require for animation. I guess the Red Vs Blue guys lucked out that Halo characters all have opaque helmets.
$300 for game engine quality isn’t that impressive. Plus you don’t know if the three products work seamlessly with each other. Too many variables.
Crazy Talk and 3DXchange were designed specifically to interface with iClone so there’s no compatibility issues there.
iClone may not replace Poser but I’m thinking it might be able to complement it nicely when it comes to animation.
Poser can do detailed, high resolution character animation but the resource overhead per character is so high, it severely restricts the degree to which you can populate and dress a scene. It’s taxing enough to do just for a still render, never mind trying to do animation!
Doing a multi-pass render is a possible solution but your scene planning, direction and compositing becomes significantly more complex when you try and get something as fundamental as shadows to work properly on a multi-pass render. God help you if you need reflections!
iClone could be used to handle the medium/far shots for scenes that are heavily populated/dressed while Poser can be used for the close-up work.
3DXchange enables iClone and Poser to share the same 3D assets in a lot of cases so it’s possible to create props that work in both applications without a lot of tweaking.
I wish the demo iClone wasn’t so crippled as well as outdated (v2.1 versus v2.5). Creating a simple test scene with shared 3D assets could’ve told me a lot.