Page 48 – Reallusion Magazine

Italian Director turns to Realtime 3D Software with Digital Doubles for Star Wars Fan Film Previz

March 24, 2020July 14, 2022 enocburgos1 Comment

Director – Angelo Licata

Angelo Licata

Angelo Licata is a Turin born, Director/ Writer / VFX supervisor known for his 2007 independent film – Dark Resurrection, a tribute to Star Wars.

His film was was greatly acclaimed by the media, paving the way towards the film industry where he collaborated on several films including “EX” and “Maschi contro Femmine”, while directing numerous TV commercials. In 2013, he wrote and directed the short sci-fi film – Closer, which received over 8,000,000 YouTube views. In 2015, Angelo directed and wrote Mala Vita, a RAI television production with excellent reviews and winner of various awards including a special mention from the National Syndicate of Italian Film Journalists.

In the last chapter of his Dark Resurrection series, Angelo created a short trailer/film where he employed iClone and Character Creator‘s Headshot plugin to plan for just 4 days of movie shooting!

Featured Story

befores & afters: What It Took to Visualize This Star Wars Fan Film

March 11, 2020July 14, 2022 reallusionblogLeave a comment

How Reallusion’s iClone and Character Creator helped Previs” Dark Resurrection – Keepers of the Force”

Special thanks to Ian Failes – visual effects / animation journalist / owner of vfx publication Befores & Afters for wrapping up the story!

Star Wars-inspired Dark Resurrection fan film – a series that has been watched over a million times on YouTube, that used Reallusion’s iClone and Character Creator for previs.

Director Angelo Licata’s Dark Resurrection – Keepers of the Force:

With a reduced budget, but high ambitions for this project – Angelo decided to use iClone to build a CG version of the characters which were made both in Daz3D and Character Creator.

“Working with iClone allowed us to discard all unnecessary shots, thus defining a much smaller list of shots than the initial shooting list. It also made communication with all departments extremely simple and made actors understand the necessary actions during filming. The crew was also excited to watch the animatic, and this motivated every element of the team enormously.”
— Angelo Licata

The iClone previs:

“In one morning I understood the basics of animation in iClone and in the evening I had an approximate but extremely functional animatic. Although the environment was done with simple volumes, the movements and action mirrored exactly what I had in mind. Since then I always have a preview of the filming with iClone, especially if there were special effects or elaborate camera movements. It is an exceptional tool that allows me to solve many problems before going on set.”
— Angelo Licata

Real the full article on befores and afters : https://beforesandafters.com/2020/03/03/what-it-took-to-visualize-this-star-wars-fan-film/

Learning

iClone MasterClass #5 – Customizing Characters for Realtime Animation

March 10, 2020July 14, 2022 enocburgosLeave a comment

Experienced Video Director/Animator – Benny Dee shares a detailed tutorial on how to customize characters for realtime animation in iClone 7.

Hello in this iClone tutorial I will show you how to create your custom characters for real time animation. This tutorial is part of the Master Class series to help iClone users improve and level up their creative skills.

Learning

HOW-TO: Generating a 3D Animated Gollum From a Single Photo

March 2, 2020July 14, 2022 reallusionblog2 Comments

The Headshot plug-in for Reallusion’s Character Creator allows users to generate 3d animated digital humans from one photo. You can download a free trial here, and learn how to create a classic movie character like Gollum without any 3d skills.

To find out more about the process, we invited Peter Alexander to walk us through it. Alexander is a digital freelancer specialized in illustration, graphic design, and 3d modeling. He develops content assets for various digital marketplaces.

Peter Alexander

In this video and text below, Alexander explains how to create a fantasy movie character by using Headshot for Character Creator 3. He touches on how to choose a quality reference, overcome an open-mouthed reference image, choose appropriate masking features, and block proportions for the head and body using the “bake” feature. Alexander also covers the Mesh Editor tool, which can be used for a variety of purposes, and in this article will be used to customize a hair asset.

Learning

How to Combine Real Footage with CGI in iClone

February 25, 2020July 14, 2022 reallusionblogLeave a comment

Discover how to use iClone for compositing, mixing real footage, lights, particles and CGI.

In addition to making animations, iClone can be used to facilitate the compositing process by enabling you to add backgrounds or billboards, textured with real footage, to your 3D models. The tool reduces the number of meshes needed to create complex sets, while at the same time ensuring the scene is highly realistic.

See how the process works in the video below, or read on for a full explanation and some expert tips for taking advantage of this feature in your own projects. All these methods are surprisingly straightforward and flexible, allowing you to make adjustments on the fly.

Events

Reallusion Character Creator Headshot @ 2019 Sydney SIGGRAPH Asia Real-Time Live!

February 12, 2020July 14, 2022 reallusionblog1 Comment

November 20th in Brisbane – Six teams gathered in Australia to compete in SIGGRAPH Asia’s Real-Time Live! Reallusion was invited as a guest to showcase its latest Headshot technology for Character Creator 3.

The show featured the host and Real-Time Live! chair; Mike Seymour – editor of FXguide, introducing each team in the competition from Australia, Japan, China and the USA. Reallusion’s John Martin presented Character Creator Headshot with a demo that created a digital human from a photo and added the character to a virtual production previs shot in iClone.

Product Release

Add Animations Seamlessly into Your PSD Workflow

February 11, 2020July 14, 2022 reallusionblogLeave a comment

Cartoon Animator 4 connects PSD tools with Wacom tablets for a roundtrip workflow.

Cartoon Animator (CTA) is recognised among the easiest 2D animation software to use. Version 4 connects the tool with users of all the mainstream PSD tools, from Adobe Photoshop to Krita, Affinity, Clip Studio and Photopea. Creatives who use these PSD tools can now swiftly turn their creative concepts into animations, using their original processes, via Cartoon Animator.

Featured Story

New Workflow Turns ZBrush Sculpts into Animated Characters for Unreal Engine

January 30, 2020September 21, 2022 reallusionblogLeave a comment

Create, animate and automate Unreal Engine characters with the Reallusion Digital Human pipeline. See how master character artist Hossein Diba uses Character Creator to generate a real-time animatable digital human for live performance.

Learning

7 Expert Tips for Digital Human Facial Animation in iClone 7

January 21, 2020July 14, 2022 reallusionblogLeave a comment

By Leo Lucien-Bay

iClone makes it easy to create HUD animation for realistic digital humans.

iClone is a powerful real-time animation tool that aims to remove the painful and repetitive aspects from the animation process, and simplify the difficult job of creating realistic digital humans. Like the game engines that gave rise to Machinima, iClone has always focused on being real-time, making it less complex than the more conventional animation tools.

The recent 7.7 update saw the introduction of the Digital Human Shader, which added sub surface scattering, as well as improving the materials on offer, to give skin, teeth, eyes, and hair a much more realistic appearance. It also brought with it Headshot, an AI-based generator that enables users to create character heads from photos of real people.

Download the iClone free 30-day trial

With more realistic looking characters comes the need for more convincing animation. There are few things more off-putting than a 3D character model that looks realistic, only to become awkward and unnatural when it comes to open its mouth.

For that reason, this article will focus on facial animation. We’ll take a look at some of the tools and techniques that you can use in iClone to help you not only get your animations looking good, but do so relatively quickly. Follow along in the video below, or read on for a written version.

If you’d like to render this video in Unreal Engine make sure you check out the bonus tip at the end, which shows you how to use the Live Link plugin.