When I first got into animation, I remembered early on that some of the hardest animations to keyframe and sell the audience on were everyday motions. Something as simple as picking up or putting down a drink on a counter took hundreds or thousands of keyframes from limbs down to finger joints. It took days, not hours unless you had a lot of experience and back then, no one had a lot of experience as practical and effective 3D animation was something new.
Shaking hands, forget about it. Things like that just weren’t done back then. They were intentionally left out of the storyboard due to being financially and deadline impractical. It took a long time to animate any movement. In some applications, every bone or joint had to be moved until some form of linking or IK was introduced and even then, it was basic and simplistic with a lot of adjustments.
Some of you know that I hate tedious tasks and to be honest, I’ve never met anyone that really embraced it either. It did not take long to realize that this cool thing known as 3D Animation was going to, possibly, become the most tedious work a person could do.
Imagine populating a battlefield with low poly proxies before multi-duplicate or scatter existed. Sure, we could cut, paste, and drag each item to a location but what if there were 500 to 1000 items? Even this was preferable to keyframing a motion like smoking a cigarette in a camera closeup. This could take thousands of keyframes until it was done and at the end… the creative spark was dead, cold, and buried.
AI-Aided Animation
We move on down the timeline of life a few decades and Reallusion brings us AccuPOSE. AI-aided sweetness that does so much of the hard work of everyday motions that I have LOOKED for scenarios to experiment with. Generally, I would have avoided such work, when possible, but AccuPOSE has flipped the script for me by opening up more opportunities to enrich a scene with detailed movements and motions I might never keyframe and curve on my own.
What’s the big deal? Well, I’m an animator not an AI expert but it basically marries AI-assisted posing with automatic keyframing for lack of a better term. All we have to do is lock down certain parts of the character we don’t want to move, then go down the timeline and make our changes by simply moving the character into place. AI makes sure everything else follows in a natural way.
Core Library
A library of AI-Assisted motion is provided with the plugin. From the Reallusion website:
The Core Library is available for free to all iClone members, providing a hands-on experience of how AccuPOSE responds to fundamental human body movements. Explore natural actions like standing, sitting, squatting, kneeling, lying down, crawling, rolling, and even performing a handstand.
All of the examples used in this article use the free Core library.
Installing the Plugin
The plugin is very easy to install via Reallusion Hub. If you don’t see it there then refresh the Hub and you should see it under iClone plugins. Just press the install button to continue and the plug in along with the Core library are installed.
We can invoke AccuPOSE by selecting a character and pressing the “9” key or press the AccuPOSE button on the upper toolbar, or we can also go to the plugins menu and select it from there but the fastest for me is the “9” key. The AccuPOSE menu does not appear to be dockable but is instead a floating window.
Pose to Pose
This technique has been around for a long time, or at least of long as we’ve been able to “tween” the frames between the manual keyframes. This is a feature of most modern animation software and a norm in the industry. Computer aided tweening was instrumental in making computer animation feasible in the first place.
I’ve taught pose to pose techniques in tutorials years ago as it is a great way for beginners to get some animation time under their belts. Back then there was still a lot of cleanup and manual keyframing, but IK reduced some of the load. Now the AI-assisted AccuPOSE plugin makes sure that limbs follow in a natural progression without twisting or contorting unless that is what you want it to do.
With the old method we had to move everything down to fingers and toes in some cases, with curves, but now we just grab a character, start AccuPOSE, load a pose, set the alignment, move down the timeline to the next pose and load it.
For example, using the Core Library, I’ll load Kevin into the workspace, select him and press F9 to load AccuPOSE. I want Kevin to stand with his arms crossed then sit down and naturally put his hands on his lap.
- For this I started off by loading the Cross Arms pose in frame one.
- From here I clicked the Pose Alignment button and set it up to align to the Right foot of the Previous Keyframe. This keeps the character from sliding around between the roots of the different pose motions. In this case Kevin sat down instead of sliding back or forth to sit down.
How far apart you place the keyframes determines the speed of the sitting down motion. You can change the speed by editing the motion shortening or lengthening the distance between keyframes. - Move down the timeline and select another sitting or standing pose. From here is just a repetition of the same steps going between poses and keyframes.
Be sure to pay attention to the Align Pose settings as the default Root setting will make the character slide back and forth between root locations. In the example below Align to Right Foot kept the character in place as needed.
With this method all we have to do is choose our poses and how many frames apart they need to be as the AI makes sure the character moves according to our choices.
Control Points
Control Points are a bit more complicated than simple Pose to Pose but you can dive right in anyway. With Control Points we need to remember every Control Point activated is one less limb the AI is positioning and one more that we will have to position. We will also have to lock certain control points when needed to keep a foot or hand in place as one example.
Controls points allow us to decide what happens, where that limb will go without interference from the AI. When we set up control points, we tell AI to guide everything that is NOT a control point as we will take care of that movement ourselves.
The second tab of the AccuPOSE interface is the Control Panel that gives us access to several shortcuts like selecting only the Hip and Feet or just the Hip. We can transform, rotate or lock as needed.
This is where we can set a pose then lock, unlock, move or rotate limbs into our desired positions on the next keyframe down the timeline. This can be tricky at first but the more you do it the easier it gets. There can be a lot of locking and unlocking for some poses but not every pose. Once you get a little Control Point time under your belt, you’ll quickly learn how to handle most situations.
Kai’s tutorial below goes into detail about how to use control points and locks.
If you are a beginner, you might consider skipping control points in the early stages of learning the plugin. At least until you understand exactly what is going on with the plugin as the wrong combination can start to create unexpected results. Unlike the Pose to Pose method described earlier, the use of Control Points and Locks requires a fundamental understanding of the plugin. On the other hand, you won’t learn what you don’t try so don’t avoid it by any means. Just get a handle on AI assisted Pose to Pose first.
No Curve Editor Needed
I’m not saying the curve editor couldn’t improve things, but beginners rarely use a curve editor so the smooth tweening means little if any need for editing any curves. This leaves us plenty of time to work on all that other stuff we are learning about as new animators.
Summary
The Core library is extensive with over 40 AI assisted poses that kick your animations up a notch. No more writing around the “hard to animate” motions when the Core library provides so many poses that can translate to many different scenarios.
It’s not just for beginners either as seasoned pros can speed up their workflow while making it more enjoyable by eliminating a lot of the tedious animation work leaving room to be much more creative.
Never before has it been easier to animate everyday motions for just about any animator from beginner to pro. This is just another tool in the amazingly large toolbox of animation tools within iClone.
Manual
Reallusion Courses
AccuPose – Three Tutorials
MD McCallum – WarLord
Digital Artist MD “Mike” McCallum, aka WarLord, is a longtime iClone user. Having authored free tutorials for iClone in its early years and selected to write the iClone Beginners Guide from Packt Publishing in 2011, he was fortunate enough to meet and exchange tricks and tips with users from all over the world and loves to share this information with other users. He has authored hundreds of articles on iClone and digital art in general while reviewing some of the most popular software and hardware in the world. He has been published in many of the leading 3D online and print magazines while staying true to his biggest passion, 3D animation. For more information click here.
