Indies Rise with Real-time Digital Human Revolution
Reallusion, developers of Character Creator and iClone, proudly announce the honor of an Epic MegaGrant award from Epic Games. Reallusion iClone is used by independent developers and Unreal Engine users to create, animate and deploy characters for games, films and virtual production. The prestigious MegaGrant is a massive accolade for iClone as it demonstrates the shared interest Reallusion and Epic have with the independent development community. Thanks to Epic MegaGrants, Reallusion now provides a complete character creation and animation pipeline to Unreal Engine for indies and studios of every size to realize digital humans.
The fusion of iClone with Unreal Engine produces a unique combination of features that extend the power of iClone tools directly into UE4. Indie developers, game studios and all users of Unreal Engine can now experience the power of these essential iClone features; character generation with Character Creator and Headshot, a massive motion library with UE4 – compatible motions, mocap full-body, face and hands with a myriad of devices, Face/Body animation editing, all of which can be sent to Unreal Engine with One-click transfer and Auto Setup.
A CG generalist, specializing in character animation from Vancouver film school, Uzair has 20 years of experience setting up unique pipelines. He has worked on a range of prominent projects like Discovery next world, Toyota Scion Deviants, UPS Cardboard World and Eidos Tomb Raider Legends. Uzair setup Unicorn Black Studios to produce the Emmy nominated Series – Burka Avenger, and as the Series Director and Head of Production.
Uzair is the founder of 3rd World Studios, a 3D animation studio in Islamabad, Pakistan makers of ‘Allahyar and the Legend of Markhor‘, the first animated film made using Unreal Engine. His work has received multiple international awards like the Peabody award for broadcast excellence, Gender Equality award, Monolith award for technology, Rising Star for Animation, amongst others.
3rd World Studios created a COVID-19 public service announcement in record time by using iClone 7 (animation/editing/face mocap), Unreal Engine 4 (rendering), Xsens (body mocap), and Manus (hand mocap).
“With keyframing, an artist can produce anywhere from three to six seconds of finished animation per day. This iClone Unreal setup took 3rd World Studios approximately 3 to 4 hours to produce the entire 45 seconds of PSA animation”
Cepheus Protocol is an independently developed top-down open world RTS inspired by XCOM, Company of Heroes, and Parasite Eve.
The team is led by CEO and Game Director Robert Smith, who leads a team of diverse individuals from various backgrounds from all around the world who are utilizing Character Creator 3 in their RTS game due to release in May 2020.
“Character Creator solved a lot of problems for us creatively, as we didn’t have the character modelers needed to populate a city.”
Reallusion Inc., 2D and 3D Real-time software developer, is inviting everyone to use their time at home to get into animation. The Reallusion COVID-19 Care program includes free home access for Academic and Corporate Workgroups until June 30th, and a 50% discount on all Reallusion products until April 30th.
During these challenging times, the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is impacting families and people around the world. Reallusion is committed to a safe and productive working environment for our communities and our employees. At Reallusion we care about our creative communities and have prepared options to help them during this time to stay home and create.
In response to many of our communities’ inquiries and immediate needs for remote access software, we are implementing a few friendly options through our COVID-19 Care Program: https://www.reallusion.com/COVID-19.html
Free Home Access for Academic and Corporate Workgroup licenses
Free home access for Academic and Corporate Workgroup license accounts with temporary licenses until June 30th, 2020 at no additional cost. Existing educational institutions and corporations with workgroup licenses are eligible for the COVID-19 free software access from home to keep everyone productive.
50 % OFF in the Reallusion Software Store – for Everyone
A 50% discount on all packages in the Reallusion Software Store. The discount is available through April 30th, 2020 and open to everyone (new and existing members included). Enter the 50% OFF coupon code “COVID19STAYSAFE” at checkout.
COVID-19 Care Program Reallusion user showcases:
Get inspired by other home studio creations and see how big things can come from small spaces.
View a gallery of COVID-19 themed art from users around the world.
Hi Folks, I’m Frank, a multimedia artist from Milan (Italy). What a wonderful time to be alive for an artist! Technology is allowing us to share our art with the people we love, create connections, collaboration and friendship with like-minded people, no matter how far away they are!
I put a lot of work and love in every assets you see in my store: I build them for you, because I know you have incredible stories to tell, and I hope my art could inspire you and make your greatest ideas come to life, through a beautiful animation.
This is what inspires me to do what I do, and drives me to create better and better content every day. If you’d like to talk to me, feel free to send me a message on facebook at @franksdoodles. I’m always happy to hear from my fellow creators!
Will Iverson has been working in the computer and information technology field professionally since 1990. His diverse background includes developing statistical applications to analyze data from the NASA Space Shuttle, product management for Apple, and developer relations for Symantec’s Visual Cafe.
Clients over the last two decades include Sun, BEA, Canal+ Technologies, AT&T, T-Mobile, the State of Washington, and many, many more. From 2010-2016, Will grew Dev9, a premier Seattle-based consulting company focused on continuous delivery solutions for a wide range of enterprises, including the backend for many large entertainment firms.
Starting in 2017, Will transitioned to independent game development, with a new company, Double Robot where he used iClone and Character Creator to complete his game.
I simply couldn’t have those animated characters without CC3 and iClone, full stop. I was able to build characters from my story bible and animate them in just a few days.
FYQD-Studio reveals the secrets behind Bright Memory: Infinite game development
A new era for game developers has dawned: small and indie game studios can now compete against triple-A studios with the support of real-time technology.
Bright Memory: Infinite, a fusion of FPS and action genres created by a solo developer at FYQD-Studio, has found success and popularity since its January 2019 launch via Early Access on Steam. It received an Unreal Dev Grant in 2019 and was presented by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang at GTC China 2019. The developer, Zeng Xiancheng, lays out the behind-the-scenes story on how he achieved a spectacular looking game – with the help of Unreal Engine, NVIDIA RTX, and real-time animation tools: iClone and Character Creator.
Developer Zeng Xiancheng is currently working on content for Bright Memory: Infinite, which is slated for release by the end of 2020. He hopes fans continue to stay tuned for the launch. In this article, Zeng shares how he was able to produce the game all by himself with very limited budget and manpower.
Discover how Headshot generates a 3D animated Pennywise from a photo.
Film-inspired fan art is nothing new. But, as many digital artists will attest, reimagining a movie character in 3D is a huge undertaking. Until now, that is.
Headshot plug-in for Character Creator software enables artists to quickly generate human 3D models from 2D images. In this article, digital artist Peter Alexander reveals how to take a photo of Pennywise the clown from hit horror film IT, and easily transform it into a complex 3D model using Headshot, ZBrush and Blender.
Alexander’s guide covers everything you need to know go get started, including photo selection and preparation, using the bake, edit mesh and sculpting tools native to Character Creator 3, manually adjusting Headshot masks in Photoshop, how to fix symmetry using ZBrush, and, finally, a crash-course on creating hair with a third-party Blender add-on called Hair Tool.
Download a free trial of Headshot plug-in here, and learn how to easily create a fully animatable 3D Pennywise model from just a single 2D image.
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!
Q: Greetings Angelo, and welcome. Kindly share with our audience your background and trajectory in filmmaking.
Hello, and thank you Reallusion for the interest in my story. I started the adventure in the world of entertainment thanks to a small experimental film that was freely inspired by Star Wars, titled Dark Resurrection. It was 2007 and since then I have found myself being the director and supervisor of visual effects in various Italian productions.
Despite having participated in large productions such as the Mulino Bianco campaign with Antonio Banderas, and three blockbuster cinema films in Italy, the thing I’m best known for is always the Dark Resurrection saga,
which at the time had an incredible impact media in my country, and the science fiction short Closer which has seen over 9,000,000 views on YouTube. In the meantime I have written some scripts and a novel, which have been approved and will hopefully soon become films and TV series.
Q: Your Star Wars-inspired saga, Dark Resurrection has developed over a decade. How have your creative tools changed during this time?
The software and also the way of using visual effects has changed dramatically from one film to another. In the first volume only the spaceships had been animated in 3D. All the other backdrops, on the other hand, were static renders and then animated at parallax levels with after effects.
Volume 0 in 2011 was shot entirely on the green screen but this time the backdrops were obtained from real macro models created by a brilliant scenographer named Tommaso Ragnisco, then they were photographed and mapped on 3D.
The result is great realism that still works and collects consensus today. For the final chapter, also shot entirely on the green screen, 23 totally digital locations were created, textured with Substance Painter and rendered thanks to Octane Render in Cinema4D.
There has been a frightening evolution, and every time I have had to learn new techniques. The last chapter also had complex management to rely only on the storyboards and for this reason it was totally previewed in iClone.
Q: Dark Resurrection employed the use of iClone real-time animation, and Character Creator digital doubles. What are the advantages of using these tools?
“iClone was an irreplaceable productive tool. Having to build everything digitally, it was essential to design each shot. We had to understand which movements and which shots were possible within the soundstage, and be sure that we would only shot scenes that were useful for the final editing. ”
– Angelo Licata / Filmmaker
And of course it had to all have high quality and aesthetics. We started by photographing our actors and creating their avatars in Character Creator. The use of similar digital doubles may seem exaggerated, but it is not at all.
As with accurate digital doubles you can understand what is the best angle of recovery for an actor’s face, play with different heights and answer a lot of unknowns directly inside iClone. Finally, the animatics also improve communication with the entire crew, allowing each production department to prepare well in advance.
Q: You literally learned iClone and Character Creator in 1 day! How did you accomplish this, and what advice can you give other industry professionals being pressed by deadlines?
I understood the basics of its functioning in a morning and in the evening I had my hands in my first animatic, rough but very functional. Maybe I did it because I was moved by despair: I had to make a commercial and they called me with very little notice. I had very few hours of sets available, and I wasn’t sure what I had in mind would work in editing. With iClone I tested my ideas and made an animatic pre-assembly of the spot.
Personally I find that the interface is quite simple, the ability to animate various parts of the body with keyframes allows me to work very quickly.
“Character Creator is also a very powerful tool and in my opinion even easier to use. It is really easy to create characters of various workmanship by changing features and building by clicking directly on the point concerned. ”
– Angelo Licata / Filmmaker
In my opinion, animatics are an indispensable production tool when using visual effects or very complicated scenes, and it is essential to plan filming. In any other case they are a unique, creative tool that allow directors to experiment with alternative solutions and eliminate the superfluous. For me it is a sort of parachute to “not get hurt” on the set. Obviously, seeing the scene before shooting it allows the production to plan the shooting days and the costs with remarkable precision.
Q: Now that your Dark Resurrection saga has come to an end, what can the filmmaking community look forward to from Angelo Licata?
Finishing Dark Resurrection was a dutiful commitment to the thousands of fans who supported me from all over the world. Since January almost 10,000 people have downloaded and read the free ebook and many are asking me to make the full film, but it is an impossible thing to do. It would cost millions of euros and three years of work and is unthinkable for a non-profit film.
Download eBook
In the last few years I wrote some screenplays, including a fantasy and a thriller, both very close to seeing the light thanks to important production houses in my country, but the world of cinema and TV has totally stopped due to the pandemic.
In the hope that everything will start again soon I am writing my next novel and continuing to study Unreal and iClone. I’d like to make a fully animated short film using these two incredible tools. Thank you.
