iClone5 review

iClone is a quick and easy to use visualisation tool enabling you to create complicated character animation without all the usual messing about with key frames and 3D modelling software.

Its rendering acts in real-time, so images are realised at around the visual level of most videogames, but its streamlined interface means it leaves out many tools professional animators will find indispensable. That said, by treating animation and character modelling a bit like Lego, it can very quickly build up and edit full scenes.

Version 5 includes a raft of new features. Users can now add rigid and soft-body dynamics to any objects in your scene. You can give objects weight, friction and elasticity that behave just as they would in real life – falling to the ground, bouncing and falling over when hit. If you define the objects as soft bodies, they’ll deform and bend as though made of rubber or cloth.

iClone’s physics simulation is easy to set up and works reasonably well. It’s the fastest way to give objects in your scene realistic motion, but you’ll need to play around with the settings to get exact results.

Character animation has been made even simpler with Body Puppeting options, offering the ability to quickly lay down animation tracks for any body part, just by moving the mouse around.

There’s also a new Mixmoves system providing animations for everyday movements like standing up, sitting down and moving around. These can be blended seamlessly together to create more complex sequences.

iClone’s new rendering tools enable you to give your scenes a hand-drawn, cartoon look. You can edit the colouration of your objects and the black lines around these in this view, giving a basic level of control over the whole effect.

However, you can also add colour tints, blurs and lighting effects – all of which can be combined in Photoshop-style layers, helping to understand and build quite complex looks from the ground up – getting away from the severe videogame appearances of previous iClone animations.

If you spend an extra £79 ($99) you can add motion capture to the iClone5 feature list with the Mocap plug-in. You need to own a Kinect for Xbox you can use its camera (mounted on top of your computer) to record animation by capturing their own movements and applying them to characters.

These movements can be saved to a library for later use and the results, considering the present limitations of Kinect motion capture, are fairly impressive.

In short, iClone5 is a very fast way to get storytelling animations done, but those animations are limited in their quality. You can only export them as video or still images, not as animated 3D assets, so you can’t currently integrate the package into more professional pipelines – although an update to 3DXchange due early this year looks likely to change this.