Tips to make iClone Renders Ac…
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Tips to make iClone Renders Acceptable
Granville
Posts: 697
Do any of you have tips on how to make iClone 7 renders better? I am so used to Daz renders that when I tried to do animation with iClone, I found the results unacceptable.
- Skin looks unrealistic
- Lighting went bonkers
- Overall looks like something from a good 1995 computer game
Should I just learn Unreal Engine instead?
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Considering you are using a game engine instead of a render engine, it's not surprising it looks like a 1996 video game. I don't use iclone as I am sure many here don't so can't help with settings. Maybe try the reallusion forums instead https://forum.reallusion.com/Default.aspx
Learning Unreal Engine does not hurt - I plan to do it myself.
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/371856/a-using-daz-content-in-ue4-thread/p1
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/134926/adding-dual-quaternion-support-to-unrealengine4-images-inside/p1
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/309536/unreal-engine-rolls-out-real-time-ray-tracing/p1
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/322641/question-about-character-animation-in-the-unreal-engine#latest
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/367951/unreal-engine-renders-better-than-nvidia-iray-in-1-second-vs-30-minute-iray-renders-what-s-going-on/p1
iClone has iRay, but it's sold separately as an add on. Their renders look better with iRay, but imho not as good as Daz Studio renders, though their materials have recently been improved. Where they excel is animation..
Yeah, that's the way many feel. They already had a game style renderer. Guess that was the only advanced render engine they could get and quickly incorporate. They do have many tricks for getting renders accomplished faster. Many are the same for DS/iRay. But they do have the Unreal plugin now. The tech is moving way too fast for many. But the game style fast render engines still lack complete quality IMHO. They end up looking like a game to many, not a professional studio made movie.
I was thinking along the line of smaller scale productions where rendering power is limited and you have to trade-off rendering quality vs. Time. Given Iray's speed, 4 hrs for 10 seconds would equate 1 day for a minute. And that was a very simple scene with 1 G8 figure at base resolution and 2-3 props and an HDRI and iterations set to only 500 per frame. More complex scene will take even longer. For smaller scale I think real time renderers offer a lot.
wow 4 hours to render 300 keyframes at 800 x 600. that is awful thats not even reaching 720p ,. I would be discourage as well if i were getting those kinds of number. I render my animations 1920x1080p I try for a target of around 12 -18 seconds a keyframe and can render 300 keyframes usually in about a hour and a half. depending on how much stuff is loaded in the scene.
The trick is to use the reduce, reduce remove, method., Reduce Iterations, Reduce textures map sizes , Remove all the normal maps. I can see why people get discouraged trying to render animation with iray
This animation took a week to put together and render out in Iray
Click to play
Ivy, clever fun!
Thanks Kevin :)
iClone characters look absolutely, objectively horrible when compared to Daz characters. I got iClone 7, 3DXChange, Character Creator 3, the whole lot... and the first time I posed a character's leg and saw how the knee looked without those beautifully crafted JCMs that Daz artists provide was the last time that I took iClone seriously. I don't think there's any going from Daz Studio to iClone.
I gripe a lot about things yet here I am still because there is just no other framework where you can get a fully rigged, beautifully detailed character for a few bucks.
composition is the answer.
I use iClone among an arsenal of other software including Carrara, Twinmotion, Blender, Unreal engine, Poser and even DAZ studio, the latter for those detailed closeup iray shots.
Everything is rendered as sequenced png images with alpha.
I then composite it, real footage as well, if it's good enough for the big production companies it's good enough for me.
another often overlooked bunch of Reallusion products are Crazytalk and Cartoon Animator (the latter you could also substitute OpenToons, Clip art studio, etc for)
these work well with DAZ studio iray renders as the base images.
rendering images as layers and a sprite like process it is surprising what you can create from a few images, a walk cycle can loop, a few gestures and the face image animated with Craztalk.
when it takes more than 1 minute to render 1 frame of animation and you add 300 keyframes to make up a 10 second animation . your looking at 300 minutes & looking at around 5 hours of render time.
dropping your iterations to around 20 is a great start and then you can push up the iterations a few points at a time to clear up the image, removing all normal maps is the next step i will take. Some props & hair sets need bump maps to look right so I reserve removing those last.
I always try to hit a target of around 12 to 18 seconds a key frame which even then a 10 second 300 keyframe animation will take a hour and a half or more. . and honestly the fact of the matter is it does not really matter the software your using ,because even game engines that are using Iray for a renderer will take some time to render out. so patients is a key factor to rendering with Iray as well
This animation just took a day to put together and render out in iray
click to play
Like it!
Iclone users who need better quality are using UE4.
I personally use Blender since I create
all assets there any way
Great Job @Wolf
That. Was. Badass.
Yeah, Granville the unfortunate posture in consumer end 3D animation is comprimise. I love the look of Iray renders but if you want to add anything else but a single character with hair and clothes..........good luck. I have started moving back to 3Delight because you can pack so much into a scene and still render each frame in a few seconds. I still prefer the way skin looks in Iray but tweaking is the name of the game. I attached samples below showing 3Delight renders in the first 3 photos which took about 10 seconds each to render. The last on was a frame from an Iray video which involved using the tricks Ivy spoke of, reducing textures, using only the items you see in the scene and deleting or hiding those you don't. I also attached a NPR rendering that was done in 3Delight using PWtoon and it is about 2900 frames and rendered in about 3 hours. So it all depends on what your willing to accept in DAZ. There are tons of Gurus in the DAZ forums that can help you along the way, when they are willing to chime in.
Bringing everything up another notch! Good job, Wolf!
Ivy, I have always wanted to know how you got the background to move in you "Run Banana Run" video. I was pretty sure you were using and HDRI but I how did you make it look like the banana was running past the front of the buildings. Was the last part done with actual gemetry?
If you are ok with a bit of a weird workflow, you could try this idea here. I have found it to work well in some scenarios.
You can use EBsynth to do a style transfer of an IRAY rendered frame on top of something that is animated in any other render engine. openGL, whatever. Any real time engine. An animation with 100 frames typically will only need 3 of those frames to actually be rendered by a ray-tracer. the other 97 frames can be rendered far faster by style transfer. It's weird, and a bit buggy sometimes, but worth trying out.
The essential problem is matching up frames from one application to another for precise frame syncronisation.
So, render your frames in Daz studio (some of them). Do animation in iclone. Then use EBsynth to apply the render style to the animation from iclone.
While it is currently impossible to get animation from iclone to Daz with the required precision. Getting animation from Daz to iclone is possible.
@Kevin and Donald: Thanks guys!!
I am really trying to "raise the bar" with this current episodic project as it is the first true test of my Iclone/CC3/Blender pipeline.
For me the biggest advantage of Blender is environments
Outer Space, Volumetric daylight atmospheres,indoor these are the areas where Iclone fails the most IMHO.
although I love Iclone for its ease
in creating base layer Character locomotion in realtime
and piping it over to blenders action editor
for further refinement,
Iclone native render engine is far too primitive.
BTW for those who think UE4 is far superior to EEVEE
here is a great comparision study on Artstation.
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/0X0WrG