Book Image

iClone 4.31 3D Animation Beginner's Guide

By : Mike D McCallum
Book Image

iClone 4.31 3D Animation Beginner's Guide

By: Mike D McCallum

Overview of this book

Reallusion’s iClone is an animated movie making application that allows hobbyists, machinimators, home-based animators, and professionals to visualize their story or an idea by seeing it in action. Years ago, creating animations and single images would require a team of trained artists to accomplish. Now, iClone real time rending engine empowers its users to instantly view what is loaded into the 3D workspace or preview it as an animation, if you have the precise instructions.The iClone 3D Animation Beginner’s Guide will walk you through the building and animating of a complete scene and several one-off projects. First we create a scene with sky, terrain , water, props and other assets. Then add two characters and manipulate their features and animate their movement. We will also use particles to create the effect of a realistic torch and animate cameras to give different views to the scene. Finally we will see how to quickly import images to enhance the scene with a mountain, barn, and water tank. It will cover some fun stuff such as playing with props, characters, and other scene assets. It will also demonstrate some advanced topics such as screen resolution, formats and codecs but mostly it will deal with doing hands on animation with precise instructions.Starting with a blank project using stock and downloadable assets you will learn to lay out and animate a scene and export that scene to both a single image and a movie. The main project will demonstrate many common and undocumented techniques, while each project introduces and examines tools and techniques for successful and fun animation of ideas or scripts.Each project of the book including the main project is designed to cover the aspects of 3D animation in a manner which anyone with basic computer skills can follow. You will discover the importance of lighting a scene including daytime scenes. The concept of the timeline and key frames will be covered in detail and other topics such as rendering (exporting), character modification and prop placement all have their own sections with step by step instructions followed by an explanation of what just happened. Good animation habits and project basics are stressed throughout the book interspersed with time saving tips and techniques gained from years of experience with iClone.When you have finished The iClone 3D Animation Beginner’s Guide you will have a solid foundation in the basics of iClone by having animated a scene with multiple characters and props that involves dialog and interaction with other characters. You will have the knowledge to create new animation projects to hone your skills, tell your story, educate students or sell your product.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
iClone 4.31 3D Animation
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Time for action - changing the speed of the animation


While the movement we have created is smooth it's a bit slow for our purposes. The only way to change the speed of timeline animated objects is to shorten or lengthen the number of key frames between the beginning and end of an animation. This is done by moving the key frame.

Right now we have key frames at frame 1 (created when we opened a new project), at frame 1000 and at frame 2000. We need to speed up the movement so we will move the key frames closer to each other. Key frames can be selected individually or in groups.

  1. 1. Select the key frame at frame 1000.

  2. 2. With the key frame selected and holding your left mouse button down move the key frame back to the approximate area of frame 500.

  3. 3. Select the key frame at frame 2000.

  4. 4. Move that key frame to 1000 in the same manner in which you moved the previous key frame to 500:

What just happened?

We moved the key frames down the timeline towards the start frame. These new key frame locations...