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 - preparing a character collision


A car crash! Oh no! Oh Yeah! Let's have some fun with this one! We'll use the Benny character for this mayhem:

  1. 1. Load a new blank scene. Select the Actor tab and click on the Avatar button.

  2. 2. Double-click on the Benny character to load him into the scene. Any character will work.

  3. 3. Load the Infinite Plane from the physics props folder into the workspace.

  4. 4. Load the Jeep from the Prop root folder into the workspace.

  5. 5. Arrange the objects as in the following image:

  6. 6. Load the Ball_001 prop from the 3D Blocks folder into the scene and scale it up along its Z Axis to around 146.

  7. 7. Position the ball prop around Benny as shown in the following image. It doesn't have to be exact, just make sure the curve of the ball is outside of his body:

  8. 8. With the Benny character selected, click on the Pick Parent button in the Linkage section on the right side menu and select the ball to link Benny to the ball.

  9. 9. Load Box_001 prop into the workspace.

  10. 10. Scale the box to X= 187.8, Y=207.4, Z=47.4 and place it as in the following image:

  11. 11. Use the Pick Parent button to attach the new box prop to the jeep.

  12. 12. Select the jeep, right-click on the jeep and choose Move_Forward from the Move command. Select a spot behind the Benny character that will cause the jeep to impact the character when it drives off.

  13. 13. Return the time scrubber to the first frame if it's not already there.

  14. 14. Click on the Physics Settings button or press Shift + F9.

  15. 15. Select Ball_001, activate the physics and set its state to Frozen and the Bounding Type to Self Mesh.

  16. 16. Choose the Box_001 prop and click on the Active Physics checkbox and set the state to Kinematic and Bounding Type to Self Mesh.

    The following image shows the meshes to this point:

  17. 17. Save the file.

  18. 18. Run the simulation.

    Note

    Linking/Attaching tip

    Remember to LINK to characters and ATTACH to props when using dummies for physics collisions.

  19. 19. Select the box and turn it's opacity down to zero to render it invisible. Do the same for the ball. The opacity slider is located in the right side menu when the prop is selected.

  20. 20. Select the Ball_001 prop and change the Bounding Type to Box then rerun the simulation to see the difference.

    The following image shows the Benny character colliding with the jeep when using a box bounding type:

What just happened?

We used the ball prop to act as a collision dummy for the character and used a box prop for the same purpose on the jeep. While props can act as their own dummy, we needed to use the built-in Move feature of the Jeep, so using a dummy allowed us to animate the jeep while having an impact object on the front of the jeep without cancelling out the built-in move scripting.

We pushed the collision dummy out and down low on the jeep to force the Benny character into the air. If you find that the character is crashing through the top of the jeep, then add another box to that part of the jeep, size it to cover the area of penetration, set it up like the other box, then attach it to the jeep. Use as many dummies as necessary.