You've seen the animated 3D news stories of Tiger Woods and other celebrity news gone 3D via AppleDaily. iClone has the chops to give you the same real-time response as a daily production tool. When the JetBlue story broke about a flight attendant's fit and flee via emergency slide from Flight 1052 on August 10th, we couldn't resist to give iClone a good test. So within a week of part-time animation from concept to complete, James and I (The Martin Brothers) release, "Steven Slater's Day Off."
The largest scene in terms of poly and face count was the airplane interior where we built-up the set with 18 characters, 66 props, 8 lights and 8 cameras. The project size is 366,941 faces and 153MB.
Dealing with a project that size requires a plan to make sure you can easily navigate the scene in real-time and see a decent frame rate during real-time preview. To accomplish this we used the, 'Render State,' options for each item in the scene. What does that do? It lets you isolate the objects you need to see in full quick or pixel shader view and let everything else either be hidden or displayed in wireframe. Why do you do that? iClone provides this feature so you can turn down the detail in the real-time renderer on objects that you are not animating or not currently focused on at that moment. Most importantly you can choose to leave some objects, like what you are currently animating in full shader preview. iClone let's you balance the load so you can see the effect of the object your are working on without letting other objects in the scene bog down your system. You can set this by either right-clicking on the object and then go to, 'Display,' or by clicking the, 'Render State' cell in the Scene Manager.
Of course this type of production requires some shortcuts and we took most of them via the Google 3D Warehouse. Some things we knew we needed, but didn't have time to model. So we fired up 3DXchange and headed over to the Google 3D Warehouse to grab the set materials. Not only did we find great stuff, but we had lots of options and immediately began working on refining the models with textures and material specular, reflection and glow attributes.
JetBlue Airplane -
Airport -
News Van -
Parking Lot -
Airplane cabin -
Transportation's pack from RL - GREAT sets in this one
http://www.reallusion.com/contentstore/csproduct.aspx?contentid=AIC420DIENU050120100729001&MenuItem=ic_scene&Type=Props
We also needed sound and lots of it. Field recording was not really an option and thankfully James and I are hams on the mic so voice overs are usually easily obtained either by us or friends. However sound effects were a big issue to get the soundscape we wanted to hear in the final product. We used these resources to strike audio gold:
http://www.freesound.org, http://www.incompetech.com & http://magnatune.com/
All in all, James and I didn't kill each other while making this over the past week and it helped that we live over 1k miles apart. In the end, is it perfect? No, but it's what you can expect to get out of iClone if you dive in with a goal and use the right shortcuts.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010 at 12:59AM 
