Tutorial
Mike Sherwood describes how to get the best out of iClone’s powerful new facial animation tools
This tutorial will take you through the many tools and techniques available for facial animation in iClone 7 – including lipsync, keyframing, puppetry, and mocap – as well as timeline editing. I’ll also describe ways to mix the different techniques to improve workflow, as well as how to fix and refine animation at any point in the timeline.
Working purely in iClone 7 with a pre-built character creator model which has been additionally polished in Photoshop and Sculptris, the tutorial will apply to any iClone/ CC characters or any non-standard human characters which have been brought into iClone and correctly set up for facial expressions via 3DXchange.
‘Out of the box’, iClone 7 provides a uniquely comprehensive toolset for facial animation which can be used at many levels – from rapid ‘blocking in’ of expression keyframes through to subtle face puppetry and motion capture.
Probably the most important thing to understand is that these techniques can be used separately, or together – depending on the results you’re aiming for. You can produce decent animation extremely quickly just by using one of the tools – or you can spend time combining different tools and refining the animation, right down to the nervous twitch of a character’s lip or eyelid.
For more information about iClone and other Reallusion products, visit http://www.reallusion.com
