Skip to main content

Learning Reallusion's iClone 5: Part 2 - Avatar Creation and Facial Puppet Motion

Today I decided to run through the next two of Reallusion's iClone 5, Quick Fix Tutorials, How to create my own character and How to create a talking character. Both tutorial videos are very short so click the links if you'd like to watch them.

BTW: If you haven't read Part 1 in this series, it's not critical but you will see my first iClone scene and will be able to read how it was constructed.

As mentioned previously this series is my experiences of learning iClone and is not intended as a tutorial. If that's what you're looking for then I'd recommend you watch the tutorial videos I'm using as a basis for these blog posts.

Creating My Own Character

Photo of me used as the
basis of my iClone Avatar.
As someone who casts myself into a lot of my own videos it's always useful having an avatar character that represents me. So that's what I decided to create.

Initially I started with a photo of me that was well lit but my face was not directly facing the camera. Although you can still get reasonable results I wasn't happy with the character I produced.

I began again by sitting in front of a window and getting as close as possible with my laptop's webcam and taking a photo. Producing the image you can see above.

From there it's just a case of adding a character to the iClone stage then running through the face fitting process - which is not that different to CrazyTalk Animator's Morph Face Fitting process.

Face fitting process.
Once that was done, Reallusion's tutorial demonstrated a few of the settings you can adjust to give your character a unique look and also showed you how to add hair.

I decided to go all out, after adding some hair that was as close to mine as I could find, I decided to really tweak all the facial settings to see how close of a likeness I could get.

I was very impressed with just how much iClone allows you to fine tune the face structure. Everything from the width of the nose to brow angle, cheek puffiness and more can be adjusted. I think I didn't do too bad (see image below)...

TET Avatar.
Obviously it's not exactly like me (the harsh lighting doesn't help) but I feel it's a good representation.

Making My Character Talk

The second tutorial on making your character talk seemed like deja vu. iClone's voice adding and character puppeteering system is virtually the same as CrazyTalk Animator 2.

The only trouble I had was my laptop computer not being able to keep up with the real time puppeteering. This could be problematic in the future but I do know there are things you can adjust to try and improve the real time performance.

Anyhow I found a short bit of my own voice I had recorded for someone else's animation quite a while ago and loaded that into iClone. The auto lip sync kicked in so that all I had to do was a bit of minor head movement and blinks to make the character feel more alive.

I then struggled through some settings for making the camera pan around my character to create the animation below. The camera pan isn't that smooth because I haven't really learnt that bit yet but it does the job. Watch the final video below. It's very basic with just the default lighting settings.



Overall I'm happy with what I achieved. A character like this can be made very quickly. Easily inside 30 minutes, probably less if you're not tweaking every little detail like I did.

I'm looking forward to adding some full body animation in future tutorials.

Popular posts from this blog

AE Juice - Animation Presets, Motion Graphics, Templates, Transitions for After Effects, Premiere Pro, and Other Video Applications

Level up you video edits and animations with AE Juice's motion graphics and templates. Some days you just don't have the time to create flashy motion graphics for your latest video or animation. For some of us it's more a question of our own artistic abilities being a little less than the awesome we'd like them to be. Whatever reason a resource like AE Juice's animation presets, motion graphics, templates, and transitions packs for After Effects , Premiere Pro , and other video applications can really make your work stand out very quickly. AE Juice gives you access to an instant library of free, premade content elements and sound effects, which you can add to with additional purchases of various themed packs from their store. There are three ways to manage their content, all of which can be used in commercial projects . The AE Juice Standalone Package Manager makes it easy to browse previews of all your pack contents and to download and find just the elements yo

Should You Buy or Upgrade to MOHO 13? *Spoiler* Yes. Yes You Should!

MOHO 13's New Character Set. Smith Micro released MOHO 13 , their all in one, 2D animation studio, this week. The question is should you buy or upgrade to the latest version? Obviously I've already spoiled this in the title, so the actual question is why do I think you should buy or upgrade? To be clear, I'm only talking about MOHO 13 Pro. If you're considering MOHO 13 Debut be aware that you're missing out on some of the new features, and a lot of existing features that are only available in the Pro version. Debut is fine if the budget doesn't stretch to Pro, but, if you never want to be disappointed about not having a feature, it's Pro or nothing! The other thing I need to be transparent about is I'm not, by any stretch, a frequent MOHO user/animator. However I took the time to learn MOHO 12 Pro fairly extensively, blogging about my process and sorting out 104 free MOHO training videos into a logical viewing order in the process. I think I ha

TimeBolt: Fast Video Editing for Anyone Creating Online Courses, Podcasts, or Vlogs.

I resisted making tutorial videos for a long time because I don't like editing. Specifically I don't like editing me teaching as I step students through a process during a screen record. I have a tendency to insert long pauses not just in the middle of sentences but between multiple words in the middle of sentences as my pace matches what I'm doing onscreen. This makes for very long and very slow paced video tutorials. To counteract this I have to edit out all the pauses. This can take hours, or even days on particularly long tutorials. For example, when I created my main course, The Lazy Animator Beginner's Guide to Cartoon Animator , I literally injured the thumb on my right hand, operating my mouse, as I spent weeks taking out all my pauses (seriously, I had to wear a thumb brace for a few weeks to fix the pain). Recently I came across TimeBolt , a very affordable, fast editing application with the featured purpose of removing all the pauses from your video (and even

Make Disney/Pixar Style Characters with Reallusion's Character Creator and Toon Figure Bases

The Extraordinary Tourist Classic Coat outfit created using Reallusion's Toon Designer for CC3. I've talked before how I've wanted to get into 3D Disney/Pixar style character animation since I first saw the animated cutscenes for the very first Tomb Raider game back in 1996. It's why I initially bought Reallusion's iClone 3D studio app as soon as I could afford a computer that would run it. But then Reallusion released their 3D Character Creator (CC) for iClone and I wanted to create my characters with that (and I did try with Bat Storm ). But the focus of CC was realism, even with ToKoMotion's stylised body morphs . Now with Reallusion's Cartoon Designer bundle for CC3 which features two packs, Toon Figures , and Toon Hair , designing Disney/Pixar style 3D characters just got a whole lot quicker. The two packs are the bare essentials for creating Toon style characters. Five body morphs (2 male, 2 female, and one adolescent body morph that w

Can You Learn Reallusion's Cartoon Animator 5 for Free Using Their 137 Official YouTube Video Tutorials Sorted Into a Logical Learning Order?

Or you could just buy The Lazy Animator Beginner's Guide to Cartoon Animator . While Reallusion's Cartoon Animator is one of the easiest 2D animation studios to get up and running with quickly, learning it from all of the official, free, video tutorials can be more overwhelming than helpful. With more than 137 videos totaling more than 28 and a half hours of tutorials, spread across three generations of the software (Cartoon Animator 3 through 5) it's hard to know if what you're learning is a current or legacy feature that you either need to know or can be skipped. Many of the official tutorials only teach specific features of the software and don't relate at all to previous or later tutorials. As a result there are many features either not mentioned or are hard to find. To make your learning easier, on this page, I've collected together all of the essential, official, free video tutorials and sorted them into a learning order that makes sense. Simply start at

Review: CrazyTalk Animator 3 vs Moho Studio Pro 12

Reallusion's CrazyTalk Animator 3 or Smith Micro's Moho Studio Pro 12. Which of these 2D animation applications is right for you? Regular readers of this blog will know I'm a strong supporter, and fairly proficient user of CrazyTalk Animator since version 1. It's a great piece of software for producing 2D animations from purchased content quickly and, with version 3, is easier than ever to create animations from your own art. Lesser known is that I first purchased Moho Studio Pro 12 (then known as Anime Studio Pro 9) back in October of 2012 and have been upgrading it to the latest version ever since because I believed in it as an application for creating great 2D animation to TV quality standard. As such, it's a much more complex application than CTA3 that I only got around to learning properly late last year. I'm still in the process of blogging my progress . Despite this I feel I've learned enough of Moho to compare it to CTA3 to help you determ

Creating a G3-360 Head From a Single Photo in Reallusion's Cartoon Animator

Source Photo from Generated Photos . Ever since Reallusion introduced the G3-360 Character Head into Cartoon Animator 4 I've wanted to see if their 360 Head Creator tool could be used to create an animated head using a photo. Part of the reason I've never given this a shot, until now, is that I just assumed it would be difficult, and require a lot of photo editing to blend out the sprite edges. It turns out, creating a photographic G3-360 head is not that much more difficult than creating a cartoon head, and can be done using a single photographic image using my own G3-360 head rigging system . While this article isn't intended to be a full tutorial, I'll run through the basic steps of how I achieved my photographic G3-360 head, shown in the comparison below, of a Cartoon Animator Morph-based head on the left, and my G3-360 head on the right. Pros and Cons Cartoon Animator's morph-based head system is ideal for animating photographic faces. It uses a semi 3D wire me