room904studio has released a 2 part short featuring a live-action mix of iClone. The story follows Ken Chan’s tormented night of sleep before a major college exam. Crashing at this desk after an exhausting day, Ken Chan drifts into a world mixed with Final Fantasy ala iClone and finds himself fighting a new breed of academic demons. Director Ro, delivers a great story where in the end Love conqures all. Great work room904studio, we’ll stay tuned for more from your sleepless saga.
The virtual world of iClone filmmaking expands with the highly anticipated release of iClone 2. Delivering new features for advanced storytelling, iClone 2 includes G2 character actors, real-time SFX visual effects, LivePlants powered by Speedtree and HD video output. Since the launch of iClone in December of 2005 Reallusion has continued to aggressively develop the world which many Machinima filmmakers have made the location for their virtual studios. Packing a complete next-gen production studio into your PC is no small effort, but guided by strong feedback from the growing mass of citizen directors Reallusion is set to introduce the next phase of user-requested features to iClone 2.
G2 Characters
Generation 2 (G2) iClone characters have a whole new appearance, performance quality and when fully featured offers 9 all new bodystyle. Enhance character customization and wardrobe creation with CloneCloth making iClone G2 characters the most advanced virtual actor. G2 characters start with an entirely revamped bone structure with increased bones providing more natural motion and posing along with precise skin weight matched to the new bones for enhanced mesh animation.
Skin texture detail is refined for realism in iClone 2 G2 characters; from fingernails to muscle tone, the new G2 skin updates iClone 2 with ultra realistic skin detail.
CloneCloth
Wardrobe creation for character costumes is revolutionized with G2 CloneCloth characters providing mesh texturing tools to create limitless character clothing designs. Utilizing the G2 CloneCloth equipped characters users have a second layer mesh to alter with any image editior creating texture maps to shape and decorate clothing.
Following the G2 CloneCloth texture templates for Upper body, Lower body and shoes custom clothing designs may be fashioned using Opacity maps to cut the cloth revealing skin and creating any assortment of character textures able to be saved to custom character libraries, shared with other users or sold as Texture packs under the newly revised iClone EULA. iClone 2 offers a new tool to export and save any character texture for easy sale or share packaging.
SFX
SFX visual effects adds a complete particle system control panel to iClone 2 for adding real-time special effects to any iClone 2 scene. SFX features particle and fog effect presets that can instantly transform any iClone 2 scene into a dynamic environment with weather effects like rain, snow or sandstorms, magic effects like cloud tunnels, and elements like fire, smoke and water. Scenes with iClone 2 SFX are more immersive allowing projects to fill with unique real-time visuals.
Customizing SFX is controlled by a new Modify panel section added to iClone 2 giving users total control of particle behavior from start and end frame assignment to gravity and wind effect. Customized textured particles are able to be created with any image, fine-tuned with the Modify panel and saved to the Custom Particle library for further use, share or sale.
3D LivePlants
Natural scenes are now enhanced with dynamic real-time foliage animation powered by SpeedTree. LivePlants in iClone 2 3D scenes animate with wind effect for hyper-realistic forests, grasslands, canyons, fields and more. LivePlants are procedural trees and plants so the system load is minimal and the real-time performance is blazing in iClone 2.
HD Video output
Keeping with the moving trend of HD production, iClone now supports both HD 720p (1280×720) and HD 1080i (1920×1280) standard with more than 68 frames per second DVD size rendering output (based on NVIDIA 7600).
First rule of film school fight club…
Your movies are in high-demand, even the one’s you haven’t made yet.
The storm of citizen director films on sites such as YouTube and BlipTV exposes web viewers to entertainment from the most unlikely of sources, themselves. Not only are the swarms of web fans flocking to become ’subscribers’ of their peer productions, but they are transforming in record-time from audience to auteur. Electrifying the surge of citizen directors is largely attributed to the advancements in video hardware and animation production though the genre known as Machinima. Machinima filmmakers blow away the Hollywood constraints of prolonged production obstacles and offer fresh content produced in studios that are normally smaller than a major studio’s coat closet. What more, Machinima delivers fast paced production making it a method of madness and certain power up for full-contact filmmaking. Machinima’s crew of gamers and techies are raising a real-time renaissance and the mass media is beginning to respond.
SciFi.com and VH1 are addressing the rise in user generated films fueling the Web 2.0 mega trend. Filmmakers from traditional methods to real-time Machinima go frame-to-frame in VH1’s Acceptable.TV where a vist to their website will deliver a tasty morsel from Jack Black waxing Shakespeare as he gives you the low down on how to enter VH1’s video challenge. Acceptable.TV is now calling all citizen directors to submit original films, which will be judged by web viewers throughout the week and highest votes get a sweet prime-time slot on the weekly VH1 tv show. Are you acceptable?
Whip out your warp drive and get ready to battle. Blasting competitive filmmaking to new worlds, Scifi Channel equips filmmakers for a quantum leap into the role of writer and director with Battlestar Galactia. SciFi has included a nice library of video and audio resources to aid in production. Winners of the Battlestar Galactia competition will air their film on Scifi during a primetime episode of Battlestar.
Competitive filmmaking spurs the muse allowing a production poised population to take aim and shoot films based on themes and objectives. Full-contact filmmaking swings storytellers into an imaginative exercise that celebrates the emergence of the citizen director.
‘The Grid Review,’ covers the headlines from inside Second Life delivering a smart series that’s worth a stream. Animating, ‘The Grid Review,’ mixes Second Life Machinima and CrazyTalk facial animation to bring the Second Life avatars to life as talking actors. CrazyTalk is a complete facial animation studio for storytellers and filmmakers with accessible tools for creating characters from any photo, JPG or BMP. CrazyTalk’s real-time playback puppets characters with voice audio. CrazyTalk facial animation was also featured behind the trailblazing Machinima from Electric Sheep, the CBS Evening News. The Second Life version of the CBS Evening News delivered the anchor’s stories through the technology of CrazyTalk. Companies like Electric Sheep are pioneers when it comes to finding inventive ways to produce with signature-Machiniima low production resource requirements aiming for high impact studio results. Tools like CrazyTalk are perfect for studios seeking efficient alternatives to animation that are designed to save production time. ‘The Grid Review,” showcases talking Second Life avtars, which otherwise do not speak in the world of Second Life. CrazyTalk creates talking characters that are performing well for the Electric Sheep.
