My Approach to Animation Movie Making
Having played with a couple of game engines in the past I settled on iClone as my main platform for generating animated clips, which I could then tie together in an editor such as Windows Live Movie Maker or Pinnacle Studio.
After an initial burst of activity using iClone 2 I then did very little for over four years, apart from some brief dabbling with iClone 3, due to my non working hours being consumed studying for a MBA. That is now complete and in the meantime iClone has evolved to version 5. iClone version 4 completely passed me by, except I bought it due to Reallusion offering a free upgrade to iClone5 once it was released.
The fire-flash shines from Reculver cliff, And the answering light burns blue in the skiff.
When using iClone 2 I built sets entirely within iClone itself (the picture above was from a set I built entirely in iClone). However while you can do a lot with the predefined shapes and materials in iClone, you sometimes want to do something different. There are plenty of tools from other software developers (ranging from expensive to free) which allow you to create things you can use in iClone. You will need the iClone 3DXchange software to make them iClone compatible. There are even libraries of ready built free models such as 3D warehouse http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/ In addition Reallusion, the makers of iClone offer a store front from which items can be downloaded for free or purchased.
I have tried using the free version of Sketchup (originally from Google but now acquired by Trimble) to extrude unusual shapes and to build terrains. For the unusual shapes Sketchup is brilliant, but I struggled to make realistic terrains.
At the time of writing this post I am starting to build terrains with the trial version of Earth Sculptor and plan to pay for the full version in the coming days. Since you can’t download a trial version of the iClone Earth Sculptor plug-in I have downloaded Earth Sculptor from http://www.earthsculptor.com/ and used iClone 3DXchange 5.0 Pro to import the terrain into iClone 5. I will be writing a post soon to document that process.
So I am restarting a project I originally started five years ago and will post progress reports and my experiences in this blog. The project is to make a movie based on the story of Smuggler Bill, from the Ingoldsby Legends written in the 1830s by Richard Harris Barham. I will explain more about that when I post about the story line and my research.
I hope you enjoy the journey.
Tony