Hi guys,
Dale (harmony gardens) --- glad you were able to see it. I was impressed with what the programs could do.
Kenny --- The animation sequences canned inside of iClone2 SE (included) are basic motions. They are exactly like the types of sequences you see for characters in games. Inside Quake, for example, they had walk, run, fall forward, fall backward, etc. without background, camera angle, lighting, and so on. They were 3-D models that you can move around as a designer. Usually games have several variations such as: walk1, walk2, walk3, .... More follows:
Inside iClone2 and before rendering, you choose distance, camera angle, 2-D or 3-D setting (background), lighting, and all the rest. So the basic motions are canned, and the 3-D "world" is canned. But because there are so many camera angles, lighting possibilities, distances, and so on, most of the animation sequence as rendered on the screen (2-D) is actually up to the user. As you may know, many games are also like that, i.e. composed of a lot of artwork, but very few animations (uh, *comparatively* speaking that is --- not a simple task to animate something convincingly in my limited experience).
The animation sequence of the girl walking across the street (camera up high) and her walking on the stairs are the same basic walking motion. I just lifted her up in the 3-D world and put her on those stairs, then let her walk by the low and closer camera. Likewise, the girl dancing on the street and dancing up close are the same "dance" motion, one with the camera looking through the fence, the other moved in very close and looking down as if dancing with her.
Hope that explains it well enough for you to get an idea. If you're familiar with game programming, then you know exactly what I'm talking about. If not, you can actually download a demo of iClone2 by itself to test it out. But a video mixer is also necessary for videos, of course. That makes this particular package a good deal.
As an alternative to iClone2, you could of course use video clips from a camcorder, digital camera, and so on.
The song had already been recorded, so I fit the animation to it rather than the reverse. I let the song, the 3-D set, and the avatar suggest the whole thing to me. I rather like having the interaction between video and audio --- makes each richer.
Regards,
Dave Clark
On edit: I neglected to mention a feature of iClone2, particularly nice for music videos: You can feed audio to the character and animate the face so that the character appears to utter the audio --- to an extent anyway. I prefer even bad animations to nothing. Some of the earlier games and cut sequences with no vocal animations were just awful, IMO.
post edited by DaveClark - 2008/04/22 03:36:14