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iClone 6.1 Review

iClone 6 jumps to DirectX 11 and raises the bar for real-time render quality, photo-real rendering and physics simulation...

iClone 6 jumps to DirectX 11 and raises the bar for real-time render quality, photo-real rendering and physics simulation...

Product: iClone 6.1

Company: Reallusion

Website: www.reallusion.com

iClone is real-time game engine technology leveraged for making machinima movies, and in more recent years everything through to pre-visualization. iClone 6 is the latest version, bringing a whole new user interface experience with third party support now including the latest speedtree, PhysX, Substance Materials, and Indigo RT renderer.

iClone 6 ships with a library of assets including demos of key features. Here speedtree shows of its Level of Detail control.
Image copyright Reallusion

iClone 6 brings a much requested feature, a new user interface experience. The new interface is configurable, allowing you to tear off and rearrange panels and toolbars which can now be organized across multiple screens. You can also save each workspace screen layout so you can organize things the way that best suits your own workflow.

iClone has used DirectX 9c as its graphics API since inception, and that is still supported, but iClone 6 jumps to DirectX 11. This brings support for features such as advanced physics and GPU tessellation. But with this leap there has also come a cost and that is backwards compatibility. Once an asset is in iClone 6 it cannot go back to iClone 5 or earlier due to the change in file format required to support these new features.

This cityscape imported from Daz3D has nearly 850,000 polygons and on this NVIDIA GTX 780 can easily run at 60 fps.
Image copyright Alan Marques

With DirectX 11 support, real-time surface smoothing and tessellation is available, a practical use for this technology is with low-poly characters. Obvious hard polygon angles can now be smoothed and rounded directly on the GPU. Tessellation allows for both grayscale height map displacement, as well as support for vector maps which is very welcome.

Allegorithmic's Substance Material is now supported, giving access to a huge library of live adjustable materials. If you have Substance Designer you can design your own.

The new UI in iClone 6 allows for an adjustable interface. Here the animation workspace and timeline have been augmented with a second 3D Mini-Viewport. Image copyright Alan Marques

The previous lighting system was fixed at 8 lights that could not be increased. Happily iClone 6 provides for unlimited lights in any scene, there are no new light types but they are much more flexible and can be combined in the form of interactive light props, a combination of a light fitting and the light source itself.

iClone has always used speedtree technology, but this version upgrades to the latest, providing for higher detailed plants and trees in both poly count and surface materials, as well as transmissive effects on leaves. The wind controls are improved but the really nice feature is flawless L.O.D. or level of detail, with the trees and plants seamlessly down res-ing all the way to a billboard.

A full physics constraint system allows for the construction and simulation of complex systems. Creating
interactive machines and gizmos becomes great fun. Image copyright Reallusion

"A whole new physics system is now included with the addition of NVIDIA's PhysX technology allowing for character object interaction controlled by collision envelopes built into each character skeleton"

A whole new physics system is now included with the addition of NVIDA's PhysX technology, allowing for character object interaction controlled by collision envelopes built into each character skeleton. This also provides dynamic hair and cloth simulation for characters and props. Combine this with a full constraint manager and you can have immense real-time fun building complex real-time simulations.

The new uni-body G6 characters improve character and hair quality significantly but at present are inflexible as they do not yet allow for body morphing and bespoke face creation. But G5 characters are still there with access to the massive amount of content available in the online Content Store and Content Market Place.

There are many ways to animate, from hand animating with Human IK through to live puppeteering of both the body
and face of characters. Image copyright Reallusion

iClone's architecture has been opened up to support 3rd party renders and the first available as a paid for add-on is Indigo RT, giving access to photoreal unbiased rendering. On a final note, apart from some minor tweaks, there are no major enhancements to the animation features.

The focus has been on look improvement at the expense of the animation system but that was one of the big asks for many prior users, and the images you can now create are streets ahead of prior versions and there will be a lot coming with another 6.2 release in 2015.

The 3rd party renderer Indigo RT is capable of producing some great images. Here Stonemason's city assets were transferred into iClone 6 from Daz Studio. Image copyright Alan Marques

Score (out of 5): 4/5

Key features:

- Human IK
- Real-time animation production
- Drag & Drop asset library
- Multi-camera switcher
- Dynamic Substance Materials
- speedtree technology
- NVIDIA PhysX for ridged & soft body simulation
- Full physics constraint system
- Real-time character and face puppeteering
- 3rd Party render support

System requirements:

- OS: Windows 8 / Windows 7 (With Service Pack 1) 64-bit OS only
- RAM: 4GB minimum – 8GB recommended
- GPU: NVidia GeForce GTX 400 Series minimum – NVidia GeForce 600 Series recommended
- GPU: AMD Radeon HD 500 minimum – AMD Radeon HD 700 recommended
- DirectX version: DirectX 9 minimum – DirectX 11 recommended
- Video Memory: 1GB minimum – 2GB recommended
- Internet connection required for online activation

Price:

$99 Standard
$199 ProEducational license (if available):
Contact Reallusion at: education@reallusion.com

Release date:

May 2015


Related links

Purchase your copy of iClone 6
An introduction to iClone 6 - video
Check out more from Reallusion

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