Jay Versluis We can use sound clips for effects and music for our iClone projects, although it’s far from intuitive how to do this. You’d think we can import a WAV file, it would appear on the timeline and we’d move it where it needs to go, but that’s of course not how it works. That would …
Material Presets for complex objects like characters and clothing are called Material Plus files in iClone and Character Creator. They can describe several surfaces across several objects in your scene. Imagine the skin shader of a character and attached accessories at the same time, like glasses or hair. They’re not exactly intuitive to do though, …
Have you ever wondered how most 3D apps have an option to export FBX files with embedded textures, except for Blender? There’s usually a very obvious tick box that says something like “embed textures”. Granted the feature isn’t fantastic, because it can only reference the base colour and not a full set of PBR maps …
Matcaps are quick and easy visual previews that let us judge 3D objects without having to setup lights or materials. They’re essentially different ways to make your objects appear while you work on them. This can be helpful if you’re working on something that’s naturally more dull or shiny, darker or lighter, or reflective in …
I’ve discovered an interesting little add-on for Premiere that lets us change people’s facial expressions! Much like a 3D character in CC or Daz Studio, it offers sliders that can adjust the mouth shape, where the eyes look, where the face points and all kinds of other stuff. There’s a free trial version available here. …
I don’t deal with paths all that much in Blender, so I tend to forget the simple things. Case in point: how do we turn two loose ends of a bezier path into a continuos curve? Merge doesn’t work by default as it does with vertex objects (although I hear there’s an add-on for that, …
I ran into a small puzzle while importing Daz clothing into Character Creator using Transformer. The garment in question was a multi-part suit that consisted of a shirt, a vest, pants and a jacket. Although all were named correctly, Transformer displayed random names during import, and as such it was impossible for me to specify …
I remember changing my active highlight colour in Blender a while ago, and naturally can’t remember in which abyss of the menu madness this setting was buried. I did this because by default the highlighted and active object have a very similar shade of orange, making it nearly impossible for my dyslexic brain to see …
Cascadeur can create animation loops, but it’s far from intuitive. It’s also a destructive process, so save your projects before applying them. Here’s how to loop an animation using Interval Edit Mode. Select the first keyframe on the timeline, let’s assume this needs to become the seamless last frame of our animation. Switch into Point …
When exporting files from Blender for use in Unreal Engine via OBJ, we have to apply some settings for objects to behave correctly. These can be made either on export from Blender, or on Import to UE. Of course I forget how it works when I need it next, and despite the handsome presets I’ve …
We can retarget animations with the Pro version of Cascadeur. As long as the figures are setup to have an auto-posing rig, the app can translate motions between figures. It’s a little cumbersome and unintuitive, and I’ll probably forget, so here’s a quick note for you and my future self. I’ll use my previous Battle …
In this article I’ll show you how to take a character from iClone with an animation applied, import them into Cascadeur to make changes, then bring the animation back into iClone. The official documentation is a little outdated at the time of writing, and thankfully this pipeline has been greatly improved. This works with CC3+ …
With Cartoon Animator 5.3 we got this exciting new feature called Puppet Stage. With it we can trigger pre-defined motions by way of keyboard hotkeys. This is very simple to implement with single objects and characters, but not quite as intuitive when multiple objects come into play. Here’s how to do it. For my simple …
When I import a mocap clip from Rokoko Studio into iClone, it’s usually not coming in aligned to the world centre. It’ll still work, but in target applications it would be helpful to have the pivot point where my character is, and the rotation aligned to where s/he’s facing. Thankfully iClone has us covered in …
The other day I had some rotoscoped footage we wanted to enhance with Topaz Video. The transfer went well, but sadly Topaz Video is very pernickety when it comes to retaining alpha or opacity. Although it’s apparently a feature, I’ve never been able to make it work reliably. Hence I thought I’ll use the original …
Extending a short part of a motion into a longer segment can be tough. Say you had a few steps recorded and you needed the character to walk like this for several seconds, while retaining forward motion and rock solid foot tracking. Thankfully iClone is the perfect tool to get the job done. Of course …
The GASP Project is designed with easy extensibility in mind. This means it’s a tad harder to figure out how to amend the project at first, but in this article I’ll show you what to do and where to add your values so your own pawn comes up in the menu. What we’ll need is: …
We wanted to tweak the ever-so-slightly-excessive wind speed that’s part of the procedural grass in Brushify. This took some research, but a video by Joe Garth greatly helped me understand where to look for the setting. Each landscape layer’s layer info gives a clue where to start your reverse-lookup research. Select the landscape, then switch …
In the above video I’ll explain how to use depth maps created in 3D rendering software to infer an accurate Depth of Field effect in Photoshop. This can be useful if you want to avoid re-rendering when you want to change the effect, or if your rendering software isn’t accurate enough (looking at you there, …
I’ve been using Premiere Pro since version 5. That was before it became “Pro” or CS. It was just called Premiere back then. At the time of writing that’s been around 25 years ago, perhaps even longer. As such, it really isn’t easy for me to un-learn all that muscle memory. Premiere is such a …
It’s rather painful that the 3D industry hasn’t come to a consensus for a “sane set” of viewport controls that’s applicable in every app. Developers seemingly go out of their way to confuse users by inventing their own control scheme, likely laughing behind out backs while we get ever more frustrated when we have to …
Object IDs are masks defined by the 3D objects that make up a 2D render. This means that compositing artists can mask out areas after a render is complete and make adjustments. Imagine re-colouring a coffee cup, darkening the sky and all kinds of other things. The big advantage of this workflow is that a …
We work a lot with animated image plates, typically of rotoscoped actors (Unreal Engine calls them Media Plate Actors). That way we can position and integrate them into the 3D world. One of the hard parts is moving the camera to a different position while leaving the plate sizing intact as we make changes to …
I get this question from time to time and thought it might be helpful to explain how to save your own morphs. This applies to characters as well as clothing, and ties in with an article I’ve written a while ago that explains where the actual files end up on your system. Assuming you’ve imported …
Landscapes in Unreal Engine typically don’t have a lot of detail. For close-up shots, we usually have to place static meshes manually or use foliage painting tools, but it can be time consuming to get right and tricky to change later. PCG Geometry Decals makes this a breeze: These decals project a texture onto a …
Render pipelines typically work by way of using the same colour profile between applications that need to process image data. When you’re working on your own even across multiple applications this is less important as you just grade the final output the way you want. However, if you’re working as part of a team and …
I need vertical sync on at all times, or my monitor gives me bad screen tearing. Thankfully there’s a simple console variable that lets us enable this ad-hoc: Sadly this does not persist between sessions. However, we can patch an Unreal Engine config file that sets this variable every time we launch the editor. This …
The nighttime buildings in EPIC’s City Sample Project are full of functionality. Did you know you can change how many windows appear lit in night mode? Me neither, had it not been for an anonymous reader who asked me about it. Fascinated by this myself, I took a closer look and here’s what I found …
Blender isn’t exactly well known for its video editing capabilities, but rumour has it there’s a very capable editing tool included with Blender since forever. While I might not be brave enough to use it for YouTube just yet, I was in need of a quick video I needed to assemble from a rendered PNG …
Everyone loves a good UI change for absolutely no reason, and the total waste of time that goes with finding where your everyday features have been hidden. Because EPIC can’t be asked to tell us what’s moved where, I thought I’ll compile a list for us so we can sleep a little easier at night. …