VERDICT Impressive and accessible real-time 3D animation power at an excellent price.
If you assume that producing a 3D-based movie demands a film studio with dozens of professional 3D artists working with expensive cutting-edge technology and massive render farms, perhaps you should think again.

According to Reallusion all you need is a reasonably up-to-date graphics card and $80 for a copy of iClone.
Launch the program and you are presented with a clean modern interface built around a main icon bar providing drill-down access to all functionality. Select the Scene icon, for example and you can choose from a range of pre-provided 2D backdrops or 3D sets – including new outdoor options with LivePlants that move in the breeze - or import or build your own. Select the new SFX icon and you can quickly add customizable particle-based effects such as fogs, fountains and fire.
Setting the scene is important, but iClone’s main focus is rightly on its actors. Here the existing range of characters or “avatars” has been expanded by two new options – Jane and Jack. These are built on new G2 technology which offers greater realism through superior rigging and higher resolution textures. Further G2 characters built on different body shapes are available for purchase but you can get a long way by customizing the provided presets - resizing body, head and hands, swapping eyes, hair, teeth and so on.
More importantly you can easily and completely change the overall appearance of your avatars simply through editing their various clothing texture maps. You can do this within iClone using sliders to quickly change global factors such as brightness or hue, or you can load the bitmaps into an editor such as Photoshop for absolute control. A major advance here is iClone’s new G2 support for “CloneCloth” in which avatars are built on dual layers – one for the outer garment and one for the inner skin. This means that you can produce totally new styles of clothing simply by editing the CloneCloth opacity layer.
iClone’s ability to customize clothing is impressive, but its ability to customize faces is extraordinary. Again this is based on texture maps meaning that you can load any existing photo. For this to work the bitmap face has to be precisely mapped to the facial geometry and this is achieved through an onscreen wizard which walks you through adjusting the facial boundary, angle and orientation and then pinning down eye, nose, mouth and eyebrow features. Even with just one photo the results can be surprisingly impressive.
Even better, once the mapping has been made, iClone can then manipulate the new face to bring it alive. In particular you can directly record your voice or load an existing WAV speech file and iClone will automatically analyze the file and create lip movements based on it. You can even apply emotional moods such as anger or humour and iClone will adjust facial movements accordingly.
In addition to animating their faces you need to animate the avatars themselves and this is easily done by applying motions and poses from a range of around 100 presets for walking, idling, dancing and so on. As these are based on captured motion data the results are surprisingly natural. The big problem is that iClone doesn’t let you go beyond these presets to create your own custom animations.
However there is a solution. Buy the Studio version of iClone ($200) and this provides a dedicated Motion Editor module where you can merge existing animations and poses and create your own by directly manipulating the avatar’s skeleton. In addition iClone Studio provides greater control over face shaping and particle-based effects, a basic timeline editor, integration with Reallusion’s dedicated lip synch software CrazyTalk and direct integration with 3ds max.
Such extensibility is clearly a major plus, but it begs a question: if you’ve already shelled out for 3ds max why wouldn’t you use its greater modeling and animation power to produce your movie? The answer is sheer speed. Character modeling, rigging and animation is the hardest 3D task going and, once you’ve laboriously set-up your project, you then need to render it which can literally take days. By comparison all 3D handling in iClone, including advanced support for bump and normal maps, reflection and soft self-cast shadows, happens onscreen in real-time which makes setting up your animation a much richer and more productive experience. And when you do come to render your project out to video format (AVI, WMV, RM and MP4) so that others can see it, even at DVD or HD 1080p quality, everything happens blindingly fast.
Ultimately of course the speed, ease and sheer fun of working with iClone come at a price – there’s no getting away from it, the results are clearly computer-generated and in the wrong hands can be irredeemably naff (though this can have a charm of its own). Even in the right hands the results are still mid-range computer game rather than Hollywood blockbuster. However, when you think of the many challenges involved and just how easy iClone makes it to overcome them, that’s high praise indeed.

EASE OF USE 6/6
FEATURES 4/6
VALUE FOR MONEY 6/6
OVERALL 5/6