An excellent, fun tool for speedy animation production, with nearly all the rough edges knocked off. Do you want Maya-quality rendering? Then feel free to spend twenty times the price of iClone 5 on the industry-standard Maya, and a shiny PC to run it. Feel free to take twice as long in learning Maya, and to wait 100,000 times longer for each of those pretty-pretty Maya test-renders. The rest of us will use iClone, which renders images in 'real-time' (just like a videogame does). iClone's comes with a free 3DXchange module, which is a simple importer for vast amounts of quality free 3D models from the likes of DAZ, Poser, and Google 3D Warehouse. 3DXchange bypasses Reallusion's rather expensive (but royalty-free) 3D characters and props, but they're there if you want them. Sure, like any powerful 3D software, iClone does take some time to learn properly. I'd say you may have to put in a few months, on and off, to learn the Pro version. But there are plenty of excellent video tutorials out there. Plus a friendly and helpful community (one that, unlike many 3D hobbyist communities, has many women in it). I've used most 3D packages over the last 15 years. So I know iClone is far less complex than beasts such as Blender, 3DS Max, Maya, and similar - learning these is usually like trying to drive a nuclear submarine. iClone, on the other hand, is built from the ground up as a superbly fast and fun movie-making tool. That means it doesn't have to be 'all things, to all 3D people'. The developers have obviously learned a lot from what DAZ, Poser, and the 'big beasts' of the 3D world have got wrong, and version 5 of iClone gets a whole lot of things very right indeed. I think another area where a lot of people go wrong with iClone, is that they want extreme photo-realism - without realizing the oodles of time and processing power that raytracing takes on an average desktop PC. If I render something in Blender at 3600px (as I'm often forced to, much as I loathe the software), then I can't expect much more than a little light Web surfing, as Blender hogs the PC to grind through 30-40 minutes of render time. With iClone I can still use Photoshop, and all my usual desktop stuff, at the same time as running iClone. If you do misguidedly try for photo-realism, then iClone doesn't have the graphical reach (although you can push it remarkably far, once you know what you're doing). If on the other hand you want a stylised look (toon, silhouette, videogame machinima) then you can get great results with iClone. Having started as a hobbyist I now use iClone 5 Pro commercially every week, and am still blown away at the features and capabilities that you have at your fingertips for such a low price. Note that there's now a free full 30-day demo of the 5 Pro version, which anyone thinking of buying should try.
Robert L. Crepeau
Walt
Robert Rasch
Luis J Ruiz