Unreal Animation Director and CG artist replaces Movement Builder and Maya with iClone 8

June 2, 2023

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256x256 fit 1642153457 — **Alireza Fattahi** – Unreal Animation Director and CG Artist

With a decade of hands-on expertise as an animation director and experience in 3ds Max, Maya, Movement Builder and Unreal Engine, Alireza Fattahi has executed quite a few initiatives, delivering content material throughout numerous media platforms. His experience lie in creating realtime environments, directing and using superior lighting and cinematography strategies that deliver life to life like cinematic animations for video games, ads and TV exhibits.

He began his journey as an architect renderer utilizing 3ds Max and V-ray. Nonetheless, he quickly realized that it wasn’t sufficient for him. So, he started engaged on short-animated private initiatives utilizing the identical workflows. Concurrently, he explored Maya for rigging and animations and created a number of quick animations and ads for native TV channels. Throughout this time, he gathered a couple of associates with totally different areas of experience and collectively, they fashioned a staff of 5 skilled animators. Their staff was capable of create a whole TV sequence in simply six months, because of their effectivity and pace.

Nonetheless, they wanted new options and software program to proceed bettering their workflow, and the most important bottleneck they confronted was rendering. To beat this, they shortly adopted new real-time workflows utilizing primarily Unreal Engine. Their second breakthrough was within the animation division, the place they found iClone and its spectacular set of instruments for enhancing and mixing movement captures, an enormous library of ready-made motions, and implausible methods of making automated animations. Presently, they’ve a number of initiatives at hand, together with a fan-made Batman quick animation, a number of ads, and their biggest ardour: a cinematic animation for a brand new recreation.

“Many indie and small groups that wouldn’t have a military of animators and technical artists to brute-force by each drawback with advanced software program. iClone and Unreal Engine give us the chance to compete with a lot bigger studios by way of the dimensions and high quality of our initiatives, primarily cinematic teasers for video games, and extra.”

Alireza Fattahi – Unreal Animation Director and CG Artist

Q: Hiya Mehran, and welcome to the Reallusion Characteristic tales! Its good to have you ever right here. Kindly introduce your self and inform us a bit about your Batman short-animations and your cinematic animation for a brand new recreation.

Hiya! I’m happy to be right here and grateful for the chance. My identify is Alireza (Mehran) Fattahi, and I’m an animation director and CG artist with a specialization in cinematography and rendering. I’m additionally liable for CG supervising and technical directing for many of my initiatives.

After a number of years of engaged on varied industrial initiatives, I made a decision to pursue a lifetime ardour undertaking of mine. As a baby, I grew up loving Batman and it’s cinematic world and tales. Subsequently, it was pure for me to decide on this because the theme for my cinematic animations.

Initially, I made a decision to create solely a brief teaser, all on my own with no funds, utilizing new and quick software program options with out conventional pipelines. After receiving constructive suggestions from quite a few CG artists, I made a decision to develop the undertaking right into a full 5-minute quick animation. To attain this, I collaborated with a bunch of extremely expert associates from varied departments, once more using new and quick software program options reminiscent of iClone and Unreal Engine.

Q: You talked about that you’ve got been a very long time person of Maya and Movement Builder in your animation initiatives. Please share with us why you determined to transition into real-time animation software program like iClone and Unreal Engine? What benefits do these new instruments deliver and what value financial savings do you see?

Sure, the discount in iteration time, on the spot suggestions, user-friendly interface, and intuitive nature of this new expertise are very interesting to work with. This answer is sort of a breath of recent air for a lot of indie and small groups that wouldn’t have a military of animators and technical artists to brute-force by each drawback with advanced software program. iClone and Unreal Engine give us the chance to compete with a lot bigger studios by way of the dimensions and high quality of our initiatives, primarily cinematic teasers for video games, and extra.

With instruments like Character Creator and MetaHuman Creator, we will even accomplish the unimaginable process of pure animated faces that have been as soon as solely achievable by sure huge productions a couple of years in the past. This is sort of a dream come true and opens up new potentialities for smaller studios and people.

Q: iClone has developed right into a full-fledged manufacturing suite with many highly effective options that now present an alternative choice to Movement Builder. Are you able to identify a few of the most used options you’re utilizing for mocap cleanup and animation normally?

The discharge of iClone 8 has positively caught the eye of many skilled CG artists. Abruptly, all of the highly effective instruments of extra established software program can be found with the convenience and intuitiveness of contemporary expertise. At first, I couldn’t imagine that with only a few easy clicks I might have a totally automated rig that works with each instrument and asset in iClone. No extra characterizing each character and each animation pack, which was once a headache because of points with scale and mixing motions, and so forth.

” The discharge of iClone 8 has positively caught the eye of many skilled CG artists. Abruptly, all of the highly effective instruments of extra established software program can be found with the convenience and intuitiveness of contemporary expertise. At first, I couldn’t imagine that with only a few easy clicks I might have a totally automated rig that works with each instrument and asset in iClone. No extra characterizing each character and each animation pack, which was once a headache because of points with scale and mixing motions, and so forth. “

Alireza Fattahi – Unreal Animation Director and CG Artist

With iClone, we even have a set of superior movement mixing and cleanup options which can be extremely simple to make use of. The automated animation instruments like Movement Director/ Nav factors for -walking Animations-, together with an enormous library of Reallusion movement captures just like the Hand-to-Hand Fight content material pack are helpful additions too.

All of those options make the iClone 8 a robust instrument that saves effort and time whereas delivering high-quality animations. When evaluating the iClone suite to software program like Maya and Movement Builder, probably the most spectacular elements are:

The most effective-in-business auto-rigging and characterization options.
The flexibility to direct captured motions in any course and path, with ease.
Largely flawless matching of each animation clip from each supply, to earlier, or subsequent movement.
Sturdy automated instruments to appropriate motions in regard to noise, clipping, and different points.

Q: As a seasoned director and CG artist, what recommendation would you give to different Movement Builder and Maya customers that want to swap to real-time software program to streamline their productions?

I urge each artist to check out iClone in at the very least one in every of their initiatives. This software program not solely has each instrument you have to full your duties, however I assure that additionally, you will love their pleasant and intuitive strategy to advanced duties.

By way of rendering, you’ll respect the real-time suggestions of Unreal Engine and the unimaginable set of options that instruments like MetaHuman and Quixel deliver to your initiatives. And I imagine that this new pipeline is able to attaining the unimaginable by permitting us to create high-budget trying animations with a fraction of the fee and manpower. Because it opens up new potentialities for small groups and impartial artists, giving them the chance to create spectacular animations that may compete with these produced by bigger studios. So, take the leap and check out iClone with Unreal Engine. You received’t remorse it!