Al B.
Very underhand practices
Be very careful if considering buying Reallusion products. Their marketing and advertising is misleading at best. Bought character creator for $200 and want to export what you`ve made to Iclone, which you forked $200 for as well,for animation? No problem as long as you`ve bought the "pipeline" version. Want to send everything you`ve made to Unreal/Unity or other external program? You`ll need to buy 3DXchange 7 for another $500 just to be able to export as .fbx as they have greyed out the export function. Really?? $500 for the privilege of exporting what you have already made in the $400 of other software you`ve purchased. What they have essentially done here is created lots of barriers between their software solely for the purpose of charging the consumer for "pipeline" products,plugins and addons. Take the headshot plugin for example I think initially it was $100 or $150 and as soon as it launched the Headshot Morph 1000+ plugin was for released for $100.Now in order to get any joy with making something with headshot you really needed this plugin. My feeling was that this was similar to the greyed out fbx exporter in iclone. That the headshot plugin had been developed with the morphs included and that these 1000 morphs had been stripped away to be sold separately. There is a real lack of base content in CC3 too. A handful of hairstyles and clothing assets that are pretty much useless means you`ll be needing a trip to the content store for assets. Here you will find the "Essential Bundles". On this point I agree with Reallusion entirely. These are indeed essential if you want to get anything done in CC3. These bundles at the time were around $150 each at the time and had all the usual tricks like T-Shirts in one bundle and shorts in the other. They even have a tutorial vid to make a Barcelona kit labelled to the effect make this from "essential bundle number 1 pack". In which the dev makes the top and goes to make the shorts when he realises there are no shorts in the pack. So he calmly says "I`ll just get them from this pack then" not mentioning that would be another $150 for those assets. Now it was obviously known at the time of filming that the title of the video was incorrect and misleading but they chose to go with it anyway. These kind of practices are right across the board where Reallusion are concerned. I urge you to watch their promo vids with this in mind as the narrator tells you how seamlessly things all work,CC3,Iclone,3D exchange,pipeline,headshot plugin, motionlive, addon. I could go on! Whilst not mentioning these are all separate things you have to buy and there`s no "sold separately" indicator onscreen. Bottom line. If you think cc3 looks good for $200 and want to animate them in iclone for $200 then send them on somewhere.You are going to need pipeline and 3DXchange as well which will cost you another $500. All of a sudden the idea of making something in CC3 is $900 and you still have no assets.No headshot plugin or morphs ($200).No body mocap ($199). No facial mocap, ( $100-$1600 approx) depending on what you need. Another thing to be wary of is content store assets which will be advertised to you at the lower "Icontent"price. To clarify this "Icontent" cannot be exported and is stuck firmly inside CC3 or Iclone. So assuming your work flow ends in CC3 I.e you just want to look at your creation on your screen then all is well and good. If you like most others I imagine are making characters and using them for games etc. Then you will need an "export" version of the asset which is at an additional cost of 30% and of course...3DXchange $500. Again my feeling is 3DXchange is partly in place to milk you of this additional 30% whilst maintaining almost Stasi levels of control over what comes in and out of 3DXchange. I would complain, but the last time I tried that the helpline advisor couldn`t even determine if my complaint was a complaint or a technical question. I bid you farewell.