Archive translation. Contest results, quotes, links, software features and prize details reflect the original publication date in 2021. Verify current information before citation or production use.
In brief: Reallusion’s 2021 iClone Lip Sync Animation Contest received 468 entries from 60 countries in three months. The selected work demonstrated lip sync, facial animation, character design and mixed pipelines using iClone with tools including Blender, Cinema 4D, Unreal Engine and Unity.
Enough of the preamble, here are the winners!
Reallusion’s iClone Lip Sync Animation Contest 2021 launched in July 2021 with the aim of delivering the best 30-second animations showcasing lip sync, facial animation and great characters. Within 3 months, 468 entries were received from 60 countries. Entrants took inspiration from comedy, films, music videos and stories and turned them into detailed lip-sync animations. In addition to the iClone software, entries were also submitted using various rendering programmes and engines such as Blender, Cinema4D, Unreal, Unity and others.
The final result is an example of iClone’s ground-breaking facial animation workflow for accurate voice lip-sync, emotive puppet expressions, muscle-based face keying and professional iPhone performance capture. A third of submissions using Blender and MetaHuman showed that iClone is a highly compatible facial animation pipeline tool used by Unreal MetaHuman and Blender users, along with Replica’s AI Voice plugin that made text-to-animation easier than ever.
“We at Reallusion are proud to see more and more highly skilled artists adding Character Creator and iClone to their pipeline. This event proved once again that iClone’s powerful lip-sync and facial animation tools can be used in professional productions when time and budget are of the essence. We congratulate everyone who attended and look forward to showcasing more innovations for the industry.” – Enoc Burgos, Reallusion Director of Partnership Marketing
WINNER: BEST CHARACTER ANIMATION
The iClone Lip-Sync Animation Contest 2021 saw over $40,000 worth of cash and non-cash prizes awarded by a number of sponsors who have partnered with Reallusion. These were awarded in various prize categories and awards. And here first is the “Best Character Animation” category: animations that show the most accurate lip-synchronised movements as well as realistic and believable facial expressions.
1. 1st place: Ice Queen – by Loic Bramoulle, Cinematics for Indies and AA Studios
“I used an iPhone XR to record a basic performance while simultaneously talking over an audio clip and capturing my face on video, which allowed me to manually refine facial expressions while aiming for hand-animated, keyframed facial animations. The process was surprisingly quick as the motion capture was essentially used as animation blocking, but without all the manual labour. Post-editing by hand wasn’t quite as fast, but it’s much more efficient overall than creating the animation from scratch.” – Loic Bramoulle
2. 1st place: Do Right, Jessica Rabbit – by Jasper Hesseling, story lover and professional 3D artist
“I had a lot of fun working on this piece with iClone’s lip-sync tools. I still have a lot to discover, but I’ve already learnt a lot.” – Jasper Hesseling
3. 1st place: Love, Rosie – by Petar Puljiz, Unreal 3D artist
“Thank heavens for these animation tools that you simply have to have in your pipeline, whether you’re a pro or a beginner.” – Petar Puljiz
WINNER: BEST CHARACTER DESIGN
Characters that stood out for their exceptional character design, equipment and voice customisation.
1. 1st place: The Pumpkin Cave – by Varuna Darensbourg, Artist & Game Developer
“Using Reallusion’s tools to bring my characters to life has been an exciting experience. They help save time, which is a great boon, and they work so well that they make even difficult tasks a pleasure. Using iClone AccuLips for the 2021 competition was incredible! The accuracy blew me away and the combination with iClone Motion LIVE and the Live Face iPhone app for layering allowed me to achieve much more than I expected.” – Varuna Darensbourg
2. 1st place: Judar – by Gergana Hristova, freelance 3D artist
“I never thought that animating in 3D would be so much fun and so fast thanks to iClone!” – Gergana Hristova
3. 1st place: Animal Farm – by Jason Taylor, videographer and director
“iClone has fundamentally changed the way I work. I love the ease of use for lip-syncing and the ability to tweak facial animations using face keys and face mocap. Fantastic. Thank you so much for that.” – Jason Taylor
SPECIAL PRIZES AND AWARDS
Judging the 2021 Lip-Sync Animation Contest proved to be quite difficult and required many hours of deliberation. In addition to the top 3 placements in the categories “Best Character Animation” and “Best Character Design”, Reallusion also selected 41 winners for special prizes and awards (honourable mentions).
We also received many great entries from our German-speaking users this year. You can find details of the winners and the showcases on the winners page.
Psychopath – by Arne Schaefer, carpenter and freelance composer
“The actors in iClone can be animated quickly and intuitively. Elaborate tracking shots from every perspective are possible and with Character Creator 3 you can create avatars for every conceivable film genre. The characters and props have now become so realistic that I only use iClone to realise film ideas or music videos. The effort involved with real actors, the associated costumes and a film set is simply too great.” – Arne Schaefer
Celebrating Donuts – by Pieter Hardeman, freelance animator and musician
“My contribution “Celebrating Donuts” was created with the help of Character Creator, iClone and Unreal. I used CC3 to create the main character, because CC3 allows you to create cool and realistic 3D characters relatively quickly. I did all the animations for the main character with iClone and thanks to Accu-Lips I was also able to quickly create a realistic facial animation. I then exported the whole thing to Unreal. And with the help of a member of the RL forum, I did a good job. The fact is, without the tools from Reallusion, I wouldn’t have been able to do all this. That’s why I’m very glad that I decided to embark on the adventure of 3D animation with iClone CC 5 years ago.” – Pieter Hardeman
LumberJack – by Rob Crabtree, creative and art director
“We found iClone particularly useful for fading out live action actor sequences for our short films and commercials. There was a learning curve with the software, but we found it was intuitive and worked well with the other software in our pipeline. Over the last 3 years and with the recent additions of iClone and Character Creator, we are discovering how realistic and cost effective digital humans can be in our films.” – Rob Crabtree
