Reallusion releases iClone Connector for NVIDIA Omniverse

Reallusion has released the iClone Connector for NVIDIA Omniverse. The new Omniverse Connector adds a complete character animation pipeline to the Omniverse Create and Omniverse Machinima applications.
When the Character Creator (CC) Omniverse Connector launched in April 2021, designers of all experience levels were able to efficiently and easily create digital humans for any type of project. Reallusion is now expanding the pipeline and providing all the tools for full character performance with straightforward face and body control with the new iClone Omniverse Connector.
During the NVIDIA GTC, from 8 to 11 November 2021, interested parties were able to experience the tools live. At the show, Reallusion presented an exclusive session on the debut of the iClone Omniverse Connector. Reallusion also gave a presentation in the NVIDIA Omniverse User Group and demonstrated the iClone Character Animation Workflow for Omniverse.

The heart of animation production

Digital humans play an important role in the meta-verse, but creating character animations often involves extensive expertise and high costs. iClone offers an innovative way to customise animations for different characters with its fast and intuitive animation production system.

The iClone Omniverse Connector simplifies character facial morph animation, body animation, props, camera, lighting and scene setup and exports everything to Omniverse. By combining iClone 7 and Omniverse, individual users or design teams can create, animate and deploy digital humans and 3D characters for simulations and visualisations.

Omniverse is a fantastic addition that enables live coordination with other 3D tools or with other programmes via the USD Data Interchange Standard

Support for photorealistic simulation

NVIDIA Omniverse is an open platform for virtual interaction and real-time photorealistic simulation. Thanks to USD and Omniverse Nucleus Service technology, developers can connect different USD-compatible applications and interact in the same Omniverse rendering viewport or collaborate virtually across the world without boundaries.

Comprehensive character rendering with straightforward face and body controls

Whether you’re creating a functional crowd simulation or telling a cinematic story, iClone gives you the ability to animate scenes with impressive characters and provides you with the tools to make your animations even more flexible.
The iClone character animation system consists of tools for lip-sync, facial expression and body animation. Equipped with state-of-the-art mocap technology and a huge library of high-quality character assets and movements from ActorCore, developers can easily create character animations with this all-in-one platform.

Developers can send the entire iClone project to Omniverse with one click or selectively edit a specific element in an iterative design process and view the progress of the work in Omniverse in near real-time with enhanced graphics.

Seamless integration with Omniverse Audio2Face – multilingual, AI-driven voice output for animations

The combination of iClone and Omniverse helps a variety of industries to access characters and use them as actors, virtual presenters or people for simulations and visualisations. In this optimised combination, Audio2Face simplifies the process of head mesh wrapping with presets of CC characters. Audio2Face generates expressive point-cache lip-sync animations from voices, with optional facial styles and adjustable intensity levels. Finally, the facial animation can be baked as iClone face morphs and loaded back into iClone. Creators can further tweak the lip details with iClone’s proprietary lip sync technology and add natural facial expressions or body movements to complete the character animation.

Photorealistic lighting and post effects in real time

Automatically transfer lights and settings from iClone – IBL, directional light, spotlight, point light, light shapes and emitting materials. Physically accurate Omniverse path-traced lighting adds realism with global illumination, natural light reflections, accurate shadows, scalable light shapes and time-of-day simulation. Additional visual effects can be achieved with Omniverse post-processing.

Directing film cameras – DOF, motion blur

Automatically transfer the properties of your iClone cameras and DOF settings, with the option to save iClone multi-camera sequences to an animated Omniverse camera. Additional camera effects such as motion blur can be added by Omniverse.

Give all objects an authentic look

Automatic conversion of iClone PBR materials, SSS and Digital Human Shaders to Omniverse MDL materials. The associated textures and material attributes are mapped accordingly.

Extensive character assets & motions for USD

ActorCore allows you to quickly search, view and download photorealistic 3D people for AEC (Architecture, Engineering and Construction) simulation. ActorCore also offers thousands of AAA quality mocap motions that can be further edited in iClone and transferred to USD for Omniverse.

download iClone 7 & Character Creator 3

Get the tools to create Omniverse-ready digital humans and character animations. Download a trial version of iClone and Character Creator to design customised characters and create character animations with ease. Get started with free video tutorials.