• Work with DAZ Productions to develop a more seamless, FBX-less, native DAZ file importer; should work with characters, props, clothing, and even entire scenes in the .DUF or .DSA or .DSE file format. And should work with Character Creator and iClone especially, without the need for 3DXChange.
• Enable support for DAZ 3D plugins (for facial mapping and character morph creation alternatives), Photoshop and After Effects plugins (for post work), and the Cycles rendering engine (from Blender).
• Develop a “Live Link” for Blender.
• Native support for Blender, Maya, and DAZ assets.
• Allow the user to use their own content folder organization system; or, make this unnecessary using a PostGERSQL database for all native—and imported—content.
• Combine 3DXChange Pipeline, Character Creator Pipeline, LIVE Motion (plus ALL of its available Profiles), as well as iClone Pipeline version all into one single, monolithic, unified application, with a singular, monolithic, unified user interface (styled after iClone’s user interface) for doing everything all together in one app, without the need to shuttle files back and forth between various programs. However, also make these products available separately, so that they can still be used in the original way they were intended, or can be purchased a la carte depending on the production pipeline’s needs. Do not overprice them or the “big” app that contains all their functionality, as tempting as it might be to do.
• Integrate Cartoon Animator 4 features into iClone, for adapting 3D animations and motions to 2D animations and motions.
• Cartoon style rendering, pencil-shaded rendering, and animated voxels with a choice of voxel shapes.
• Integrate support for using animated textures in the from of .GIF, .AVI, or .MOV files.
• Better lip-syncing.
• Allow for “Friendly” naming of files in the Smart Gallery; so instead of “arm_left_move.iMotion,” for example, I just see “Move Left Arm” in my Smart Gallery. Ideally, this would use AI and ML to “extract” a friendly name from files that don’t come with one.
• Allow me to enter custom metadata for both Reallusion or 3rd party content.
• Make the Unreal Live Link more seamless and natural to work with.
• Give us more post-effects possibilities in Iray. Like what Boris Continuum Complete offers users of After Effects.
• Make Popcorn FX compatible with Iray and Unreal Live Link. Also: Make Global Illumination and Ambient Occlusion compatible with Iray (and other rendering engines mentioned below), as well.
• Integrate Popcorn FX and Physics Toolbox directly into iClone; not as plugins, or as content, but actual embedded effects and animation capabilities.
• Integrate the ActorCore system, the Content Store, the Content Marketplace, the Software Store and third-party content creators’ stores — directly into the Smart Gallery and Reallusion Hub.
• Make a Feedback App to make feature requests, complaints, and problem-issue resolution a more seamless experience.
• Auto-lookup serial numbers, activation codes, etc., upon product install, so the user doesn’t have to enter anything.
• Integrate support for BVH and FBX motion files right inside iClone itself.
• Create an “iClone to After Effects Live Link.”
• Enable running under virtualized environments; use custom hardware and DX12 emulation if necessary on Macs.
• Automatically register apps and content upon install or purchase within Smart Gallery.
• Make iClone compatible with DAZ Productions “AniMate 2” aniblocks.
• Develop an “iClone to MotionBuilder Live Link.”
• Develop an “iClone to Maya Live Link.”
• With these “Live Link applications,” completely do away with the import-export process associated with FBX files, iMotion, iAvatar, iProp, etc. files, and other iClone assets within all Reallusion software. Retain DRM using encrypted metadata that the companion plugin in the other app “knows about.”
• Make the Kinect Mocap driver and plugin extensible via plugins, and make it do fingers and toes, hand gestures, as well as facial expressions if used in combination with LIVE Motion and either Faceware or the iPhone LIVE Face Protocol.
• Further (i.e., more deeply) integrate LIVE Motion and Unreal Live Link into iClone.
• Sell the entire package for $495, Pipeline version: $795.00.
• Integrated support for interpreting, unarchiving, and sorting Truebones and Mixanimo files, as well as Friendly Naming and custom metadata.
• Enable “unwrapping” of object UVs, and give us as basic “Layered Image Editor” feature within iClone. Steal the open source code for GIMP itself and integrate it right into the program.
• Basic 3D modeling features, like those found in programs like DAZ’s free Hexagon software, including sculpting capabilities (like Edit Mesh currently works in Character Creator), and make ALL actions within the ENTIRE animation environment — right down to selecting objects and rearranging selection order — part of a “History” palette.
• Develop a Mac version of all products that runs on the Metal graphics framework from Apple and that uses either Iray, Octane, or Radeon ProRender in addition to Unreal Live Link. The code is there. All you have to do is adapt it.
• For that matter, support installing plugins, and even considering creating plugins, for the Octane and Radeon ProRender rendering engines.
• Integrate support for LWO and LWS files, for Lightwave users; come to think of it, a Live Link to Lightwave wouldn’t be a bad idea.
• Integrate direct support for FBX file formats newer than 2012 (in case the user prefers to load in and exchange files between apps).
• Integrate Octane support, ProRender support, Iray, and Unreal live rendering directly into the Viewport. Use “Render Layers” to overlay rendering from one engine with another using layered image editing and “canvases,” as supported by Iray).
• Better OpenCL support.
• Do not use OpenGL in any application; instead rely on either DirectX 12 (Windows) or Metal (Mac).
• OpenML support in scripts and scripting languages.
• Develop—in addition to the Python environment currently available in iClone—a fresh, Swift-like unique scripting environment that can combine Python with Maya MEL script “translation” and C, C++, and Perl code.
• Allow for more intricate camera posing and animation; adapt iMotion files that include locomotive aspects to work on cameras.
• More choices of cameras to use, please.
• More choices of film stock to use, as well.
• Make Light objects in the viewport resemble the actual geometry of the Light and Type of Light being used.
• Support HDRI, and the native creation of HDRI images, even animated ones using .GIF, .MOV, and .AVI files as the source, as well as using existing iClone projects as the source file, to be rendered in the Viewport on the fly.
• Just for fun: Make Camera Objects in the viewport look and “feel” like the actual real camera types they represent; but render them only in the Viewport, of course, and make them translucent.
• Support VRAM-pooling if the graphics cards installed (such as the Nvidia Titan RTX and other RTX cards) support it; also, actually, just plain old support for multiple graphics cards would be great.
• Support live mixing of mocap sources; for instance: The user can “mix” and “blend” live Faceware camera data, live “LIVE Face” data, Rokoko (or other suit or environment) data, and Kinect Mocap data all simultaneously with one another.
• Support for AR and VR development—and application use!—using the HTC Vive or Occulus Rift, or even the Microsoft Hololens.
• Deeper support MIDI and Audio files and the “timing” of motions to MIDI data, without the need for any plugins. Should include “retiming” functionality (tempo change without pitch change, and vice versa, and “gender bending” voice data). Support Waves, Native Instruments, AAX, and Apple Audio Units, as well as round-tripping to Adobe Audition or other audio/MIDI editor or DAW.
• Integrate (into the new “monolithic” program mentioned above) ALL the currently available plugins for iClone, CC3, and 3DX.
• Support motion retargeting, even for iMotionPlus files. (Which brings me to . . .)
• Load and save everything — characters, avatars, props, physics, animations, effects, etc. — into the FBX file format. No more “iMotion” and “iMotionPlus” and “iAvatar” B.S.; just FBX, Collada, and OBJ only, throughout the entire system architecture; extend the FBX Protocol if necessary (work with Autodesk).
• Allow for incremental auto-saves in multiple file formats and multiple backup locations.
• Built-in network storage management and support.
• Develop a Live Link (how many is that now?) with Da Vinci Resolve, for color correction. Same goes for Final Cut Pro X, Premiere Pro, and Apple’s Motion.
• Offer more “final render” image and animations options and formats.
• Support the Alembic Cache format.
• Do ALL of this—all of the above—and release it all as a product entitled “iClone X,” or something equally evocative (like “Avatar” or “Reallusion Animator”) and price it at $795. You won’t be able to ship them fast enough.