Hi,

I'm trying to do pre-viz in iClone, but I'm really hitting a wall with the inability to do layered animation. The request is for additional motion tracks, or even just a single hard-coded "Upper Body Motion Track", and renaming the existing motion track to "Full Body Motion".

The only support for layered animation is to add a single upper body clip to a single full body motion clip. But this is a rare need. In reality, an actor will be gesturing while walking, then stopping walking while continuing gesturing. The upper body might be a recorded acting performance (e.g. Kinect), intended to be layered on top of a character who walks, stops, walks, stops, sits etc. Or it could be gestures from a library.

However, this is impossible in iClone, and it's such a basic need that I'm almost at a loss as to how to do anything useful in iClone. You can only apply *keyframe* animation on top of a full body motion clip. You can't record an acting performance or gestures and apply them to a character who is already walking/stopping/idling/sitting, unless you're happy with a single gesture on a single clip, and no overlap, permanent animation baking and never editing. This is way too ambitious.

The current motion mixing feature is really only good for (1) people who make single clips where everything is the same throughout the clip (always running, always fist pumping), (2) a check-the-box feature that makes a YouTube tutorial look like iClone has layered animation, and (3) people who are OK immediately baking all their animation together into a single file, and never, ever changing it or changing the timing, even a single time.

The argument often comes up from you guys that "we're trying to be virtual filmmaking for the people, we don't want advanced features". But that's exactly the point. What you have is way too complicated and limited, forcing people into workarounds to do basic things that humans do all the time. I think that in order to be a virtual filmmaking app, which includes virtual *acting*, you have to allow people to put animations on top of other animations without such hard limitations that you require the scene to consist *entirely* of a single walking motion plus a single gesture. I'm stumped. Unless I immediately want to bake it, meaning that I can never change the timing -- ever -- and that's unreasonable to ask of the user.

The minimum implementation of this feature is simply an additional motion track called "Upper Body Motion".

A bigger and more flexible implementation is that the user can create any number of motion tracks they want. Only the bottom motion track does translation. Additional motion tracks have the Puppet dialog built into it as a "Motion Track Settings...". And then you kill the puppet dialog in the inspector, since this is now rolled into each additional motion track, and is now a real-time WYSIWYG feature.

With this you can:

* Overlap motion, i.e. gestures or Kinect recordings on top of a character who walks, stops, walks, stops etc.

* Drag and drop additional gestures one after the other to create an acting performance using library motions.

* Change your timing as you develop the scene.

* Fade gestures in and out.

* Do Kinect upper body motion capture, but not have the nail the timing, which is next to impossible.

* Making iClone acting performances that feel more human.

* Makes iClone live up to its promise of *real-time*, instead of an unnecessary reliance on constant baking of animation. It's very modal. There's no reason to bake when you can keep it interactive.

I've created a drawing. I beg you to consider this. The current way is so hard to use that I think iClone is failing at its goal of being easy. Basic human motion shouldn't be a workaround.