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iClone

iClone

MAKING COSTUMES

iClone includes the concept of clone cloth. Whereas in more traditional methods, a character had one "skin", in iClone they can have two skins. The one skin approach means for example that you don't have a nude actor that you put clothes on. There is no underneath skin. The character is covered in shirt, trousers and may be flesh on the parts that are not covered by clothes. With the iClone 2 skin actors, you can have a character where the skin is that of a nude person and then put clothes on top of that. The advantage of this approach is that for certain types of fabric you can make them partially opaque, so for instance you would be able to see the body outline and some it's colour, underneath a white cheese cloth shirt.

In the example below, I opened Jack's clone cloth costume (upper body) in iClone and launched diffuse in the modify tab. This opened my art package, with the clone cloth image inside it (top image open in the art package screen capture below). I then duplicated this twice and in the first, I pasted an image of some fabric over the clone cloth image. I then painted in the collar, cuffs and buttons, using the art package (second image open in the art package screen capture below). I then saved this as a diffuse image.

I then created an opacity map in the second copy of the clone cloth image (bottom image open in the art package screen capture above). The white parts of the image will have no opacity, the black parts will be 100% opaque. So looking at the image above you will see that the actors chest will be exposes in a V neck shape (it could have been a round neck, a U neck, or any other shape I wanted it to be . The wrists will also be exposed. I then saved this as an opacity image.

By then opening the diffuse image and the opacity image in the modify tab in iClone (see image below), my actor becomes dressed in the white shirt. If I had wanted the shirt to be slightly opaque, then I would have painted the white areas in the opacity image light grey. If I had wanted the shirt to be very opaque, then I would have used a darker grey.

Using the art package I can easily make the same shirt in a vast range of colours, simply by copying the diffuse image and applying colours to it. Ways of easily applying colours to the whole image includes application of filters, adjustment of hue, and bucket fill with a colour that has it's opacity set so that it does not obliterate the underlying image. I like to use opacity of say 25% then save the image, apply the same fill again and save it again and so on. This leads to a range of identical garments of the same colour, but each with the colour increasing in intensity.

Once you have created a garment, it takes literally a few seconds to recreate it in another colour. It takes only a few minutes to make a wardrobe of 50 identical garments, but each with different colours and shades (the third image down, which is open in the picture of the art package (the first picture on this page)), is a clone of the image above it, but has had a colour filter applied to it. It has then been saved with a different name.