For digital event and video producer Elvis Deane, discovering Reallusion’s software tools like Character Creator, iClone, and AccuPOSE allowed him to animate his feature film idea 20 years in the making.
Elvis Deane
“Dream Big, When You Have All the Support to Get Over the Hump”
Hi, I’m Elvis Deane, a seasoned digital event and video producer.I take pride in my ability to communicate clearly with clients and my proficiency with a wide range of production tools.
My educational background in visual effects coordination, virtual production, and creative arts has provided me with a strong foundation in both traditional and cutting-edge industry techniques.After graduating in 1999 from one of Toronto’s first 3D college programs, I chose not to pursue a full-time career in animation.Instead, it became a hobby of mine alongside my work in video production, making me a long-time 3D enthusiast.
Breaking Through Barriers Around 2002, I started writing a show called with the hopes of producing a one-minute silent cartoon every week.The lead character was named Griff, a pilot in a little spaceship, who crash lands on a planet and is on the run from a giant army.I had been watching a lot of , and I was hoping to bring those sensibilities to 3D animation.
But after months of modeling, rigging, and animating, I stopped working on it.It was too ambitious for what I could do alone.I made a comic book with the assets to tell a small part of the story.
I started writing a story for a feature-length movie, , about Griff.I never really expected to make the film, it was just a fun idea I wanted to explore and maybe do as a graphic novel eventually.In 2020, I was looking for a way to still be creative during the COVID shutdowns, and I tried Reallusion’s software for the first time.
I quickly realized that the technical barriers I had faced when I first started learning 3D animation could be easily overcome.Instead of spending my time rigging and modeling characters, I could use Character Creator to quickly make a whole cast of characters for my projects. With iClone, I could use motion capture to act out many of the scenes instead of animating everything by hand.I could concentrate on the story and performances rather than spending all my time troubleshooting technical issues.
I dusted off some ideas I had for my character Griff and started animating test scenes.starts off with a robot police force arriving in the slum that Griff lives in.I wanted a big chase scene to introduce Griff.
A Game-Changer in Motion Editing: AccuPOSE One of my major struggles when doing character animation has been animating action scenes.I often couldn’t get my characters to hit the poses I wanted.AccuPOSE has changed that in a big way.
By offering tons of AI-trained poses.The real magic is it reacts to my adjustments automatically and generates the most natural poses.I could use motion capture to do some action, like running, but AccuPOSE really helped in getting the specific poses I wanted with great freedom of customization.
AI Guidance Based on Themed Models I used AccuPOSE to make Griff climb up a pipe and fight a robot, two things I would have hesitated to try before.Thanks to AccuPOSE INFINITY, which expands the plugin with poses based on different themes and categories, I was able to find the poses that I could play with for the two specific scenes.I used the Wall Crawler model for climbing the pipe, and it only took me a few minutes to create the climbing key poses.
I could move the hand, foot, and hips to the place I wanted, and the rest of the body would follow.For the fight scene, I used AccuPOSE to create my key poses of swinging a pipe and jumping in the air and then went back and did my in-betweening to smooth out the motion.I used some poses from the AccuPOSE Sword & Shield model to get the general movement planned out, and made adjustments to make the poses fit my story.
Visualizing and Adjusting with Motion Trail To make sure the arc of the arm looked good when he swung the pipe, I used Motion Trail to see exactly how the pipe was moving in 3D space, and adjusted my keyframes and added in-betweens to smooth out the motion.Advanced Motion Capture Editing The final shot of the scene introduces the mob boss character, and it’s the only spoken dialogue in the film.I acted out the scene in my living room, recording my body animation on my phone, and used a GoPro to record my face.
I used AccuFACE to capture the facial animation, and then made some small adjustments to the eye positions in iClone.I used Marionette XR to capture the body motion.To get rid of any jitter, I used the Butterworth filter to smooth out the motion capture curves without losing fidelity on any of the big poses, and then made some quick fixes to where the mob boss’ feet were placed.
Interacting with Unreal Scene Back in Griff’s early days, rendering a shot would take me hours and hours.I’m now using Unreal Engine to render everything in real-time.I used different marketplace and Kitbash assets to build the set.
iClone integrates really well with Unreal Engine, the Unreal Live Link plugin allows the assets from both sides to be transferred, so I can quickly move back and forth between the two to make adjustments to the performance or set.To make the final adjustments to my climbing shot, I brought the building’s geometry into iClone to make sure Griff’s arms and legs were in the right places.More Options, Less Challenges with iClone I’m really having fun mixing motion capture, keyframe animation, and AccuPOSE to animate the story. It gives me so many options on how to approach a scene.
I can start a shot using downloaded mocap clips and then add custom animation with AccuPOSE, or I can act out a scene with motion capture and exaggerate the facial expressions by keyframing the eyes and eyebrows.There’s so much flexibility in how I can tackle a scene, and less technical challenges compared to when I started writing Griff’s stories.To Conclude Bringing Griff back to life after all these years has been an incredible experience.
The roadblocks that once made animation feel impossible are gone, replaced with tools that let me focus on what really matters—the story.With iClone, AccuPOSE, and Unreal, I can mix motion capture and keyframe animation in ways that weren’t an option when I first started.Here you can gain more insight into my process for Griff’s story.
Instead of getting stuck on technical issues, I’m experimenting, refining, and actually finishing scenes.Griff’s world is finally coming together, and this time, I’m seeing it through.Elvis Deane is a seasoned digital event and video producer in Toronto, Canada.
