Focus on The “Creative Process” Instead of Technical Setbacks
Nick Shaheen: From Medicine to Motion
I’m Nick Shaheen, a radiologist by profession and a CG artist by passion. My journey into animation started in an unexpected place—medical illustration. Early in my career, I spent a fair bit of time creating motion graphics and anatomical visuals to help explain complex medical concepts. That experience taught me the power of visual storytelling and deepened my appreciation for animation as a way to communicate ideas dynamically.
Over time, my work expanded beyond medical visualization into character animation and motion design. I’m always looking for ways to refine my process and bring more life to my work, and discovering Reallusion’s tools opened up new creative possibilities that I hadn’t explored before.
Discovering the Power of Reallusion
I’ve been working in CG for over a decade, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that character animation can be a massive time sink. Early on, I’d spend days sculpting, rigging, and manually keyframing, only to get something that looked fine but never quite as fluid as I wanted. The thing is, I never loved the technical grind of rigging and prepping characters. I wanted to animate, tell stories, create dynamic scenes, and focus on the creative side of things while still maintaining creative control over my own work.
I’ve always been drawn to animation challenges—they’re a great way to push yourself and get inspired by other artists. It’s also an opportunity to learn new techniques from other artists. I’d see people turning out insanely polished character animations in a short time span and I kept wondering: what’s their secret? After some research, I found many of my peers were using the Reallusion suite of tools. I decided to give it a try about a year ago, and I haven’t looked back since.
The Animation Ecosystem
Suddenly, I had access to an ecosystem that let me create characters, drag and drop animations, tweak performances, and maintain a procedural workflow at nearly every step. I can create a character in Character Creator, export it to iClone for animation, make changes to the character in Substance Painter or ZBrush and then pipe it back into iClone without having to redo the entire animation.
Crowd Simulation
I recently finished work on a commercial project that required a dozen characters interacting with their environment as well as each other. With iClone, I could layer in mocap, tweak performances quickly, and move on. This made multi-character animation far more approachable than ever before. There’s even a set of tools (Motion Director) specifically designed to handle background characters and crowds. Having a built-in system for animating crowds efficiently has opened up a lot of possibilities.
Facial Performance Capture
Lip sync is one of those aspects of character animation that can quickly become a time sink without a procedural workflow. With AccuFACE, I can use live or pre-recorded video for facial motion capture. The built-in cleanup tools help refine the animation and remove jitter while preserving key details.
I collaborated with JP Ashkar on the music video California Christmas. Despite living nearly 2,000 miles apart, we were able to sync the character’s lip movements to JP’s performance. He recorded a video on his phone, which I used with the AccuFACE plugin to drive the facial animation. One of my favorite features of AccuFACE is AccuLips, which allows you to refine lip sync even further by typing in the dialogue for improved accuracy.
iClone Has Become Even Better
The latest version of iClone has evolved yet again. With the arrival of iClone 8.52, a couple new features were introduced that can be a real lifesaver for all the animators out there. Let’s take a deep dive into those exciting features.
AccuPOSE: AI-Assisted Posing
My favorite new feature is AccuPOSE. Think of it as an AI powered posing assistant that reacts automatically to your adjustments. The magic of this tool is that it lets you customize each pose as well as animate between poses without breaking the overall structure of your character. If you move an arm or a leg, the AI trained model adjusts the other joints to keep a natural balanced pose. You can even lock the position and rotation of certain joints to really dial in your animation.
AccuPOSE INFINITY is a subscription service, which offers over a thousand additional posing presets with various themes like “daily life” and “super power”. This is a great tool if you want to create something as simple as a stylized walk cycle or something more complex like scaling a wall. This was a huge time saver for the video I recently made for Reallusion.
Advanced Curve Editing
I use an inertial motion capture suit for body animation, which is great, but often requires cleanup to remove jittery artifacts. iClone streamlines this process with tools like the Curve Editor and Advanced Curve Filter, allowing you to visualize and refine mocap data with precision. You can easily navigate the character’s bone structure to locate keyframe data within the Curve Editor, where you can manually adjust keyframes or use the Advanced Curve Filter to smooth out motion. This is especially useful when working on scenes that require precise interactions between characters, like in my Pirates animation.
Non-Destructive Editing
Another new feature is the Non-Destructive Editing workflow. This gives you the ability to cut a motion clip in the timeline and maintain the keyframe data in the cut out portion. This makes the combination and transition between separate motion clips much smoother and allows a more procedural workflow. I used this extensively in the Parkour section of the Reallusion video to combine multiple separate parkour animations.
Reallusion’s Impact on My Animation Journey
Since integrating Reallusion tools into my workflow, I’ve found myself tackling projects I might have avoided before such as facial animation and performance-driven storytelling. I now have a streamlined procedural way to handle rigging, motion capture, and editing which has made me more marketable as a CG Generalist.
Over the years, I’ve learned that growth comes from embracing the process, experimenting, and patience. The right tools can unlock your creativity in ways you never imagined, allowing you to focus on the art of storytelling. With each project, each challenge, and each breakthrough, you refine your craft and bring your vision to life, frame by frame.
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