RGCA Best One Minute Video Harborside Press

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For my video, I volunteered iClone6 Mason into the US Army and placed him at Omaha Beach June 6, 1944. D-Day. The game I am simulating is Medal of Honor: Allied Assault by EA Games PC version, released in 2002.
To do this, I transformed iClone 6 Mason, a G6 character, to match the uniforms of the G3 avatars of 2nd Ranger and 101st Airborne Pack created by Reallusion. I accomplished this by using Photoshop and various props.

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Here are other G6 Mason avatars in GI uniforms. All the military equipment and weapons are from Reallusion Pack US Ranger 101st Airborne Pack. In Photoshop, I altered the face of Mason to try and make him look different as each avatar.

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Sorry, resubmitting my video.
Here is the new link. https://youtu.be/D9vedgibWwI

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Here are the four sets I used for the video. In set 1 and set 2, I used Photoshop to create the silhouette of warships by finding a photo on Google, cutting the outline out of the ship and then create a .png file. I then dropped and dragged the .png file from a saved folder into iClone while holding down the CTRL key where it became a DefImagePlane prop which could be re-sized and duplicated.

The extra Higgins boats in set 1 and set 2 was a low-poly model I found on Google 3Dwarehouse and imported in with iClone 3DXchange.

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At first I wasn’t going to enter the 2015 iClone Animation Contest because, to be honest, I didn’t fully understand the rules and requirements. I haven’t played a video game in six years so I felt left behind there. But after watching submitted videos and realizing there was (I think) a 1-minute movie category, I decided I could make a 1-minute movie -- with the mindset of “you can’t win it, unless you’re in it.” The competition is fierce and I don’t have any delusions of grandeur of winning, but I do enjoy the challenge of competing. Plus making these videos, for me at least, is just plain fun.
I started my production on June 25, 2015. So I obviously put myself under a deadline. I choose the video game Medal of Honor: Allied Assault for three reasons.
1.) It’s a video game I actually played back in the day.
2.) I am a World War II history buff. I’ve read every Stephen Ambrose book about the subject.
3.) I have been developing a WWII US Army battle uniform for iClone’s G6 Mason and thought he would be perfect for the role in the video.

Mason is a G6, non-standard character, in iClone 6. As a non-standard character, what he’s wearing: rolled-up sleeved, button down shirt, pair of jeans and boots, is what he’ll always be wearing. The shirt can be manipulated with opacity maps, to create shorter sleeve, sleeveless shirts and variations of tank tops. Colors and patterns can also be changed with ease in Photoshop. The pants can also be made into shorts with opacity maps. What you can’t do with Mason is fit him in a long sleeve shirt.
Here is iClone’s definition of an opacity map:
Opacity map
(supported by Quick Shader and Pixel Shader)
• Make transparency and cut-out effects from grayscale images. The black part will get cut out; the white part will be fully displayed; the gray values determine the transparency (alpha) level of the object.
• Use bright gray RGB(253,253,253) on the Opacity map to make 2-sided 3D Surface from Plane mesh.
In plain English, white is what you see, black is what you don’t in your clothing material.
The first photo is Mason in various outfits created by Cellygon and Alley, content developers for iClone. The next is an opacity map of Mason’s shirt. You would think all you need to do (especially if you’re familiar with iClone Clonecloth) is extend the sleeves with white in Photoshop. However, because he’s a non-standard character, the rules of Clonecloth do not apply and the opacity map does not extend any cloth beyond his elbows. So, how do you create sleeves? This is where I used props and will cover that in my next entry.

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Here are 3 Indigo renderings of Mason in full GI World War II battle dress.

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I began working on a World War II US Army uniform for G6 Mason in mid-February.
My goal was to create a historically realistic uniform and match (or come close) the uniforms of Reallusion’s G3 avatars in their 2nd Ranger and 101st Airborne Pack. This way an iClone user would be able to place the G6 and the G3 characters in scenes together.
Most WWII GI’s in the field of battle wore a jacket called the M41 or wore a tanker jacket. Due to delays, the much superior M43 jacket (which is still used today in variations and styles) was issued in mass to US Army troops in August 1944 (in September 1944, the 82nd Airborne and 101st Airborne were issued the new M43 field jackets before jumping into Holland for Operation Market Garden aka “A Bridge Too Far”).
The M41 jacket is the most ubiquitous and familiar to most (think Sgt. Saunders of ‘Combat’ the WWII series of the 1960s), so that was the jacket I concentrated on making. It closely resembled the jacket worn by the G3 Avatar Ranger Sergeant of the 2nd Ranger and 101st Airborne Pack (he’s wearing a tanker jacket). The Ranger Captain avatar is wearing an M41 jacket, but it’s mostly hidden underneath his D-Day vest (FYI: the vest was worn only for D-Day itself, yes, that’s right for 1 day, and it was frustrating that his avatar was created always wearing the vest).
The official color of the M41 jacket was olive drab shade 3, but due to various dye lots the jacket came in a wide range of shades, from an olive green to khaki. Thank goodness for match color in Photoshop.
The two main problems to hurdle were I needed long sleeves and the jacket drapes below the belt line.
Addressing sleeves first:
Since this was beyond an opacity map fix, I decided to cover Mason’s naked forearms with a prop. This was trial and error. First I tried Pipe_001, sizing and refitting it to act as a bottom half of a sleeve. I felt the results were unacceptable and tried Capsule_012. Better but I was still not happy with the result. I then tried Displace_004 found under the Tessellation Template. This prop allowed me to alter the shape with Displacement values, transforming a tube to more of a convex shape of a sleeve. With the proper Bump map (again trial and error) the sleeve had the appearance of wrinkles, giving me the effect I wanted. The next step was matching the sleeve color to the jacket color (more trial and error) and I used Indigo rendering as my guide to finding a perfect to near perfect match. I attached Displace_004 to Mason’s RL_G6Beta_R_Forearm and RL_G6Beta_L_Forearm and “viola!” sleeves!

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Creating a jacket bottom:
With the sleeves done, the next challenge was to extend the jacket past the belt line. Again this was not correctable with opacity maps. A prop had to be used. My first attempt was with Ball_002. It worked for appearance but looked overall stiff. What worked best was a Physics Prop, Cloth Template Gray: a half-sphere called Soft_f. Being a physics prop it hung more naturally around the hips. I rotated the prop 180 degrees on the X axis. I altered the opacity map and then the weight map, which were important to the process. Editing both these maps involved a lot of trial and error to get the look I wanted. I added an all-white displacement map and set the multiplier to 1.0. Once I was happy with the results, it was time for a diffuse map with the color of the M41 Jacket and buttons and a bump map to add texture and wrinkles to the material. I attached the prop to Mason RL_G6Beta_Pelvis and now my character had a full jacket.
To finish the look, I created a cartridge belt from a prop Pipe_001. This again involved a lot of sizing and refitting to get what I wanted. After adding a diffuse map, I attached this to Mason RL_G6Beta_Pelvis. What the cartridge belt did was hide the connection of the jacket bottom prop I created to the jacket, making it appear seamless and all of the same material.