Project Sharing Scripts

With the recent releases of the City Elements and the 100 Years War Theme Packs the situation with the way projects are handled in iClone has got me thinking. These new packs have offered an incredible selection of props that enable complex scenes to be built within iClone that can take a lot of planning and a long time to complete. Some truly impressive urban landscapes or medieval battlefields can be created and it is incredibly satisfying to see it all come together in the finished project. Saving the project for personal use is not a problem and one click and it is yours for use any time you like.

The problem comes if you would like to share your complex masterpiece with others. Say you wanted to put up your project on a website for others to use saving them a lot of time in the creation process. Currently iClone saves all the contents of the project in the project.vns itself so it's an absolute no no to share this project file with anyone else because you would be giving away the content to someone who may not have purchased the packs in the first place.

So at present you simply can't share projects with anyone else and this is a shame because projects are like complete movie sets and having a library of pre-built movie sets that users could download would be a real bonus and time saver. For new iClone users who have yet to grasp the complexities of scene creation this would be a great way for them to see what can be done with iClone.

So is there an answer? Well possibly. If a way could be found to save a project script rather than a file that contains all the physical items etc. Say we could save a text script that contains a complete list of everything and the locations in the scene. This would be a small file that could easily be shared and then if the person who receives the script has the content in their library the scene will be recreated just by clicking a load button. To make it easier the process would just ignore any props or accessories that the user doesn't own and create the scene without them rather than throwing up an error message. Pretty cool yes?

Now lets be clear this is just me as an iClone fanatic dreaming. This isn't, to the best of my knowledge even in the works but I wonder what you think? Would this be useful to any iClone users out there? If you have an opinion why not post a comment and let me know.