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Fair points, I think the Autograph UI looked fine btw. Maxon has all these Red Giant apps that put their hand up and ask for permission to send stuff over to AE, and maybe they can do it to Fusion, Nuke and whatever other compositing app you care to name. Fusion (though also available as standalone) sits under Resolve. Blender's integrated comping sits under Blender, Houdini's new compositing features sit within Houdini. Maxon makes a 3D app for creating stuff in 3D for comping, they make Red Giant plugins for grading and adding particles and doing further comping and FX, they have a renderer where you can make your 3D stuff look even better before you comp it, but it's all stuff that asks the user to eventually drag the results away into another app at the end. It's like Maxon have a variety of food trucks that make increasingly tasty meals, but they never invested in a restaurant where you can sit down and eat it. So, they sell a lot of apps - again, the Red Giant stuff - that ultimately need another non-Maxon app to really be useful. An umbrella app that gathered SuperComp and Magic Bullet and the like all together, with zero difficulty communicating with C4D, would have its own selling points for C4D users, and it wouldn't make Maxon One any less useful. There aren't a lot of fresh competitors to AE in the industry, as it take a lot of time and effort to build a brand new compositor. But - surprise! - the Left Angle guys just built one. A few (just a few) AE users under EJ's Twitter post on this topic said they had used Autograph, liked it, and one guy said it fixed a few pain points that had bugged him for years about AE. Autograph had received several feature updates since launch, so you'd figure the application was becoming useful for something. The Maxon press release has been carefully parsed by posters here and elsewhere, but the final line of the Maxon comment says much: "Stay tuned, we look forward to sharing more in the future about how we plan to use this technology for the benefit of the community. " The technology being referred to is the composting application Left Angle built, the only way you can use a compositing application is to composite things in it, Maxon has a bunch of Red Giant plug ins built to be used in a compositor, and they now have a compositor-building team that just brought a finished compositing app into the Maxon building with them. At a certain point, there's not a lot of mystery about where all this is probably going.

Thanks man ! Appreciate that !

I love this character ! Nice and good job on that and keep it up too !!

I used to copy them directly from the Unicode manual... https://www.unicode.org/Public/16.0.0/charts/CodeCharts.pdf I found it very interesting as I was in to linguistics stuff and the information it provided were brief yet enough to search further on the internet.

It never works well with extreme Tension values. It will Always look a bit squished because it doesn't work similar to a Sweep. One way to do it the right way would be to use a Matrix, a Tracer and a Sweep but it will take time as you'll need to adjust many things to match the topology of the rest of the model. Start with the Matrix and create one on a Polygon Selection with the Distribution set to Polygon Center. Then Connect the two matrices with a Traced. Set Spline Type to Bezier. Make the tracer Editable and Put it under a Sweep with the appropriate spline for thickness. Adjust the tangents of the two ends of the rail spline to match the cups of the original model. Lastly adjust the Rotation of the Sweep from the Details moving all points the same height. This step has to be done last as any change to the Tangent orientation will mess everything up. Then you have to make the Sweep editable, connect it to the rest of the model and ... you guessed it, bridge the ends... or Weld with the Connect object if points are close enough to the patch. There is no one-click solution. This isn't recommended for many objects or procedural bridging. This should have been modeled as a spline from the beginning.

Hey Doug. It's a perfectly valid question, and one we have all wondered about at some time or other... 🙂 Open Charmap, directly from the Windows command prompt, and select the font you would like, and find the character(s) you need, then Select (that's how you can get multiple characters at same time) and Copy them (Ctrl-C), and paste (Ctrl-V) into Cinema's text field. Would be nice if Cinema could do that bit for us though, so might suggest it, although I can imagine the reasons they might give why that's not possible. CBR

Greetings everyone! As a noob, I am stumbling around trying to find my way ... so far, not being very successful - at least I have not been kicked off the forum, not yet anyway. I am having trouble getting ASCII characters to be accepted by the C4D Text Editor. I thought holding Alt while entering the four digit code would insert the character, but it does not seem to be working for me. If anyone can point me in the right direction, I would be most grateful. I apologize in advance for posing such a seemingly elementary issue, but for me it is significant. Please don't judge me to harshly. Thank you in advance for any assistance anyone can provide.

Can you manage the same trick with a cylinder? I can only get it to flatten in the middle.

zBrush was always the leading app in it's segment, acquiring that app was like getting a crown juwel into the portfolio. Autograph on the other side really is tainted with a first reception of being too expensive, too incomplete and too 'old' (referring to their UI/UX and marketing). In my view, the brand 'Autograph' has little clout, I'm sure they'll drop the name at least. The current app and tech? Well, that's a more complex question. You're right, to suddenly have an almost full-blown competitor to AfterEffects is attempting to wield against Adobe. Would Maxo dare, though? Right now they have strategic and sales-alliances like the MaxonOne+Substance bundles. I guess they actually make some bucks from those cooperations. So, what could Maxon gain if they sever the strategic alliance with Adobe and place an competitor? Not much, I guess, because comping land already is a crowded place. There's the AE-people with decades of AE-projects, -scripts, -plugins, - tutorials. That audience is deeply entrenched. The subset of people who are so pissed by AEs legacy cruft already have alternatives in Blackmagic's Fusion (priced very competitively), Blender's integrated comping (priced even more competitively), with even further options on each end... OpenSource Natron or Hi-End Nuke. What would be a 'Maxon Autograph's USP here? It would need to be better than 20 years of AE-development and better priced than free. Tough battle. On the other hand, it would make sense to port the RedGiant offerings not only to Resolve, but also to the rest of comping apps. Maybe the Leftangle-Team will just port stuff and deal with the comping workflows / tech environment of the other apps. Who knows. In the end, I actually hope you are right and we see a fresh new competitor for the Adobe behemoth, I just fail to see the dollars on that way 🙂

You can have Hair on Hair ! Dynamics are enabled only for the main strands. Main strands don't have a hair material. Secondary hair material has a high value of Kink(>200) It's very efficient and fast.

For me Surface mode bulges the connection... Normal Average worked for me for a smooth connection.

I don't intend on posting any more updates to the scripts here. I think it serves its purpose for me. This was just me sharing with you guys and maybe getting ideas for other ways us non-programmers can use AI to make small workflow scripts. I know Greyscalegorilla recently released a small script pack where Chad used AI to help write for him.

I wanted to move a lot of free Blender objects and scenes into C4D. I tried a free IO plugin on Gumroad which could copy/paste between Blender and C4D apparently using FBX. Many times the materials didn't have textures or were referencing ones that were misnamed in the conversion. I decided to try USD instead and it seemed to work better. Full scenes of objects w/materials came across including converted RS materials. While it wasn't perfect as any materials with transparency had that parameter lost in the process, it was better than straight FBX. I had ChatGPT then come up with a couple of scripts, one for Blender and the other for C4D. The one from blender would simply copy selected geo a temp USD file. In C4D, the script would copy that temp file into the existing scene. I eventually added to it to allow the Blender scene to unpack and write any textures to disk before exporting the USD. That's because some Blender scene files have their textures packed inside the file and it seemed like the USD export didn't grab them. Somewhere along the way with the rewrites I had it do, it decided to export the whole scene (incl cameras). I'm ok with that for now. I also had ChatGPT create an icon for the C4D script. I didn't do one for blender since the devs hate any real customization like putting custom buttons on the UI or other fun stuff (without coding it with serpens). I know you can add an icon in the addon but I hate the UX of the addon tabs anyways. Included below is the bundle. Install in blender as an addon. You'll find the addon in the addons tabs. Install in C4D as a script. Apply the icon to the script and place the script anywhere on the UI if you want. It asked if I wanted to create it as a plugin but I didn't go that route. NOTE: This is free. Do whatever with it. During the modifications of the scripts in ChatGPT I specifically told it I'm using Blender 4.4.3 and C4D 2025.2.1. I can't verify this will work on older/future versions of either software. It's the environment I'm using now so I built it as such. It does make me wonder if some of the old scripts/plugins could be reinvigorated w/GPT to make them work with newer versions of C4D. usd_io_blender and c4d.zip

Thanks Mash for your insight, You're right I just had a surface as emitter. I didn't have time to change the model so I improved it by adding a localized gravity field, telling the pyro sim to go downward on the ceiling instead of upward through the surface and it looked much better already. I will think of giving it thickness first if I run into such probs in another project !

You can generate various geometry types (including an instance if needed) using hair itself using generate tab. Check the attached simple example head_hair.c4d

I wanted to test out ChatGPT converting RS Standard Materials to OpenPBR. After 30 minutes of correcting it I gave up. I changed the Redshift_Material_ID to 5703 after it suggested I check the material ID through another script it created. I still couldn't get it to work. I ended up running out of my free credits. Is this functionality going to be in the next C4D 2025 update? I had submitted a request on Maxon's site but it goes into the void. It did mention one thing: If Maxon exposes official Redshift Python API for 2025+, it might become possible, but as of now, it’s limited. ChatGPT called out Maxon? This was one of the versions it created. The first iteration actually had a section for specific texture inputs: transfer_texture(rs_material, "diffuse_color", openpbr_node, "base_color") transfer_texture(rs_material, "refl_roughness", openpbr_node, "roughness") transfer_texture(rs_material, "bump_input", openpbr_node, "normal") ---------------------------------------------------------- import c4d REDSHIFT_MATERIAL_ID = 1036229 # Redshift material type ID (adjust if needed) OPENPBR_MATERIAL_ID = 1036227 # OpenPBR material type ID (adjust if needed) # The node ID string to identify Redshift node graph — you may need to adjust this based on your scene/plugins REDSHIFT_NODESPACE_STR = "com.redshift3d.redshift3dnodegraph" def find_nodegraph_by_id(root_node, id_string): """ Recursively search nodes starting from root_node to find nodegraph by ID string """ if not root_node: return None # Check current node's type ID string if root_node.GetTypeName() == id_string: return root_node # Recursively check children for i in range(root_node.GetDownCount()): child = root_node.GetDown(i) found = find_nodegraph_by_id(child, id_string) if found: return found return None def convert_redshift_to_openpbr(): doc = c4d.documents.GetActiveDocument() mats = doc.GetMaterials() changed = False for mat in mats: print(f"Checking material: {mat.GetName()}") # Check if this is a Redshift material if mat.GetType() != REDSHIFT_MATERIAL_ID: print(" - Not a Redshift material, skipping.") continue # Get Node Material reference nodemat = mat.GetNodeMaterialReference() if not nodemat: print(" - No node material found.") continue # Get root node root_node = nodemat.GetRootNode() if not root_node: print(" - No root node found.") continue # Find Redshift node graph inside root node by ID string rs_graph = find_nodegraph_by_id(root_node, REDSHIFT_NODESPACE_STR) if not rs_graph: print(" - No Redshift node graph found.") continue # Here you would copy or remap the textures/nodes from Redshift graph to OpenPBR graph # For demo, just create a new OpenPBR material and replace the old material in document print(" - Creating new OpenPBR material.") new_mat = c4d.BaseMaterial(OPENPBR_MATERIAL_ID) new_mat.SetName(mat.GetName() + "_OpenPBR") # Insert new material doc.InsertMaterial(new_mat) # Optional: Transfer textures/connections here if possible # Replace material in objects (simplified example) for obj in doc.GetObjects(): if obj.GetMaterial() == mat: obj.SetMaterial(new_mat) # Remove old Redshift material (optional) doc.RemoveMaterial(mat) changed = True print(f" - Converted material: {mat.GetName()} to {new_mat.GetName()}") if changed: c4d.EventAdd() print("Conversion complete, scene updated.") else: print("No Redshift materials found to convert.") if __name__ == "__main__": convert_redshift_to_openpbr()

Indeed it did, and if we change the mode to Surface as well we even get the curvature we need automatically ! Looks like those specific settings evaded me when I first tried ! CBR

Autograph isn't tainted, just like ZBrush wasn't tainted, but Maxon dropped the name Pixologic and I expect them to drop the name Left Angle. They could easily dump the name Autograph as well though. I guess. One of Autograph's most recent touted features was the ability to import AE files and replicate whatever was going there in Autograph, barring various plug-ins. Maxon are heavily invested in AE plug-ins but it wouldn't hurt to make them all Autograph compatible, and to tell some newcomers, yeah you could sub to Adobe if you want, but Autograph (or whatever the new name is) has most of that stuff now, works 100% with our Red Giant and C4D stuff, and you don't need a second subscription, just ours. Would this make them more bucks, or less? RedGiant already has RedGiant staff working on RedGiant comping plugins, do they need more people doing the same? The Left Angle guys just spent three years invested in doing something different to AE, rather than just making AE plugins (which would have been easier) in a compositor similar to AE but conceived as fresher and hopefully with a more ambitious road map. Should they now (a) dump all that work getting away from AE and go back to making AE plugins, or (b) keep on trying to do the new stuff they were doing when Maxon bought them. More to the point, which of those two options do you think they want to do? If Maxon just wanted to buy all the Left Angle staff and have them do Red Giant plugins, there wouldn't have been much need to put out a press release with the word 'Autograph' in the headline, and a big fat screenshot of the Autograph app at the top of the page. So Left Angle has gone the way of the dodo, but I think the chances of Autograph coming back in some fresh rebranded form are a fair bit higher. Possibly the name will change totally, the UI will get the Maxon treatment. If the 'something new' is something with a timeline, an object browser, a compositing window, various generators and text tools and so on, it'd be daft to make all that a plug-in inside AE rather than presenting the whole lot, tidied up, as a new app hopefully presenting a competitive alternative. The few Autograph threads on the AE Reddit page (there were a handful) all said "Please give us an alternative to AE, it's such a crashy POS". Then when I do my annual ritual of checking the official AE forums, the posts there under most updates read "Has this app become even worse? This is the crashiest version in years." There is room for an alternative. McGravran was previously the director of engineering for After Effects, and the Left Angle guys had heavily planned to make a modern AE competitor, and neither of them seem lazy or unambitious. The next 12 months will be interesting.

Maxon's news article reads: The people of Left Angle bring deep expertise in modern compositing workflows, and we look forward to combining their innovative approach to technology with Maxon’s creative ecosystem  to build something new together. I assume, at least the 'Autograph'-brand will be dropped, because it's now tainted. I doubt Maxon will build an AfterEffects-competitor since they are so invested in the AE-plugin ecosystem? Also, they operate strategically alongside Adobe, it would make little sense to confront one of their apps heads-on... My guess is, the Leftangle-team will work on RedGiant-comping-plugins like supercomp and magic bullet... but we'll see. All in all, it's good to see Maxon is looking lively, launching new products, acquiring talent, developing things nice and steady.

I think you're half right. The timeframe between Autograph first being announced, shown to the public, demoed and tested, before it eventually finally released, was something like a couple of years because they were building the app up. If you were McGavran, what would you do, figure out a way to build on that further and sell it, or dump it and ask the team to go back to the drawing board for another year or two to conjure up new stuff to sell as additional Red Giant plugins for AE? McGavran can rename the app above and build on it, and also ask the team to start joining the threads between all the other Maxon One apps. That makes more sense than dumping a composting program and starting from scratch.

I think Autograph won't be continued at Maxon, but the team's comping Know-how will be folded into the existing portfolio.

There was a thread about them on this site two years ago, started by me. I was thinking of starting another one. No need now. Left Angle had been doing some decent updates something like three times a year or more, here was the last one from a few months ago (more writing below). Everything looked fairly snappy and colourful but I was always looking for something startling or eye-popping and never saw it. They had mentioned on social media that they had planned to bring in nodal compositing features, and were leaning into cool new mograph stuff. Lionel, the French C4D trainer who has popped up in Maxon videos here and there, had done a number of interviews and sit downs with the French developers, so they weren't unknown to Maxon, and Maxon weren't unknown to them. The general consensus on the Left Angle site, socials, Reddit and Youtube from posters was that it was interesting software, heading somewhere interesting, but not quite there yet, although the fact that it had a fresh new core rather than AE's aging decrepit one was another selling point. I'm assuming it will get rolled into Maxon One, and if they can make smooth and direct connectivity with C4D (you'd figure that must be the goal) it will be even more interesting.

Would i use spline dynamics or a IK-tag with bones/joints for this type of hair? Or is there another method? Any help would be appreciated! I've attached the reference video below! Thanks in advance. videoplayback.mp4

Continuum 2025.5 Boris FX began to add AI features to Continuum in its 2024 releases, beginning with machine learning-based filters for denoising, upresing and retiming video. In Continuum 2025.0, they were joined by machine-learning-based filters for generating motion blur, and obscuring car license plates in footage. To that, Continuum 2025.5 adds the new AI-based object masking and tracking toolset from Mocha, Boris FX’s planar tracking software, the core tech from which is integrated into Sapphire. The Object Brush ML feature makes it possible to isolate objects in a single frame of footage simply by clicking inside them, with Continuum automatically generating a corresponding mask. The selection can be refined by selecting extra parts of the image to include or exclude, or by painting areas in or out manually. The Matte Assist ML feature automatically propagates a mask throughout a shot, tracking the object selected and generating animated mattes matching its changing outline. The release also adds three other new AI tools: BCC+ Depth Map ML, BCC+ ST Map, and BCC+ Frame Fixer ML. BCC+ Depth Map ML automatically generates depth maps from video footage, based on objects’ distance from the camera, making it easier to add fog and haze, or fake rack focus. Users have a choice of two ML models, one tuned for performance, and one for detail. BCC+ ST Map generates ST Maps, often used to encode lens distortion data, making it easier to distort or undistort video footage, or to convert it from rectilinear to 360° formats. BCC+ Frame Fixer ML automatically fixes ‘bad’ frames in footage: for example, those with scratches or tape degradation, or with flash photography changing the lighting of the subject. You have to identify the bad frames manually, but processing is automatic. According to Boris FX, the filter can also be used to fix dropped frames, and even to hide jump cuts. Updates to existing AI tools include a Smoothing Level control for the BCC+ Witness Protection ML filter, used to obscure people’s faces automatically in source footage. BCC+ Retimer ML now supports retiming footage with variable frame rates, although only in Adobe host apps. The AI models used by the tools also now load faster on first use in a work session. Of the non-AI features, the FX Editor, for editing effects and presets, gets performance and workflow improvements, with “2x speed improvements” when playing back 4K footage. Particle generator Particle Illusion gets workflow improvements including the option to save camera animation presets, and an updated emitter library. The 8,000 x 8,000px limit in 3D titling plugin Title Studio has been removed, making it possible to work up to the maximum resolution supported by the host application. There are also over 100 new presets for filters, and support for a “full set” of blend modes in BCC+ Vignette. Continuum 2025.5 is compatible with a range of compositing and editing software, including After Effects, DaVinci Resolve and Nuke, on Windows 10+ or macOS 10.15+. It is priced according to host application, with new perpetual licences costing from $365 to $2,195. Subscriptions cost from $215/year to $765/year. https://borisfx.com/release-notes/continuum-2025-5-0-for-adobe-ae-premiere-release-note LuxCoreRender / BlendLuxCore 2.10 Formerly known as LuxRender, and rebooted in 2018, LuxCoreRender is an alternative to Blender’s native Cycles renderer, particularly for product and architectural visualization. It’s a physically based render engine with a range of production features and, as of LuxCoreRender 2.0, supports hybrid rendering on CPUs and GPUs. LuxCoreRender 2.10 is the first stable version of the software in over three years: while there have been some experimental updates, the last stable release was LuxCoreRender 2.6. Development then stalled after several of the original key developers left the project. According to the release announcement, the 2.10 release is mainly intended to put development “back on track”. While it doesn’t introduce major new features, it makes the software compatible with the current Blender 4.x releases, and makes it “ready for new development work”. LuxCore Python bindings are now available as wheels on PyPi, making it easier for third-party developers to integrate the renderer into their software. The update also makes LuxCoreRender available for a greater range of platforms: as well as Windows, Linux and Intel Macs, it now runs current Macs with Apple Silicon processors. For GPU acceleration, the software still uses CUDA on NVIDIA hardware, and OpenCL elsewhere: it doesn’t currently use Apple’s Metal API when running on macOS. LuxCoreRender 2.10 is available under an Apache 2.0 licence for Windows, Linux and macOS. BlendLuxCore 2.10 is compatible with Blender 4.2 and 4.3. The experimental 3ds Max integration plugin, MaxToLux, has not been updated, and is no longer available on the downloads page of the LuxCoreRender website. https://forums.luxcorerender.org/viewtopic.php?t=6678 Xsens Animate 2025 Xsens Animate processes and exports raw motion-capture data generated by Movella’s inertial capture hardware: the Xsens Awinda and Xsens Awinda Starter systems, where the sensors are attached to an actor’s body with straps, and its Xsens Link mocap suit. The software is aimed at entertainment work – game development, animation and visual effects – and comes in four editions: Animate Export, Animate Live, Animate Pro and Animate Record. Animate Export is intended for offline recording, processing the motion of a single actor and exporting it in FBX or BVH format to DCC applications and game engines. Animate Live streams the motion of up to two actors to compatible applications, which include Blender, Maya, MotionBuilder, Unity and Unreal Engine, in real time. Animate Pro combines the feature sets of both Export and Live, plus further advanced features, and supports recording of up to four actors simultaneously. Animate Record is a free tool for recording and previewing data. The software used to be known as MVN Animate, but was rebranded last year, Xsens being the name of its original developer, acquired by Movella, then known as mCube, in 2017. Xsens Animate 2025 reworks the software’s motion engine, supplementing the legacy unisex profile with new male and female profiles. The latter use body proportions more typical for male and female subjects – primarily hip and shoulder widths, and placement of the center of mass. In addition, the curvature of the spine is now tracked more accurately. Both changes are intended to recreate the motion of an actor or stunt performer more accurately, reducing the time needed to clean up the raw data. The software’s user interface has also been reworked, simplifying navigation, making it possible to access key tools more quickly, and introducing a new dark UI mode. Users of Awinda systems get an experimental Auto Sensor Mapping feature which detects the sensors and attributes them to the correct parts of the body automatically. Xsens Animate is compatible with Windows 11 only. The software is rental-only, and priced on enquiry on Movella’s website. Movella told CG Channel that Animate Pro subscriptions cost $9,590/year, down $1,400/year since we last wrote about the products in late 2023. Animate Live subscriptions cost $3,990/year, while Animate Export subscriptions, which are not available in the US, cost €6,490/year. Animate Record is free. Movella also offers three- and six-month subscriptions. https://3446270.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/3446270/Xsens 2025.0 Release Notes.pdf Cavalry 2.4 Originally released in 2020, Cavalry is a procedural animation app “combining the power and flexibility of 3D with the ease of use of 2D”. Although currently a pure 2D animation tool, it supports workflows that will be familiar to 3D animators, including keyframing, curve editing, deformation, rigging, scattering and instancing. Scene Group’s background is also in 3D motion graphics: the firm is a spin-off from Mainframe North, which developed MASH, Maya’s motion graphics toolset. Once created, images may be exported in a range of file formats, including as JPEG, PNG or SVG sequences, as animated PNGs, as WEBM or QuickTime movies, or in Lottie format. It’s a sizeable update, adding the option to write custom image-manipulation filters in SkSL, and save them as third-party plugins. SkSL, the shading language used by open-source 2D graphics library Skia, is a variant of GLSL, so code from sites like Shadertoy should work with “minor modifications”. The update also adds a new SLA shader for creating a range of animatable noise types. Other changes include new styling options in the Text Shape, making it possible to apply apply effects like underline, strikethrough and superscript to text. It is also now possible to import Excel .xslx files. Users of the paid Pro edition also get the option to create 2D meshes to deform images or shaders by placing control vertices. When creating 2.5D animation, it is now possible to use a Camera Guide – a representation of the region of the scene visible to the camera – to drive its animation. For managing complex projects, a new Dependency Graph window provides an editable schematic view of a composition, replacing the old Flow Graph. Cavalry 2.4 is available for Windows 10+ and macOS 12.0+. The full software is available rental-only, with Pro subscriptions costing £192/year (around $255/year). The free edition caps renders at full HD resolution, and lacks the advanced features in this table https://docs.cavalry.scenegroup.co/tech-info/release-notes/2-2-0-release-notes/ Feather 1.2 The update restores the augmented reality workflow available in the original free version, with the new AR Viewer making it possible to view 3D sketches in real space. Feather 1.2 is compatible with iPadOS 16.0+. A perpetual license costs $14.99. https://support.feather.art/docs/releasenotes/officialservice