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Blender Tests and Impressions


CApruzzese

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Ah, the old Amiga days. Still lamenting the demise of her.

I created my first 'professionally printed' DTP work in Pagestream. The first 'proper' 3d app I used was Sculpt 3d (later Sculpt/Animate 4d - Cinema '4d' is not as original as you would think 😜 ). Later Imagine, Lightwave, and Cinema4d on the Amiga. I also recall dabbling in Turbo Silver Pro!

 

But I first started working with 3d wire renders of objects on an Amstrad CPC664. How far we've come...

 

I would love to use Affinity Publisher, but the Affinity range of products do not support 1bit images, which I require for my work.

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PS the Juggler animation is what REALLY got me interested in 3D animation. I was gobsmacked by the quality! The first time I watched it, I kept it on for an hour, or so. That glass ball sound effect still haunts me today! 🙂

 

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Something

16 hours ago, hvanderwegen said:

PS the Juggler animation is what REALLY got me interested in 3D animation. I was gobsmacked by the quality! The first time I watched it, I kept it on for an hour, or so. That glass ball sound effect still haunts me today! 🙂

 

Something about these 80s / 90s 3D-animations is just haunting to me. They way everything looks and moves and sounds just... gives me the creeps.

That said: Them raytraced reflections at 03:06 though!

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5 hours ago, DasFrodo said:

Something

Something about these 80s / 90s 3D-animations is just haunting to me. They way everything looks and moves and sounds just... gives me the creeps.

That said: Them raytraced reflections at 03:06 though!

I have to agree.... there is something creepy about them and to think at the time we thought they were so cool and real looking! 

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2 minutes ago, CApruzzese said:

I have to agree.... there is something creepy about them and to think at the time we thought they were so cool and real looking! 

Many intros of games I have played in my youth are the worst offenders in this. They look mostly good / very good for the time. But they're just... creepy.

Two examples:

 

Maybe it's just me because I saw these as a kid, but I'm not sure.

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  • 5 weeks later...

Resurrecting this topic, since I've return to Blender for my personal experiments/character animation..
Has anyone managed to adapt to Blender's Dope Sheet/Graph Editor during animation?
I find it extremely clumky... cant select an object by name on dope sheet and automatically select its keyframes....  
it has a very weird behaviour. In c4d, the animation process just flows nicely...

Has anyone struggled with that also? 

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Blender is a good software but we have 2 blender users in the team and we will likely all swap to cinema mostly. blender is still free and you can always do something you cant do in cinema if you need.

 

The biggest drawback in cinema for us is the lack of Multi UV editing and relying on a script for face weighted normals and such things (and bad booleans)

 

Working with a modeller on Blender who has always used it, I noticed that it also has a lot of downsides like cinema or any software.
Some things you think are given in cinema seem like a godsend in blender. If you want to use a cylinder in blender, then change the amount of sides - you do that once, then its editable when you move it once. You cant stay with primitives and just change their size later without making them editable.

Things like arrays are not easily done. These are things where I think "***" - but it also has a lot of upsides clearly. It does feel as if some things are just not possible to do in cinema, but in the last years the gap has closed noticeably and cinema has really gained its own big advantages.

 

So is the other side of the grass greener? Id say definitely no.

Its up and downs. Volume builder and fields are a game changer on cinema for us. Cinema has a great hierarchy and makes it easy to change things down the road. Non destructive workflows are really second only to Houdini I would say. Also the cinema UI is the best, making it very easy for me 
to make a easy to use workspace for the team getting everyone on track fast, while Blender has the worst usability of all 3D apps still, which is the mayor drawback of it. If only cinema had a little more care for realtime. Realtime clearly is the future, and game dev is a big market.

If anyone from C4D is reading this, give us multi UV, split phong by UV islands, face weighted normals workflow options and cinema could be amazing for gamedev and any realtime art.

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4 hours ago, Shrike said:

Blender is a good software but we have 2 blender users in the team and we will likely all swap to cinema mostly. blender is still free and you can always do something you cant do in cinema if you need.

 

The biggest drawback in cinema for us is the lack of Multi UV editing and relying on a script for face weighted normals and such things (and bad booleans)

 

Working with a modeller on Blender who has always used it, I noticed that it also has a lot of downsides like cinema or any software.
Some things you think are given in cinema seem like a godsend in blender. If you want to use a cylinder in blender, then change the amount of sides - you do that once, then its editable when you move it once. You cant stay with primitives and just change their size later without making them editable.

Things like arrays are not easily done. These are things where I think "***" - but it also has a lot of upsides clearly. It does feel as if some things are just not possible to do in cinema, but in the last years the gap has closed noticeably and cinema has really gained its own big advantages.

 

So is the other side of the grass greener? Id say definitely no.

Its up and downs. Volume builder and fields are a game changer on cinema for us. Cinema has a great hierarchy and makes it easy to change things down the road. Non destructive workflows are really second only to Houdini I would say. Also the cinema UI is the best, making it very easy for me 
to make a easy to use workspace for the team getting everyone on track fast, while Blender has the worst usability of all 3D apps still, which is the mayor drawback of it. If only cinema had a little more care for realtime. Realtime clearly is the future, and game dev is a big market.

If anyone from C4D is reading this, give us multi UV, split phong by UV islands, face weighted normals workflow options and cinema could be amazing for gamedev and any realtime art.

Yeah, I dont plan to replace C4D with anything.
I am using blender mostly for some character animation, because I really love the auto-weight, and how it just works... 

But I dont feel that Blender, at least for me, is production ready.
The realtime render is a LOT of fun, and characters and sculpting too, but yeah...  not there yet

 

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Another adventurous Blender user here! 😄 Been playing with it for a few weeks now. And now I'm even using it for a paid project, using Eevee to render an animation that would otherwise take ages even with Octane... You know, it's really really tough to learn a new 3D sofware after 25(!) years with Cinema 4D! But for some strange reason I actually enjoy it... It's so different from Cinema that it's like starting from scratch (all the background knowledge helps of course, I learn much faster than a true beginner). Brings me back to how it all started for me. The noob fase! Constantly hitting brick walls but not giving up and googling and youtubing (well not back in those days haha, I actually had to read the manual) until you find the solution (or a workaround) and you just keep going. I kinda stagnated as an artist for years but now I'm forced to learn how to use nodes properly and make nice materials, it's about time. 😉 I relied on Cinema's "easy mode" for too long. And making pretty stuff with Eevee effortlessly is tons of fun. Well I hope I'll still be able to afford Cinema in the future when I need it but since I don't want to be that dependent on whatever silly pricing MAXON comes up with next I'll put my bets on something that'll always be free, including 2 awesome free render engines, fluid sim, particles, smoke etc etc (and don't forget the very active community)... For me it's worth it.

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9 hours ago, Janine Pauke said:

Another adventurous Blender user here! 😄 Been playing with it for a few weeks now. And now I'm even using it for a paid project, using Eevee to render an animation that would otherwise take ages even with Octane... You know, it's really really tough to learn a new 3D sofware after 25(!) years with Cinema 4D! But for some strange reason I actually enjoy it... It's so different from Cinema that it's like starting from scratch (all the background knowledge helps of course, I learn much faster than a true beginner). Brings me back to how it all started for me. The noob fase! Constantly hitting brick walls but not giving up and googling and youtubing (well not back in those days haha, I actually had to read the manual) until you find the solution (or a workaround) and you just keep going. I kinda stagnated as an artist for years but now I'm forced to learn how to use nodes properly and make nice materials, it's about time. 😉 I relied on Cinema's "easy mode" for too long. And making pretty stuff with Eevee effortlessly is tons of fun. Well I hope I'll still be able to afford Cinema in the future when I need it but since I don't want to be that dependent on whatever silly pricing MAXON comes up with next I'll put my bets on something that'll always be free, including 2 awesome free render engines, fluid sim, particles, smoke etc etc (and don't forget the very active community)... For me it's worth it.

I think that is the best approach to have Janine 🙂  And I hope you only continue to learn even more about the software.
For me, as an artist, I love to have options. I have 18 years of experience with C4D, so a lot of the experiments I wanna make, it becomes natural, I can think directly about the result I want, and the steps I make are almost instant, since I know the software very well.  
The pricing thing is becoming a nightmare unfortunately. I am a subscriber, but I think it is extremely unfair to people who has perpetual license, to keep them from using the latest version and updates the software has to offer... 

Some of the things from Blender keeps me from using it fully though, like I mentioned before, its dope sheet and graph editor, for me at least, is a nightmare. I love making loops, walk cycles and easy repetitions, and with C4D, one click and you can set up a whole chain of objects to repeat, which is impossible in Blender 😞

I love the competition though, I think it will push more and more the paid softwares to observe things that works really well in Blender, like Eevee and the character animation setup. For now, C4D will stay as my commercial software of choice.

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