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Blender Tests and Impressions


CApruzzese

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5 hours ago, FLima said:

And I dont know any other 3D app capable of realtime render like eevee.

 

C4D with U-Render 😉 @Igor

10 hours ago, Lonchaney said:

Also the paid version of Polycam allows me to export the LiDAR scan directly to Sketchfab (glTF) which then imports flawlessly into Blender, textures and all. 

 

 

3D-1.jpg

That's a dream for room planning! Is that all to scale? Or do you need some kind of reference?

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When I look at the Blender asset manager development page, I get the feeling that it's more of what the asset manager in C4D is and less of a material manager?

Because I absolutely agree that material management in Blender is quite horrific

And would love to see a proper material manager implemented, but I get the feeling it's not quite what we hope for in that term

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21 hours ago, FLima said:

Omg.. didnt know about the material manager!! That is great news!

If they add that... possibility to group things... linking light, and I think it will be more and more production ready. 

about the render, I dont think Redshift RT is going to be as fast as eevee.... not sure... because eevee has more like a game engine behaviour: no global ilumination, but rendering of shadows, etc..
And I dont know any other 3D app capable of realtime render like eevee.

 

Early tests on Redshift RT tell a different story. 

 

Redshift 3.0 - New Feature - Announcements - Redshift RT - YouTube

 

I hope they can deliver because frankly, after using Blender for over two years, I kinda miss C4D simplicity. Blender is great for modeling but for animating is just.. weird to work with. Insydium + C4D + Zbrush is a pretty powerful combo for one man band like myself.

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37 minutes ago, luchifer said:

 

Early tests on Redshift RT tell a different story. 

 

Redshift 3.0 - New Feature - Announcements - Redshift RT - YouTube

 

I hope they can deliver because frankly, after using Blender for over two years, I kinda miss C4D simplicity. Blender is great for modeling but for animating is just.. weird to work with. Insydium + C4D + Zbrush is a pretty powerful combo for one man band like myself.

Dont get me wrong. I think this example is a good one.. but it is not as fast as eevee..
Eevee is basically an extension of viewport. You can literaly grab a light, move around and see how it affects the objects, add volumetrics, etc... all just like you were moving your mouse through the viewport.

The quality of course, doesnt get close to what Redshift outputs, but it is not the same thing.

About the animation, I highly agree, working with C4D, feels like it was made for artists who just want to create stuff, and dont want to get too technical about things. And it works perfectly. My only reason to test Blender so far is because, animating more than 2 characters at the same time, it is basically a big no no 😞
And I had no idea about this...   I mean, I had a sense something was off, from the lack of short films or full on character animation features made with C4D, but getting into this specific technical limitation on the production of my shortfilm, was no fun...

Still, Im not 100% sold on Blender. Im also trying Maya.. but Maya seems even less friendly in my opinion.
Creating joints, constraints, IK's... feels like a nightmare over there!

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14 hours ago, Chris Phillips said:

 

Out of curiosity, what is weird about Blender animating? 

 

Where do I start.... C4D is straightforward, if you work with joints you can mix and match them using the outliner / inspector  just by drag and drop them, and same with everything else. There is little you cant do with C4D because even parts of the software you havent really used become pretty familiar to understand because almost everything uses the same drag and drop philosophy, so using it for daily work is really quick even if the client ask you to do something you never used before.

 

With Blender, not so much. Modeling is great, is pretty powerful and very fast to do, but everything else is the same "we are working in this module to improve it and its on the roadmap". Animation I had encounter roadblocks with infinite loop, with joints, with the key manager, etc, etc. Things that are really easy or straightforward in C4D even for someone who never used them, but in Blender you are constantly changing keys and workflow because the particular developer who did the part of Blender you are using, didnt follow the same logic applied to other parts of Blender. Or maybe did follow them in a weird way. So you end up half of your day watching videos on youtube so you can say "ohhh thats how you do it". Granted, once you know the workflow its yours forever unless you forget about it if you arent doing it daily.

 

Also, it gets really annoying when you work with multiple objects, something that is doable in every other software. For example, if you work with fonts, you cant really select multiple and change the text at the same time, or changing character spacing without clicking alt + enter. Using Ctrl + L to link materials, fonts, etc help to an extent, but as far as I could test not everything worked with alt + enter.

 

Oh and the most annoying was editing a really dense object by mistake. Sadly Blender doesnt do well dense objects, so you have to be careful not to Tab by mistake on one.

 

Last but not least, Blender has fluids, particle system, C4D doesnt (sorry Thinking particles)... but soon that proves to be inconsecuential because Realflow and Insydium draw circles around them. Last time I used them, you cant preview them unless you cache them first, so again, C4D is way faster to work. And again, drag and drop people! you can take anything into a mograph cloner and it will work.

 

I forgot to add.. OF COURSE I want C4D to be as fast as blender playback is, and OF COURSE I also love Eevee and want Redshift RT to be like it, but even if Redshift RT is as half as fast as Blender Eevee, I would go back to Maxon in a heartbeat. Right now, I mostly model stuff, so Zbrush / Blender are really really great to work with, because C4D modeling is cumbersome.

Edited by luchifer
spacing (see edit history)
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17 hours ago, FLima said:

And I had no idea about this...   I mean, I had a sense something was off, from the lack of short films or full on character animation features made with C4D, but getting into this specific technical limitation on the production of my shortfilm, was no fun...

 

some Blender short films are done by Blender Foundation, and yeah, Blender has a lot of strenghts, but on the other hand.. you also don´t see a lot of Motion Graphics done with Blender for a reason.

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28 minutes ago, hikarubr said:

I'm surprised you're saying this.

 

In my opinion (and of my students, as I teach both C4D and Maya to them, at the university level) Maya is ten times easier to use to rig characters, either manually or using the HumanIK system.

 

The join tool is easier to use, the algorithms for skinning are better, weight painting is easier, constraints are easier, you never get those annoying rig problems due to the order of operation that you get in C4D, HumanIK runs cycles over the equivalent Character Object in C4D, Mocap retargeting is flawless, Playback speed iis super fast (even with multiple characters), etc...

 

I'm equally skilled in Cinema4D and Maya and I tend to use more C4D than Maya for everything BUT character animation. In fact, everytime I have to do characters in Cinema4D, I rig and animate them in Maya, then I bring them to Cinema 4D. 

 

Maya Outliner sucks in comparison to C4D Object Manager, but it's a small price to pay when you're working with characters. 

 

Please @hikarubr, can I be your student ? hehe
If you have any paid tutorial online, let me know.

i bought two already, and I dont know.. it feels more technical than creative for some reason.
But I will continue to give it a shot. I already paid for the subscription anyway.

Thanks for your insight!

13 minutes ago, luchifer said:

 

some Blender short films are done by Blender Foundation, and yeah, Blender has a lot of strenghts, but on the other hand.. you also don´t see a lot of Motion Graphics done with Blender for a reason.

Very true! 
Yeah, maybe this is a good thing, having certain softwares to excel at something.

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40 minutes ago, luchifer said:

Oh and the most annoying was editing a really dense object by mistake. Sadly Blender doesnt do well dense objects, so you have to be careful not to Tab by mistake on one.

 

That... is weird. Yes, pre-2.93 Blender's raw mesh editing performance left a lot to be desired. It is one of the main common complaints of Blender users, including myself.

 

Release 2.8 actually introduced edit mode performance regressions compared to the older 2.79 releases. While navigating the viewport was no longer an issue (it was in 2.79 with heavy meshes in edit mode) 2.8 up till 2.92 performed WORSE than in this regard.

 

2.93 performs more or less on par with Cinema R23/S24 in my testing. Better, actually, because Cinema completely chokes on transforming a 2 million scanned mesh object with all faces selected, while Blender chugs along nicely. Not fast, mind, but still workable.

 

Anyway, release V3 is by far more performant. The developers had a Summer sprint focusing on improving raw mesh edit mode performance, and it really paid off. I could not believe how much this improved within only a month or two. Overall a performance boost of 10-18 times compared to v2.79.

 

In my testing Blender V3 alpha is about on par with Houdini (little bit slower with smaller selections, faster with larger selection sets), faster than Maya, and much faster than Cinema4D 23/24.

 

The king remains 3DS Max, however. It kills all the contenders.

 

PS in sculpt mode Blender is as smooth as Max in transforming heavy selection sets. Cinema4D can't compare with Blender's sculpting performance, so not much help here either.

 

When Blender v3 is released, and unless the upcoming Cinema4D R25 improves mesh editing performance dramatically, my tests so far indicate rankings of raw mesh editing performance as follows:

 

  1. 3DS Max (by a wide margin)
  2. Houdini (smaller or bigger margin over R3 Blender depending on selection set size)
  3. Blender R3
  4. Maya (small margin over 5 and 6)
  5. Blender 2.93
  6. Cinema 4D
  7. Blender 2.8x - 2.92
  8. LightWave (by a wide margin)

 

Keep in mind I tested pure mesh editing performance only. No sub-d modifiers, or other functionality. Blender's optimizations are also dependent on multi-threading. The more cores, the better.

[all apps tested on the same machine, AMD3900, 64GB, GTX1080)

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3 hours ago, hvanderwegen said:

lection sets. Cinema4D can't compare with Blender's sculpting performance, so not much help here either.

 

3 hours ago, hvanderwegen said:

 

That... is weird. Yes, pre-2.93 Blender's raw mesh editing performance left a lot to be desired. It is one of the main common complaints of Blender users, including myself.

 

 

I havent retested recently, I tend to avoid large objects in general, or just work with them in Zbrush, because, while is true C4D sculpting is basic, Zbrush is way better than both, I dont really find a reason to sculpt in Blender instead of Zbrush, I can do hardsurface in Zbrush with Zmodeler and it has an army of tools like spotlight modeling for hardsurface.

Disclaimer, In no way im disregarding all the excellent work Pablo Dobarro is doing to enhance Blender sculpting tools.

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