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Very interesting analysis of the art and environments of Dune from Aesthety... and as if that wasn't enough - here's a 1 and half hour deep dive on the VFX on that Absolutely VAST VFX team on that - 84 TDs ! CBR

Yeah, I do concede Blender has a lot of extra bits and pieces that C4D does not. The cool-looking Grease Pencil side of the app has been continually updated and is very flashy, EJ from Eyedesyn posted some amazing anime style stuff on Twitter which Blender can apparently do with the touch of a button, and I was thinking, jeez I hope Maxon re-visists Sketch and Toon sometime in the next half decade. But I rarely hear many people saying, wow, the experience of using Blender is much smoother and easier than using C4D. It's always a list of the features, bragging about how it's free, and a thread dump of all the new companies that have come on board to sponsor it, so the future is getting brighter and brighter, why would anyone want to use anything else, etc etc. The features, the funding and the cost mean jack all to me if the experience of using it is a stilted and poorly thought out pain in the arse, so I'll happily sit with C4D for the next few years and see what's coming up. No offence to the nice folk running Blender, Ton is a cool guy and I enjoyed watching what Pablo was up to at Blender Today, but I just didn't enjoy the software that much.

One thing I haven't seen mentioned (and to be fair, maxon seem to have skipped over it) is that you can now work over the network at more or less full speed. Loading and especially saving is now multiple times faster than it was before. A quick test here over a 1gbit network Saving 800mb c4d file over gigabit network R25: 32 seconds R26: 9 seconds If you have a faster network connection then the speed improvement becomes even higher. With a 10gbit network you can expect file transfer times to be up to about 10x faster than in R25.

I couldn't care if maxon copied pasted from every other app it can..just as long as it brings extra functions to the actual software I use all day. Say what you want about blender being free, it's still a pig to use and always will be.

Saw this yesterday and thought 'WOW!'. Prehistoric Planet I love anything to do with history and remember watching 'Walking with Dinosaurs' 20 odd years ago, which blew me away - but this look in another league. Not so sure about how much of it is conjecture though, a swimming T-Rex with babies following? I am wondering if this can be done with C4D and all it's toolset - probably 🙂

That sounds fair enough. But I don't find Maxon to be particularly unfriendly. They make the software, they occasionally patch it to fix bugs, they do lots of online training for free, they chip in on forums here and there, they chug away at improving the software (hopefully this will now speed up, huh?), and they're a fairly cheerful bunch. Maybe some people in countries where the exchange rate or currency is low think the pricing is too high. The pricing is alright for me, could be worse. But generally I just want to pay them do all the stuff I outlined in that first paragraph. I'm happy I didn't jump into a subscription as the releases from then till now weren't exactly stacked, but we'll see what happens now that they've made some progress.

I don't really get when people complain that Maxon became Autodesk... This is not true and I wish it was! The current Autodesk is a much better company than current Maxon. This is not 2007 anymore, Autodesk is a much more transparent and user friendly company than Maxon has been in the last 10 years. We are not talking about the evil "lets kill Softimage" Autodesk anymore. Maya and 3ds Max indie cost a fraction of what Cinema 4D costs and they are both much more complete 3D packages (you'd need a Maxon One susbscription to get closer to what Maya alone offers). They also receive substantial upgrades every year, unlike Cinema 4D that receives a substancial upgrade only every 5 years (and a bunch of joke releases between). So yeah, I WISH Maxon became Autodesk.

Exact same thing happened to me. I have been wondering where it was but hadn't gotten around to trying to find out what happened to it yet. I'll try later to rebuild it and see if I get the same results as you.

I think that is the plan, but isn't here quite yet, and hasn't been the case before... CBR

Another vway you can 'aim a light': Select your light in the Object Manager. In your perspective viewport : menu 'Camera > Use Camera > Set Active Object as Camera. You can now navigate your view - your view is your lights view : ) When finished: menu 'Camera > Use Camera > Default Camera

Keep in mind winzip and winrar are commercial apps. They will keep working after the trial ends but you will get popups you have to dismiss. 7zip is completely ad/payment free. Just one bit of advice, run 7zip once as admin, then turn off all the right click menus you dont need in the preferences, as it adds quite a few by default

But you can. Just right click any file and select "Send to -> Compressed (zipped) folder" But the answer to your question is 7zip. https://www.7-zip.org/

How about this? https://www.dropbox.com/s/6cgx9mmo0717058/Test_pillow.mp4?dl=0 It helps to actually understand the system before criticizing it...

Right then - you want some simulation stuff ? - Here we go, courtesy of, and with kind permission to post from Yan Ge. sim tests_yan_ge.mp4 sim tests_yan_ge 2.mp4 CBR

Perhaps you'd like to speak to the manager of Cinema 4D?

Finally I was able to spend a little time with S26. Here's my unstructured collection of very early impressions. Everything compared to S24, since I slept over R25 🙂 Quicker Startup S26 is a lot quicker to start than S24. Could be plugin-related, nonetheless: cool. New theme It's okay-ish. I took only 2 hours to get used to it. I get the style they are going for, but I found the old Icons hat better legibility and better color separation. Renderview still wastes a whole bar of empty space when docked. Overall: = Z-Remesher This is so friggin' cool. The algorithm is fantastic, and it can be used in a procedural way, like Chris showed in his video. I see so many situations where this allows for faster & cleaner workflow Overall: ++ Modelling-Tools I'm no big modeller, but I swear, there's a new tool for every problem I once had and could only solve by pain 😄 I especially like: There's not a ton of cryptic options per tool, they work pretty much as expected. Very artist-friendly. Overall: ++ Task-Manager Very nice. I docked the full thing in my layout to always see what's going on. There's room for a lot more stuff though that could be displayed here. Sadly, it doesn't solve the problem where you could still lock up C4D accidentally by input mistake ( like, 1000 clones of something heavy). I hope, one day one of my cores will be reserved just to "Esc out" of a lock-situation. Overall: + (but with looots of headroom) Simulation I only played around with a basic cloth sim. The settings are much more managable and intuitive. Performance is ok, but as soon as you move to "Marvelous"-territory, resolution-wise, you basically get the same performance as Marvelous (like 1 fps for something really dense). Interaction with all the known tools like wind, etc. is very nice. I do have some major technical problems with the simulation, though: I get the dreaded 'viewport-freeze' quite often, Could be an nvidia-driver-Problem. Sidenote: In the light of the new, particle-based and GPU-assisted Unified simulation, it's no wonder Maxon doesn't buy Insydium. Of course they have a lot of catch-up to do, but the foundation of the new sim framework feels much more clean and solid. Overall: ? (More testing needed) Reshift integration RS Objects: This was so confusing at first 😄 But it's actually quite sensible: Change to RS in the render settings, and the RS stuff replaces the regular one. It took me a while to find the RS Volume object for example, but of course it's in the Volume menu now, where it belongs. Node materials: This is quite a change from the shadergraph, but I think I like the Nodes a lot more. No more fiddling connections! Node Previews! And the best of all: A proper viewport preview! The last one makes a much bigger difference than I anticipated. Very cool 🙂 Overall: ++ Redshift XPU That got me so excited. Sadly, with my test scenes, I get around the same rendertime as with GPU only. I'm not even sure it uses the CPU at all, as I can't start a CPU-only render with Optix Denoiser enabled. This was the biggest surprise in the release btw, after the announcement I thought: Ya, ok, this will take 3+ years. Overall: = (I hope they can turn it into a XPU performance-plus in the future) Redshift 3.5 I like the new Standard Material a lot! Way easier to quickly set up a good material, but with all the options still there. Lot of quality improvements in there! RT is still unusable on my machine, I wish they left that a year longer in development. Four decimals precision! (Actually a C4D-feature) This is literally a small change, but what a pain-point that was in Redshift! Yay 😄 The solid viewport representation is the biggest thing for me, personally. Everything feels much more coherent now! Overall: ++ Maxon One I don't have Maxon One (only C4D+RS), but I feel the value of the big package really improves. I loathe zBrushs UI/UX, but it's so powerful. One day, I'll just have to bite the bullet and learn that thing. Big plus included without price hike. Nice! VFX Real Lens Flares looks really good! There's a real lack for a Hi-End-Plugin like this one. Overall: + (getting tempted to upgrade 😄 ) Quirks Redshift Volume objects still have a much too big point size in the viewport The Asset Browser/Content-Library-Move still stings hard. At least performance got better. That's that. Looking forward to hear from your experiences!

Maybe to divert the discussion into more civil waters, a few new things I have (almost) not yet seen mentioned anywhere. And yes, I am biased and I do understand, these are probably more important to scripters and developers than for others. But my point would be, without too much effort, pretty much anybody can script a little bit and so everybody could profit of these as well. Here we go: 1) Not scripting related at all and a totally minor thing, the project tabs can now be closed with the click of the middle mouse button. Just like in any other application. Minor point, but as it is so common in Windows I found myself more than half of the time trying to close a project tab by middle clicking in R25. Please spare me the discussion, why this has not been done right in the first place. I do not care. I'm just happy it finally works as it works best for me. 2) Another tiny thing, missing for a long, long time, the Console finally remembers the last selected tab. Believe me, if you do anything with Python, you will find this tiny change massive. It's one of these fractions of second, now saved, that really accumulate over the day. Now, you select it once and are happily developing ever after... 3) And there's a new bridge to Visual Studio Code (for those not doing any development, scripting work, it's basically a Python text editor with loads of bells and whistles, and those who do a bit of development forgive me this over simplification). Now for example you can debug scripts in Script Manager directly from Visual Studio Code. If you do not get, what I am talking about, please ignore this, or feel free to ask. But this is actually quite huge for anybody wanting to do some scripting work or plugin development in C4D. 4) The Python SDK/API now has ways to work with the Asset Browser. Certainly an addition that allows for smooth integration of the Asset Browser into a lot more workflows. Please forgive me pointing out such developer centric features. on the other hand I know, I'm not the only one in here working with Python.

Bearing in mind that all I say next will appear directly below a picture of a dinosaur that looks vaguely preposterous, I'd give any project David Attenborough was associated with more credit than most, and I am willing to trust that this series is based on the latest finds and research. But to be honest, even if it's not I will find it no less enjoyable ! Who doesn't like nice CG dinosaur with dinner ! I do think this quality of 3D work is mostly attainable in Cinema, except, as mentioned by Zeden above, the water sim stuff. CBR

I just tried to recreate those circumstances, and the new tool bars I add don't disappear, either when I untick Edit Palettes OR close the Command Manager. Which makes me wonder if this might be something to do with importing the layout from a previous installation. I have previously had some issues doing that in versions upwards of 23/24. So I think I originally created a brand new custom layout for S26, which is the only thing I can think of that might explain the difference... oh, unless it is something to do with dynamic menus, which I have turned off in my custom layout. CBR