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(Probably my first original 3D article) This is a list of 10+1 useful yet overlooked or unappreciated features in C4D. 10) Scene Nodes Scene Nodes made their debut with R23 as an experimental feature drawing developer resources resulting R23 and the next couple of releases deprived from any major features. Due to its unusual for C4D UI, workflow and intuitiveness standards most users tried to stay away from it in a “let others figure it out first” response. None-the-less Scene Nodes are here to stay despite many people’s beliefs it would soon flop. Now many users do not hesitate to use Capsules but still quite few will spend time making their own, propagating the belief that SceneNodes maybe are not that powerful to produce what they expect or compete with other systems like Blender’s GeoNodes or Houdini. The Truth is that behind the scenes more and more people are working with SceneNodes and soon tutorials and new Capsules will be popping more frequently as witnessed with the last couple of releases. 9) Polygon Reduction This little generator is rarely used. Due to its name and function most users will rarely even considering using it because “Who wants to compress their geometry in a pile of ugly mess anyway, especially when Remesh is around to do it better”. Actually the Polygon Reduction can come in handy in abstract modeling, weird animations and my favorite: as an indirect uniform instance distribution. Polygon Reduction has a useful Preserve 3D Boundaries option. So when the Object Surface distribution mode of a Cloner fails to satisfy and you end up hitting the Seed value for half an hour to land a distribution where you don’t have intersecting instances, try to populate your surface uniformly use the Polygon Reduction as an instance in Vertex distribution. If the scale of your instances is not an issue throw a Push Apart Effector. 8 ) Sculpting Although not as powerful as ZBrush is, if you don’t want Forger because you don’t work on a tablet or don’t want a subscription to ZBrush, then this is your best alternative. It includes all the essentials for sculpting plus many advanced tools. It’s a quite complete tool case. Probably the most invaluable feature is to turn your sculpts to a Displacement Texture using the Bake Sculpt. Blender boasts its recent 3.5 release about its VDMs (Vector Displacement Maps) after ZBrush later this year made it possible to copy sculpted details as brushes and reuse them while C4D had it all along since R15. Plus the very useful and overlooked Projection tool. Which can also project tubed meshes ! 7) Camera Calibrator Tag This is another tool most users haven’t ever used myself included. It is used for Camera Mapping and provides many useful parameters and options for a quick camera placement from a reference image. It’s basically the equivalent of Motion Tracker but for still images. 6) Tension Tag The Tension Tag is placed in the Character Tag menu so most users that aren’t concerned with Character Rigging overlook it and don’t know it can also be used for modeling. Although you can achieve the same effects using the Displacer Deformer, the Tension Tag is more preferable for animations when the amount of deformation of a polygon from its initial state alters the Weight Map of the object allowing for local effects on regions of structural stress. Try doing this Reaction Diffusion without Fields! I think it’s faster too. And we have the Tension Tag to thank for this since R17 (I think). 5) Feather Object Right in the middle of this Top 10 list lies the Feather Object. I don’t just rarely see projects that use feathers. I’ve just never seen any feathered projects ever. And I’ve never used that object myself either! I might have seen a scene or two during MAXON’s demo showreels but you never know what percentage of those scenes are C4D. It’s a quite interesting generator with many parameters carefully designed to model any type of plume. It’s also a generator that doesn’t work on geometry like the Hair object but on guides. It essentially generates guides for guides. So if you want to turn any hairy model into a feathered model just put the Hair object under the Feather oblject! (also works for splines) 4) Instance Object Who uses Instance objects, right? Cloners create instances themselves by default why should I need an Instance object ? Maybe it’s used only when you turn a Cloner to an Editable Object. The truth is that the Instance Object can make your scenes a lot lighter when you don’t use a Cloner yet you do use a lot of copies of the same objects. Most users overlook it because the first thing that comes to mind when you need a lot of something is to clone it with the Cloner. Probably the Instance Object is what makes the Cloner work in stealth mode. I'll let the Master Shapiro show you one practical use of this object. 3) Smoothing Deformer Oh the Smoothing Deformer! With a bent tube as an icon (a flat iron R25+), it doesn’t really excite. Also the name doesn’t excite either. Usually users when they want to smooth things out they’ll use the Subdivision Surface generator (SDS). But what if you don’t want to increase the number of your polygons? Yes you guessed right. But wait, what are the Relax and Stretch modes? Stretch will try to maintain the overall shape and volume of your object. So any hard edges will be preserved while polygons try to be of homogenous area. The Relax is the most interesting one. People ask all the time how to make stills with realistic cloth wrinkles and will resort to cloth simulations or even sculpting… Look no further, this is your salvation! With just a few mindless brushstrokes with the Brush tool this deformer will blow your mind. 1) Plane under SDS. 2) Plane without SDS, just play with the Brush (Mesh->Transform Tools [M~C]), 3) SDS again 4) Just apply the deformer in Relax Mode. 2) MoSpline Turtle My favorite. MoSpline is not a rare tool on users arsenal. Who doesn’t like those sexy curves, and the icon is the most elegant in the whole app (talking about the old one). But the Turtle mode is just absent from any C4D project I’ve ever seen. It’s like it doesn’t exist… I guess people see those unintelligible symbols and delete the poor tree before a virus turns C4D into Houdini. The Turtle mode is highly unappreciated. Although it does have room for improvement in its capabilities, what someone can achieve with it is quite impressive and there is no other way to do it (except maybe coding it in Python). Anyone with affection for fractals appreciates this tool. Unfortunately most people love only the colored Mandelbrot type fractals. Line fractals deserve some love too! 1) XPresso Well, what did you expect? Although a lot of users do use XPresso, still very few are well knowledgeable with it. Most users relate XPresso only with Thinking Particles and this is the main reason most users resent XPresso, because it doesn’t deliver easy, fast and intuitive particle setups. There are also many shady corners in XPresso that are rarely used in scenes so most people don’t know how they could even be used. What for should someone use Dynamics nodes or Hair nodes ? Who knows ? Anyhow, XPresso is very powerful tool if you know how to use it, and it has an overlooked cousin feature the Driver Tag that developers made just for those who don’t like XPresso. Bonus Feature Pyroclusters The most underappreciated feature ever. Today it’s totally outdated because we have Pyro. But if you don’t have RedShift or any VDB compatible renderer what will you do? Just look at those clouds! 0 voxels, 0 GPU RAM needed. There are some preset shapes you can use like box and cylinder which I have no idea what practical purpose they serve but the Hemisphere can be used to see clouds from below. The downside is that you don’t have the flexibility Pyro offers because you need a particle setup, and sometimes particles are not enough so you have to use Thinking Particles which leads us back to XPresso. Other limitations follow like that they are not compatible with VDBs because they use apperceptive 3D shading algorithms instead of voxels, so you can’t export them to an other application and that PyroCluster does not work in conjunction with the depth-of-field functionality. Other than that, if you work natively, Pyroclusters can provide some comfort when you need some fluffy clouds or smoke. This is a special case of under appreciation because people do not appreciate the ingenuity used for this one-of-a-kind feature. I should be making a YT video 🤔

I just go down the route of "its easier to ask forgiveness than permission" If you ask almost any entity for permission, they'll almost always just say no, because there's nothing in it for them and just potential downsides, so they will say no almost every time. In reality they don't care, and if you include it, it wouldn't be worth their time to do anything about it. The realistic worst case scenario is they find it by chance and ask you to remove it, in which case just remove it and reupload the reel without that part. It also depends a bit on what you do with the reel. Personally I've only ever sent a private link to people when needed, so the video isn't out in the public for anyone to see, this makes the odds of anyone important noticing it more or less zero. Honestly, your main concern should just be "is this going to piss off a client I want to worth with again"

I did a lot of work for very big companys in the last decade and I am not allowed to show anyhing publically. Tha t is a serious problem for freelancing.

This doesn’t surprise me at all. I think due to the large amount of models on that site stuff tends to slip through the net and / or is ignored. As someone who regularly gets the their work stolen you can’t blame the manufacturers from cracking down on it.

Most branded cars where in fact removed from Turbosquid. Many cars manufacturer took legal action, including BMW : https://www.solidsmack.com/cad-design-news/bmw-group-sues-turbosquid-for-selling-3d-models-of-their-car-designs/ Turbosquid Inc. itself is responsible for violating “the Trademark Act of 1946… and New Jersey law through its marketing of 3-D virtual models of vehicles that infringe the BMW Group’s trademark, trade dress, and design patent rights.” For the few cars left on Turbosquid, you need to ask permission to the manufacturer before even being allowed to download the file. And in most case the authorization is declined (for me it never works, whatever the project).

Hey It now works nicely and is a really big change on especially volume builder poly reduced meshes. Examples: So this is really great. Having the shading not split is also improving performance by reducing polycount, (at least on export). (anyone can get my edge damage generator in the download section) --------------------- The spline one also works nicely I am uploading this spline edge damage setup here: Edge Damage based on Phong Edges Spline Generator.c4d Im not 100% sure yet of the advantages over the boolean based edge damage approach but this could be better in performance in some cases compared to the very slow boolean. Hard to say without testing more. There is one limitation however, the splines are also on the intersected meshes and go inside the mesh. Im sure this is somewhat easily fixable however either with some volume/boolean trick or by nodes. (Also another thing I noticed is that the vertex color field does not recognize it as spline or even geo, and it just dosnt display anything. However if its currentstateToObjected it counts again - The spline points are also not welded but can be easily done with a connect) Great work! PM me your paypal then I send as promised. These should be officially included in the content browser in my opinion. --- Other topic, there is no Boolean for nodes yet right with proper multi threading? The C4D boolean is very slow on higher meshes.

Well....I wish I could provide the same instructional benefit to you as you have provided to me but the only areas of expertise where I would presume to be able to offer advice would be in electronics manufacturing. Relative to software, then definitely Microsoft Excel and a better than average knowledge of other MS tools I use at work like Smartheets, Powerpoint, Word, etc. I also have a pretty good knowledge base into the history of VFX up through the early 2000's buy then the rapid growth of CG techniques just became too fast to keep up with. But that's it! Which is probably all pretty useless to a CG professional such as yourself. So thus, my enduring appreciation. Dave

It is evident from those short tutorials that you are extremely busy and were making those tutorials from what limited free time you could squeeze from your schedule (BTW: Now it is Sunday 😁) But....they do make a huge difference to me and I am sure to others. They don't need to be long because as I said you packed more useful information into those short tutorials than I have seen in over half the tutorials out there. So I am sincerely appreciative for whatever you can provide in the time that you have. Dave

I'm glad you find them helpful ! I always worry that my thoughts on these things tend to emerge quite chaotically, and I usually forget at least 3 things I meant to say in every one, so nice to hear people find the main points are getting through ! 🙂 CBR

CBR, you are a Master Craftsman. I love the way you go about problem solving and the natural way you communicate and explain where errors are going to come from and why. We would all love to see more tutorial if you ever find the time. Jacobite

There was more information packed into that 9 minutes than I have seen in full hour tutorials. These need to become a permanent part of Core4D. Can they be added to the Videos section please? Thanks, Dave