Jump to content

Leaderboard

  1. Cerbera

    Cerbera

    Community Staff


    • Points

      2,406

    • Posts

      17,792


  2. 3D-Pangel

    3D-Pangel

    Contributors Tier 2


    • Points

      995

    • Posts

      2,843


  3. HappyPolygon

    HappyPolygon

    Customer


    • Points

      870

    • Posts

      1,789


  4. Mike A

    Mike A

    Limited Member


    • Points

      555

    • Posts

      981


Popular Content

Showing content with the highest reputation since 03/03/2020 in all areas

  1. @RBarrett @DMcGavran I don't know about why others on this forum haven't switched to another app already, but I've been needing to stick with Cinema 4D because I started a personal project with it a while ago. I have to keep my C4D license alive until I finish. I'm a character modeler, rigger, and animator. Those haven't been priority disciplines for Maxon when compared to Motion Graphics (though R23 did give a lot of love to character animation). To keep myself from feeling too trapped, I've also gotten a Maya Indie license and installed the latest version of Blender. I have used these three apps extensively. Here are my observations: Cinema 4D vs. Maya vs. Blender User Experience Cinema 4D C4D still benefits from the UX decisions made long ago: the Object Manager/Tags model is still the best of the three. As others on this thread have stated, no one was complaining about the UI...the tabbed documents are cool, but do you really want to force people to relearn your UI right now? Doesn't that just beg people to learn a new (potentially FREE) application just as easily? I didn't understand this move. People aren't switching to Blender because of its UI. Maya Using Maya, its efforts in Parallel Rig evaluation show that Maya's primary function is for character rigging & animation. Being the industry standard for so long, most of the commercial rigs and rigging/animation courses are for Maya. The Arnold GPU implementation doesn't work any better in the Viewport than Octane/Redshift in C4D's. If Cinema 4D's multi-threaded scene nodes can remove the need for Constraints/Deformers that use Priorities, Character Rigging in C4D would take a huge leap forward when compared to Maya. Blender When I do start to work in Blender, it's never comfortable. Blender's 'Industry Compatible' hotkeys don't get covered in most tutorials, so I'm left pecking at my keyboard trying to get things to work. I feel like I'd have to learn the native key commands to learn the software. Also, its Viewport doesn't seem to be any faster than Cinema 4D in any area yet. Being able to use the same materials with Eevee and Cycles is genius though and with Cycles X, this makes its Viewport my favorite. Animation I, surprisingly, find Cinema's F-Curve / Graph Editor with its latest improvements the best of the three. Maya's rig playback speed still beats Cinema 4D and Blender, however. Character Rigging As for Character Rigging, I haven't worked much in Blender, but Cinema 4D's Character Object is miles better than Maya's Quick Rig (though the rigs are still way faster in Maya). mGear is good, but not currently caught up to the Python 3 release of Maya 2022. Weight painting sucks in both Maya and Cinema 4D, so I can't pick a favorite. I really like the Maya plugin ngSkinTools' User Experience and wish Cinema 4D could make their weights work like this. xRefs Cinema 4D's xRefs are incredibly buggy (I have probably reported 50+ bugs for it) and have been the bane of my character animation life. Maya and Blender's are amazingly stable. Without good character/prop referencing, Cinema 4D isn't a viable character animation tool for teams or long-format animation. I was told by customer support that a new referencing system is coming, but I'm not sure I'll still be around by then. Sculpting Blender's sculpting looks like a strength from all of the additions Pablo Dobarro made to it. Cinema's sculpting workflow is pretty good, though it's missing things like a Cloth brush (I am aware of the workaround, but it's not as predictable and requires a Deformer). Cloth seems like a primary need for sculpting to me. Also, Normal/Displacement Maps get baked into standard C4D materials. It would be time-saving to integrate this with Substance Painter or GPU/PBR materials. Texture Painting C4D's Bodypaint would benefit from working with materials other than standard C4D materials. Just as with sculpting, if texture painting worked better with Redshift or a PBR workflow, I think it would fit the needs of modern 3D much better. Materials Cinema has material schizophrenia: Node-based materials, PBR Materials, Standard Materials, and Redshift Materials. And none of them really look great in the Viewport compared to Eevee. UVs Cinema's gotten much better in this regard since S22. The UV Unwrap, Rectangularize, etc. were great improvements and I really like UV editing in Cinema 4D as compared to Maya and Blender. Innovations With Blender, things like Grease Pencil and Eevee make me really want to switch to Blender because they seem like artist-first innovations (over Motion Design & technical 3D animation). Before GPU rendering, Sketch & Toon was an incredible innovation! Fun features like this made Cinema 4D special! Now it's long in the tooth (like Bodypaint) and tied to the Standard materials/renderer. @RBarrett, you mentioned procedural workflow innovations, which benefit Motion Designers, but what about innovations like Sketch & Toon, Bodypaint, Projection Man, etc., that made Cinema 4D cutting edge for non-photorealistic 3D artists? Those tools haven't been touched in over a decade! User Relations Blender's Developers are easily accessible by forums and chats. I've raised the issue on this forum many times that Maxon seems uninterested in its users' feature requests based on their lack of investment in collecting them. Users don't feel valued. Maxon: COMMUNICATE WITH YOUR USERS! We've been holding on to this app for a long time with little reason to continue. Obviously leadership need to make the call when there are tough decisions and they know the budgetary implications, but C4D's roadmap currently feels very broken. It's only revealed at these release dates and sets the users up for a letdown. The employees/users lacked enthusiasm/beautiful artwork from new features in their 3D Motion Show presentations. Social Media / 3D Motion Show Blender Today on YouTube feels like an organic program with real human beings talking openly about the future of Blender and current improvements. Blender's constantly being improved and the momentum is huge. The 3D Motion Show and Maxon's Social Media presence seems like Maxon keeps rolling out artists that bought in back when C4D was the hot app (2010s). It's also surprisingly unprofessional: the mics sound like crap (even from the Chief Marketing Officer!), the banter either seems unprepared or super-canned, and no one has any genuine enthusiasm. It's like Maxon in LA gave up. Also, having presentations from all of the Maxon products makes the 3D Motion Show unwatchable. You really need individual shows for each product. I used to be able to watch C4D Live with glee. People's time is too valuable - who is going to willingly be force-fed all of your marketing for all of your products on YouTube where competition is so high? As soon as a Red Giant Magic Bullet Looks hour-long tutorial starts, I bet your drop-off rate is huge! Buying other Apps Buying Redshift made sense to me because it was a much better product than the ProRender feature. If well-integrated, Redshift would improve C4D. Buying Red Giant and Forger are starting to make me feel like Maxon is diversifying its offering for stockholders. It feels like it's letting C4D be one of many Maxon apps in case Cinema 4D fails. I understand that Maxon is a business, but why not put that money into product research, more developers, etc. & making Cinema 4D better? Regardless of intention, it feels like Cinema 4D is being left to die on the vine. Price In my opinion (and seemingly others as well) C4D is too expensive for what differentiates it from Maya and Blender. Last year I did the math and C4D was the most expensive for an Indie artist. Cinema 4D: $719.04/yr modo: $629/yr Houdini: $269.99/yr Maya: $265/yr 3DS Max: $265/yr Blender: Free Summary For me, Cinema 4D still shines with the Object Manager, Character Object, F-Curve Editor, & UV Editing, and those are huge parts of my 3D workflow. However, the lack of enthusiasm about the product, poor communication, and the dryness of updates feel like a kick in the stomach for the future. Currently, as soon as I finish my project started with C4D, I'm planning to switch to using Maya with an Indie License & Blender. That would be some time next year. I do hope scene-nodes, pricing plans, and key feature updates change my mind in that time because I loved using C4D. Currently, it's trending downwards.
    18 points
  2. As a personal side project to provide more information on Scene Nodes to everyone interested i started a small page. https://nodebase.info Feel free to request topics that should be covered
    15 points
  3. Hm? Actually I prefer not be drawn into (as Cairyn would say) "one of these threads". Also I'm not sure, which insights I'm supposed to share. I assume, I'm being asked as developer and not as a former Maxon employee. So I will keep it more general. From my point of view onboarding new developers is (or at least can be) a difficult task. It almost always takes quite a bit of resources (aka time of already experienced developers) for a significant time. Every developer is different. And like all humans every developer learns differently. Can bug fixing be a good learning path? Yes, I think so. If you have a tenacious and masochistic type of a developer, this can work out great. I do not mean this in any bad way. Maybe in other words, you need somebody with a lot of will to reach the goal. If you have someone with such characteristics, then the result can be awesome, because the knowledge collected on the go is immense. On the other hand there the "this baby has to run as quickly as possible" type of developers. For those a smaller or simpler starter project can offer a better learning curve, as they have better chances to reach the needed feeling of success to keep them going. Also bugs are pretty human in this regard. Every one is different (I hope, now I do not get drawn into a discussion, how theoretically many bugs are identical) and like with humans you can't really judge it by looking at its cover. So it can already take quite a lot of work from an experienced developer to judge, if a bug is suited to be worked on by a beginner (usually you want "isolated" bugs, where the fix has little potential to influence or break other stuff). And afterwards you need an experienced developer to check and verify the fix of the newbie. This can lead to a situation, where it costs more resources than would have been needed if the experienced developer worked on the bug in the first place. I think, comparing Blender and C4D in this regard is misleading and probably also a bit unfair. Open source in a way is way better suited for onboarding new developers. Of course a) the code base is open, so chances to get somebody, who already has some experience, are better. And b) there's a kind of playful flavor in the process, which you usually do not have in closed environments. I do not want to say either way is superior. It's different and the difficulties are different. I don't think, it's a good idea to transfer the paradigm of either to the other. And of course either side can also learn from the other, but chances are the result of such learning process or evolution will not be identical to the other side you started to learn from in the beginning. The constraints are too different to end up with an identical result. I could go on talking for hours about this, but as I said in the beginning, I'm not even sure, what I have been asked for. For example the topic, how many interesting ways there are to make even the best developer have merely no output at all. Although I tend to like the view from the other side a bit more, the many ways you can get productive output from bad developers (or as I would put it, there are no unproductive employees, only employees used in wrong ways). Or the topic of team mindedness of developers, something my breed is probably not really the best in (which on the other hand is most likely the reason, they got developers in the first place...). Just to be not completely off topic: I see nothing wrong in a service pack focusing on bug fixing. And I'm a bit irritated, about certain views for example about the number of bugs in "UI change" release. To me it's pretty obvious, even if there were no features to present, there is way more work going on than visible at the surface. Please, do not misunderstand this, I'm not interested in another discussion if R25 is a release worth its money. Or if the communication strategy is right or wrong. Or Maxon's business strategies. In my view Maxon tries nothing less but rebuilding a skyscraper from scratch without scratching the old facade during the process (better: with as little scratches as possible). Or trying a heart surgery on a living walking human without any support machinery. Not many companies have even dared to try this. For this alone they have my fullest respect. It's even worse for them. Their customers grew used to one of the most stable and backward compatible software products (not talking about DCCs but software in general) out there. And for such an endeavor this luxury turns into an immense burden. Whatever you do, somebody will always be pissed (even worse, most likely rightly so). And I doubt, many can imagine how different, how much more complicated and how much more time consuming this is compared to building something new from scratch. Maybe not even all developers at Maxon did foresee the complexity to its full extend (which is no critique). I mean, hell, I live in a country, where we are not even able to build an airport from scratch anymore. Something which has been done thousands of times all over the globe. Complexity is a bi... and forums can be a bad place to discuss complex topics. Most humans are not interested in understanding complexity. We usually prefer the simple, black/white answers. And, again an example from the country I live in, people can get pretty angry and even violent, if the answers to questions which frighten them are neither black or white (yep, talking pandemic here). I think, same patterns can be seen in the C4D discussions since a few years. Understandable. Inevitable. Certainly not constructive or helpful for anybody. Sorry for being carried away. Probably another reason, why I shouldn't be pulled into threads...
    15 points
  4. Useful overview. This guy has probably the best C4D modeling channel on Youtube right now.
    14 points
  5. (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 🤔
    13 points
  6. Martijn Korstanje aka Kingcoma is a well known 3D artist from Netherlands and our fellow member.Currently lives in Belgium and is active in industry for 20+ years. He worked at graphics and 3D companies in the past but for last 15 years he has his own company. Apart from addictive 3D passion he enjoys nature, traveling, photography, Lego, how stuff works and loves driving his car. We are very happy to present him and his fabulous work! Describe yourself in a single word: Downtoearth : ) How did you get into C4D and 3D in general? A couple of centuries ago, some new computers arrived at the school I was attending. Instantly loved working on it (I think we used to work with Photoshop 5) and a couple of years later I bought my first Mac. Spent almost every day practicing and discovering new things, for hours and hours. I was a pretty quick learner, so once I got the hang of Illustrator and Photoshop, I came across Swift3D, and started experimenting with that (very basic 3d). Because there were lots of limitations and I really wanted to make my drawings and characters come to life, I searched for other, a bit more advanced software. 3ds max was only available on windows, so that was out of the question, and Maya had a HUGE learning curve. And then I bumped into cinema4d. Love at first sight! I can’t count the evenings / nights / days I spent learning it and trying out new things, but it’s a massive amount of time. Which area interest you the most? Modelling techniques. I’ve always been a fan of nice and clean topology, and I really enjoy figuring out the best and nicest way to model something, whether hard surfaces or organic / characters. Other then that, I love doing animations. How things move, how slow or fast things move, how a character moves when he’s just standing there. What does the left hand do when the right hand’s busy doing something? Whenever I have character animation jobs, I always find myself standing up and acting a bit first, to see what a ‘natural’ movement is and what not. Really silly, but super helpful. What other apps are you using and what for? Mainly Illustrator, Photoshop and aftereffects. Illustrator for vector paths, creating logo’s or creating packaging or visuals that need to be put on 3d models. Photoshop for textures, compositing and retouch. Aftereffects for animations, putting together all different parts (rendersequence, sounds, music, texts, logos, etc) Which learning resources you used and would recommend? In the very beginning, there weren’t that much tutorials online, so you had to figure it out yourself or look for help on different forum (such as core4d, previously c4dcafe). Most tutorials were screenshots and written text. Later, more and more video tutorials came along, which are very easy to follow and you can actually see what’s going on and what you’re missing or doing wrong. Whenever I need to learn or check something nowadays, I usually check Core4D, Cineversity, tutorials from GreyScaleGorilla, or when I can’t find it on there, general google searches. Do you think talent is overrated and can be offset with a lot of hard work? I don’t think talent is overrated. I think when you have talent, it comes a bit more natural and some things are a bit more ‘easy’. The thing with 3d is, it’s not just one thing. It’s a boatload of things. You can be talented in modelling, but really suck at texturing. Or you’re an average rigger, but you master simulations. Your drawing skills aren’t all that, but when that Xpresso or Python script editor open up, you’re on fire. Overall, I think everyone has something they're good at (or better at), and I think in 3d-land, you always have to work hard, talented or less talented. Your character work is stellar, what made you focus on them? Thanks! As a kid, I wanted to be a comicbook-artist, always drawing creatures and characters. Later it shifted to Illustrator, and after that, I really wanted to translate my thoughts and creativity of those characters in 3d, so I could animate them, look at them from all sides (which you can’t with 2d obviously) and put the expressions and humor in them I so clearly see in my head. I also admire Pixar / Dreamworks characters and animation, the details in them, the movements, the humor. When I watch animations, I don’t just watch them, I anaylise them (sometimes frame by frame) to try and learn new things or ways to improve myself. Your best advice for newcomers, tips or tricks to pick up? Have fun, don’t take it too seriously and practice, practice, practice. Give it your own twist, don’t just copy something blindly, and don’t stop learning new ways or techniques! Where do you see yourself in 5 years? I really hope I can continue doing what I’m doing now, making fun and friendly characters to brighten someones day or to put a smile on someones face. Thoughts on AI? It’s a bit frightening, hence the answer above.. I hope I can continue doing my job til I retire. I probably keep doing 3d even when I’m retired though. But yeah, as many other artists, I’m worried about this. AI as a tool to help the artist is great, but AI taking over would be lame. Lately there are more and more examples of AI that I receive in briefings, but they’re only used to show ‘something like this’ or an overall moodboard / look&feel. Fortunately, clients can be very tricky and very unclear as to what they want exactly or it’s the oposite: super-extremely specific and detailed. It’s part of my job to assist them in the whole process of creating the perfect character or visual for them, and advise them where I can. Top 3 wishes for C4d I don’t have any wishes actually, I’m very happy with all the tools available right now and I don’t have any problems making the things I want / have to make. If you could send a message for Maxon, what would you say? A big thanks. It’s a marvelous piece of software which I love to work with and not a week goes by where I find something new which I haven’t seen before (or found out about) after all these years. I think it’s amazing people can create software like this, have all the options you can possibly imagine, making it possible for people like me to create art and have the ability to do what I love to do most. Message for Core4D? Also a HUGE thanks. For all the talks, insights, tips, tricks, questions, answers, tutorials, models, contests. I wouldn’t be the artist I am today without the people, help and knowledge found on Core4D. If people want to contact you? They can, of course! I’m just an email, phonecall or whatsapp away https://www.kingcoma.com phone +32 479 43 61 82 email: info@kingcoma.com Thank you very much for your time and all the best in future endeavours!
    13 points
  7. You can abandon it if you like, and enjoy your time in Blender, but no need to shit-post Maxon with a load of unevidenced assertion on the way out. A lot of what you say is self-evidently untrue. You are IN one part of the Cinema community right now by being on this forum, and there is Cineversity in addition to Maxon's training channels, not to mention hundreds of thousands of tutorials on Youtube, with new ones being added every day. There are current podcasts, videocasts, and Siggraph presentations from present day and going back years. Geometry nodes are far from useless, and their potential is becoming more obvious with every release. There are literally THOUSANDS of plugins and scripts for Cinema. CBR
    13 points
  8. Yep, and they have every right to continue to do so if they feel Maxon continues to release weak updates ! All the opinions from all the people are valid (the ones doing hate for hate's sake tend to be transparently obvious, so exclude themselves !) and should be heard by the community and by Maxon ! Leaving any software is a big wrench if you use it every day, or have done for some time, so I think it's understandable that long term users drop a rant or 2, and a bit unfair to label them cowardly for not jumping ship earlier... I imagine most of these people love Cinema like I do, and really don't want to go, but voice their opinions inthe hope they may be heard if they say it enough, and who can blame them for that ?! CBR
    13 points
  9. If I may be so bold. In my experience, a lot of universities running 3D courses seem quite myopically blind what the real world demands are of 3D artists. They look at what the most exciting things are for students, predominantly working in the movie industry and seem to blindly target that as if it will be getting their students a job at the end. The reality is that the vast majority of 3D jobs are for generalists, people who can model, clean up cad, texture, light, animate, render, post produce in AE + PS. For every person spending 2 years working on animating Groot's left nut, theres 100 more working at a less prestigious company creating every day artwork. Product renders, adverts, previz, theatre shows, projection shows, town planning, architects, packaging visualisers.... We recently went to some university recruitment days looking for new staff, and honestly the experience was quite miserable. Maybe 30 stands from employers looking for people and perhaps a couple hundred students handing out resumes and virtually everyone who we spoke to was unsuitable. More or less all of them had chosen one single specific niche, looking for a job at a studio. I need someone who can take a client's idea and run with it from start to finish. Instead all we found were 20 people that want to do nothing but rig characters, 20 texture painters, a dozen modellers and a random scattering of uv layout people, simulation engineers and TDs / scripters. Not one of those people could produce anything from start to finish.
    12 points
  10. Dear visitors and members By purchasing membership fee you become registered member with full forum rights with all associated services and benefits including posting, downloading, access to video trainings, plugins and removal of Google ads. Membership is 5 Eur / 3 Months and can be cancelled at any time. Do note that this helps us run the community and enables us to provide quality content, including premium video trainings. Membership purchase link https://www.core4d.com/ipb/store/product/38-membership-fee/ Regards Core Staff Note: Cancellation of membership is done through paypal account
    12 points
  11. You don't need a ceo to have a community, you just need people with a passion for something. The original 3 founders pretty much never posted or made themselves known, and yet places like postforum, cgtalk, c4dcafe and the german c4dtreff had nice communities there; people make communities, not ceos. The guy in charge was inconsequential. Now that Dave is here what has changed? You get a post once or twice a month and all it tends to contain is some tone deaf defence of a new shitty policy. Our studio has subbed. We didn't want to, saw no benefit and actively dislike them. But the writing was on the wall for several years watching anyone on a perpetual licence get screwed in every way imaginable, so we bought subscriptions due to having no other viable choice. Enjoying your MSA price? fuck you. Enjoying the cinversity plugins and tutorials? fuck you. Enjoying having the latest version? fuck you. Want a warning about R25 being the last perpetual so you can make an informed financial decision? Fuck you.
    12 points
  12. Just catching up with Core4D / C4D Cafe as I haven't visited in a while. Myself and Crew Reynolds started C4D cafe. We were both trueSpace users and both into animating. We could see that truespace's days were numbered so moved over to Cinema 4D. In fact it was about 10 years that we then later me on my own ran the cafe before I sold it and moved on. I'm not actually doing any 3D these days and only have Blender installed on my computer and that's just to view a couple of model files. People may recall that I was modelling Lego motorcycles in 3D. That's developed to actually modelling them for real. I currently have about 55 Lego Technic motorcycles and now design my own. I exhibit them at Lego shows here in New Zealand. Getting back to the topic. I would be fine paying a small contribution to keep this place going. I know I had to dig into my own wallet a few times to pay the bills. Running and maintaining a forum on its own server isn't cheap. Cheers Nigel / 3DKiwi
    12 points
  13. R20: Gave us node materials, fields, volumes and the CAD importer, 9/10 R21: Cheap versions removed, Subscriptions added. new extrude bevels and Windows 4k support, 3/10 R22: Lots of smaller bits and general improvements, 5/10 R23: Nodes, but nobody uses them, USD, but nobody uses it, Magic bullet but poorly implemented, 2/10 R24: Online content browser, placement tools, currently useless scene browser, 3/10 R25: So bad, they didn't even give it it's own press release, 1/10 R26: X implemented, X overhauled, X overhauled, dozens of new X tools, X also implemented, 9/10 You can see why so many perpetual owners all stopped at R20. Everything since then has been a bit of an anti climax. Useful bits, but nothing that's going to change your life. R20 was nice for its 4k support, but the job is only 80% finished, too many elements are still low res. You can add bonus points if you happen to need USD support or GLtf export, but they're not complete enough implementations imho. "We don't talk about R25, no no no..."
    12 points
  14. I used C4D to create a fan film based off the game 'Subnautica' - Super fun project that took about 2 years to finish. Rendered with Arnold/Redshift
    12 points
  15. Just a quick point of view from me, because the topic recently came up: I’m one of those Blender converts still hanging around here being angry at Maxon and McGravran. The reason is not that I’m not happy with Blender. Blender is great since v2.80. But it’s by no means perfect. Cinema 4D does some things exceptionally well, like the object manager and interface in general. For anyone really invested in this, it’s not so easy to just leave. As several others in this thread said, learning Cinema 4D was a massive, decade long investment of money and time. I have several perpetual versions up until R21 still around and still being used for older customer projects. Why not use them? They did cost real money. I was a longtime MSA customer. I was really attached to the spirit of Maxon. It is difficult to get the rug pulled from under you by a company one relied on for almost decades. It feels abusive to have paid the MSA for years for the most expensive version and then being treated like shit unless converted to a subscription. And to be honest: It’s a little heartbreaking seeing the software I learned CGI on being neglected for many many years in the productive parts – and on the other hand resources are put in areas that are clearly there to push people even harder to subscriptions (Content Library, Online Activation etc.). The promise that finally all the neglected things will get updated is now many years old. The new core was promised years ago. Everybody has a different breakpoint where one doesn’t believe these promises anymore. Some people in this thread still believe R27 will finally be it. I wonder when they will give up… The thing is: yeah, converting to Blender was not easy and is still an ongoing thing. Some things are better, some worse. Not everything is rosy over there. But even not paying another Euro to Maxon, I’m still invested in this program. R21 will occasionally be opened in the coming years. The process of learning a different program is not done over two weekends. No matter if it is Houdini, Maya or Blender. I’m just finishing first customer projects in Blender after ~1 year of learning. I will definitely be back here when S26/R27 comes around, still hoping the cheerful, customer centric spirit in Maxon is still there deeply hidden within the company they have become; and some of their hostile moves will be reversed—or the new core will finally pay off. Maybe this day i will buy another perpetual. But until then it’s just prudent and healthy to seriously look at other solutions. R21 will not forever keep working (and it’s slow compared to more modern programs). But for some over here this just can’t be a clear cut, never looking back. It’s sad. I’m a little sad. Yes, it’s just another company, just another software in a sea of great CGI programs. But Maxon/C4D were different, long ago. The anger at McGravran is clearly grounded in all the bad changes that either directly were his cause or coincide with his taking duty where he may or may not be to blame (endless core rewrite) I tend to the later; I think the core rewrite is just taking many years longer than they anticipated. But the hostile business changes for paying longtime customers are to put at his feet.
    12 points
  16. With the growing of a software the dependencies inside grow, too. And normally not linear but square. That slows down development. With the growing of the company the regulations grow and the amount of people that have some say in the development, too. in a small company the CTO and the developer decide. In a big one there are also project owner, project manager, UI depatement, quality control, and more involved. And this also lets the development explode. I have the impression, that maxon tries to tackle at least the technical side with the new core, a system, that should be (in my understanding) much more flexible than the old one. I really would be fine with this even though the development of new features is slow right now. But I don't like the business attitude of the new maxon. they are feature wise just not in the position to force their customers. They instead should try to produce good will. They also should give it away for free to anybody who wants to learn without the need to be student and the size of the university and all this. That is the only way to stay relevant. The situation has changed in the last two years. I see huge industry companies that switch to blender and they expect their agencies to build up blender know how. Autodesk tries to fight this development with indi licenses. If this is the right way I don't know, but the way maxon is acting in a almost arrogant way definitely not the solution. Adobe can do this because of its size and the market at the time they switched to subscription, but they also are getting a problem with Affinity and Black magic. The argument that subscription is needed because of the maturenes of the product..... well that might be true for a photoshop, but as long as we can not generate weather, clouds, fog, rain, buildings, streets, and so on parametrically with some sliders there is so much room for development (look at Unreal) the possibilities for development are still endless. So that can't be a reason for a 3D App. And the Game engines are also an other challenge. My impression is, that the commercial 3D software packages like C4D, Maya, 3DS really have a small time window to adept to not get chrushed between blender and the game engines. I as a 3D Artist in C4D already feel the changes. In the 20 Years I am doing this the changes where never so obvious fast and radical. I really hope, that maxon finds a adequate solution. I have the impression, that it needs bold and creative solutions now. subscription on its own will not save them in the long run.
    12 points
  17. Hello, The UV projections occupied my mind for quite a while, I made some tools to unwrap them, to make the edition easily, add features to BP UV Edit... But the problem was still the same, the UV edition is still boring to do and quite often we prefere to use the common automatic projections when it's possible. I was wondering, could we simply make other kind of projections to fit more shapes ? So I came up with a new plugin, the UV Projector ! It works like a deformer object and only edit the UVW property, it have some interesting new UV projections with the advantage to not have to make the object editable ! Here is some new projections : Rhombicuboctahedral : It's like a cubic projection with the 45° edges. Cylinder with deformations : Like the classic cylinder, with deformations to adjust the shapes. Half-cylinder : Some times you want to have only one side round and the other side plane. Y shape : It's maybe still a bit wobbly to setup but it gives a nice start. The last is I think the most interesting, it's a plane shape with editing points : Simply uset he point mode to move the surfaces points and adjust them to your object, you can literraly wrap it around your object ! All the features and download here : https://code.vonc.fr/projecteur-uv The free version is limited to 1000 polygons count with all the features so you can still enjoy it. The plugin is a part of the Vonc Suite that contains others tools. If you have other projections shapes ideas don't hesitate !
    11 points
  18. Here's a fun example for what you can do with Scene Nodes: You can implement even a game! I added comments to the node graph, I hope that helps if you are interested in the example. Here's the C4D file, it requires 2023.1: tetris.c4d tetris.mp4 To play the game, you have to press the usual play button in Cinema, and then either use the arrows for the Move/Rotate/Drop user data of the Keyboard Handler to control the game or install these Python scripts and assign shortcuts to them with the script manager. tetris_scripts.zip For a new round you have to reload the scene.
    11 points
  19. More than just a service pack, we got a few very cool things added this time round... New Relax Mode in Brush and Magnet tools Cloth and Rope now work with Fields / Field Forces Front and Back Colliders for new sim system New HDRIs New RS materials New grunge maps collection Improved Node editor Geometry Curvature now available to fields. Volume builder improvements My favourite is the new relax mode of Brush and Magnet tools allowing us to smooth, and regularize topology without losing surface curvature. Here's Chris Schmidt explaining the rest of it, with his usual degree of thoroughness and detail... So, lots to enjoy there, as well as lots of bugfixes and smaller QoL changes. CBR
    11 points
  20. I did not lock it for no reason at all, nor in response to any one post. It started off toxic, and remained largely that way, despite some reasonable points being made amongst the maelstrom. Whilst not exactly an enjoyable read, personally I found it interesting. But then it became apparent that it was something of a crap-magnet for anyone who just wanted to generally bad-mouth Maxon, reasoned or not, there was a sort of undercurrent of recrudescent anger, it was all getting very tired, circular and repetitive, and I didn't think much new or constructive was going on, so it seemed to me to have reached its natural conclusion. If I was censoring stuff I would have deleted it shortly after it started or would be hiding it now. We DID allow the conversation to continue for at least a month - almost 2 ! Only when it was rattling on and on did I feel the need to lock it in the hope we could all move on and talk about literally anything else ! I am aware some people will appreciate that and others won't but we can't please all the people all the time hey ? CBR
    11 points
  21. 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!
    11 points
  22. Maybe we could get a little less personal and snarky here on all sides? I really like these threads discussing all the pros and cons of new releases. Especially those parts, where people point out small details I had not discovered, yet. And it's surely an integral part of such threads to also provide an opinion on future implications of the development, business decisions and strategic ways. But can we not maybe agree on, that all these topics are neither black or white and almost none of us has any detailed understanding of what lead to certain decisions inside a company? Feel free to assume. Even be sarcastic about it. But please, can we leave the aggressive notion out of this discussion? Can we please acknowledge, that everybody has a right to have an opinion and that this opinion does no harm to anybody else? It may be right or wrong in an individual point of view and this may well be discussed. But, please, in a civil way without any aggression or personal insults. At least for me ignoring these most basic rules of human social behavior eradicates the fun out of these threads completely. And I'd assume you put your opinions here, in order to have them read by others, don't you? Not only are you reducing the chances of your posts being read, but I also have yet to witness an aggressive behavior convincing the counterpart.
    11 points
  23. I already expressed my great enthusiasm for the next release (based on Mat's insight here). Nonetheless, I hope for some specifics 😄 Best Redshift Integration of all DCCs It's the same roof, so C4D should have a premium RS integretion. Materials in the viewport. New node system with all functionality. Material previews rendering with IPR. OCIO-aware Picture Manager. A one-click "Render beauty + AOVs and export everything to After Effects and rebuild there automatically". Add RS Materials to the Content-Library-Assets. Make RS the standard renderer. Remove the UI deadspace in the IPR. Interactive help like in C4D. Redshift RT is still very early und very unstable, but it should become C4D's viewport, some day. Stability This is aimed at C4D, Redshift and mainly nVidia. A "wrong" nVdidia-Driver-Version can cause troubles without end. How to know the best driver for your config? Forum exchange, try and error. Luckily, there are some really stable driver+software-combinations everytime I had to jump these hoops, but the journey is *SO* painful. Bugs This was the only new feature of R25 😄 Come on now, really Maxon, up your QA-game! Also, there should be *much* longer bugfixing-support for owners of a perpetual license. Release cycle Honestly, I'd rather have only 1 big update per year. Less hassle updating stuff, finding working drivers etc. Maybe more time for QA on your side? So far, I can't see any benefit of the biannual release cycle, only that it apparantly forced you to do the fubar R25-release, needlessly so. Performance This is a broad field. I don't want to dive into details here, I want to express a broad wish. Currently, we are confined to rather small/medium scenes. 2 Characters, a landscape tile, some decoration and boom, you're already operating at the edge of C4D's performance envelope. Very quickly, work becomes about managing ressources, not making artistic decisions. And trying to hide the seams of the performance envelope all the time 😕 I wish we had some kind of streaming engine for geo. A unified simulation system. A unified cache system. A clear feedback system, that shows me what is computationally expensive and what isn't. I don't know, if the "core rewrite" adresses any of that, I just want to feel some realtime-magic in C4D. zBrush It has by far the best scultping "feel" of any app I tried. It's a mindblowingly good app, as demonstrated again and again by zBrush-artists. But, for the love of all UX/UI saints, zBrush sorely needs a complete UX/UI overhaul. That's one of Maxons strengths. zBrush-Artists defend the current UI, but Im quite sure that is a form of Stockholm syndrome. Maybe offer an "Easy Mode" alternative, here. A very strong "GoZ"-implementation is also obligatory here. My last point is not software related, but regarding communication. Once, an attempt has been made by Maxon towards more transparency. Anyone remember the three-and-a-half blog posts? 😄 Ok, now do that again, but thoroughly. Just do it like the Redshift team. Have a nice, active forum with Premium sections for paying customers. Talk with us about problems. Listen to our wishes, in a way that we know we are heard. Share at least a broad roadmap for the next releases. This is by far the biggest problem with Maxon and C4D. You guys are almost completely opaque, and that's a severely outdated mindset for a company that relies on the thriving and the goodwill of a community of communicators. And communicators we are, visual, textual, social. Talk to us, please! 🙂
    11 points
  24. I am doing a Black Friday deal. All my free tutorials are 100% off... https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkWGnSaQR_XBMe3Yx4WHJ5Q
    11 points
  25. Only commenting on the things I used. Scene nodes look promising (haven't tested), but more importantly again show a strong vision for the future. I also comment on the general outlook, MyMaxon and the pricing on the bottom. Feedback on new UV workflow: It is definitely a huge step forwards but it seems like in beta still. There are many bugs and broken tools right now. This includes S22 but in general there is still a clunkyness that could be easily solved, mostly by fixing the broken not working selections. The new S22 auto unwrapper is mind blowing in some areas as it does advanced things I would have only done by hand on many occasions and no software can repeat, not even rizom but sadly inconsistent, still very useful. Very impressed by that one, but other areas can still be questionable. I actually have forgot to test multi UV but I assume it just works as expected. Broken / Not working Tools: Some tools straight up do not work in the UV space and make it feel like a beta still or plain buggy. Just nothing happens or they glitch out. The colleagues were also surprised. - Fill selection does not work (no way to select an entire UV island? That is very basic and required - it creates a buggy hover selection and makes the UV view appear frozen) Edit: Double click does fill the UV island - this is convenient but not consistent and I didn't get it even after trying all my possible tools. Fill should definitely work. - Outline Selection does not work (not much to see in the gif it just dosnt do anything) - Live selection scaling the selection size Freezes the UV view for the time you try to drag the size with the typical command - UV Magnet (very cool tool btw) does the same freezing - probably more tools do it (Am I being stupid or is there no way to select an UV island?) Edit: Double click does it - this is not consistent but is convenient. Why not for normal non UV selections as well? - Path selection does now work (Broken with S22, now fixed!) (the only good way to unwrap messy geometries, Rocks or similar well) That was very needed, makes certain things crazy faster. We desperately need a function to get an edge selection back from the UV cuts we made. There is no proper way to get this selection and if you want to split your Phong properly based on UV split as it is required for widespread highpoly-lowpoly baking workflows, you have to make all your cuts in one go, keep shift pressed all the time and save the selections which is extremely clunky and inconvenient. Please add a function to select by UV islands borders. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Also from the perspective of years back, it took me literal years to understand that UV mapping in cinema is supposed to work by making cut selections across the mesh and then pressing the Unwrap button. It is easy but nothing hints you on it. Its not an button, its not an action, its a workflow that is never implied or mentioned. It is so simple but I just understood that like 6 months ago after 10 years of Cinema usage. Maybe that me but maybe that is also part of why it has a bad reputation. The UV layout feels very cramped at first glance. The new center bar is good but the rest is overflowing. Having UV settings hidden in view settings is also something I would have never found if not seeing the video. Just add a button to the new UV palette for convenience leading to this. The packers could work better, this will still be worth to export and repack in some other tool I would say. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Plugins Many Plugins no longer working is a bummer but thats out of hands I understand This can however be a very harsh blow to an already dwindling plugin community (more towards that below) Remesher We tried the new Remesher today and I have to say that this is absolutely excellent. I tried a popular plugin mentioned in the thread before but the C4D remesher is definitely better and just works as you expect. Very clean and professional. Delta Mush Delta mush working on varied Deformers just like that was a positive surprise. Ill probably use it to add some quality to damaged objects that need deformation. Deformer Polish The new handles are great to see, please also add it to the Array modifier, it can be extremely disorienting. Dragging Handles for Spline objects would also be very needed. I need unending spline rectangles for rounded rectangle models with is just a basic primitive shape that should exist imo. Also please for a nice parametric workflow you aim for, allow us to Disable and enable Top and Bottom caps of cylinders individually, there are unending screws which have unnecessary hidden caps that need to be manually converted and optimized just to get rid of one bottom cap, otherwise it could just stay primitive ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Subscription / MyMaxon As a company owner I am very pleased with the new MAXON service. At first I hated the idea of online login and the google login bugged out. But now I really love the way the Seats are handled, this is the absolute best I've seen. For Photoshop I had to create a dozen Adobe accounts. Autodesk Urgh. Forgot to log out? No problem. Its just a click. I can just go home, kick my work PC out, and keep working. You see all your licenses and who uses them on startup. Give the environment artist from the other team a license to just get some 30m volume builder action, kick the other guy out who is on a break and free him up a seat. Just want to show some other guy some very basics so he may learn C4D down the road, just get a free seat for 10minutes. Just log in with one single account and it all works. That's just the greatest service and the best handling of seats and licenses I've seen and that must really be highlighted. Price, Plugins & Community The 60 Euro per month are not cheap but as company thats not a big deal. In the end the efficient usage of seats is also a value proposition going into the price of the subscription. Id say with 5 seats I would gain more the value of 6.5-7 as a company. However, outside of company usage, I really have to say that 60 a month would not feel great if they came out of my pockets. But much more importantly, I strongly feel that the high barrier of entry (its not 100 for 1 month, its the commitment towards continuous payment of these 60 you have to set yourself to) is really limiting the reach of the software. C4D right now is in a bubble and mostly used in one specific field. Things which are the bread and butter of other 3D softwares, baking highpolies down for high quality 3D assets, texturing with proper unique UVs and painting based on baked maps in Substance painter or such, that is all basically nonexistant in Cinema circles which is just mind boggling as this is the core to industry standard 3d assets of any kind. There is a huge untapped crowd of the most essential 3D modellers / asset producers (Hard surface, environment art, character art). If you go to a 3D modeling community like polycount, nobody uses Cinema. Id estimate 3%. MAXON really needs to be careful with gating the community, give means for hobbyists and solo developers to be happy with the purchase and enter the ecosystem, and start reaching new grounds especially with Realtime and Games. There needs to be an affordable indie license with acceptable limits that make you really want to get the full version but not require it entirely. Remember where your users come from in the end, Teenagers like me who started using it with a crack or at school and then work on minimum cash then own a company later or do freelance. If you don't offer Teenagers, Students, 2 man indie developers, movie makers, hobbyists, freelancers on low money, or living in east europe / asia - a way into the ecosystem the future users will logically die out. Plugin development is what is driving many of these other softwares as well. Blender lives based on plugins and game engines make most of their money from plugin stores. The plugin community is dying and S23 could be the killing blow with C++ recompile and Python 3 breaking many things. Plugin devs also always need the latest versions to fix their plugins. Be the first and implement a plugin & script store on your own website. Give creators the reach, more power to make money, and you take a modest share (+- 1/7th) knowing this is overwhelmingly to your benefit either way (and you want to not make people think its worth setting up their own site to cirvumvent a harsh 30% cut or so) - and give out a piece of the revshare back as discount on C4D versions so plugin makers can cheaply get the new versions to update their plugins and also buy more new versions. Cryengine made the big mistake of not keeping up with asset stores when they could and have been entirely crippled and left behind. Gamedev lives by plugin stores just like Blender. Unity makes way more money with the Asset store than with their actual engine licenses for sure. Many plugins for varied softwares are or were system sellers at varied points. This is low hanging fruit. Start with a contest, give the best creators a bonus, incentives, promotion. Be smart about this, don't miss the window. Outlook A couple years back I would have said I bet on the wrong horse but imo MAXON does make slower advancements in the weak areas but if they do things they are usually very methodical / specific in one area and well executed and on a deeper technical level that you would unlikely see implemented by other 3D apps (which do seem to often scramble together random but cool features). In gamedev I see that a strong foundation is extremely valuable and C4D is the only software I used from the big ones (aside of Houdini, maybe modo?) that feels like its not hacked together and it will get harder and harder for these others to not stagnate. While I don't know, I have a strong feeling C4D was set up in a much more modern component way back in the beginning days compared to the competition, (the UI components hint towards it) to mostly strong contrast, and seeing things such fields implemented throughout the project is something that would just never happen without huge work effort in other patchwork environments. Fields, Volume Builder, the Modeling Core Rework, Neutron are very big elements that do show a strong vision and hint towards a extendable and healthy codebase and I am more and more happy to use C4D each iteration and it feels like the critical weaknesses are clearly diminishing, while a lot of strong advantages have opened in the last years that clearly overshadow certain issues (even if large roadblocks), at least for my usage cases. It has shifted from the constant feeling of "Ah damn, in 3DS you could have done this" towards more "Hey look what convenient or crazy stuff I can setup here" so I am very positive of the future of the tool, but I can't say the same for the community and userbase which in the end does drive everything, that depends on management not engineering.
    11 points
  26. Dear members We are happy to announce brand new Youtube channel with focus on C4D node system. In our research we realized that training content for nodes is very sparse and lacking in quality and depth. We already have two lessons available which will be part of ongoing series. Humble request from our side is that, even if you are not into nodes, please subscribe in order that the channel grows which will enable us to monetize it down the road. On longer timeline this can enable us to reduce the subscription period or even remove it alltogether and open up forum for many more artists. https://www.youtube.com/@CORE4D Thank you and enjoy the content! P.S. Any member willing to contribute to the channel is more than welcome - drop us a message : )
    10 points
  27. *Shakes 8 ball "Acquired by Adobe in 2025" *shakes 8 ball some more The year is 2030. Unreal engine continues to grow and becomes the defacto render engine for most 3D work due to the balance of realism and render speed. c4d is still going fine and profitable, but blender has become the number 1 app due to the fact that it has been 7 years and the c4d student licences still don't work, thus there havent really been many new users. Octane 2029.2 still crashes every 3 hours, if you ask for tech support they will still blame your psu and gpu drivers. c4d 2030 still has no particle system, 90% of all new c4d features are now provided by Insydium which now has a higher monthly cost than c4d itself. 2035. C4D is now available as a plugin for the Insydium Suite. 2037, Adobe adds a new feature to Photoshop that people actually asked for 2039, Yīngyǔ xiànzài bèi jìnzhǐ, yīnwèi wǒmen de zhōngguó bàzhǔ rènwéi tā wéibèile rénmín de yìyuàn. Xí huángdì wànsuì
    10 points
  28. I'm moving my office. Look what I found. Old hardware and software. Memories that are now going away to make room for new things 😉
    10 points
  29. You can't multi-thread xpresso. That is the problem. That is why the new system is being created with multi-threaded at the heart of the architecture. The scene nodes will allow you to overcome the object count limitation that has plagued C4D for years. Allowing for hundreds of thousands, or millions, of objects to move around your scene. Scene nodes have a purpose and will be the future of a lot of new content in C4D. Essentially you can create capsules that are the equivalent, or surpass, the speed of C++ plugins. This is because the capsules code can run on the GPU taking advantage of all your system resources. Xpresso won't go away. But it is a very different system to the Scene Nodes. Scene nodes won't talk to Xpresso because then that would tie Scene Nodes to the Xpresso update system, essentially making it single threaded and reliant on all the other messaging going through C4D. However you could use Xpresso to control a Capsules parameters if you wanted. The same way you would control a Sphere for example. Since a Capsule can also create new geometry types (as an example), and expose parameters to C4D that Xpresso could control. Different things, different use cases.
    10 points
  30. Hi everyone, I'd like to announce the release of a new plugin for Cinema 4D: Asset Juggler Asset Juggler assists with the creation of series of unique combinations of arbitrary assets. Be it in game development, in order to quickly show different options and variations of a project to a customer or, as requested several times in this community, for series of unique images... We put quite a bit of effort into the design of Asset Juggler and its workflow, to provide as much flexibility as possible, while at the same time keeping the time to results as short as possible. The unlicensed version works as demo, so all functionality can be tested prior to investing money. Only limitation, series will have a maximum of five combinations. Special thanks to forum member Tural Mammadzada for helping with workflow ideas and testing. Cheers, Andreas
    10 points
  31. regarding the rather harsh comments on the simulation stuff: this is the first iteration, sure it isn't there yet with marvellous, maybe it never will, since marvellous is a specialized tool for just that task, so it's not really fair to compare. i remember a lot of you asked for a unified simulation system, now you see the first bits of it and then it's all shit because it isn't perfect yet? to me it's a promising start, still a lot to improve, but overall it's much better than what we had before and the underlying tech allows it to become as good as vellum. (in theory 😉 ) and yeah, judging something by hitting play with default settings is like opening up a new file and hitting render to judge a render engine. solid approach.
    10 points
  32. Well I really don't know where to start with that appalling list of ignorant and uninformed assertion ! Fortunately it will be obvious to most that this is the case without me adding anything at all ! But just taking the comments about the modelling tools as an example, where is 'Set Flow', 'Poke Polys', and 'Smooth Edge' (not Round Edge, which is different) in HB modelling bundle ? Does HB's Points to circle script have all the additional options we have in Fit to Circle ? No, it doesn't. Does it matter, even to the smallest degree, that some of these tools might have been inspired by the fantastic tools in HBMB that all serious modellers have been loving for years ? No it doesn't. We have at least 10 new modelling tools in Cinema, and they are, in the vast majority, massively useful. I have seen INCREDIBLE cloth simulations, some comparable to MD - it is only a matter of time before these surface and make your comments about it even more self-evidently untrue. ZRM in Cinema - BRILLIANT - we now have the best quad remesher in the world integrated in Cinema. There's no counter - argument - it's there and it works, and I would bet 99% of Cinema users are incredibly grateful it is ! And I am not going to waste my time addressing the other rubbish in that post. CBR
    10 points
  33. Version 1.0.0

    302 downloads

    This is a hybrid "texture/procedural" OceanShader for C4D+Redshift. -- Foam is texture-based; no-tiling is achieved via OSL -- Foam-distribution via curvature (2 seeds for more natural look) -- Foam around objects via AO, also texture-based. -- Texture by Ivan Bandura/Unsplash (slightly edited) The scene-file contains a xpOcean-object, but it should also work well with other ocean-generators. Have fun and feel free to improve (and upload your better version ;D)
    Free
    10 points
  34. Off topic but I would like to say I am really enjoying the conversations happening in this thread. I just wish we could all keep chatting like this usually, instead of just once every 6 months when a new version of C4D releases.
    10 points
  35. Well the new UI was primarily created by the same hard-working and talented UX designer behind the old UI. It was over a decade old, and needed to be updated not just for appearance sake but also for some technical reasons. And I imagine y’all can respect that while our UX designers have lots of great skills, they’re not C++ modeling developers.
    10 points
  36. Sadly this is the truth now. I also know many developers who have left C4D plugin development. With the cost of subscriptions and the fact that nobody wants to pay to help develop a plugin to its full potential, the number of C++ developers will go down to almost 0. The C++ plugin development market will disappear completely. - The cost of C4D for one reason. Developers now have to either pay a monthly subscription or be eligible to join the registered developer program. If you are a C++ developer then please reach out to support and ask about their developer program. You may be eligible. - Ongoing SDK changes means throwing away lots of code. Anything for R19 backwards needs a re-write. - Every new version of C4D requires building and maintaining a new version of the plugin for customers. - And since Catalina for macOS it is now much much harder to build and release a plugin for OSX. Unless you do it right the OS will block your plugin from loading. - Equipment issues. You have to have multiple machines to be able to build and test these plugins. - Taxes. If you are running a proper registered business you have to do it properly. You can't sell your plugins anywhere legally unless you collect and remit tax to all the different countries in the world. GumRoad and FastSpring do that. But that takes a 8% cut of the sale. - Business costs: If you are running a business then that costs as well. Very hard to break even selling things cheap or giving them away, - New License System: In R20 developers had an easy way to lock to the serial number of C4D. But since R21 onwards every C4D developer now needs to roll their own custom built licensing system. Every Single Developer needs to do this. Reinventing the wheel over and over. It is not easy to do and takes so much time to develop and adds zero benefit to the plugin you are actually trying to sell. - Making C++ plugins for C4D is increasingly become much harder as well. They have a brand new way of doing things that will eventually mean you need to update more and more of your original code. Possibly leading to the inability to have one code base for all version of C4D. - Websites, Support, Documentation, Video Tutorials... the list goes on and on. If you just want to write small plugins that are more workflow oriented and less computationally expensive, then Python is the way to go. But even then you will run into issues as the SDK changes. It takes a very long time to become proficient enough to develop a plugin that is useful enough to even consider trying to sell. Then you have Marketing and selling of your plugin, which is an art form all in itself. For myself I find I am really only able to squeeze in a little bit of dev time here and there. I have an automated build system which is an absolute life saver. But you still need to do websites, videos and support. For anyone still reading this... if you like a plugin or a plugin developer then treat them kindly. Donate where you can, support them anyway you can. Because before long they will all be gone. I see a lot of articles about artists not working for exposure. The act of a plugin developer giving plugins away cheaply or even for free is exactly that. Just to get the word out. But unless they get paid then they will all leave. And they will all leave. It is just not profitable unless you spend 2 years making 1 plugin that hits the ball out of the park first go. But who has the time for that these days. Best of luck to all you devs out there!
    10 points
  37. I do hate subscriptions. And I hate online activation / periodic checking. Even though I have R21, I don't use it because when I don't use it regularly it loses the login credentials and I have to look for my password again. And it's a pain with plugin licenses compared to the easy serial system before. Also I don't want to have my workstations online all the time. The MSA for R20 to R21 was waste of money for me. Therefore R20 is the last version of Cinema I enjoy and I'm glad it was a great release (compared to what came after, feature-wise, in my opinion). As a hobbyist I'm not interested in renting software, I want to be able to use them whenever and wherever I want at a fixed one-time cost (except for maintenance for perpetual software which I can stop at any time and still use the software). I paid for R16 - R21 Studio with MSA and purchased almost all commercially available C4D plugins (TFD, Forester, X-Particles, Drive, RealTraffic, everything from Nitro4D and GSG etc.), various render engines (Vray, Redshift and Cycles 4D) and commercial training. With this I can work for years to do almost everything 3D with Cinema, specially combined with Blender. When there was MSA, I was very enthusiastic about Cinema. Siggraph with new MAXON announcements for the upcoming versions were like Christmas and Birthday for me. MAXON as a company with the new management and policy lost all charm for me and sadly I lost interest in Cinema improvements. Online documentation, online asset library, subscription-only features (even including plugins like CV Tokens), no Cineversity for perpetual license owners, MAXON's way of obscuring the rental cost with tax and annual payments, hiding the perpetual upgrade cost, limited bugfix support, that all draws a clear picture to me, not my thing. As someone mentioned, I feel the same, MAXON joined the dark side. With the online checking and subscription, MAXON lost me as paying customer. Also, to me it's clear that perpetual licenses will disappear at some point. Well, I'm only a hobbyist, I understand there are other requirements for enterprises. I'm not mad at MAXON and as mentioned, I still enjoy using the last (and to me best) perpetual version of Cinema.
    10 points
  38. Apart from what we wish for this software we must be realistic and try to see what is MAXON's real goal and what should we be expecting. To do this we also must see what is happening in the other 3d software packages. C4d along with houdini is the main package for motion graphics and an industry standard in broadcast, advertisement, design studios, motion studios etc. MAXON will try to defend this status since it's the main profit branch so it will include more stuff dedicated to motion (scene nodes inluded) and also the reason why its buying red giant etc. Also c4d is know for it's easy approach so the stuff we'll see it's probably gonna be not very technnical. in my opinion MAXON will try to consolidate its presence in this side of the industry in order to keep blender away and to distinguish itself from houdini, since its an easier and more compreensive software. the other commercial software packages are kinda doing the same. in their own game. Autodesk 3ds max is boosting its modelling tools and also developing better material editor in an effort to maintain its status as modelling and render king. However, it relies in two major 3d party softs. Vray and recently tyflow. Without those two max is just and old software with good modellling tools but nothing special. Also autodesk is not introducing nothing new besides these features. max doesn't have a decent take system, nor a decent xref system, nor volume modelling etc. The list goes on. And you have to rely on lots of third party software. Maya is the same, they boost rigging/animation tools since its main business but besides that i dont see much. They dont upgrade their motion graphic tools , or everything else. and its crashes a lot (kinda buggy) Houdini is the main competitor for c4d in my opinion. apart from modelling, sculpting and character animation and rigging it is a stronger software but its hard to learn, and is a lot slower to produce results comparing to c4d in small advertisement projects. However i think they favour the development of vfx tools apart from anything else, since its main profit . Basicaly every company do the same as MAXON. They develop their software according to their commercial needs in order to defend their status in each industries, and if that status is gonne that software is as good as dead. We all want better tools that can do everything and in the end to pay the lowest price as possible. I think its very difficult to do that. Sometimes it's just better to learn a second soft and use it to complement (if needed). For motion graphics / advertisement etc, c4d will be a safe bet and with good tools. For everything else i think it will depend. My guess is that character animation will receive some better tools also. (and i hope) cheers
    10 points
  39. I'm in the first camp, have already switched to Blender. I used to teach Cinema 4D and now I teach Blender, mainly to beginners. MAXON is completely overlooking that group of people, they have nothing to offer them that doesn't cost a fortune. And for me, teaching Cinema 4D is no longer fun because I hate teaching to people who can't afford a decent render engine and have to resort to standard/physical. That's just painful. It's not like people don't have other subscriptions to pay every month, it all adds up, especially with all the addons that you need for C4D... All the good stuff costs extra! I'd rather use all that money to go on fun vacations and use (and teach) Blender instead. Would love to get back to C4D at some point (in addition to Blender) but I'm not getting my hopes up...
    10 points
  40. I had a surface level look at scene nodes but then digged into the past material nodes again and want to share some thoughts, not so much about the functionality but the implications of the prioritized things. Maybe I am confused about some things but I think this post is very valuable regardless and contains things I thought about some time and as the C4D team seems to be listening Ill put up the effort. Scene Node & Material Node first thoughts: - First things I searched were UV, blur and curvature nodes, then normal - Right now there is no UV unwrap node, when you create one, please add parameters to clamp the packing to a range on the UV space so you can pack multiple pieces to separate areas - I am a bit confused of the existence of material nodes in parallel. Will material nodes be switched into the new system? - If not, at least link the systems in some way. And maybe have them not at totally different areas in the UI. Material nodes button next to the scene nodes button? - UX: I am heavily expecting to get a preview when I click the node in the search - show a preview on the Attibutes manager maybe with a colored border or such to indicate preview - UX: what is desperately missing is a search function on right click on the background in both. There is a "Type to search" but it can find nothing. Having to go top left and click the search bar is very inefficient and slow. At least the commander should know contextually to find the respective node graph nodes. - UX: all nodes so far have no documentation which is unusual from MAXON and one of the best parts of Cinema usually. These are the most complex things in the engine as they are used in combination with others and as such they need the documentation the most. - Talking of material nodes, I was very dissapointed to find no curvature node in either. Curvature maps are an extremely low hanging fruit way of increasing material quality by an extreme amount for users. All modern texturing apps only need curvature and AO to make extremely advanced texturing and material effects and cinema already creates a good AO. Without a good curvature generator an entire world of texturing quality is just absent in Cinema until it is introduced. The inverse AO trick is no real substitute. After seeing this I really have to iterate on why this is important, as this really shows a big detachment from what is essential in a material system and 3D Modeling in general. The state of Modeling & Texturing in Cinema 4D Don't take this too negatively when I say it, and this will sound like a big tangent but I think its very important for the future - I believe Cinema offers me a great package with just different focus but there needs to be a wake up call, the Cinema community and team is in a bubble where standard 3D modeling basically is not practiced. Many C4D users are not very keen of going above modeling simple objects and seemingly the overwhelming amount don't start to begin how to properly texture a model. For this post I tried to search picture examples and was shocked how little proper textured models exists from C4D users. Texturing is exactly half of 3D modeling. 3D modeling is the essence of everything being done in this software. People cheat around it with cubic and tiling materials and so did I, but without raw offline rendering power that would never begin to work. What C4D users are doing is throwing on raw calculation power to hide bad workflows. If you would just give people the tools for texturing you wouldn't have to put as much effort into upgrading the rendering. A good texture is doing more than you can achieve in 10 years of rendering progress or buying all the new render engines. I will make some strong suggestions later. This all is low hanging fruit really but there is a strong absence of things that users from all others software users see as absolute basic. Lets see what usually is being done; Visual Target & Examples: In other 3D applications you almost all models being done with a unique UV workflow. Very popular is the highpoly to lowpoly baking normal maps workflow as it gives you everything you need (certain special texture maps) to make cutting edge texture work, which is then usually done in a painting app like substance painter or 3D coat. Often are also only masks created and then the model is assembled with shaders in final engine by using the complex masks as a base for layering. Texturing & Baking - Lets reiterate why highpoly > lowpoly baking (not the same as cinema 4D baking features), curvature [ ], normal mapping [ ], AO [x] is such a popular and extremely powerful workflow for asset creation in the entire world of 3D and see what is out there. (Not saying any of these artworks are bad of course!) You can get by with tiling materials only, but this is generally regarded as not good by the average 3D modeller and cinema users get good results regardless due to raw power of offline rendering making things still look pretty good but there is so much more possible. Lets ignore the complicated normal map baking, in cinema polycount dosnt matter that much, but lets focus on the things that drive majority of the quality in the visuals and that means texturing. The UV tools are finally there, so people can take the next step now. Curvature Maps - This is the essence of any good texture. One can do some trickery to get a really poor replacement by using a channel from a baked normal map, or in cinema the inversed AO shader but that is far from great. If you want to texture well, you need to generate a proper curvature map. Based on a curvature map presenting cavity and convexity, one can extremely quickly derive extremely complex edge wear by just multiplying 1-2 overlapping noises onto it. A good artist will further paint but that alone would be a extreme advancement. Proper curvature is usually baked to a texture by raycasting an objects surface but some also use a post effect for a cheap approximation. Blender offers a cheap curvature in the viewport based on scene depth, which make my employees preview renders look way better than my cinema 4D previews. There is an "Edges mask" node but I just cant get it to work. It only has a color output but dosnt do anything no matter which setting, always pure black. Model UVd or not, phong breaks or not. There is no documentation and nobody on the internet seemed to use it so I assume it has a bug. (This all is not for me, Im getting my curvature either way by full baking workflow but I wouldn't say no If I can automatize with shader nodes) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Suggestions: Now that we know what our visual targets are, what can we do to improve? 3 Steps to upgrade visual outcomes of C4D artists and worth of shader nodes setups drastically: 1. Embrace Curvature Add a curvature node in the material graph using the standardized curvature map style output all bakers use, add a curvature feature to the baker. Think about how to bring this extremely simple and powerful feature to majority of the users on the most direct way, this is the easiest way to increase visual quality of virtually everything C4D users output. This needs to be right next to the Fresnel, Gradient, Color and Noise in the material dropdown. Make sure to add a 'levels' or similar in the node itself. + Fix the vertex map shader not working when layered + Fix? the edge wear node + Add a curvature based detail edge chipping effect to the metal, plastic, rock, wood graph example materials to show off the power. 2. Embrace object space masking All the other things which are not based on curvature or AO are usually based on a directionality. Like sand coming from the top, ice layering, dirt on the car skirts etc Use the triplanar functionality as a base and add a directional gradient node. Add a dropdown to select the direction in easy to read directions "Left, Right, Top, Bottom" etc and add a gradient. This can then be used in an easy and user friendly way as a mask to make all these type of effects like sun bleaching, ice, etc. I would strongly suggest looking at 3D coats implementation of additionally wrapping the complicated things in an easy front end node, which makes creating complex materials a breeze but in reality its just some very simple world/objectspace and curvature multiplications in a preset but this increases the output of good art per time immensely. (3D coat does not offer the raw directions so you are limited in the end but like this is is way faster to create these complex layered masks than in substance painter or quixel mixer) Also make sure these new masks are compatible with other renderers if that is possible. The C4D material nodes are crazy in what they offer, texture things by approximation of 2 objects? There are so many advanced options but sadly the absolute essentials are missing, making the entire thing so much less interesting than it could be. Imagine the big vision of scene nodes in conjunction of material nodes, there is so much potential here. Its so close of going all the way through the entire pipeline. 3. Add Anti-Tiling - Vertex Painting Yes you can do this already but its not in great shape. This is the last of the big texturing essentially aside of maybe trim sheets. Add a vertex painting example material. Fix the vertex map not working with layers. Add a vertex painting shader node that works with the first given vertex map of the shaded object. Right now using vertex maps is extremely cumbersome as you would need one material per model with unique vertex map. In other engines the material just checks the vertex color and thats it. Also I would get rid of the vertex map concept and make everything into vertex color but thats easy said. This seems like a relict and makes everything confusing. You can also not see your shaded model when painting a vertex map right now IIRC. - Stochastic Sampling This is for the people using cubic only regardless. Add stochastic sampling to remove tiling in the projections and as a node. This won't help push people towards proper texturing but this will greatly aid all the people who rely so heavily on cubic mapping and tiling materials. Its not that hard and its a killer feature. - Interpolated cubic mapping I think I saw this somewhere, the cubic mapping interpolated the values at the intersection between both sides based on an angle, it was not perfect but you would not have the ugly seams you get right now with cubic mapping in cinema 4d. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Lets talk about practical "Real world" NODE examples and what I feel is wrong. In cinema circles people do a lot of simple abstract things and ""real world"" usage cases really like to fall under the table, (and material nodes did really fall under the table) so I really want to highlight some real world scenarios that many people would like to build given the chance and are needed all the time. If MAXON could pull this off and include the material nodes to do some parametric texturing and include baking, then this all could be extremely powerful and a big contender for the procedural workflows which are very much in focus nowadays. Doing some crazy random abstract shapes and such is cool for motion graphics but if the engineering team is always just doing such things then the practical things fall flat and people will be pushed even further to just do some abstract random stuff and see it as gimmick for motion graphics. I feel the material nodes had this exact issue, where nobody did some real texturing with it and as such it has a LOT of highly advanced features but the essentials for good texturing are basically absent. So I very strongly suggest to pick out a set of "real world" examples as goals to achieve to really get to know the requirements and not just add features coming to mind. You see it in the new example videos as well. Twisty tubes, Extruded faces, arrays of primitives. Suggestions for Scene Node goals: The engineering team needs clarity and to know what people want it to support. What are the goals? What do people actually need and want? Hrvoje made some good attempts with the road and raycast, thats the stuff has real potential. I can't speak for animation and mograph but this is certainly the type of stuff that is highly desired in tons of 3D environments and I see always asked for: - Pipe Builder with Unwrapping - Cable & Post connection Builder - Shelf Builder - Skyscraper Builder - Road Builder with Signs - Rock Builder with lowpoly > voxel > unwrap > bake > lods - Spline River Generator with stones and Flow maps generated - Biome Builder - controlled asset placements based on areas, falloffs, certain requirements and exclusions - Terrain Builder with slope & height based vertex color material, assets populated by vertex colors, transistion of biomes - Car Tire Builder Spline Based with High & Lowpoly - Raycasted Decal population, like paint splattering decals on shots - Spline Castle Wall, House Wall and railing builder with doors and windows - Auto UV mapping and packing into areas - Material based destruction setups - Auto Exposure and color balance - Grow vines around objects based on geometry convexity - Simulate "heat maps" based on geometry and raycasting "roomba" style to see where people are walking in your building - Automatic Edge trim decals - Voxel Operations - Create voxelized highpoly and generate variations, automatic unwrap, bake maps, material based on baked maps Imagine the future of the C4D nodes, what would you want to be able to do? What is the big vision? For me, p.Ex. Model a parametric shelf, set up infinite variations with a seed, select 20 variations, make them automatically into highpoly wood through volume building and projecting different wood noises from all directions (you can do this now to a degree), unwrap your input lowpoly geometry and or remeshed highpoly automatically in the node system with the new unpacker, let the graph cut out all the unnecessary loops based on angle - pack the wood in the upper 3/4th and leave the metal pieces in the lower 1/4th of the UV, dynamically create a decal mesh based on the text, pack the text lettering into a seperate UV, then get your AO and curvature bake to make AAA level quality materials based on actual geometry based on your material node setup, then be able to export this all into any render engine of choice with all textures and lowpoly on a naming convention (or render in C4D) - These all are of course a very optimistic wishlist. I'm sure not all these are achievable and some would probably be misplaced by using this system but we need to get away from playing and thinking with abstract objects and shapes, and into something practical otherwise it will be the same fate as material nodes are right now, amazing potential and highly advanced featureset but missing the real world use cases - and are then rarely used. These node structures have a lot of potential but we'll only see it when the engineers actually get the feedback from the designers, and only when the designers have some actual practical goals in mind they try to achieve, they can properly give back feedback where the limits are right now and what they need engineering to expand on.
    10 points
  41. If I may, I love Cinema 4D and my intent with my Avatar is not to profess fanatical devotion to Blender. Now, Blender is a good program. It's users do have a lot to be happy about. I did try it when the interface improved with 2.8. But despite those improvements, it is still a bit clunky. Everything is there and for the most part stable, but (IMHO) the UI unnecessarily gets in the way of fully enjoying the program. In short, C4D is a lot more fun to use! So why do I have that Avatar? To serve as a reminder to MAXON's leaders should they troll the site that the hobbyist community does have a pretty valid option other than C4D for our CGI fix. Yes, we could follow the subscription plan, but we are hobbyists....we use C4D for the love of it and not as part of a business model. As for me, should my personal financial circumstances change such that I can no longer afford to stay current with the program, I still want to have something that works and not watch years of work go away when my subscription turns off. You can ONLY keep C4D on with a permanent license and those costs have increased significantly (from $620/year in 2017 for the Studio MSA to ~$950/license upgrade). So my avatar is really part of that old argument of subscription vs. permanent licenses. I am a hobbyist that wants permanent licenses as long as it remains affordable for a hobbyist. Blender as an open source program will always be affordable. Blender gives us options....a reminder for the MAXON employees and CEO who visit the site and not intended to disrespect its members. Dave
    10 points
  42. I'm a member of the forum from the "3dKiwi" era. After the switch of captains there was as bit of upgrading the forum (which took a bit to be honest). I have nothing against paying for the membership, but ARE YOU SERIOUS guys? People are searching for a solution to a problem -> they find a link in google -> you have to pay to find out if this will solve your problem. NOPE. I would never do that. I'm paying my sub just because this was and still is the best C4D forum and I like helping other guys when I can. READING THE ANSWERS SHOULD BE FREE!.
    9 points
  43. I don't seen 3Dpangel/Dave's posts as supporting it, simply stating facts. I don't like the direction Maxon is taking in a corporate way. I still use their software, our studio still pays for it, I still test it, but I don't like the direction or how they're treating customers. For years, the users have trusted Maxon and given them a lot of leeway. We've had years of lacklustre updates with hardly a feature worth the time or effort of installing a new version, let alone having a 'must-have' release where people have clamoured to download it ASAP. With the rug pull that is removing perpetual licences, all that good will is gone and the relationship is now reduced down to a simplistic monetary one. Is the product worth the price, or is it not? Because all the good will and sense of community is completely evaporated. If I were a hobbyist, I wouldn't pay for it, Blender is a large amount to learn as a new app, but I dare say that I would see this as a fun challenge, and at the end I know I'll get free updates forever and a good pace of product updates. C4D has been waiting for this core rewrite to fix the general speed issue for well over a decade now. Capsules were only made as a way to get some use out of the new core and nodes system because otherwise the new node based core would be 100% useless. My educated guess is that we're still 5 years away from the new node core actually replacing basic functionality. Until the new core replaces basic geometry like cubes and cylinders, and basic modelling tools like bend and twist deformers, Its a glorified set of fancy xpresso plugins which has cost an inordinate amount of dev resources. If I were a new 3D user, Im not honestly sure if I would pick C4D as my app of choice. Really for the same reasons, Blender is good, C4D is slightly better, is it worth the money? With xparticles and a thirdparty render engine, yes, C4D is great. But Blender has many of those same render engines, so a lot of c4d's userbase really comes down to mograph / xparticles users and those who are just used to how the software works. This includes myself. If I could click my fingers and transfer my c4d knowledge into blender knowledge, I probably would.
    9 points
  44. It's kind of sucky that they didn't use the most recent version to announce the end of perpetuals so people knew from then on this would be the last, rather than just all of a sudden not have perpetuals, say basically nothing about it, and have the previous year's be the last perpetual. It's a bit of a sleazy way of doing it imo.
    9 points
  45. I'm against people repeatedly asserting things that aren't true, despite evidence presented to the contrary. It is impossible to discuss anything with people that won't respond to the points answered, the evidence shown, and explanations provided, but instead parrot the same baseless accusations again without further elaboration. You said I didn't give warnings - I then posted the warnings. You said I wasn't interested in the thread, despite me asserting specifically the opposite earlier in this one, and actively contributing to the thread in question ! I then provided a long and detailed explanation for why I locked it. But instead of responding to any of those points you just 'said the power-trip thing again'. It's very difficult to respect that attitude. And thank you for reminding me of what my moderation duties involve, but you left out the one other duty that primarily motivated the decision to lock the thread - that I am trying to do my small part in preventing Core4D from developing a reputation for being less a forum people go to for help and reasoned debate than a poisonous slanging match arena, where people say absolutely anything they like without the slightest thought or respect for the choices and opinions (and in some cases hard work) of others. No. Not bingo. I do not have any blanket objection to criticism of Maxon, especially if it is evidenced, and if the reasons for those accusations / complaints are explained, and subsequently calmly discussed. What I do object to is unevidenced assertion that goes on and on over multiple threads, for a sustained period, and involves endless repetition of the same points, some of which are valid, but more of which are not. If people were repeatedly berating Autodesk or anyone else with that level of vitriol and for that amount of time, and with that much repetition, and with so much of it unjustified or disproportionate I would have the same response. But these other companies don't seem to attract nearly the same level of hatchet-job appraisal and condemnation that appears to be exclusively reserved for Maxon, and I can't help but consider that unfair and feel the impulse to limit it if I reasonably can. You'll notice I have not locked this thread despite believing it's a crushing waste of everyone's time. But I would like to express the hope that Admin will do it for me at some point ! CBR
    9 points
  46. We are very happy to inform you that the latest release of U-Render is online! Release 2022.4 brings a brand-new package of features for Non-Photorealistic Rendering (NPR), Screen Space Global Illumination (SSGI), Multi-materials, Sharpening filter, an easy-to-use installer and a free assets library. Non-photo-real rendering (NPR) focuses on enabling a wide variety of expressive styles for digital art. In its very first version, it offers many new features, such as color gradients, specularity, emissive, rim light, normal / bump, but also mask, displacement and overwrite lines. The lines drawn can be applied scene wide or on a per-material basis allowing enhanced artistic granularity on the style applied. Screen Space Global Illumination (SSGI) allows creating a more authentic looking real-world lighting environment by adding indirect lighting within the screen view area. Multi-materials helps to save time with cloned objects and numerous materials to manage. Release 2022.4 introduces the sharpening filter as well. This helps for printed rendering, when details are needed to be shown. In combination with DOF the sharpening filter boosts the focused area reaching much more reality and eye-catching effects. U-Render has also improved the installation process with an easy-to-use installer. Furthermore, this release offers Cinema 4D S26 support. Read more here: https://u-render.com/news-2022-04-release-2022-4/
    9 points
  47. In broad terms, Omniverse is a suite of freemium applications (free for personal use, payed for companies as an Enterprise version). There are applications for developing your own apps and games based on OV technology, apps for viewing archviz scenes and apps for building scenes. There's a launcher from where you can install what you need. Omniverse has its own custom realtime RTX raytracer and a fast path tracer as well as its own physics system for rigid and soft bodies. These are more or less the key features you'd use when you want to use OV for building and rendering scenes. Omniverse requires a Nvidia RTX GPU to run. All apps are based completely on USD. Omniverse apps do not accept anything BUT USD. In the background, the apps use a database core called Nucleus. This is essentially a localhost server that you can setup only for your machine or you can setup a true server to share with team mates online. There's also an app called OV drive for quickly creating a virtual harddrive in Windows Explorer that is linked to the Nucleus core. Software companies can develop connectors (= plugins / live connections) for OV. With these plugins, you then export your entire scene or single assets from the scene as USD files to the Nucleus core, e.g. by exporting them to the virtual Omniverse drive. Then you import the USD assets from the Nucleus core folder structure to your OV scene. Once exported, you can continue editing the scene in your DCC application and with every change you make, be it a modelling change, lighting, materials, adding new objects (...you name it), a re-export of the scene as USD (thus overwriting the existing USD asset) to Nucleus is triggered in the background. The nucleus core keeps track of only the differences since the last export and streams them to the OV scene, causing the assets to update in near real-time in OV. So if you are using a nucleus server that is online, one team member working from home can edit an object in Maya, another team member somewhere else does something in C4D and another person textures something in Substance Painter. With the connectors from these apps, all team members can see what the others are doing live on their own screen through the scene in OV. Because OV is based on USD, it is compatible with Pixar's USD Hydra delegate (essentially a bridge for render engines): Any render engine that supports Hydra can be plugged into OV and used for rendering the scene instead of OV's default path tracer. The main idea behind OV is thus collaboration across multiple apps in real-time where OV can serve as both a bridge and an endpoint for rendering the final scene. Because everything is a baked, exported asset, there are no incompatibilities between apps. USD supports MaterialX, so I suppose we'll see more MaterialX support across render engines in the future in addition to each engine's custom materials. Now read the initial post again and it should make more sense 🙂 Edit: German press release from Maxon if you want to know more about C4D / Redshift and OV: Team-basierte Zusammenarbeit für Maxon-Produkte jetzt mit NVIDIA…
    9 points
  48. Don't worry guys - the next version of Z brush will be great - it will just have half the icons missing... 🤣
    9 points
  49. Why is it that Houdini, 3ds Max and Maya all have very affordable and powerful indie versions and C4d does not? When I purchased c4D studio (R17) it came with two years of MSA free. So I paid $3500 and didn’t have to pay a cent for two years. And then the MSA was $650 which as a good deal amount of money but I owned the program, it was mine. Now you can still have a perpetual license but the price isn’t even featured on the ‘Buy’ page. And for upgrades you need to contact MAXON. I feel that it’s just a matter of time before perpetual is done away with completely. Now you need to rent the program, stop paying for the price to rent and you can’t use the program anymore. Now instead of a $650 a year MSA you need to pay $719 a year to rent it. And if you want a modern render engine like every other program comes with (redshift) you need to pay $983.00 a year or pay $719 and rent either Octane, Arnold or something else for $400 - $800 more a year. The last 4 out of 5 smaller vfx and animation studios I have worked with in Los Angeles have artists using Blender for one task of another. Nobody was using C4d, some had in the past but switched. These are generally smaller indie studios and not tied to huge pipelines so they have the freedom to choose what makes sense to them financially, ethically and personally. The majority of the younger artists coming in where raised on blender and Youtube. Or learned Maya in school. Why should they use c4d except if they want to get a job that requires it? Usually at a high end motion graphics studio? While I love c4d, as a freelance artist and hobbyist who wants to continue to play and experiment with a tool for the rest of my life it is absurd to me when I think I will be paying to rent something forever. With Blender the tool is completely mine, though there are a ton of things that make no sense to me in the program such as no logical way of copying a modifier from one object to another without remembering a weird shortcut. Bizarre unintuitive spline tools and the lack of a decent picture viewer. There are tutorials on how to make anything I can dream of whether it is a weekend spent making a spaceship, castle,dinosaur, dragon or modeling characters. There are hundreds of free tutorials for that. Or a subscription to CG Cookie or something. For c4d there isn’t a single tutorial for either of the mentioned things even after decades of the program being around. Maybe a simple gummy bear or dancing hotdog. If I want to make a hundred cubes undulate, well there are a million tutorials for that. Removing Cineversity for anyone not on the subscription was another slap in the face. Do I switch to Blender and Houdini indie and donate a couple hundred bucks a year to blender cloud with millions of great tutorials, assets, movies and tools and helping the program grow? Keep my perpetual R21 and buy a decent render engine and UV tool and be left behind in a few years? Or pay $719 - $1000 a year for a c4d subscription for the rest of my life. Offering an indie license or keeping perpetual with decent yearly upgrade prices would be a decent thing for MAXON to do as well as attract new users.
    9 points
×
×
  • Create New...

Copyright Core 4D © 2023 Powered by Invision Community