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Maybe it's been moved a new place, but I didn't see a render engine section anymore, so I'm posting this here. I watched this very well done and extensive look at all of the most popular render engines. It's done by Andrew Price, the Blender Guru, but he uses different apps if an engine isn't available in Blender. Lots of good info if you're on the fence as to which engine to choose. At least I thought so.

I think he covers off that point in the video to be fair. Expert users can reduce the times in ALL render engines. There's a broader point though - I think the fiddling around time in the render setings should be added to the render time in these tests! It's fine having Octane render something in 30 seconds that takes Corona 2 minutes. But if the setup in Octane takes 2 minutes to fine tune, than its actually taking me longer than in Corona, where I basically don't have to change anything and it already looks beautiful. Incidentally, Is anyone using Vray now that its being developed directly by Chaos and is CPU/GPU. It does very well in the test above, but I dont hear it mentioned much anymore. (They also recommend using the default render settings for the best speed these days!)

every render engine has its strengths and weaknesses, it totally depends on the project which one is the right choice. i use standard, corona, redshift or arnold, depending on which one gets the job done most efficiently. for arch vis stills and product vis corona or vray is probably the best choice. for cinematic looking everydays octane is hard to beat. if you have somewhat bigger animation projects redshift is really good... on huge projects, where you can‘t anticipate entirely in the beginning what you might need down the road arnold is probably your best bet. you don‘t have to learn them all, but having a choice between 2-3 engines depending on the job really helps making your life a bit easier. in the end they are all quite similar and not that hard to learn.

Its so subjective and there are hardware realities to consider as well. I've started looking at render engines like Cameras. Some people like to shoot on Canon, some like to shoot on Nikon, some prefer...... I think less about tests of seconds but which one feels better and is more instinctive to me. Corona is this hands down for me - easily the easiest render engine I've ever learned and great images right out of the box. But I don't do animations, or heavy vfx, or characters, so it's going to be so different for everybody and I don't pretend to think it's the best solution for anyone else. Without the render wars, though, we would still be yelling at random strangers online about mac vs. PC, pepsi vs. Coke, or the z-brush interface.

I can give you a car modelling tutorial in 4 words: Reference, Alignment splines, poly patching and SDS ! However, if you'd like that elaborated on somewhat, here's Youtuber PolygonPen explaining in rather more exhaustive detail... it's a good tutorial; he is very thorough. You can build the whole car using this strategy - quite a lot of rinse and repeat involved. CBR

I mean, AE JUST reintroduced multiframe rendering after like what, 10 years since they removed it? I don't think AE is good at benchmarking anything but single core performance 😄

Here's a really quick Surface Deformer rig in action... Here it's in UV mapping mode, using the offsets to animate it about. the main advantage here is that we are actually conforming the moving object to the surface of the central one, even if it is very uneven, as I suspect it might be in an organic type animation. Couple of disadvantages / things to watch with this though: 1. It's dependent on the UVs in the central object; here I used standard sphere UVs, which look fine in the middle but rubbish at the poles - suggest you try hexasphere to start with because of the better UVs you will likely get. 2. Same advice again for the orbiting objects ! Note the horrible star-format artefacting we get at the centre because I put a standard sphere (albeit squashed) in an SDS ! That would also look a lot nicer had I started with a hexsaphere. CBR

Insydium 25% on Maintenance 40% on Fused https://insydium.ltd/

This file generates a random integer in range 0-6 every 10F random integer.c4d might get you started 😀

I mean you need to take a more realistic view of things. 1) Nothing is ever going to exceed everyone's expectations. The UI will never satisfy everyone, all bugs will never be fixed, Native Redshift will increase the price, Scenenodes can never be complete and never so quickly, Maxon is doing nothing further with Xpresso (at best just hope they don't remove it), and a whole ton of features on your personal wishlist aren't going to suddenly get added any quicker than the development pace or focus of the last five years would indicate, and so on. Ditching backward compatibility is also not something Maxon will do. 2) Modules are not coming back and equally distributing the price amongst them is not how things work.

Looks like a similar list can be found here. Usually, the guys at Greyscale Gorilla have a deal for Black Friday, but I don't see it yet. https://www.actionvfx.com/blog/the-best-of-black-friday-2021-must-see-deals-for-vfx-artists

This poll is premised upon so many absurd and ridiculous assumptions I really don't know what to think.

I have no Idea ! It automatically converted the whole text to uppercase. On top of that, the system wouldn't let me post the poll without filling the Content form which is not in the Poll mode... my "What do you think?" reply was the txt I chose to put...

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Next week, The Pixel Lab will have 30% off all materials, VDBs and… well, everything.

Maxtree has made 90 of its 3D plant models available to download for free. The free Plant Models Vol 60 collection comprises 15 temperate and semiarid plant species, including broad-leaved trees, shrubs, herbaceous plants and grasses. The high-poly assets, which include files that have previously been available as free samples for Maxtree’s commercial plant collections, are provided in formats suitable for use in most DCC applications. The models come with albedo, glossiness, normal, opacity and translucency maps at up to 4,096 x 4,096px. System requirements and licensing The Plant Models Vol 60 assets are provided as Blender, Cinema 4D and 3ds Max files, and in FBX format. 3ds Max users can also download the plants in a format editable inside Exlevel’s GrowFX plugin. The files are licensed for commercial use. (Requires registering for a Maxtree account) I really want this collection but the subscription asks too many personal info and I don't need another newsletter spam source. https://maxtree.org/products/plant-models-vol-60/

The guys from 3Dcoat always put something for sale, Even though is super buggy sometimes, I havent found a better alternative for retopology and UV yet!

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@jackTheStorm Here is a simplified version of that scene. I cut down number of nodes from 23 to 12 while functionally wise it is the same. Also, I generate geometry within nodes since that is most performant. Hope it helps a bit making you more friendly towards nodes. If you hit a snag with nodes just post in nodes section, there are quite a few people on forum that will be more than happy to take a stab at it 🙂 selection_pattern_holes_0001.c4d

That will be a fair expectation, but it is impossible to say when developments in that area will happen. For now, a lot of the gaps are admirably covered by XParticles but of course I appreciate that is an extra cost, and not an insignificant one ! But I don't think the native situation is quite as hopeless as some may imagine; we recently had a look at new dynamics in the S24 placement tool, and it seems reasonable to imagine that PhysX style interaction could be expanded and further integrated as time goes on. I hope cloth gets some love though - it would be great if that were capable of something more than drapes or capes - something that would make it genuinely useful for character clothing. And it can only be a matter of time (though how much time is anyone's guess!) before we get some sort of proper fluid / fire / smoke action... CBR

Actually Neutron is far richer and more capable in options regarding array, geometry, distributions than ICE. Where it lacks is simulation though

errr.. Neutron? 🙂 It is visual programming language at the moment

Also, doesnt have sculpting, not even basic tools like C4D, but you can export to Zbrush, and It had this little plugin for fire and combustion that Insydium bought a few years ago called Explosia FX, so.. there you have it, even if XSI is not with us anymore, its legacy will carry over generations. Fuck Autodesk... (sorry guys for the swear)

It doesnt matter, you can still use XSI, but sooner than later you will encounter roadblocks because is no longer supported, so any driver incompatibility and you are EoL. I bought a 4K monitor and XSI was unusable, although Im getting old and have to use bigger fonts, maybe is not your case. If your plan is to freeze your PC as 2015 and never ever update it, then yes, its a great software and your best bet is to look at Vitaly Bulgarov, who last I knew used to be a big name in XSI, although he also use Moi3D, and Im not sure what he is using these days. Art of Vitaly Bulgarov Softimage community still exist, so they can help you as well. www.si-community.com - Index page XSI vs C4D modeling wise.... to start, cons of XSI was splines and text tool, splines plain suck in XSI. They just do, dont ask why, so use Adobe Illustrator if you truly need splines and export as Version 8.0 because nothing latter will be supported. Strenghts... XSI viewport, it can support a lot ... and I really meant A LOT of polygons, more than C4D, 3dsmax and Blender can support together. It has this old modeling school way of thinking where you need to duplicate half your model and scale it -1 to have symmetry working. It has every modeling tool expected plus the ability to go back and modify them through a smart history stack that does not have an equivalent in C4D or Blender. It also have some uncommon shortcuts (I think it was "E" for moving objects "Y" for points ?)... anyway, you can change shortcuts to maya, although you will loose the ability to loop select. Softimage ICE has no match in C4D land, is similar to Houdini, its very intuitive visual programming language, you can render with XSI mental ray or use Redshift -though Im not sure if they still support it. The only thing XSI does not have as far as I remember was fluids (C4D has plugins for that, XSI doesnt). It has Lagoa multiphysics though, very cool to work with but buggy and obviously not supported anymore. If you need fluids, you can export as FBX and use Realflow. Documentation on Lagoa is scarse though, and Autodesk devs didnt knew exactly what to do with ICE. There are some tutorials on youtube about ICE, or modeling, so, do some research, treat it with respect, XSI was one if not the best of all DCC apps in the market. Countless movies were done with it, including Jurassic Park and even after EoL its legacy continued with the Lego movie. Good luck.

XSI was one of the best pieces of software, unfortunately it was bought and discontinued by AD a while ago. It would still compare favorable with current 3D DCCs, but you can't get it anymore.