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Here is a curl spline setup, quite interesting! Curl_spline.c4d

I'm guessing standalone and included in Maxon One with new bells and whistles. No idea if it will still be called Autograph but the roadmap for those guys is now likely easier as they won't have to replicate anything that is already in Red Giant. The past couple of years too I was wondering how they could afford development, now they don't have to worry as much. Some of the dedicated nerds on Reddit are really swearing about this but I don't get the hate. We get to see new cool stuff in the future and that is a win. Not much more to say about it, so now we can all wait and see what happens.

Happy to say I prefer forum discussion much better than anything else. At very least bashing is delegated to very end of the topic 😄

Fair points, I think the Autograph UI looked fine btw. Maxon has all these Red Giant apps that put their hand up and ask for permission to send stuff over to AE, and maybe they can do it to Fusion, Nuke and whatever other compositing app you care to name. Fusion (though also available as standalone) sits under Resolve. Blender's integrated comping sits under Blender, Houdini's new compositing features sit within Houdini. Maxon makes a 3D app for creating stuff in 3D for comping, they make Red Giant plugins for grading and adding particles and doing further comping and FX, they have a renderer where you can make your 3D stuff look even better before you comp it, but it's all stuff that asks the user to eventually drag the results away into another app at the end. It's like Maxon have a variety of food trucks that make increasingly tasty meals, but they never invested in a restaurant where you can sit down and eat it. So, they sell a lot of apps - again, the Red Giant stuff - that ultimately need another non-Maxon app to really be useful. An umbrella app that gathered SuperComp and Magic Bullet and the like all together, with zero difficulty communicating with C4D, would have its own selling points for C4D users, and it wouldn't make Maxon One any less useful. There aren't a lot of fresh competitors to AE in the industry, as it take a lot of time and effort to build a brand new compositor. But - surprise! - the Left Angle guys just built one. A few (just a few) AE users under EJ's Twitter post on this topic said they had used Autograph, liked it, and one guy said it fixed a few pain points that had bugged him for years about AE. Autograph had received several feature updates since launch, so you'd figure the application was becoming useful for something. The Maxon press release has been carefully parsed by posters here and elsewhere, but the final line of the Maxon comment says much: "Stay tuned, we look forward to sharing more in the future about how we plan to use this technology for the benefit of the community. " The technology being referred to is the compositing application Left Angle built, the only way you can use a compositing application is to composite things in it, Maxon has a bunch of Red Giant plug ins built to be used in a compositor, and they now have a compositor-building team that just brought a finished compositing app into the Maxon building with them. At a certain point, there's not a lot of mystery about where all this is probably going.

I wanted to move a lot of free Blender objects and scenes into C4D. I tried a free IO plugin on Gumroad which could copy/paste between Blender and C4D apparently using FBX. Many times the materials didn't have textures or were referencing ones that were misnamed in the conversion. I decided to try USD instead and it seemed to work better. Full scenes of objects w/materials came across including converted RS materials. While it wasn't perfect as any materials with transparency had that parameter lost in the process, it was better than straight FBX. I had ChatGPT then come up with a couple of scripts, one for Blender and the other for C4D. The one from blender would simply copy selected geo a temp USD file. In C4D, the script would copy that temp file into the existing scene. I eventually added to it to allow the Blender scene to unpack and write any textures to disk before exporting the USD. That's because some Blender scene files have their textures packed inside the file and it seemed like the USD export didn't grab them. Somewhere along the way with the rewrites I had it do, it decided to export the whole scene (incl cameras). I'm ok with that for now. I also had ChatGPT create an icon for the C4D script. I didn't do one for blender since the devs hate any real customization like putting custom buttons on the UI or other fun stuff (without coding it with serpens). I know you can add an icon in the addon but I hate the UX of the addon tabs anyways. Included below is the bundle. Install in blender as an addon. You'll find the addon in the addons tabs. Install in C4D as a script. Apply the icon to the script and place the script anywhere on the UI if you want. It asked if I wanted to create it as a plugin but I didn't go that route. NOTE: This is free. Do whatever with it. During the modifications of the scripts in ChatGPT I specifically told it I'm using Blender 4.4.3 and C4D 2025.2.1. I can't verify this will work on older/future versions of either software. It's the environment I'm using now so I built it as such. It does make me wonder if some of the old scripts/plugins could be reinvigorated w/GPT to make them work with newer versions of C4D. usd_io_blender and c4d.zip

Autograph isn't tainted, just like ZBrush wasn't tainted, but Maxon dropped the name Pixologic and I expect them to drop the name Left Angle. They could easily dump the name Autograph as well though. I guess. One of Autograph's most recent touted features was the ability to import AE files and replicate whatever was going there in Autograph, barring various plug-ins. Maxon are heavily invested in AE plug-ins but it wouldn't hurt to make them all Autograph compatible, and to tell some newcomers, yeah you could sub to Adobe if you want, but Autograph (or whatever the new name is) has most of that stuff now, works 100% with our Red Giant and C4D stuff, and you don't need a second subscription, just ours. Would this make them more bucks, or less? RedGiant already has RedGiant staff working on RedGiant comping plugins, do they need more people doing the same? The Left Angle guys just spent three years invested in doing something different to AE, rather than just making AE plugins (which would have been easier) in a compositor similar to AE but conceived as fresher and hopefully with a more ambitious road map. Should they now (a) dump all that work getting away from AE and go back to making AE plugins, or (b) keep on trying to do the new stuff they were doing when Maxon bought them. More to the point, which of those two options do you think they want to do? If Maxon just wanted to buy all the Left Angle staff and have them do Red Giant plugins, there wouldn't have been much need to put out a press release with the word 'Autograph' in the headline, and a big fat screenshot of the Autograph app at the top of the page. So Left Angle has gone the way of the dodo, but I think the chances of Autograph coming back in some fresh rebranded form are a fair bit higher. Possibly the name will change totally, the UI will get the Maxon treatment. If the 'something new' is something with a timeline, an object browser, a compositing window, various generators and text tools and so on, it'd be daft to make all that a plug-in inside AE rather than presenting the whole lot, tidied up, as a new app hopefully presenting a competitive alternative. The few Autograph threads on the AE Reddit page (there were a handful) all said "Please give us an alternative to AE, it's such a crashy POS". Then when I do my annual ritual of checking the official AE forums, the posts there under most updates read "Has this app become even worse? This is the crashiest version in years." There is room for an alternative. McGravran was previously the director of engineering for After Effects, and the Left Angle guys had heavily planned to make a modern AE competitor, and neither of them seem lazy or unambitious. The next 12 months will be interesting.

Ok, so 2 things contributing to that. 1. Your phong tag has Use Edge Breaks active. 2. In the text object your caps / bevels have the phong break rounding box enabled, which it is by default. Disabling either of those should remove the dividing line between beveled cap and rest of mesh. However, does tend to lead to messy results on the corners of the bevels, as we see below, so mostly it is preferable to leave that on. A messy, non phong-breaked corner, earlier. You'll notice on that particular text object that adjacent topology changes as it goes round the corner, and this is only cleaned up (ie cut / truncated) by the solve intersections checkbox, which we also need here for beveled caps to work in most circumstances. I would agree it is perhaps not the most elegant of solutions, but it is what it is in order to give easy access functionality all within 1 single object, which is rather what the Text Object is all about ! We should be able to circumvent some of these problems by using a bevel deformer instead, where we get more control, but again I fear that geo mismatch at the corners may lead to rounding artefacts anyway, despite the better control / ability to only apply it to certain edges / and manual phong break advantages. OR at any point you can make the mesh editable, and then manually select the edges you don't want phong broken and then use / unbreak phong shading command (I get it from down the very bottom of the right click menu) to remove that hard edge specifically without affecting the corner ones... It probably is worth noting that if we use the 3rd option in the text object rounding department - bevel outside - that actually solves the corner phong beak scrappiness because no geo is intersecting badly like it was before, at the expense of slighty 'fatter' text ! And then, if you set your phong tag angle to something low like 18 degrees, you can get the best of both words, thusly... But then of course we have this massive discrepancy between rounded bevel phong shading and the razor sharp edge running back away from the caps, and a fairly grim transition between the 2 on that corner... So lastly, the phong tag itself can help us there. By setting the angle in there waaay high instead, and changing the phong type to something like Angle and Area weighted we can improve it again, and gain consistency of shading in the bevel AND back across the mesh, so I guess this is the ideal solution in your case. We can see this better if we zoom out a bit and look at the 'B'... very nice consistent shading everywhere. CBR

If you are willing to point to forum that would be greatly appreciated. I don't see why this should anger Maxon people? We have members who are frequent here and help out yet they work for Maxon You could share your multi year project insight and feedback? That sounds interesting

calling this one done..for now 😛

Thank you so very much. Seems I may have resolved the matter by using version 10 which my boot sequence is required to be compatible with Redshift. Again, thank you for your kind words, you are the best!!!!! DDO

Thank you, ALL! This solved my issue and I am humbly grateful! DDO

Interesting to see if they will build a C4D Compositing tool or a new standalone based on Autograph and Red Giant

Yep, I prefer the forum days rather than Twitter or Reddit. I checked a couple of Reddit pages on all this and there were already people wanting to burn Maxon's house down, which seemed a bit harsh. I expect interesting times ahead too.

@BoganTW, I think we properly laid out Maxon's options – it will be interesting to sit on the sidelines and watch how things will unfold. Thank you for the discussion, this feels like internet from a more elegant and civilized age 🙂

Finally got around to finishing all the modelling now working on the materials. first time using bodypaint in side of c4d to paint the textures for the horse body 😄

zBrush was always the leading app in it's segment, acquiring that app was like getting a crown juwel into the portfolio. Autograph on the other side really is tainted with a first reception of being too expensive, too incomplete and too 'old' (referring to their UI/UX and marketing). In my view, the brand 'Autograph' has little clout, I'm sure they'll drop the name at least. The current app and tech? Well, that's a more complex question. You're right, to suddenly have an almost full-blown competitor to AfterEffects is attempting to wield against Adobe. Would Maxo dare, though? Right now they have strategic and sales-alliances like the MaxonOne+Substance bundles. I guess they actually make some bucks from those cooperations. So, what could Maxon gain if they sever the strategic alliance with Adobe and place an competitor? Not much, I guess, because comping land already is a crowded place. There's the AE-people with decades of AE-projects, -scripts, -plugins, - tutorials. That audience is deeply entrenched. The subset of people who are so pissed by AEs legacy cruft already have alternatives in Blackmagic's Fusion (priced very competitively), Blender's integrated comping (priced even more competitively), with even further options on each end... OpenSource Natron or Hi-End Nuke. What would be a 'Maxon Autograph's USP here? It would need to be better than 20 years of AE-development and better priced than free. Tough battle. On the other hand, it would make sense to port the RedGiant offerings not only to Resolve, but also to the rest of comping apps. Maybe the Leftangle-Team will just port stuff and deal with the comping workflows / tech environment of the other apps. Who knows. In the end, I actually hope you are right and we see a fresh new competitor for the Adobe behemoth, I just fail to see the dollars on that way 🙂

I don't intend on posting any more updates to the scripts here. I think it serves its purpose for me. This was just me sharing with you guys and maybe getting ideas for other ways us non-programmers can use AI to make small workflow scripts. I know Greyscalegorilla recently released a small script pack where Chad used AI to help write for him.

Indeed it did, and if we change the mode to Surface as well we even get the curvature we need automatically ! Looks like those specific settings evaded me when I first tried ! CBR

3ds Max 2026.1 The new feature in 3ds Max 2026.1 is the Attribute Transfer modifier, shown in the video above. It transfers attributes – vertex positions, normals and colors, plus up to two sets of UVs – from one model to another. According to Autodesk, it provides a “new, non-destructive modifier workflow” for tasks that were typically done through scripting. There are also updates to a couple of the existing modifiers, including the Push modifier, used to inflate or deflate 3D meshes. It gets a number of new options, including the option to use other objects in a scene to limit the result of the push operation. When the result collides with a control object, it stops moving in that direction in real time. A new Relax Iterations setting smooths the mesh in a similar way to the Relax modifier, helping to prevent issues with self-intersection. It is also now possible to limit push operations to specific axes. The XForm modifier, used to apply transformations non-destructively to objects, gets a choice of four transformation modes. As well as the previous default behavior, users can now transform objects in local space, world space, or relative to another object in the scene. There is also a self-explanatory new Preserve Normals checkbox. 3ds Max’s Universal Scene Description plugin has been updated, with USD for 3ds Max 0.11 adding a new Promote to 3ds Max Object option. It promotes USD geometry to a 3ds Max object, making it possible to work on it using native 3ds Max tools. In addition, the USD Exporter now supports the OpenPBR material, which has been 3ds Max’s default material since 3ds Max 2026. There are also a number of workflow improvements, and new Python functions for manipulating USD layers. 3ds Max’s integration plugin for Autodesk’s Arnold renderer has also been updated, with MAXtoA 5.8.2 supporting the changes in Arnold 7.4.2. They’re primarily performance improvements, especially to scene initialization times when rendering on machines with high numbers of CPU cores. 3ds Max 2026.1 is compatible with Windows 10+. It is rental-only. Subscriptions cost $255/month, up a further $10/month since 3ds Max 2026, or $2,010/year, up $65/year. In many countries, artists earning under $100,000/year and working on projects valued at under $100,000/year qualify for Indie subscriptions, which now cost $330/year. https://help.autodesk.com/view/3DSMAX/2026/ENU/?guid=GUID-584026C2-5EAA-4F03-B676-0A4D0C2372AA MotionMaker Autodesk has released Maya 2026.1, the latest version of its 3D modeling and animation software for visual effects, games and motion graphics work. The release adds MotionMaker, a new AI-based system for generating movement animations for biped and quadruped characters, especially for previs and layout work. Other changes include a new modular character rigging framework inside Bifrost for Maya, plus updates to liquid simulation, OpenPBR support and USD workflows. Autodesk has also released Maya Creative 2026.1, the corresponding update to the cut-down edition of Maya for smaller studios. The headline feature in Maya 2026.1 is MotionMaker: a new generative animation system. It lets users “create natural character movements in minutes instead of hours”, using a workflow more “like giving stage directions to a digital actor” than traditional animation. Users set keys for a character’s start and end positions, or create a guide path in the viewport, and MotionMaker automatically generates the motion in between. At the minute, that mainly means locomotion cycles, for both bipeds and quadrupeds, plus a few other movements, like jumping or sitting. Although MotionMaker is designed for “anyone in the animation pipeline”, the main initial use cases seem to be layout and previs rather than hero animation. Its output is also intended to be refined manually – Autodesk’s promotional material describes it as getting users “80% of the way there” for “certain types of shots”. Accordingly, MotionMaker comes with its own Editor window, which provides access to standard Maya animation editing tools. Users can layer in animation from other sources, including motion capture or keyframe animation retargeted from other characters: to add upper body movements, for example. There are a few more MotionMaker-specific controls: the video above shows speed ramping, to control the time it takes the character to travel between two points. There is also a Character Scale setting, which determines how a character’s size and weight is expressed through the animation generated. You can read more about the design and aims of MotionMaker in a Q&A with Autodesk Senior Principal Research Scientist Evan Atherton on Autodesk’s blog. According to Atherton, the AI models were trained using motion capture data “specifically collected for this tool”. That includes source data from male and female human performers, plus wolf-style dogs, although the system is “designed to support additional [motion] styles” in future. RealityScan 2.0 RealityCapture 2.0 – or rather, RealityScan 2.0 – is a change of branding, with the desktop application taking its new name and logo from Epic Games’ existing mobile scanning app. First released in 2022, RealityScan was originally pitched as a way to make RealityCapture’s functionality accessible to hobbyists as well as pros. It’s a pure photogrammetry tool, turning photos captured on a mobile phone or tablet into textured 3D models for use in AR, game development or general 3D work. New features in RealityCapture 2.0 will include AI-powered masking, with the software automatically identifying and masking out the background of the source images. The change should remove the need to generate masks manually, either in RealityCapture itself or an external DCC app. In addition, the default settings have been updated to improve alignment of source images, particularly when scanning objects with smooth surfaces and few surface features. To help troubleshoot scans, a new Quality Analysis Tool displays heatmaps showing parts of the scan where more images may be needed to reconstruct the source object accurately. The update will also introduce support for aerial Lidar data, which may be used alongside aerial photography and terrestrial data to reconstruct environments more accurately. It isn’t clear which of those new features will be included in the mobile app, although it will presumably also be updated to version 2.0 at the same time, since Epic Games’ blog post announcing the changes describes its aim as to “unify the desktop and mobile versions”. RealityScan 2.0 is due in the “coming weeks”. Epic Games hasn’t announced an exact release date, or any changes to price or system requirements. The current version of the desktop software, RealityCapture 1.5, is available for Windows 7+ and Windows Server 2008+. It’s CUDA-based, so you need a CUDA 3.0-capable NVIDIA GPU. The desktop software is free to artists and studios with revenue under $1 million/year. For larger studios, subscriptions cost $1,250/seat/year. The current version of the mobile app, RealityScan 1.6, is compatible with Android 7.0+, iOS 16.0+ and iPadOS 16.0+. It’s free, including for commercial use. By default, its EULA gives Epic Games the right to use your scan data to train products and services, but you can opt out in the in-app settings. https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/news/all-the-big-news-and-announcements-from-the-state-of-unreal-2025 Unreal Engine 5.6 Character artists get the “biggest update yet” to the in-editor animation tools, with major revamps of Motion Trails, the Tween Tools, and the Curve Editor, plus the option to sculpt morph targets in-editor, and built-in physics in the Control Rig. Lumen gets performance updates to Hardware Ray Tracing (HWRT) mode, intended to help games using the real-time global illumination system run more consistently at 60fps. There are also several completely new toolsets, including the Mocap Manager, a new “end-to-end solution” for recording and managing mocap data inside the Unreal Editor. In addition, MetaHuman Creator is now integrated directly inside Unreal Engine: part of a wide-ranging set of changes to the character-creation framework. The Unreal Engine 5.6 Editor is compatible with Windows 10+, macOS 14.0+ and RHEL/Rocky Linux 8+. For non-interactive content, the software is free to users with revenue under $1 million/year. For larger studios, subscriptions cost $1,850/seat/year, including Twinmotion and RealityCapture. For games developed with the engine, Epic takes 5% of the gross royalties after the first $1 million generated. https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/unreal-engine-5-6-release-notes

It bridged fine when I enabled the Reverse option and set Spin Steps to -1.

Yep, Bridge can do that... Settings thusly However in the precise example you gave, then yes it can do it, but you can see below, it currently breaks if we try and connect offset pieces. There we are actually crossing polys half way down it, which is obviously useless, which I will report as a bug, because I think it should be able to do that ! You can see it's got the right idea, but has failed to execute. And so we must instead delete the end faces and do it with Stitch n sew instead. I used the shift modifier for that, which, interestingly, failed in exactly the same way the bridge tool did, so I had to use Ctrl modifier instead - not ideal, but it worked ! This can't put the sexy curvature in tho, and although it is relatively trivial to pop that in manually, but with Bridge tool working as intended we shouldn't have to ! However, to pop that curvature in in a semi-automatic way, we can can always just select the top and bottom edges in that section and Set Flow them, which does OK... So yes, Cinema can do it, but few more steps than a single tool. CBR

Zero sales, everyone was busy playing Mario kart.

I think Maxon is trying to get into the market of Arch viz and compete with Chaos. Look at AutoDesk - best I can tell from unvetted sources on the internet - there are around 15,000 Maya subscribers vs. 7,5000,000 AutoCAD subscribers. Archviz seems like a good market to go after. Also - Nemetscheck, which owns Maxon, owns Vectorworks, so there is a natural fit there, though it seems they want this new tech to eventually open up to all BIM software. Only time will tell - we should know more at the end of this week after AIA demos. e.

Thank you so much, CBR! This is super helpful and instructive. Thank you for figuring this out.

This is what the fracture object (not voronoi) is for. it allows you to custom make each mograph element

Volume vectors Tornado fun: ) Tornado_vectors.c4d

To tighten it you need to put more thickness to the sweep. Ideally if the Sweep and the thickness of the rope have exactly the same value there shouldn't be any gaps between the knots. And the Field Force would also tighten the shape.

While not solved for Cryptomattes, my solution was to use a Puzzle Matte instead - which I’d totally forgotten about. Fortunately, the Puzzle Matte also ignored the atmospherics and honored my sprites, so I was able to get the alpha restored by just lobbing a Redshift render tag at the root, everything getting an Object ID of 1 (red) which I then used over in After Effects. Saved me from having to laboriously select each and every object as a matte in the Cryptomatte plugin. Posting in case someone else has a similar issue in the future. Chep

Near year ago I saw on Likedin that Maxon had job for architectural visualization person who will create new strategy for this sort of marketing and product strategy. ArchViz from years was a domain of Autodesk. Maxon want to be a part of this market too. This is why more and more capsules are related to this business. I found link : (22) Senior Product Manager, Architectural Visualization (m/f/d) | Maxon | LinkedIn

I have an other question. Why isn't MAXON ever mention this forum ? Twice a month there's an "Ask the Trainer" live. Every week there's "Rocket Lasso" live. Every week there's a "VFX and Chill" live. Why isn't anyone ever even make a tiny reference ? People ask a ton of things that the presenters for various reasons dodge. Those could be redirected here. Not all questions worth a screen time. Should I herald the site in the comment section of YT chat ? I don't mind. But I don't want to anger the presenters or the Maxon supervisors of the shows.

I think we're the older crowd who have been used to forums for a long time. Younger generation loves discord, IG and Tiktok for answers. Platforms like that make me feel like I'm getting ADHD. Stuff is all over the place and you may never find posts after viewing them once. With IG and tiktok, if you don't like or save a post you'll probably never see it again.

I believe that you will be quite pleased then. Check around june 6 for info that will most likely pop up with some details.

As a typically staunch promoter / defender of Cinema's modelling toolset I still can't argue with your criticisms of those 2 aspects of it. There is certainly much to be done by way of improving both Line Cut and Poly Pen, particularly relating to their behaviour around ngons. But me and a fair few other modelling-focused testers have good coms with Maxon and ensure they are fully aware of our frustrations, and we do constantly push for improvements and fixes to the modelling tool set. And Maxon do listen to those concerns, fix what they can as they go along, and bank up ideas and retooling plans for the next time modelling is in 'dev-focus' so to speak... At the moment, unsurprisingly, it's Particles and Liquids that are getting a lot of focus, but it'll be modelling's turn again soon enough I imagine... CBR

I used a very simple setup The Surfase Attract did the trick for me. Just use these aattributes: As you can see the particles keep following the surface dispite the deformation taking place. Just don't forget the Collision Tag on your object as it's absolutely necessary for the Attractor to work.

Happy to help ! Like these ones for example ? 😅

Lucasfilm's vision for AI in Stars Wars is making me cringe Article from CreativeBloq. https://www.creativebloq.com/entertainment/vfx/lucasfilms-vision-for-ai-in-stars-wars-is-making-me-cringe