Cerbera

For those of you not on the MAXON Twitter feed, here's a new shiny keyboard from LogicKeyboard, with C4D literally written all over it ! More about that over here. It's £90 in the UK, which seems a little steep, but that might mean it's really well built and I suppose we have to pay more because we're a comparatively smaller market. CBR

I don't think the tune is that bad, considering some others I've heard, but it certainly could be a bit more anodyne to ensure wider appeal ;) Though you still want something fairly energetic so you preserve momentum and 'excitement'. Or you could accept that music is entirely subjective, and just do what sounds fine to you - for every one person that hates it, another will think it's fine :) CBR

Excellent work - very cool and nice topology too :) CBR PS: That cat in your avatar is my new favourite thing.

Hello, and welcome back ! Looking good, if a little dark - did someone leave the frontal lights off ?! :) Could we see some wireframes ? CBR

Nice scene :) And props to you for the sheer amount of vegetation going on ! But the road surface looks wrong to me, not just the scale of the lines, but also its general colour, which is a very uniform grey with only the odd splotches of darkness and not much in the way of texture, in sharp contrast to everything else, which has loads ! So I think that could do with a revisit. About those lines; I'd be very surprised if that road was sufficiently neglected to get that overgrown but the lines were still perfect ! Is this the type of road that would even have lines ?! ;) Also everything in this is sharply in focus (and possibly oversharpened in places ?) from foreground to backdrop which is disconcerting - some natural / subtle DoF would go a long way here... CBR

You certainly did :) I'll update the running scoreboard !

Hi Antek, and welcome to the cafe. First up, some Admin stuff - when you want to show us images please upload them using the cafe image upload system, rather than bouncing us all out to loads of separate links. Your head is generally going in the right direction, and the Blender tut seems to have led you to put your loops in roughly the right sort of places, but there are some classic mistakes in it that newbies tend to make. Triangles do not belong in any mesh that is using SDS. That is rule 1 of SDS modelling ! So things could be drastically improved in your model if you take the time to solve your triangles to quads, which (as a rule) is what SDS wants. You can do this easily enough by dissolving certain edges, but it is best not to create them in the first place as you model. Next the neck section is going wrong, and your edge flow there is a long way from great. Again, you need clean, even strips of 4-sided polys that flow around and down the neck, not the ugly mess of triangles and stretched / elongated polys you have currently ! Have a look at the human models that you can find in the content browser and have a look at the edge flow around the neck area to see how this should be done. Polygon density. Your model does not have enough polys to describe the forms in that face. You can't just slap something that low poly under SDS and expect it to give you a recognizable face. Basically this is half complete. The next step would be to apply just 1 level of subdivision, and then continue modelling now you have enough polys more accurately to describe the form. To do this, you can either select all polys, and do a smooth subdivide to Level 1, or you can set your SDS to level 1 (viewport AND render setting) then make that editable, and put it inside a new SDS that is only set to Level 2. I see my modelling bro @VECTOR beat me to it to say largely the same thing :) CBR

That's terrible bathroom design :) But it's a nice clean, pleasing render. You're right - needs some real-world filth, but apart from that, looking good ! CBR

Well done, that is the correct attitude to that, and it brings a warm glow to my heart every time someone realises :) Yes, it is great isn't it :) Something about the 'calm tranquility' of beautifully regular topology is very addictive once you get into it :) Glad to hear it. And your new piece is looking totally fine - nothing to criticize there so far ! :) I've been doing this 20 years, and I am still improving ! :) Fortunately, this is never going to stop being creatively interesting, because you will never run out of things to learn, and better ways to do things. Best of luck, look forward to seeing your future work on this ! CBR

As nice as that lightsaber is @cavolfiore, I'm afraid this isn't your thread ! Clue's in the name ! ;) However it is so nice, Vecs and I have decided to let it pass on this occasion :) CBR

Excellent :) Go to your profile, and just at the bottom of the title bar there is a little button 'Edit Profile'. CBR

Looks like a neat time saver if you do a lot of interiors, and has good applications elsewhere too - thanks for making this. If I did have one suggestion it would be to rename the 'Shape' section of your UI to 'Path' so it followed standard naming conventions, although it's hardly a biggie ! CBR

No, a kite shaped poly is totally fine - it's still convex, by which I mean not concave, coplanar, it is not degenerated, and none of its internal angles exceed 180 degrees, so nothing wrong there. CBR

Yes. Just not a regular quad, which is square. You solve them to quads. I can't possibly teach that skill in a forum post I'm afraid but I can show you how to subdivide a triangle into 3 equal quads. That's done like this. The difficulty of course is preserving the surrounding topology if it doesn't allow you to cut the triangle like this. then you need to solve it a different way, but unfortunately, it's this sort of skill that takes years of doing it every day to develop. CBR

There are good quads and bad quads - unfortunately it is not true that any quad will do ;) You should also seek to avoid concave, coplanar, and degenerated quads. Good quads are convex at every corner, that is to say no internal angle is greater than 180 degrees. Here's a file I use with my modelling students to explain what these things are. Only the green one below is any good - all the others have problems. Polygon Errors.c4d CBR

I just print screen the viewport when I'm doing wireframes ! And have my Open GL AA set high on 16 for ultra silky smooth lines. Now we can see the wires, it's not a bad job, and leagues above what you did the first time, so full marks for doing it again, but there is still room for improvement. For example it is possible to build this entirely from quads, and as it's being used with subdivision there is a reasonable argument that you should. However, this is a good example of just how forgiving of triangles the SDS algorithm in Cinema is on flat surfaces; as long as you are aware that this is not the case on curved surfaces, that's the main thing :) CBR

I shouldn't whinge - there's a lot of good fixes in that, but of course every time there is an update I search the Details PDF for the phrase 'OpenSubdiv', which has not worked with UV mapped objects since its inception in R18, making it effectively useless in a professional workflow. Still no mention of that here. Are they EVER going to fix it ?! :) But on the plus side, after some initial tests, I can cautiously say that Cinema no longer crashes for me using Rectangle Selection, so I am certainly grateful for that if it remains the case ! And wow - the whole content library again !!! I wonder what prompted that !? CBR

Well, those are pretty bloody top notch, my friend :) 3rd shot particularly is exceptional. Initially I was going to say that I didn't think the far shot rock was looking correctly scaled and was very bright, but by god how things improve when we move in !!! Lovely work. You almost had me thinking that was a photo for a second there ! Can I see a seam in the sky in that last one though ? :) CBR

Oh dear ! That sounds very frustrating :/ Is there a floor object in your scene by any chance, and does the camera dip below it at any point ? If it's not that totally random guess, then we are going to need more information to be able to diagnose this. At the very minimum we need a screen grab showing the object manager and the scene. Preferably we need the whole c4d file and all the textures, or at least a simplified version of it that demonstrates the problem. you can upload that to dropbox or similar if it's too big to upload directly. CBR

This is a perfect example of cognitive dissonance. I'm suitably repulsed by the form, but the topology is sooo attractive it doesn't matter :) CBR

Hello, and welcome to the cafe He may not actually need a tutor - fortunately there are literally thousands of tutorial videos online for all aspects of the program, and if he's only 12 he's got time to work his way through them for the 3-5 years it will take to learn the software to a professional level. Unfortunately the demo will run out after 42 days, so you should contact MAXON directly about getting him the proper student version. But if you really think tuition is the way to go you should say if this is a paid position to avoid any confusion when people are replying. Typical tuition rates are around $70 per hour. If it is a paid position, I'll move this post to 'The Job Line' for you. I'm in the UK, but do 1 on 1 C4D workflow training via remote screen sharing anywhere in the world for a £50 (UK) per hour if you would consider that. If interested feel free to PM me to discuss further. CBR

No, I think you get an account created automatically when you buy the software. Details should be in the email you got with your serial numbers at time of purchase. CBR

There aren't many people here who have realflow - you'll get a faster answer if you ask this on the realflow forums. CBR

I have no great thoughts on doing that procedurally (though why does the word Houdini keep popping into my head ;) but just wanted to commend you for the effort involved in animating that many wasps by hand ! CBR

I'll do Yoda if he's wearing Kylo Ren's helmet :) CBR