BoganTW

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think you're half right. The timeframe between Autograph first being announced, shown to the public, demoed and tested, before it eventually finally released, was something like a couple of years because they were building the app up. If you were McGavran, what would you do, figure out a way to build on that further and sell it, or dump it and ask the team to go back to the drawing board for another year or two to conjure up new stuff to sell as additional Red Giant plugins for AE? McGavran can rename the app above and build on it, and also ask the team to start joining the threads between all the other Maxon One apps. That makes more sense than dumping a compositing program and starting from scratch.

There was a thread about them on this site two years ago, started by me. I was thinking of starting another one. No need now. Left Angle had been doing some decent updates something like three times a year or more, here was the last one from a few months ago (more writing below). Everything looked fairly snappy and colourful but I was always looking for something startling or eye-popping and never saw it. They had mentioned on social media that they had planned to bring in nodal compositing features, and were leaning into cool new mograph stuff. Lionel, the French C4D trainer who has popped up in Maxon videos here and there, had done a number of interviews and sit downs with the French developers, so they weren't unknown to Maxon, and Maxon weren't unknown to them. The general consensus on the Left Angle site, socials, Reddit and Youtube from posters was that it was interesting software, heading somewhere interesting, but not quite there yet, although the fact that it had a fresh new core rather than AE's aging decrepit one was another selling point. I'm assuming it will get rolled into Maxon One, and if they can make smooth and direct connectivity with C4D (you'd figure that must be the goal) it will be even more interesting.

The April update should be the chunky one.

Dave verbally hinted that fluids were coming a few months ago at one of the trade fests when a Youtube interview asked him what was next for simulations, asking if improved muscles were coming, and Dave said we're a German company, beer is important to us, so think along the lines of beer rather than muscles and that's what sim will be coming next.

Dave McGavran retweeted a preview of C4D fluids from Derya Öztürk's page. Looks cool though others in the thread noted some artifacts or glitching at the very end. I'm sure that will be sorted out. I expected goopy slimes were going to be simulated okay, I'm curious to see how it handles water. https://x.com/dmcgavra/status/1880165853435687293

That season goes up to Episode 16. There's no new ones on his Patreon covering C4D 2025.1 so I think you'll see him do coverage of the new stuff early next year.

He's probably on holiday and will do a catch-up video early next year when the next Lasso season starts. Browsing posts on Twitter about this update, folks seem happy.

The latest M4 Mac Mini's are matching or exceeding the Mac Studios from a couple of years ago, so be aware. That said if you're happy with PC you'll get faster everything if you chuck just a bit of money at it.

I'm guessing these won't be around forever. The Foundry have provided free download links for the latest version of MODO here https://support.foundry.com/hc/en-us/articles/360019180479-Q100595-Download-links-for-previous-Modo-versions And you can grab the ten year license for it here https://campaigns.foundry.com/modo-eol-license With the officially given license reprinted below in case that link goes. Sad news obviously but some might have fun having another solid app on their desktop to play with. LICENSE foundry modo_i 2025.1107 14-nov-2034 uncounted hostid=ANY share=h min_timeout=30 start=30-oct-2024 issuer=foundry issued=30-oct-2024 _ck=191ec77102 sig="60Q04580QANXKRND9V0D9UG14XXQ NEK71BYF4UVX08AG15XEFJ8GM4DSUJDSPMTNJR9UN3YU7HFY0"

Blender is fine. They're leaning more heavily into documentation, bug fixing, and all those things you listed, and since you can still use and download every past version from prehistoric times up to today, seeing features changed (or even dropped) maybe impacts different when guys like Maxon or Autodesk do it. But I wasn't a huge fan until recently, and it just took a little while to have things sink in a little before it clicked, if you use an app that you prefer, that's good too. I think C4D will be more 'complete' a year down the track than it is now, but there's still a bunch of stuff Blender can do that C4D can't. And vice versa.

Yeah, I didn't follow the forums super closely but I recall a few people were unhappy with where things were going. I think anyone using C4D for paid work will be fairly happy at the moment and likely getting happier in the near to medium future as more features roll in. It's a bit sad to see Modo joining the same club alongside Vue and Softimage XSI, but I guess not every app sticks around forever.

There's a few threads on the Luxology forum and some of the orphaned users are already talking about Blender. One Modo user even paid $400 maintenance to the Foundry a week ago.

On reflection, learning three new keys to replace E R T probably won't be the end of the world, I'll use the Blender shortcuts and I'm sure it'll start to stick in a week. Everything else is feeling very solid and with that out of the way I think I'm good to start expanding my knowledge of the app.

I might need to go in and change some preferences. After assigning the industry keycap, I tried the quick method of right-clicking on the move / scale / rotate icons on the left of screen to reassign the move / scale / rotate to E R T, as this had worked for me before. Blender seems to add the new ones there but also keep the old ones, as the old ones are listed as 'shortcut' and the new ones are listed as 'shortcut cycle'. I'm used to E R T so I'll see if there's a way to fix that. But the gizmos for all three choices appear automatically rather than free floating so that's an improvement. This was the other UI presentation. It's worth a watch but particularly for the bit at the end where they give you a big page full of the many improvements they likely plan to spend the next few years on to better what's currently there.

That's really useful, I'll let you know how I go. This whole 'here's another new version, and it's free' upgrade process is something I'll happily get used to. And I just saw that the Foundry have ceased development of Modo. https://community.foundry.com/discuss/topic/163616/the-end Sad news. I wonder if Nigel is content to sit with the version of Modo that he has, and how many Modo users in general might shift to Blender. Edit - here's one guy who did. https://community.foundry.com/discuss/topic/163625/thoughts-for-the-modo-diaspora

Yeah, I wouldn't think the industry keymap would be an issue. I've been similarly happy to watch older C4D tutorials despite them using the earlier UI, as there's little difficulty translating the new to the old, and vice versa. All those add-ons look great. I'd heard of some of them, but most are new to me, and I like how each will push my daily use of the app back a little towards what I'm familiar with. I was happy with the navigation I'd set up but the rotate issue was annoying so your recommended fix looks good. I'll wait till the new version drops next week and set that one up accordingly.

Blender. I set up E R T for move/scale/rotate and 1 2 3 for the navigation, which is how I did it in C4D. (Chad Ashley's video on setting up preferences, plus a couple more recent ones, were helpful). Rotation is different as you have to immediately specify the axis with a second key stroke, otherwise it free floats, though I might be missing a trick there. Courses are cheaper. I'm seeing fully fleshed out courses on various topics going for $20 or $30. The CGCookie guys did an excellent looking bundle of several redone courses for 4.2, and the whole batch of them is $90 total. There's more training. C4D has the Maxon Training Team, a few guys like Polygon Pen making modelling videos when he can, Chris at RL, Tim Clapham doing a good Hello Luxx course every six months, various YouTubers, and a handful of courses popping up on Udemy or Skillshare or whatever. That's all good and useful, but I'd say Blender has at least 5 x the quantity of courses coming out, or higher. The annual BCON list of presentations just had two different talks on improving the UI, one with Andrew Price making some smart points, the other with five guys including Pablo Vasquez discussing how they'd just spent a year working on UI improvement, and were about to do the same thing for the foreseeable future. C4D has better UI but they showed the before and after for the Blender colour picker - a minor thing in the scene of things, I know - and the before had a jankiness that I found off putting, and the after had the intuitive layout that I associate with C4D. C4D is still even higher here but at a certain point other elements become an elephant in the room beyond how super polished you can make the UI, and C4D has sat rigid in that territory for quite a while. I don't view Blender as 'better', I just view Blender as different, but its difference now strikes me as interesting and intriguing rather than off putting. Even though C4D has the word 'Cinema' in the title, I suspect I was gaslighting myself into believing that C4D was an all-purposes app and it would settle into being fully featured for generalist use. I no longer believe this to be the case. I think C4D is certainly expanding its toolset, but I think it's doing this under the guidelines and purpose of using these tools for mograph above all else. The above isn't an exhaustive list at all, and I'm not closing the door on C4D, which I still like a lot, but if I sit down and try and make a short film over the next year and change with the tools available both, I'll get further ahead with it in Blender than I will in C4D, despite the improvements finally coming into the latter. I've been interested in learning nodal workflows for a while. Nodes landed in C4D more than six years ago, but what can you do with them yet? And how widespread is the training for it? Meanwhile the Blender Geometry Nodes developers and users are just getting on with things, and still adding functionality and improvements. In the Blender UI presentations they made it clear they were aware of their shortcomings in usability and design and were dedicated to improving things. The jankiness in Blender is going away with each release, and the functionality is getting stronger. Blender 4.3 comes out Tuesday next week. I'll follow what C4D brings to the table in the near future with some interest, but it's an interest that sits just below my interest in learning how to settle into Blender, and I think this is a healthy place to be, as I don't need to wait for important feature improvements, or worry for now about budgeting the cost of the app. I'll stop this ramble here for now.

Yeah it's pretty clear that Maxon doesn't care too strongly about the educational market. The cancelling mid Semester thing, as you described, was bananas. What were they thinking? I've had a couple of months spare and have had some time to play with one of the rival 3D apps. It's sinking in and starting to click a bit. Guess which one.

Editor Rob Redman published his own C4D tutorials for a while, and did a nice MILG volume on modelling. Sad to see the mag go but nearly every magazine I used to buy has gravitated to online, or vanished.

If that suits you, that's perfect. Particles, pyro, redone dynamics and softbodies and the upcoming fluids are all from the new regime, not the old one, so the devs are clearly adding something, but I think it will take another year or more before everyone can look at C4D and view it as being fully changed and beefed up from what had come before. As Mash once pointed out, you used to see or hear bugger all from the Maxon heads back in the day, so I view having Dave doing an interview and appearing super focused on where C4D is going is an improvement. If you have R20 perpetual and it mostly does everything you need, you'll save some bucks by not subbing and you can put the cash towards other apps or whatever that might fill in the gaps.

Shrug. The impression I get is Maxon is convinced C4D is a tool people should use for paying jobs, which will cover the cost of the app (or better, it'll be tax deductible as you use it for work), and all the stuff they chuck into it like capsules and the many hundreds of assets and the Red Giant Suite if you need it is geared towards that end. The money they make from it then gets poured into a growing series of updates, fluids before the end of 2024 being the latest. People that are busy working in 3D (and I'm not) will just get on with it, and people that prefer to tinker with personal projects will wander off to Blender, or Houdini if they're especially stubborn. I'll still resub eventually but a few more months wait while they top it up with some extra features won't hurt.