BoganTW

Both you guys make good points, it is a first iteration, there's room to improve, Maxon have been slow in the past to do exactly that. All those things listed were pre-McGavran and pre the new node code, so let's see if things change a bit with the new leadership and the new foundation.

That sounds fair enough. But I don't find Maxon to be particularly unfriendly. They make the software, they occasionally patch it to fix bugs, they do lots of online training for free, they chip in on forums here and there, they chug away at improving the software (hopefully this will now speed up, huh?), and they're a fairly cheerful bunch. Maybe some people in countries where the exchange rate or currency is low think the pricing is too high. The pricing is alright for me, could be worse. But generally I just want to pay them do all the stuff I outlined in that first paragraph. I'm happy I didn't jump into a subscription as the releases from then till now weren't exactly stacked, but we'll see what happens now that they've made some progress.

The really weird screen glitch I wrote about in another thread is still a thing. I wanted to show my son the new cloth and rope simulations, made a blanket and let it drop through the air onto a plane. He could barely see it as the screen was filled with glitchy flashing horizontal stripes that flickered and completely destroyed the image more often than not. I'm actually looking at them now. But jumping out, then back into perspective view seems to remove it temporarily. Hopefully the presenters at the 3D Motion Show this week aren't using M1 Macs. I'm enjoying everything else about C4D at the moment, but not this glitch.

Yeah, I do concede Blender has a lot of extra bits and pieces that C4D does not. The cool-looking Grease Pencil side of the app has been continually updated and is very flashy, EJ from Eyedesyn posted some amazing anime style stuff on Twitter which Blender can apparently do with the touch of a button, and I was thinking, jeez I hope Maxon re-visists Sketch and Toon sometime in the next half decade. But I rarely hear many people saying, wow, the experience of using Blender is much smoother and easier than using C4D. It's always a list of the features, bragging about how it's free, and a thread dump of all the new companies that have come on board to sponsor it, so the future is getting brighter and brighter, why would anyone want to use anything else, etc etc. The features, the funding and the cost mean jack all to me if the experience of using it is a stilted and poorly thought out pain in the arse, so I'll happily sit with C4D for the next few years and see what's coming up. No offence to the nice folk running Blender, Ton is a cool guy and I enjoyed watching what Pablo was up to at Blender Today, but I just didn't enjoy the software that much.

I don't have Maxon One and currently don't need it, so I'm very happy they chucked Z-Remesher into C4D. I can now try out all sorts of odd modelling things with the Volume mesher and boil them down to models with nice topology. This will be a very cool workflow. Anyone who has ZBrush and is using it shouldn't be bothered that some extra Zbrush bits are landing in C4D. They have Zbrush and know how to use it, so what do they care? TBH I could care less where they got the idea from. S26 gives me ten new modelling tools. For some reason I've also seen Blender and Modo users on a few forums whining that Maxon has done this.

Please rewrite this into English so I can read it. I thought giving Redshift additional CPU rendering capabilities was improving it further. Did it make it worse? It's commercially obtuse to develop for a laptop that is selling millions of units? I thought that would make them more money from those users, not less.

If the cheapest of the cheapest gravitate towards Blender then I'm not sure that Maxon is losing anything by ignoring them.

No one is prohibiting Redshift subscribers from using the GPU, as using the GPU to render is presumably the entire reason you subscribed in the first place. You're not losing anything but if you ever stop subscribing to Redshift your Redshift skills will still carry over into the world of Redshift CPU rendering, if you ever want to go that route.

I think if they had announced new modelling, rendering, simulation stuff in advance, they'd have to (a) answer endless questions about those very topics, (b) set some customers up for disappointment when the promised stuff varies slightly from what the customer had imagined. "I held off for months on doing XX because I thought that in April you'd release something that did XX but now I see it does XX whereas I thought it would do XX, couldn't you have shared this additional detail earlier etc etc" That noted the help file for S26 makes it clear that the rope and cloth upgrade is the beginning of a lot more redone dynamics stuff to come, which they now call 'simulations' rather than just dynamics, hopefully in part because more stuff is going to be simulated down the track beyond just things breaking, bouncing or bumping into each other. Lots of nice little touches with this release and the two videos today from Chris Schmidt were a great fun watch. This is a really nice release.

Maxon Training Channel just finished a month of new Redshift training and are preparing to do more, so anyone using Physical can spend a few months getting their head around Redshift before it apparently gets made the default renderer in September. Once they're using it and like it, they can pay if they want to gravitate towards the GPU version, if they have a rig with nice GPU's or feel like spending money on GPU's to do this. This extra money earned by Maxon can then be given to the Redshift devs for them to continue working on Redshift, unless they can be convinced to do all that work for free somehow instead.

So this is a wonderful life changing that you'd never want to be without, but it's not worth paying for and Maxon charging for it is unforgivable? I really don't follow the logic TBH.

I think anyone who really needs the GPU render version each fortnight for the big projects they're cranking out can probably afford the Maxon One license. I can start playing with the CPU version today and it won't cost me anything extra. Good news I think. John Dickinson says the revamped Blender object manager is still rubbish compared to the one C4D has had for a decade for more, dunno if I really care about how wonderful things must be over there with multiple GPU's when some basic workflows still haven't been sorted out.

Another rundown.

CPU GPU thing is fine. Stream continues here. Have just installed S26, looks good. https://www.twitch.tv/rocketlasso

The GSG guys have had a look.

Whoa, Rick just had the same screen glitch in the live stream that I had a few weeks ago. He's also on a Mac, hope they can fix it. I'm getting an error message when I try to install and a note saying my M1 iMac 'does not meet the installation requirements'. "There has been an error. This software requires a CPU that supports the AVX instruction set." AVX doesn't exist for M1 chips and R25 runs fine so I'm assuming they'll fix this, might leave it a day.

Rick just said early initial days with Redshift CPU, they see lots of room to speed it up further.

Live stream with Rick and Chris about to start.

8am Pacific Day Time on April 20th, tomorrow. https://www.maxon.net/en/event/maxon-spring-launch-event

Oh, I remember a 'consensus' among members speculating that R20 would surely be the big game changer because it was overdue. This wasn't a Maxon announcement and I don't recall any Maxon staff making the promise. If I missed a specific comment from Srek etc though, fair enough. Improved performance does however fall into the pretty big category of C4D features that are long overdue for a fix. Like Bodypaint. But not to be down, I have high hopes for S26 and kind of high hopes for the next few releases right after S26 where Maxon should be jumping into the other areas that S26 doesn't address. I'm getting older though so I hope the next decade of C4D releases doesn't chug away like the last one did.

I don't remember anyone announcing that R20 was a big one where we would see speed improvements because of the new core - I thought they announced Fields, Volumes and Nodal materials. Maybe I missed it. I won't argue with your assessment of how slow things are, if they are then they are, but to say they'll never ever be fixed seems a reach. Why not? Putting it in all caps and saying you're certain about it doesn't make it true.

Maybe if public demand is there they could rewrite the rewrite? It might take another half decade but the improvement gains could be substantial. I am hoping for a Pyrocluster update, I think if that section of the app wore a skirt she'd have reached marrying age by now.