BoganTW

No mention of Apple products being affected even though the M1 doesn't support AVX2. I'm assuming the Apple Silicon architecture does what they need it to here without AVX2 being a part of it. I wonder if the below means a chunkier than usual update is on the way? Changes are expected later this year, so it is highly recommended that users anticipate these updates and their impact on your pipeline.

I'll work something out. I just got a few thousand back on tax, so I'll likely be re-subbing early July, plus settling into Houdini a little as well.

I was also disappointed to see renewals don't get a discount, would have been tempting. But it is what it is. Shrug.

I remember subscribing at some point in the past. Clicking on my user name icon (top right of screen) tells me nothing about whether I'm still subbed or when my sub might be expiring, or when it expired. I'll have a look and sort it before the June 1st deadline but just noting that the info doesn't appear easy for me to see at a glance.

Nah. Folks who use other DCC's and who aren't interested in Lightwave won't care. Folks who are using Lightwave and who have been antsy about its future will be happy to have a target for them to throw their spare money at, in the hope of keeping the sinking vessel afloat. See the official Newtek forum where various people are already jumping in to buy the package with the hoodie and get some shares chucked in with it. Beyond that, I dunno what they're meant to charge. How much are permanent licenses for most DCC''s? Maxon charges something like that new user price annually. Older users can get the next version for half that price, people who just bought it can get the new version for a bit over a couple of hundred. The folks now running Lightwave will need every one of those dollars and more if they're going to get anywhere. It'll be interesting to see if they can offer anything that differentiates them from their competitors, other than being old and requiring a lot of work to catch up.

I would not put Maxon at the top of any ranking where speed and several others things are concerned. Was just looking at it the other way, from the dev perspective. Who has the more bucks to pay devs for ongoing work, McGavran / Nemetschek or the bloke who just bought Lightwave? I would have thought the former. Maxon are chugging along, and will continue to chug along, and I don't think hiring a few more devs would change that for them, they'd still chug along in a Maxon way. Maybe having Lightwave UK based makes it attractive for devs who live just down the street, with work mates from the same neck of the woods. I'm sure that doesn't hurt.

I liked this bit from the interview. As you can imagine we have been bombarded with interest from developers that want to be part of the next chapter and we are in the process of determining the shape of our future team. If there's that many 3D app programmers floating around some of them should go work at Maxon, which despite lagging behind wherever it's lagging behind, would surely be further ahead of things than Lightwave is. Maybe those programmers just want a cool Lightwave t-shirt or something.

Yeah, it is kind of bananas. What he really needed was a morning sit down with a business advisor over pancakes and coffee with a guy in a suit looking at the situation like you did and explaining it while the two of them poured cream and maple syrup over waffles and hot young waitresses scurried around taking people's orders. Instead he's wandering the street while a cold wind blows, tumbleweeds roll past towards destinations unknown, and a loud saxophone honks and blarps on the soundtrack. I have no current use for it but would have still bought a polished up release of it. It's a topsy turvy world we live in.

Huh. A writer friend in Melbourne told me over a year ago he was splashing out on gear to start doing films in Unreal. I should message him and see how he's going with it, he was buying a very beefy PC from memory.

Chris Schmidt is usually worth a look but I've been too busy to watch. And I'd watch anything Tim Clapham does, but I haven't seen him do a Maxon show for a couple of years or more, probably because his own work (more fun than mine) keeps him busy too. I did meet Tim in Melbourne a few years back and he was truly the nicest guy ever.

This shows dedication to the cause. Some council planner who enjoys 3D should commission a Polygon Street or Loft Nurb lane.

I've always been happy to see good books on CG apps, but every time I've bought one I've made it made a dozen or less pages into it, then returned to watching video tutorials online instead. Pradeep's book does look like a worthwhile volume though.

Fair enough. Although if grains are doing what he demonstrated above, and Maxon are continually working on sim stuff, I don't see any reason why the sim stuff for the rest of this year will be restricted to just more rope, soft squashy soft bodies, and pyro. But yeah, who knows. With the frequent tendency of these DCC's to all for some reason release updates on the same day, I wouldn't be surprised if Maxon drop another update later this year on the same day Houdini R20 gets unveiled.

Grain dynamics were apparently a feature of C4D 2023.1, and were yanked back out of 2023.2, unless I'm misinterpreting what he's getting at in this video. If they're out they'll presumably be back later this year.

It'll be nice if they can keep it chugging along.

Are they still adding back updated icons? I'm guessing the answer is yes but would be nice to know for sure.

Not true at all. Rick talked about it in the Rocket Lasso live stream three posts up, and he noted they try and give the majority of capsules and freebies to regular subscribers, and there's just a few that are kept exclusive to Maxon One. I was a regular C4D subscriber and I thought I was getting most of the Rocket Lasso offerings, the grid one was certainly there. I thought it was quite cool as the day Chris would announce it, it was there in the content browser ready to be played with. So in that light it worked quite well. I was just less thrilled to see a few C4D goodies like that kept for Maxon One only. But as I noted above they probably have their reasons. And I confess Rick did not seem super thrilled in the live stream when he observed there were a couple of bits and pieces they were keeping for One subscribers only, and he said they tried to lean towards giving regular users the big majority of those assets. So I'm not going to super bash Maxon over it, they're freebies of a sort and they notably have been chucking new content (models or textures or Rocket Lasso stuff) at users at a steady pace. But I just want to give them several months of sorting things out and hopefully adding some useful bits and pieces before I sub again, and in that window I'll be looking at Houdini, Blender, Bitwig and Davinci, over a couple of months apiece (wish me luck doing any 3D stuff with the latter two). Once I've had a solid play with all of those I'll likely be in a better mind to look at C4D again and Maxon will have hopefully pushed the whole app further along where it's meant to be going. Their updates seem more chunkier and more frequent these days, even if the latest one perhaps wasn't the biggest.

Something I hadn't realised. Though I think others have discussed it already, I just didn't grab the import of it. Some of the new capsules Maxon have come up with are available to subscribers only. So if you've bought perpetual, you won't (I think) get access to those. But also - some of those subscription-only capsules are restricted to those who are getting the full Maxon One subscription. So if you're subscribing to C4D (like I was recently, and probably will again at some point), you'll get a lot of the subscription-only capsules, maybe most of them, but there will be a few that you won't get because you're just a C4D subscriber, and not a Maxon One subscriber. Whatever. Maxon's developers have to pay the bills somehow, fair enough. So I guess they're trying to add incentives to go full Maxon One. But I dunno if I'll ever need Maxon One even if I resubscribe. There's not enough time in the day to learn every single one of those apps, and I'm trying to move away from AE to. maybe something like Autograph, if they get it going, or Fusion, if it does what I want it to. A C4D sub annually is a bit over $1000 AUD a year. A Maxon One sub is a bit over $2000 AUD a year. So yeah, I dunno about that one. A Maxon guy on a Twitter thread (deep in one of EJ's comments threads, I think) noted that the Nodes UI overall wasn't done and they were going to continue to add stuff to make it easier to use. This was in a comments thread where the poster had written, you know, Houdini does this, it would make things easier if you did it with C4D, and the Maxon guy had said, yep, fair comment, we're still adding stuff and that particular suggestion is on our list. All this will be looked at by me at some future date, after I get a few weeks to ponder what Houdini is doing, and after I play with what Blender is doing, sometime later this year. Bitwig is currently fun. Chris's latest C4D run through with Rick B. is below.

I bought the Cafe nodes training when it was there, and (could be wrong) it might have been on Youtube for a bit as well, as some of the recent Cafe training ended up there in 720p versions before they changed their mind. Funny comment in the earlier thread There was a guy online who had done a good long Scene Nodes video for Youtube then on his website he said that a full Scene Nodes training course was coming from him. I wrote to him, hey, can I buy it, etc. He wrote back, he wasn't going to bother recording any further videos on it until Maxon finished their development. This was something like a couple of years back, and a fair point as it's still in development and Maxon have done another UI change for it. Rocket Lasso does periodic videos with it, Noseman does videos for it, not many others. Tim Clapham did a video a few months back on Scene Nodes, below, and the comments below it on Youtube show that most people still haven't got their heads around it. Sometime this year or next Maxon should just pay Chris Schmidt to do a Nodes from beginner to hero course, and either have Chris then sell it to make some more bucks, or put the whole thing online for free. Or, if they want, the Training Team could do a multi part series (like they do on Redshift, C4D, rigging etc) just on Nodes, here's how to get started. here's what you can do. And I appreciate a fair bit of this is already out there, but it's scattered all over. The learning process is part of what I want to see in any 3D app's ecosystem, Maxon are doing a good job with most other aspects of C4D right now, but the Nodes training for beginners isn't extensive. My general guess is once that Scene Manager is done and they have their Object manager replacement there for everyone to see, we'll get more training showing us what's what, but I'd guess this would be in 2024 or later, would love to be wrong.

Solid update, even the Maxon site shows some extra love in the update pages there. Hopefully they can keep the cool features coming at a decent rate through the year.

I expect H20 to be a chunky one. New C4D node Ui improvements are very nice. Bitwig has a really great nodal interface for its Reaktor / Reason style synth window. They're a German company I think. Some of the Maxon guys are into (or come from, or play) music, so they've likely already seen it. A Bitwig feature Maxon should copy - the help windows where the features demonstrated can actually be tweaked onscreen, so if you go into the help page, you're dealing with a live feature that can be tweaked and adjusted, alongside the text and guides that explain what is going on.

The usual weird quirk of timing continues with Blender's new release coming out the same day. Both releases look fine, and both show a snapshot of what each developer is up to, what they're evidently interested in, and where they're going. C4D continues to polish the stuff they're polishing, Blender continues to add the stuff they're adding. I'll be largely off the forum for the next couple of months while I learn Bitwig, will drop back in after.

Yeah the new node UI looks a lot more appealing. Even Paul in the video is going, modes are really great, but some people have found it a bit confusing, so we've changed stuff so you might find it easier now. Shrug. Good news, I'll have a look someday.

The lovely Elly at the training team just confirmed new feature announcements for later this week, in just a couple of days.

NAB this year is Saturday April 15th to Wednesday April 19th. Maxon is there for all those dates. Their ad copy says "this is where you'll find a renewed path to clarity and confidence that takes your work in bold new directions." https://www.maxon.net/en/event/nab-show-2023 And the headline at the top of the page says NOW GET READY FOR WHAT'S NEXT The only way they could make it any clearer that new features will be demoed there would be if Dave and Rick wrote the message on a baseball bat and Noseman then thumped readers over the head with it like Robert De Niro in The Untouchables. The April 2022 features last year were shown off just a few days before NAB, so my guess is late second week of April we'll see Maxon's new bits and pieces, I could be wrong though. Or we could get them even sooner. Maxon have a 'very special' @Ask the Trainer episode for March 30th, topic yet to be revealed. Hopefully it'll be more worthwhile than the very special episodes you usually get when you hear those words. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_special_episode