EAlexander

3 hours ago, No One said:

 

To be fair, that's the only thing I've been waiting for more than 10 years in either Maya ou Cinema4D. The only reason people are using Unreal for stuff outside game design is because of the amazing real-time rendering it offers, both with Lumen and the Pathtracer. The only comparable thing (and still kinda far off) in a general 3D DCC is Eevee in Blender (and it seems Eevee next will close the gap to Unreal). 

 

It blows my mind that Autodesk and Maxon are letting Unreal take such big slice of their market share. I've been using Unreal in the last 2 years and it's amazing but the workflow is really cumbersome. i wish we had something similar real-time rendering in either Maya or Cinema4D.

 

(U-Render was promising and I was an earlier beta tester and earlier buyer. But they never reached a level that was even close to the Element3D plugin for After Effects, much less Unreal. I was really sad when they closed. They had a lot of potential, specially with the Maya version that was never released.)

I'm keeping my eye on Chaos Vantage for exactly what you're talking about.  It's currently only serving up VRAY, but Corona is supposed to get support and accessibility in it's next release.  So I'm hoping this is somewhere between Cinema and Unreal for client walkthroughs and quick animations.  I know about Twinmotion, but the appeal of Vantage is not having to do any alterations to your normal Cinema scene in regards to lighting, materials and Cameras.  Just waiting for that.  I love Unreal, but it's a haul to get full scenes or interiors going properly.

Check that the label and the glass aren't overlapping. If you pull the label forward some tiny amount does it clear up? 

1 hour ago, zeden said:

Question: do you have an idea how to rig and animate Splines in Unreal? For thnigs like cables etc?

Haven't done anything like that yet, but why not build it in Cinema and carry it over? 

Back on my bullshit.  Just trying to get as much practice time in the software as possible around client work.

Hi Stephan, 

I am in agreement and do not mean to undermine the work you or other developers put into these kinds of products. I have bought expensive and cheap plugins with great success. What's hard, is not being able to see it in action via a demo and to only go by the written description. That's all I was trying to say. I want it to be awesome and am willing to pay for that, I just don't have a clear sense of what I am buying. 

Stephan has been a visible and active member of this community for a long time and I've  had one of their other products (rhino.io) for many years with great success, so I trust him.  But, I don't know in 2024 that I would buy a $99 plug in sight unseen.

On 3/28/2024 at 9:02 AM, stephan laub said:

i use my plugin UV splinemapper for this, we extra made this for curved or polygonal folder elements in building streets, furniture etc:

 

https://3dtools.info/shop/spline-uv-mapper/

 

it generates a UVW map tag, that can be rendered in any engine and the result can be also rendered in other c4ds that not have this plugin.

one controlls the fow of the UV via a simple c4d spline. no unfolding or bodypaint needed;)

@stephan laub Do you have a video anywhere showing this in action?

Since the spline is pulled from edge segments - it goes from blue to white and then blue to white again. This is showing point order and it ideally is blue to white once over the whole spline run. 

What happens if you try to reorder the points and set a new first point? (right click on the spline, the ordering options should be near the bottom of the list). 

Does this change anything? 

Not exactly what you are looking for, but you can select the the polygon that you want to add the primitive to and go to CREATE>WORKPLANES>ALIGN WORKPLANE TO SELCTION and then make your primitive.  You'll still have to adjust, but placement tool would fix it.

Donuts on the Bridge

How weird! And annoying. 

What happens if you use Find and replace at the bottom if that window instead of relink? Copy the breadcrumb trail from the bad link up to the folder with the textures and paste that into find and put your good breadcrumb link into replace. If it works on one, then you can select the whole list and do it in one go. 

Can't see why that would make a difference, but try it out.

On 3/9/2024 at 4:04 AM, zeden said:

I am investing some time into a Lumen Rendering workflow as well right now. The fact that you see what you get in the final image is such a workflow boost it is amazing. Makes up for some Unreal quirks in building projects 

It can be frustrating to set up, but Realtime makes working in offline renderers feel really slow 

First pass at some auto animations.  Car needs work, but this was focused on cameras.....which need work as well

Cerbera, you're a wizard!

Still plugging away at learning this workflow around client work.  First attempt at Particles and they need work, but vdbs working nicely.

Looks like a Phong Shading error.  Check the phong tag - try an angle limit of 40 and see if that improves it.

Never tried, would require some research. 

https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/hair-rendering-in-unreal-engine/

Looks like people are using baked hair via alembic mostly. 

Thank you!

Yes, it is a bit clunky, and I find things that you can do in Cinema without thought take a lot of set up in unreal.  But I'm addicted to that speed!

Playing around with the DMX lighting setup.  This is a pretty basic animation, but since my main work is concert production design, this workflow could potentially be very exciting.  

These from Stuz0r (Stuart) got me started:

I also like Thaddeus :

https://youtube.com/@azielarts?si=GgFDgeHBoi3JeNXp

Josh is good too:

https://youtube.com/@JoshToonen?si=YPei9zJoppzdZWDV

I'm learning it now (started a sketchbook in the Unreal section here on the forum) and it's a different mindset than Cinema4d for sure, but working in real time is addictive, especially for animation. Building in Redshift or Corona in cinema feel slow to me now. 

There is a quality loss, but I've found it to be minor so far and I'm rendering 1200 HD frames in about 3 minutes on a single 4090 with volumetrics. So I can rerender or even add another sequence or camera angle and have the clip in a few minutes. 

It's the most fun I've had in years on a computer. 

Here is Procedural Content Generation used to make a forest.  Similar to the Matrix object in Cinema, but you can see it all in real-time using high res scanned assets.  Could use more work on the undergrowth layers, but I'm moving on to the next experiment.

Anyone catch this one? Merk using cinema to drive an AI render. His Instagram says coming soon. 

And the secret ingredient: Talent.