everfresh

i've found that it's quite hard to get cartoony looks with any kind of dynamics, since the shapes are never as clean as you'd like them to, and also the motion is hard to control and to give it a cartoony timing. but mograph and fields in combination with the volume builder to the rescue, you can do a lot with those, the main issue is that either you end up with really dense geometry, that make things a bit slow, or you do a lot of smoothing with the smoothing deformer at the cost of some jittering, which might be ok if the overall motion is fast enough anyways. i do have a couple of tutorials on cineversity about the topic, one also contains an explosion. here are some examples of what you can do, all of them are without any dynamics, and except for a very few without particles, pure mograph and deformer solutions.

regarding the rather harsh comments on the simulation stuff: this is the first iteration, sure it isn't there yet with marvellous, maybe it never will, since marvellous is a specialized tool for just that task, so it's not really fair to compare. i remember a lot of you asked for a unified simulation system, now you see the first bits of it and then it's all shit because it isn't perfect yet? to me it's a promising start, still a lot to improve, but overall it's much better than what we had before and the underlying tech allows it to become as good as vellum. (in theory 😉 ) and yeah, judging something by hitting play with default settings is like opening up a new file and hitting render to judge a render engine. solid approach.

one thing from that hasn't been mentioned anywhere, but might be big deal for the character animation folks:

AI art is already a sub-genre in nfts. people pay money for it. the thing is, right now you can tell in almost all cases if it's AI art or not. and people that do AI art usually don't try to hide the fact that they are using AI to create their images. will be interesting to see how things will develop as AI becomes better and better. my guess would be that we will be seeing more behind the scenes content and making of videos from artists that do their work manually, and those artists will be the preferred choice for most collectors.

While it is true that the ethereum network has the CO2 footprint as of a small country, nfts only make up a tiny fraction of that, last numbers i've read were 3%. the majority on transactions is caused by trading bots that perform hundreds of them per minute. The most widely spread misinformation is that one NFT would cause the same CO2 emissions like an average US household for a year (i've even seen YT vids that claim that it's the equivalent of 10 years) . Let's apply some logic and math to that: if that were true, minting an NFT would have to cost you around 1000$ at least, right? when you make a transaction on a blockchain, which minting an nft basically is, you have to pay the miners a fee to crunch the numbers and validate the transaction for you. this is called gas. So if minting an NFT would consume as much power as an average household for a year, why on earth would any miner validate the transaction for 20$? that would mean they make a 980$ loss, right? i might be wrong here, but i think they wanna make a plus at the end of the day, and probably a good one. energy cost is not the only thing that has an influence on gas price, which is (like anything on the blockchain) highly fluctuating, if the network is very busy the gas price rises. But that doesn't mean it costs more energy, just that the miners face more demand, resulting in them being able to take more profits. Another factor is the amount of eth you move within a transaction, so if you move millions of $, gas prices will be much higher. i have the feeling that those numbers i mentioned above result from people looking at the 69m $ sale of beeple, and generalizing the CO2 footprint of that nft sale to every single NFT. So let's get back to the fact that only around 3% of the ethereum networks energy consumption leads back to nfts, and also let's distinguish further between crypto-art and collectibles. about 95% of the items in the nft world are collectibles, those 10k pfp projects that promise 1000x profit within weeks if you buy one of them. I wouldn't even call the majority of them art, and if we take them out of the equation when we're talking about artists selling their art as nfts, that leaves us with around 0.15% of the ethereum networks energy consumption for the whole of 1/1 crypto-art. So if we take the Netherlands, which is often named as the equivalent of the ethereum networks energy consumption, which has 17.44 million citizens, 0.15% of that is 26.160 people. Suddenly doesn't look that bad anymore that millions of artists selling nfts cause as much CO2 a year as 21K people, does it? But oh the evil and irresponsible artists that mint an nft once or twice a month. Tbh i've never seen so much hypocrisy. If someone buys a brand new mercedes i don't see people pointing fingers at them, have you ever looked into the numbers what the production of a car like that causes in CO2 emissions? Minting an nft maybe has the energy footprint like buying the door handle for that car. Yes, that car has an actual use, but so does selling their art for the artists. We never had that chance before as digital artists, and i don't think it's fair and called for to demonize those who took that chance. Is there a lot wrong with nfts and crypto? absolutely. Are those issues discussed enough in the NFT space? absolutely not. For instance, take stolen art ending up on Open Sea. It's bad, really bad. Why is this even possible? Because of a thing called "lazy minting", that mostly just Open Sea and a few other open platforms offer. This means you can list any item for free without having to mint it first, and it only gets minted the moment it gets sold. While on the one hand this is great, especially for people from poor countries, where minting costs can be a huge barrier, it's an open invitation for thieves and crooks. Take a look at how much stolen art you can find on platforms that don't provide lazy minting, you will barely find any. That's why i think lazy minting is a terrible idea the way it is implemented now. A lot of people seem to be brainwashed on either side of the fence, which doesn't really lead to solutions, just unnecessary hate and divide. I can totally understand everyone that calls out the bs in NFTs, but let's stay true to facts and logic. And btw, there is already proof of stake blockchains on which you can buy and sell nfts, for instance tezos. There's different opinions on wether or not ethereum is gonna move to POS this year, personally i think it's likely that it does. The way i see it is this: even if blockchain tech itself will fail, the highly increased interest in digital art will stay, and every single digital artist will benefit from it in the future, blockchain or not. We are seen now, also in the traditional art world. And that's a good thing. For all of us.

it's just a priority issue, don't know the in and outs of the mixamo control rig, but it's common practice to drive Ik controls with objects outside of the rig, so your professor doesn't really seem to know what he's talking about 😉 so you really just need to find the right priority setting.

what i don't get, why do you have to deactivate the fluid dynamics before switching to gpu? does that mean you'll have to run the fluid sim first in cpu mode anyways? if so, this would be pretty much pointless.

@aneirinif you're still having trouble, upload the file and i'll take a look. should be as easy as changing the constraints target.

just use a spline wrap instead of a sweep.

not really a problem, just a limitation by the nature of how an ik chain works. once it reaches its maximum length, it always gonna be straight. to avoid this just make sure your initial position of the goal is closer to the origin of the chain, so the vibrate tags range can never stretch it entirely. there are tricks how you can avoid the popping when a chain reaches its maximum length, but in your case i don't think you even want that to ever be the case. btw, what you're doing won't give you natural swimming like behaviour anyways, since the motion should travel down from the origin of the chain to the end, which is the opposite of ik chain behaviour. you might wanna take a look at orestis auto-overlap tool springy (can be found here in the plugins section i believe), which does all the work for you. 😉

the topology is certainly important, especially if normal modification options are not available. you build in quite hash edges where you want the shading to break as you move lights or the character around… but IMO that doesn‘t mean you have to use such horrible geo like in the first example. this specific one would cause a lot of rigging problems for certain poses. you could get all those creases in the exact same spots with clean quad topology as well…

you definitely don’t need crappy topology for toon shaded characters. mine are all clean quads and proper flow. it‘s just that with toon shading you can hide ugly topology quite good, so often people just don‘t care that much . in c4d we don‘t have proper normal editing tools, so we can‘t really get super smooth cartoon shadowing lines . as light travels across the model you get that crawling effect, to avoid this you need smoother normals than the actual geometry is… blender or houdini have those tools to edit normals properly or transfer normals from a more simplified model like an egg shape onto the head mesh for example… while we can transfer normals too in c4d, the problem is that normals get overwritten as soon as you put your model into an sds.

just do what you want to get jobs for. so for instance if you don‘t want to get character jobs, don‘t include character work. if you want to create colorful shiny organic mograph animations, do mainly that. if the ultimate goal is to get gigs from agencies and studios, you should probably do a mix of rather popular trendy styles and some really original stuff, so people know you can create stuff in styles that are en vogue right now, but also come up with something different and truly original. there really is no recipe, some people are specialists and they really focus just on one thing, and everything in their reel looks quite similar, while a generalists reel will look much more diverse of course. the only general rule is to keep it short and interesting.

@norealthere you go... sorry, wasn't checking the forum for a couple of days... freshbreast_D_0001.c4d.zip

here‘s some of mine: also nebula studios did this one here entirely in c4d:

every render engine has its strengths and weaknesses, it totally depends on the project which one is the right choice. i use standard, corona, redshift or arnold, depending on which one gets the job done most efficiently. for arch vis stills and product vis corona or vray is probably the best choice. for cinematic looking everydays octane is hard to beat. if you have somewhat bigger animation projects redshift is really good... on huge projects, where you can‘t anticipate entirely in the beginning what you might need down the road arnold is probably your best bet. you don‘t have to learn them all, but having a choice between 2-3 engines depending on the job really helps making your life a bit easier. in the end they are all quite similar and not that hard to learn.

got my maxed out new MBP today, first impression: f*ck me, that thing is fast. i get more than double the vp performance in c4d compared to my maxed out 2016 mbp. 3-4 characters at realtime? no problem. my wettest dreams became true. 🙂 after the first tests redshift runs faster than on my setup from 2 years back with a 1080ti in an egpu. logic seems to be super snappy as well, the only thing still kinda crawling is AE, i mean it is a bit faster, but not significantly. but let's be real, has anyone expected anything different?

that is exactly how you would do it. take the y-scale of the pole object and hook it up to the y-pos of the flag object. you‘ll need a range mapper inbetween, that’s about it.

say what you want about my "flawed judgement" (whatever that might mean), all i can say for sure it that the trashcan served me well, so i'm not sorry at all for my purchase. it's in its 8th year of being under heavy load more or less 24/7 with 0 issues. i'm sorry for anyone who had different experiences, but in my reality the machine served me well, i don't see anything flawed with that. i would be sorry if i bought a new mac pro last year though.

ordered a 16“ mbp on tuesday, the beefiest one, only thing i didn‘t max out was the ssd. never looked forward so much to a new laptop. i agree, quality standards were once higher at apple, but overall i‘m still happy, never had any major issue with any of my macs in 20+ years. @srekon the trashcan i disagree a bit. while the general design in terms of modularity / upgradability was a mistake, apart from that it was a good machine. still using mine from 2014 as my main desktop machine, it handles large psd files very well, and isn‘t holding up that bad overall considering it’s almost 8 years old. it’s freakishly silent even under heavy load, and didn‘t give me any trouble ever. it’s a workhorse, just not one you can upgrade properly. still, in retrospect i don‘t regret getting it, i‘m just glad i did not get a intel new mac pro last year, now that the arm chips have proven to be the hottest shit.

you need to distribute your weights better. this area is probably the most tricky one to get right.

align you joints so they re bending the correct way and then click reset bind pose in the weight tag.

your lighting is still too "hot", you get lot of blown out areas, where there's no color information in there any more. in real life, if you have such a big window and such bright surfaces, the bounce lights would even things out a bit more, you would not have those very dark areas you currently have. right now the lighting looks more like a room that has a window half the size of this one. i get that the blinds cover about half of it, but blinds like that are not fully opaque, so you might wanna give those some more translucency as well.

i created a lot of shorts and commercial character work in c4d, granted, most don't have more than 2 characters in one shot at a time, but if you're clever about it and work with layers (nitro-mans magic solo is also pretty good to just be able to focus on the stuff you need in a scene for animating the shot) it is workable. i too get the issue with c4d slowing down after manipulating many keyframes at once, and i don't really know why that happens, maybe a data leak or something. what i usually do when that happens is to close the scene and re-open it. then it's "fast" again. i recently rigged 16 characters for aixponza, and can (the creator of the l'artista" short) animated them, and he said he could run 11 characters in the scene at realtime. granted, those characters where very simple low poly geo and i made super simple performance optimized rigs for them. but yeah, it is kinda frustrating.. so i get you. i also try to learn blender atm, as time does allow it. the performance seems to be a bit better over there.

the toon rig was used for this. maybe give it a shot, it's a fun rig to animate. 😉 and yes, it is speed optimized, but there's only so much you can do in c4d unfortunately.