DaveW

I actually think it was specifically targeted at high end professionals and IMO is actually one of the biggest reasons behind such a push. Lots of larger studios have massive CPU render farms. Meaning they would never bother using Redshift. Now maybe they will... C4D also comes with five free nodes so those midsize studios that often still have CPU farms can toss a few on the farm depending on how many seats of C4D they have. That's a lot of render nodes. This also applies to online render farms. CPU farms are cheaper. Versatility is good for RS. Means it may be adopted by more and more studios. You can do your look dev on the box with GPUs and then send to a massive CPU farm. I think overall, this update provides a decent amount of value to C4D users. Certainly the Maxon One subscription just got more attractive to me but I already own all those licenses separately besides RG(Which I don't need or use). But after R25 it does feel a little "light" especially seeing how fast Blender and Houdini are moving. Would be nice to see more emphasis on Scene Nodes. I haven't seen a single person use them or a tutorial on them outside of the official channels. That doesn't bode well for the feature. Meanwhile Geometry nodes is everywhere. Overall though, good update.

Can you create UDIMs in the UV editor inside C4D?

Solid update. Would still like to see UDIMs supported though. Especially since Maxon now owns Zbrush.

Which really is no advantage at all to a working professional. If the only thing Blender has going for it is the price then blender is screwed! (I don't think Blender only has that going for it though...) The future of Blender is very bright and learning it is not wasted time(IMO). I wonder what they'll be able to accomplish in the next five years. Blender doesn't have to be better than C4D to overtake it, it just needs to be just as good. I think it's almost there as is. I can chime in a bit. I didn't "leave" C4D, I just use Blender for the things Blender is better at. Which IMO are modeling(and sculpting), lookdev, traditional animation/rigging. It's far better for creating/designing game assets as well which is why it's making big inroads into game artists workflows. On the Film/VFX side it's being used heavily in concept art workflows. I don't think C4D will ever break into these areas(further than it has currently, I have used c4d for concept art on film). It's also recently got much better at creating procedural assets with it's Geometry Nodes. I still prefer working inside C4D for rendering. Mostly due to engines like Redshift. That being said lookdev in Blender is so much better due to Eevee and a viewport that actually reflects what your material nodes are doing.

Cycles X doesn't have light linking which is why it's not used heavily in production. There's one reason. It's also far slower than Octane or Redshift and only available inside Blender(currently).

This is the thing a lot of people didn't understand about AI. "Learn 2 Code" and all that other bullshit... Wishful thinking.

The whole Cycles X debate is irrelevant. Blender can use Octane. It can use Redshift. I've personally seen more and more software agnostic workflows popping up because of remote work and at several different studios. All that being said... Blender is only free if you don't value your free time. I think eventually there is a very good chance it could take over especially in 3-5 years as more and more people enter the industry knowing Blender. Motion Design is interesting because it's not as strict as VFX. I see no reason why Blender won't be utilized more in our workflows.

Well Rob is the tech and rendering lead at Unity. They are using Ziva though, they're currently "migrating" to it. Whatever that means!

In the twitter thread I believe they used 4D capture and are moving the entire thing to Ziva in the coming weeks. "Facial animation is still a 4D capture. We've improved our workflow and quality, but 4D would still be impractical for any larger production. The future of our productions is Ziva, where we only train the system with 4D, but final performance is captured even with and HMC."

Better viewport. Redshift Integrated fully into C4D. UDIMs. Better RS Node Graph. Faster simulation system. A new native particle system. Adoption of USD workflows to allow for more software agnostic workflows(Is this in and working in R25?). Also as realtime workflows become more prevalent accross multiple industries the game asset workflow needs to be more bolstered inside C4D. Need to be able to edit normals in a more robust manner, redone baking system inside C4D, Continuing improvement on UV tools, livelinks between UE, Unity, and C4D.

This blogpost is the most you're going to get currently unless they're recording their presentations at GDC(likely). There are a few twitter threads by the developers.

Yes and I believe this was a creative decision. This is almost all "performance" and doesn't have much to do with the actual tech IMO. We will also be able to download this scene in a few weeks(Q2 2022?). I think a lot of the assumptions in this thread will turn to be wrong. Specifically around the "compositing" artifacts. Real-time engines are all about "faking it" far more so than offline renderers. There will be small artifacts around objects for a plethora of reasons. It's not limiting the critique. This will literally be a scene released for free by Unity for further study by its users. This is most definitely one of these best real-time digital humans I've ever seen. From the description of the video it seems like it's also an ongoing project. They're currently at GDC showing off the tech. This is a 100% a single unity scene. I find it funny people are calling it into doubt which makes the whole thing even more impressive. From the Unity blogpost. "The demo will be featured at the Unity booth at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) on March 23-25, available for attendees to check out as a standalone or running in the Unity Editor. "

I use Blender for modeling, UV unwrapping, and sometimes animation and do all of my scene layout and rendering inside C4D. C4D's UI/UX cannot be beat... yet anyways! I'm still on R21 at home.

A lot of Hard Surface techniques for games(beveling shitty geo) etc like this, have alternatives in blender or even Houdini. Zbrush is used in a lot of use cases outside of traditional sculpting and yes those people will jump ship if necessary. I use it as a utility tool all the time but have found other comparable workflows in Blender.

I think it can be misleading. Certainly not unfair. They both do 3D work... And in the near future I may be using only Blender for my work depending how this all shakes out.

This is awesome, I was recently struggling to get something like this working in C4D that was actually usable. Does this have any sort of dynamicss? Like riding over terrain etc?

Then stay on R17 and nobody here is angry. You’re argument makes no sense. This user was responding to the comment that there hasn’t been any huge updates since R17. Which is ridiculous. Just because you don’t use fields doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good update… and the most recent updates will of course be smaller as the release cycle is now sped up.

Not necessarily. I have worked in many studios that were unwilling to buy more than a handful of seats of H. It's also far harder to train up/find good Houdini artists. If Maxon takes their ease of use philosophy behind procedural node systems I think it could be a huge win. However, I do think your trajectory is correct, even if Maxon does everything right in the next few releases they could still be crushed between Blender and Houdini. IMO the only thing holding blender back right now is performance. I'm just looking for an update to C4D that's as well integrated as Blender + Eevee/Cycles. Doing lookdev and shader-fx in there is so smooth compared to janky ole C4D. They feel like they're from different eras in that regard. I wouldn't read to much into Toby Pitman leaving C4D. C4D was always a horrible modeling tool compared to the competition and it was amazing that he even stuck with C4D for so long. C4D's power lies in other areas.

I think the idea behind them is basically to be a user-friendly Houdini. Which would have huge implications for the software IMO. Especially if it starts to integrate into real time engines like HDA's can. There is a reason Blender is also creating Geometry nodes.

This only matters if you aren't using UE like you would an offline render engine. To do any serious work in Unreal requires another package alongside it. Like C4D, Houdini, Blender etc. A more apt comparison would be to an offline render engine. You can get a comparable looking scene out of UE5 at a fraction of the render time of Octane or Redshift and build large environments much quicker. Things that that you would normally have been matte painted or required tons of v-ram can now be done instantaneously inside UE5 thanks to nanite and megascans.

Houdini Engine for game engines is completely free up to 10 nodes.

Well they have a better solution. Houdini has Houdini Engine, which is miles more useful and it seems to have it's own separate format.

Doesn't stop Houdini

They could just do an indie with no limitations besides a .c4dlc file like Houdini does.

No you really won't. Out of the box Blender is a powerhouse now. With decent modeling, UV, and sculpting tools. It's pretty much a perfect pairing for real-time applications like Unreal or Unity.