hvanderwegen

I agree mostly. The Blender Foundation's seems to listen better to studios nowadays: the LTS (Long Term Support) initiative is great, allowing studios to work on long-term projects while staying in one stable version that is bug fixed for two years. The current version 2.83 already received 5(!) LTS updates since it was released last June. I noticed a marked improved stability since release 1 (and Blender is on the whole very stable running as it is). And version 2.9 is about to be released (next week) with a quite long list of interesting new features and improved edit mode performance, but also nice little GUI improvements across the board. The usability of the outliner, for example, is improved once again. One thing I have noticed over the past few years is the DELUGE of add-ons for Blender. It is intimidating and impressive at the same time. I see ex-Modo users create addons to bring Modo functionality to Blender. I see ex-Max users create addons to add features they had in Max. The community is hard to beat. Anyway. A c4d to Blender plugin would be nice to have. Are you aware of the copy and paste addon/plugin that allows for copy and pasting of geometry between various apps? https://github.com/heimlich1024/OD_CopyPasteExternal I've used it at work for seamless and quick switching between C4D, Modo, and Blender while working on projects (before Covid, that is). At the risk of repeating myself, in my mind licensing is the major hurdle right now for MAXON. Secondary hurdle is the rather slow development of C4D in the past five up to ten years. It is lagging behind and relying too much on third-party developers to fix the gaps, which rubs more salt in the financial wound, so to speak. Hopefully with R23/S23 development will have picked up.

Finally the forum works once more! Thanks - it was nigh on unusable.

More and more users are switching to Blender not because of pricing, but because of what other users are accomplishing with it. In studios it's become quite normal to see Maya and Max users adopt Blender in their workflow. The community is thriving, and this is very attractive to new users as well. The attractive pricing (free) only serves to help adoption, but I think it also has to do with the simple licensing: Blender doesn't even need to be installed to run. Compare with the C4D trial: in a move to make it even more hostile to potential new users, MAXON decided to time-limit the demo/trial and put it behind a registration. Personally, I have way more fun modeling and working in Blender now than I ever had/have in Cinema4d. And I am not alone in this... It's a very robust and quite user friendly 3d app. The tabs I really love: quick switching to sculpting or UV'ing with one click. Tabs were something I also loved in Lightwave. The viewport is an absolute joy to work in. C4D feels very clunky to me compared. Yes, there are rough edges, as there are in any software. C4D is no exception either. The main difference at this point is that Blender is actively being improved making great strides, while C4D seems to move along at a snail's pace. But perhaps with C4D 23 a break-through will finally happen? We can but wait and see. I believe Cinema4d is losing and/or will lose ground because of its abysmal licensing and pricing, unless MAXON changes it. Compare with Max and Maya Indie (even though it can only be used on projects worth less than 100K) for $250 a year, or Houdini, Blender: all have much more attractive pricing schemes. AutoDesk is feeling the heat, and their response to the Blender upheaval in the market is probably too little and too late. Heck, even LightWave seems to attract one or two new users that would have picked Cinema4D instead, but were rebuked by MAXON's licensing/rental plans. Especially in tough economic times like these MAXON's licensing is akin to a kick in the face when you're already down on the ground. And exacerbating the situation is that Cinema4D users, while paying a premium upkeep, need to invest in an external particle plugin, external render engine, and other plugins and apps to keep up with the competition. Something needs to give.

Confirmed. Working with Firefox Developer (latest): the page keeps bugging out with the same error. It is unusable.

Luxcore produces some beautiful results, and is quite fast for what it does. We may count ourselves lucky to have free access to all these renderers. Something for everyone.

The latest ProRender 2.4.11 was released a few days ago. Installation in Blender is very simple now, and no longer requires a separate installation - just point Blender at the add-on package. This version finally works properly with my setup: previous versions refused to work. It actually works quite well so far, and renders nicely on my GTX1080. Notable changes: Installers are now simply zip packages. To install, load the add-on through the Blender add-on preferences menu and point to the zip file. You will need to manually uninstall the old plugin fist here. macOS now supports ML Denoising. Support for Blender 2.83 has been added. Support for reading OpenVDB files via Blender 2.83 “Volume” objects has been added. The RPR 2.0 “experimental” render mode has been added. Currently this is Windows only and only recommended for final rendering. This is a prototype of our next generation renderer. Performance and memory usage should now be improved, especially for complex scenes. Multi-GPU and CPU + GPU performance, particularly when rendering with an AMD CPU + AMD GPU, is dramatically improved. For complex scenes that are larger than video memory size, out-of-core textures and geometry are automatic. Baking nodes. We have added utilities for baking nodes. This is useful with nodes that RPR does not translate natively, such as noise texture nodes. It is also quite useful with complex node networks, as they run faster at render time. There are two options:Select an object and material. In the Shader Editor, select the nodes you wish to bake, and press the “Bake Selected Nodes” button. The nodes will be baked to textures, and texture read nodes will be created;In the render settings, press the “Bake All Unknown Nodes” button. All nodes that RPR does not translate will be baked to textures.Please note that after changing node setups, the nodes will need to be re-baked. There is a new GL_Interop setting under “Viewport Sampling” settings. Users who use external GPUs (eGPUs) for viewport rendering may need to disable this. The speed of export of images for rendering has been increased.

Blender ships with an add-on called "Import Images as Planes", which makes it a doddle to import any number of images in one swoop, map them to planes, tell it to offset the planes at a preset distance and the axis, and have them track the camera. All part of the plugin. Camera (projection) mapping is also fully supported in Blender. And, unlike Cinema4D, Blender features a nodal compositor, so it is easy to composite things directly in Blender as well. Last, but not least, Cycles (Blender's renderer) has really nice GI and overall output quality. It's a modern render engine, and if you have a good GPU it will render your work fast. If you need faster output, e-Cycles is even faster (not free, though).

PS the Juggler animation is what REALLY got me interested in 3D animation. I was gobsmacked by the quality! The first time I watched it, I kept it on for an hour, or so. That glass ball sound effect still haunts me today! 🙂

Ah, the old Amiga days. Still lamenting the demise of her. I created my first 'professionally printed' DTP work in Pagestream. The first 'proper' 3d app I used was Sculpt 3d (later Sculpt/Animate 4d - Cinema '4d' is not as original as you would think 😜 ). Later Imagine, Lightwave, and Cinema4d on the Amiga. I also recall dabbling in Turbo Silver Pro! But I first started working with 3d wire renders of objects on an Amstrad CPC664. How far we've come... I would love to use Affinity Publisher, but the Affinity range of products do not support 1bit images, which I require for my work.

I noticed your comments: To parent stuff in the outliner, just hold down shift while dragging the object over another object. If you need more speed, E-Cycles is dramatically faster for many scenes. Worth investing in to half your render times, and even more so on the newer Nvidia cards. To improve overall workflows, do a little research in the add-on / plugins ecosystem. Nowadays there are add-ons to solve or improve anything in Blender - it's overwhelming.

Materialize is free now. Offline desktop application! No need to be online. http://boundingboxsoftware.com/materialize/

That is definitely not true! She said it in Doctor Who!

Blender 2.8 beta is out! https://www.blender.org/2-8/ And a quick introduction video.

@3DKiwi That looks brilliant. Is this based on that car tutorial?

Just found this one: a remake of the intro used for Hilda (animated series) with Blender's Grease Pencil. Looks nice.

A historic moment in Blender development: starting today left-mouse selection is now fully implemented! No more usability conflicts. Even a nice start-up dialog with the choice between left and right click select. A few new Eevee demos for your viewing pleasure. The new development demo: ...and just to show that Eevee isn't just about scifi scenes: Artists around the world are getting into Blender's new Grease Pencil, and discovering innovative uses for it: sketch shapes in 3d space, export to Photoshop for finishing. Grease Pencil is in use for pre-production in feature movie creation as well. Also, today the new ProRender 1.8 is released for Blender, Max, and Maya. Blender's ProRender render viewport works very smooth now. @vanderleden the Blender team is currently tackling low-end Intel and lower end Nvidia and AMD cards for Eevee to run on those. Remember, Blender 2.8 is still in alpha.

Time does not stand still, and those who rest on their laurels are left behind. In the meantime the Blender foundation just introduced their own Cinebench variant, and it includes GPU rendering benchmarks and production-level benchmark data to test your hardware. Results can be shared online which are presented with nice graphs and all. OpenCL, CUDA, and CPU rendering can be tested, although OpenGL testing is not (which hardly anyone doing benchmarks is interested in). The tool and page are in beta right now. https://opendata.blender.org/ Devs at MAXON: if you take too long with releasing a new version of Cinebench, before you know it all benchmark testing will no longer include your branded benchmark tests, and instead use this alternative, because it includes CUDA and OpenCL GPU rendering benchmarks. Similar to the BodyPaint debacle, you will lose that niche. Please take heed. You've already waited too long.

2) Yes, must be, because the physical renderer is exposed to nodes for now, while ProRender does not support nodes yet.

I understand that. It's easier to deal with C4D tightly integrated classic renderer and code base first. More convenient, easier. Less scary. I understand all that. Better be conservative in your thinking rather than risking scaring existing classic C4D renderer users away. It's also plain silly and back-ward thinking. It means that ProRender's development and integration is to be regarded as a beta version even in R20. ProRender users are treated as second-class citizens now in R20, just as they were in R19. That is somewhat understandable in R19, and somewhat unacceptable within the scope of this new release, because a PBR based render engine such as ProRender just SCREAMS for a node-based material system! Can't wrap my head around that. I'd have expected the devs to push the modern render technology first, and get up to speed with the competition. Compare Lightwave and Blender: both made a clean break with their older renderers (with LIghtwave throwing away the old one altogether which was, granted, perhaps a step too far), and their users switched quite quickly, even with Cycles not being quite production ready in the first year, and Lightwave's new render engine still rough around the edges. But Cinema4D's approach is kinda like it wants to hold on to the past, and is reluctant to embrace the future. C4D finally, FINALLY introduces nodal materials, yet they don't work with the MODERN render engine that was implemented in the previous version! I just don't understand that line of thinking. It's like holding candy in front of your users, and then snatch it away. In the meantime C4D is left with an aging renderer that just can't produce the same level of quality renders as ProRender and other modern renderers yet STILL gets the candy first, and not having material nodes for ProRender is stifling users from properly transitioning to ProRender. Which only solidifies the general feeling that an external render option is going to be preferable even over ProRender in C4D. So weird. Perhaps I am beginning to understand why Newtek decided to rip out the old render engine: in with the new, out with the old. Look forward, don't look back. Sorry for my rant, but I was really looking forward to see ProRender's potential fulfilled in R20, but look at it now. No node-based materials? Instead, the old render engine got them? How does that make sense? So I suppose ProRender users will have to wait another 14 months for material nodes to be made available to them. Sorry for my rant. I think this is a nice release otherwise.

Agreed, that's what I am thinking as well. Get rid of Prime, put BodyPaint in all editions (including sculpting), combine Visualize and Broadcast into one edition for $1999, and keep Studio. At this point I think all those editions are hurting sales and confusing customers, similar to the modules situation years ago. Simplify, simplify. Good to hear that ProRender is available in the Broadcast and Visualize as well. Very odd that nodal materials aren't available for ProRender (yet). I thought ProRender is supposed to be the new render engine, and now it seems that the old renderer was given nodal materials first? That doesn't make a lot of sense to me, because it feels as if ProRender is sort-of second guessed by management. ProRender is the new kid on the block, so I'd have expected it to have nodal materials; instead, the OLD renderer got nodal materials, not the other way around? Which could mean more users will stick to using the older render engine for years to come. Not sure, but the development roadmap sometimes makes little sense to me.

Also a bit weird: according to this thread: http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=47&t=1509908 ProRender users cannot use node-based materials yet? True or not?

Yes, noticed that as well. If that is true, it's a rather sad state of affairs - in particular seeing that Maya, Blender, and Max get a fully featured ProRender for... free. I really think MAXON's management is making a mistake with this: if it were integrated in all the other editions it would draw some interest, and more importantly, more C4D users would take ProRender more seriously as an rendering alternative. But if it's only made available to Studio users? Really? What is the point? You either push your new render engine to ALL your users, or you risk having your beautiful new render engine adopted by a small percentage of users. Open it up to everyone. It's not as if ProRender is a unique key feature: all the rival applications already sport more advanced render engines at this point. AND have free access to ProRender. Reserving it to your "elite" users is merely petty attitude, and in my opinion indefensible. That said, I can't see this being true! ESPECIALLY the Visualize edition would benefit from ProRender. If it IS true, and it is not a mistake, then I am dumbfounded by that decision. It makes no sense at all the way I see it, and is just plain silly.

I suppose a nice release for motion graphics artists and CAD users. Nodes were LOOOONG overdue, so not really a new feature in my view, and ProRender users in other packages have had those render options for a longer time now as well. I didn't see the denoiser option for ProRender? Did that make it into this release? Otherwise, quite a few long standing issues and missing features that I assumed would be tackled in this release still haven't seen even a glance of attention, it seems? Odd. Anyway, good to see nodes finally introduced. One thing I am wondering about, though: what's the point of Prime anymore? MAXON even dares to mention "UV editing" as a Prime feature - that's grabbing at straws, isn't it? Perhaps it would be a good idea to merge Broadcast and Visualize into one, call it "Foundation" and keep "Studio". Then put a price tag of $1999 on "Foundation".

Now this is interesting to anyone doing retopology jobs. It's friggin' amazing.

And Blender, of course. A superb off-line perpetual license with full access to the latest betas (with full access to the original source code) and a one-in-all version (no silly "premium" or "entry-level" versions with various pricing to deal with). The one-time entry fee is quite acceptable as well. No serial number or activation necessary. And no dongles either. Best license scheme ever! ...sorry, couldn't resist. Very sorry to hear - wishing for a best health and a speedy recovery for you.