hvanderwegen

Yeah, upgrading to a new version of 3d software is getting more expensive nowadays. "Subscriptions", MSAs, ... And often the lack of useful new features make it a tough decision. I mean, I switched to Blender, and look at the upcoming new 2.79 version: built-in @render-time denoising, shadow catcher (finally!), principled shader, alembic and collada import improved, 22 new add-ons (camera rigs, magic UV, archipack, mesh edit tools, export paper models, etcetera), Rigify animal rigs (bird, cat, horse, shark, wolf), Cycles GPU AMD OpenCL rendering feature parity with CUDA, grease pencil improvements with 2d animation automatic inbetweening, new surface deform modifier, improved displace and mirror modifiers, 3d viewport improvements, and numerous other small improvements and bugfixes. No idea if I should update or not. The new feature list is disappointing to say the least, if you ask me. At least it has a shadow catcher now. The next version 2.8 will be better, though, with Eevee. I wish Blender had some of that sweet "tomorrow’s technology" MAXON mentions in their new blog entry, such as OpenGL. Not sure if v2.79 is going to be worth the upgrade price the Blender Foundation is asking. I'll have to discuss it with my wife first before I splash out the dough - she won't be happy, I'll tell you. But if I don't I'll have to pay a penalty when I decide to skip one version and wait for 2.8 and Eevee. Decisions, decisions.

In Blender 2.79 (about to be released) a new denoiser is available that is applied during render time, which vastly reduces render times while resulting in quite acceptable renders - far better looking compared to denoisers that are applied after the render is finished. I hope that MAXON will include such a denoise method in their Prorender implementation. Btw, I did get GPU rendering to work, and with a reduced viewport size, it works quite well. Just not as fast as Cycles, though. I also expect an AMD GPU to render much faster.

Now, this is getting really interesting. AMD's new Epyc server CPUs are blowing Intel right out of the water. New benchmarks for Cinebench: http://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu_benchmark-cinebench_r15_multi_core-8

Well, my new GTX 1080 arrived today, and it allowed me to install AMD Prorender in Blender for testing. I have mixed feelings: for some reason GPU won't be activated, so I had to render with CPU only (old i7 920@3.6ghz OC). Compared to Cycles it is S.l.o.o.o.o.o.w.w.w.w. Even in CPU Cycles I am able to work on a (simple) scene while the viewport is rendering away. Changes made to models and materials are instant. Not so in AMD Prorender: it takes a relatively long time to initialize, and each change made to the scene takes almost as much time to update as the first initialization. Integration in Blender is quite okay, and the built-in materials library is a great addition. But it just feels very slow and awkward compared to Cycles. I hope (expect) Prorender in Cinema4D to do better than this. I suppose a modern high-end AMD video card would be helpful to have ;-) This weekend I will attempt to get the GPU to render in Prorender. Eevee is much more fun to play with, though :-P *EDIT* I got it working now - it required an additional click to list "unofficial" (read: non-AMD) GPUs. It's pretty workable now: both CPU and GPU are used in tandem, and changes are now updated within a second, or so. Having said this, Cycles with the one GTX 1080 GPU feels a little over twice as fast as Prorender with both the 1080 and the CPU rendering. I assume the C4D version will also require a good GPU for reasonable speeds.

@Cutman, you can find it here: http://www.instantlightrt.com/ I looked at it again, and it seems a PBR renderer only - which means it is not integrated in the viewport the way Eevee is in Blender, as far as I am aware. Instantlight has been in development for over two years now - (mostly?) one guy's effort. Eevee seems more evolved at this point - and they're still in alpha stage, so. Still, InstantLight also looks quite impressive - and inexpensive. As for Eevee: Refraction and soft shadows are next, I believe. Basically, Eevee is meant to completely replace the old internal Blender raytracer, so users may choose between Cycles and real-time rendering. It's amazing what we can do nowadays! I recall rendering chrome and glass balls with checkboard floors on my Amiga 1000, taking hours for one 320x256 image to finish. And now we get real-time viewports that look better than raytraced images! Insane - mind-blowing. There's also been some talk about Eevee and integrating it into Blender's game engine. Makes sense.

Community is putting up more demos. The Blade Runner one looks very impressive.

Just discovered InstantLight for C4d - pretty much identical to Eevee, am I correct? It was released a couple of weeks ago. http://www.instantlightrt.com/ The promotional video is terrible, though - the post effects applied to the video make it look as if it is glitching out all over the place, and render it almost impossible to review the models properly. I also noticed that "Buster Drone" is used by both Eevee and InstandLight as an example model. Funny.

Actually, it is REALLY difficult for companies to find experienced UX designers. Here in Vancouver good User Experience designers are immediately snapped up by Google and other behemoths and given salaries that make it impossible for smaller software and web companies to compete with. I talked to a manager of a well-known dev house here who told me they have had a senior UX position open for two years now, and finally had to settle for someone junior - and he was certain that the moment that person would get some experience under their belt, that they'd be snatched away again within a year. It's proving to be impossible to hold on to a good UX designer for smaller houses/agencies/companies. Notice the listing date for MAXON's UX posting: over a year old! I am an experienced UX designer myself, and that MAXON job sounds nice - but I am not about to relocate to Germany.

Eevee (the realtime PBR rendering engine/viewport to be integrated in Blender 2.8) is starting to look very, very interesting. Similar to Pixelberg for Cinema4d, Eevee already seems more capable. Volumetrics, transparency, reflections are now possible in Eevee. Refraction soon to be added as well. Of note is also the tight integration with material nodes, and how simple it is to have one material node setup output to both Eevee and Cycles (and in theory to any other render engine). Pixelberg is pretty much identical in regards to intent - although I am unsure whether Pixelberg is still being developed? This idea to leverage realtime GPU rendering isn't new: Machstudio Pro was the first on the market to do this a couple of years ago (now defunct). It was used to render a feature length animation film made in Maya at high resolution and each frame cost ten seconds (or so) to render on a single AMD Firepro video card. Times are a-changing, people. Soon we'll no longer be waiting hours for an animation to finish rendering and the (as good as) real-time quality will be more than sufficient for many projects. Perhaps Prorender is already behind the times? We'll see. Exciting times ahead. 2.8 alpha builds are available for anyone who is interested in testing the waters. I did, and it's great fun. Examples:

Obama is not looking sad in that photo - it is an "I am pretty impressed" facial expression. Not everyone is as adept at reading facial expressions, and that one can be confused with "I am sad/disappointed". It really is quite an interesting field of research. Women are generally better at reading expressions, I believe I read somewhere. Thing though is, nowadays more and more (younger) people are getting worse at reading facial expressions and body language - due to internet and cell phones. Emoticons/emoji are very shallow replacements. ----- Back on topic: Intel is getting trounced in other areas as well. It has been confirmed that the new Intel i9 has SEVERE overheating issues: You read that right: even with a high-end air cooler the CPU will be throttled after a few minutes. It basically means it is worthless for 3d rendering at anything beyond a couple of minutes, unless you invest heavily in a costly high-end water cooled system. Read up on the story here: https://www.extremetech.com/computin...xs-design-well And all because Intel decided to scrape the bottom in favour of profits. Intel is looking pretty bad at this point, while AMD is looking better and better.

Agreed, this reminds me of the good old days when AMD would go head on with Intel. AMD could have priced these much higher, but decided to side with the consumers - the only reason why I went with Intel last time was purely because AMD could not compete at all at the time. Things look very, very different now. And the single thread performance is pretty good as well: a 3.4 GHz base clock and a 4.0 GHz boost! This is the perfect 3d workstation CPU. I want it!

$999 for the 1950, and 799 for the 1920. And 64 pcie lanes!!! To bring this into perspective, Intel's $13,000 Xeon Platinum has 48 lanes. Which means we can have up to 1TB of RAM. Intel got caught with their pants down. The only answer from Intel so far: a paper-based $1990 18-core i9 which will be out next year, I believe. This is an amazing CPU, and the price is unbelievably low. Good times! Finally a reason to upgrade my old i7 920 in few months. They start selling them in August. Dell is coming out with this:

https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/AMD-Ryzen-Threadripper-1950X-and-1920X-Announced-Flagship-Performance-999 Bad news for Intel. Good news for the CPU market and the consumer!

Don't forget to teach yourself to become well-versed in After Effects and non-linear video editing (Premiere, Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve, etc.) as well. In particular After Effects should be at the top of your list right beside C4D. You will also require a good sense of timing and animation flow. As Grain mentioned, you will have to become a good 3d generalist. And also become acquainted with film/short/video production in general. Not only in terms of learning software - but key skills such as animation (timing, spacing), story boarding, keying, composition techniques (how to combine 3d with real footage), etc. It depends on the type of company, though, in my experience. Motion designers are often a jack of all trades. It is good you have a graphic design background, so your design sense should be great - a good starting point.

I would have to agree here with 3D-Pangel. I am more of a 3d generalist, and 3d is only a small part of my work. I'd say I use 3d software 85% for personal work, and 10-20% for paid jobs - as part of the overall workflow. My 3d experience goes back to 1986 on the Amiga (Sculpt-Animate 4D), and I worked with most 3d apps throughout the years. I first encountered Cinema4D on the Amiga, and loved it. I got a license, and continued to use it when I got my first Windows machine. But Cinema4D's upkeep was just too much to bear at some point for me. I have an older Studio version, with many addons, and paid through the nose for that. The updates kept getting less interesting, and more expensive - until the breaking point where I had to make a decision. The division of features between the various editions made no sense to me either - so downgrading wasn't an option either. And yes, I did feel somewhat held captive by MAXON's update terms when they introduced stricter rules. I then decided (years ago) to try Blender, and while it was different at first, I can now work faster than I ever was able to in C4D. But it isn't the fact that Blender has a pretty good feature set in comparison (and its rocket speed development in the past few years) that keeps me in the Blender camp: it's mainly the freedom I felt after leaving commercial 3d apps. There's none of the financial stress involved, of course (and I support the Blender Foundation financially), but for me it is the openness of development/road-maps, the fact I can test new features as they are being worked on, the fact the main developers personally involve themselves in helping users (where it makes sense). And that I can download the source, and build my own version. In short, I feel entirely FREE since I switched to Blender. When a new version of Blender is released, it feels like Christmas to me: a lot of cool new things to play with every time, and for 'free'. While with Cinema4d, when a new version was released, I'd feel stressed out, because I'd have to check my financial situation whether I'd be able to afford it, and whether I'd WANT to afford it. And MAXON, as a company, is pretty tight-lipped as well, which I feel is a very old-fashioned manner of doing business nowadays. Just compare the guys behind Unreal, 3DCoat, or Substance Painter, and how they deal with their customer base. After I bit the bullet, and dropped Cinema4D in my workflow, I felt a big sense of relief. I am still interested in C4D's development, and I still do download the trial versions to test drive out of pure interest. Of course, these are just my personal observations.

Seems to me that if MAXON is integrating Prorender in the next version, NOT integrating this with material nodes from the very start would be rather odd. It wouldn't make sense, would it? It is THE opportunity to implement material nodes - even though those might not work with the old internal renderer.

Those look nice indeed. Aarghh, I'd like to test Prorender, but I suppose I will have to get a more modern GPU first. Well, yet another incentive to do so (and my birthday is coming up, so...)

For those interested to test-drive the new Radeon Prorender render engine: it was just released today for Blender. A manual is provided, and Blender is free - so here is your chance to check out Prorender now, while we wait for it to be integrated completely in C4d R20. No Mac version, though? When you install Prorender for Blender, it will ask you to register to receive a key. No need for that, it is the same key for everyone: GPUOpen2016 http://pro.radeon.com/en-us/radeon-prorender-for-blender-and-solidworks-now-available/ Even a Cycles to Prorender material converter is provided, as well as a built-in material library. Unfortunately my old GTX 590 GPU is blacklisted... I really need to get a GTX1080 soon

BodyPaint is the sole reason I keep my old Cinema4d license. This update is a bit disappointing, to be honest - MAXON had a DECADE to work on improving BodyPaint, and they completely dropped the ball: they could have had the market cornered. Instead, players such as Substance Painter and Mari appeared. And In the meantime ONE man in the scope of the past five months developed a BodyPaint "clone" in Blender with options like procedural texture layers and adjustment layers! It will be released next week: I'll be getting that, and I can say my BodyPaint dependency finally goodbye. :-) And it looks like it's easier to use as well. Lately a flurry of interesting (many forward-thinking) add-ons for Blender keep appearing. Available either for free or a dime. The same developer released an asset sketcher with PhysX Painter features last year.

For what it is worth, back when I did my modeling in Cinema4d, 99% of the time I hit the shortcut key to convert to a mesh after adding an object. For polygonal modeling it is not very useful. A non-destructive modifier stack is more valuable, in my opinion, and Blender does offer that. Text is also non-destructive and parametric. Lightwave's and Modo's base objects aren't parametric either, as far as I am aware. Each application has its strengths and missing features. Give and take.

No plugin anywhere?

Does anyone know if an equivalent function is available in C4D? Close Hole only creates an n-gon.