hvanderwegen

I would also add here that the rate of development of new features and (free and commercial) addons is a big plus. Blender's development is seeing an incredible momentum forward from a huge community, and this is clearly visible in all areas.

For example, Bone-Studio just released their own build with patches that will be included in the official version later, but can be used right now:

- light group passes (!)

- OpenVDB remesher non-destructive modifier including OpenVDB boolean operations

- Metaball to mesh both meshes/vertices and particles which carry motion blur information.

https://blender.community/c/graphicall/kdbbbc/

And around the corner is E-Cycles in the official releases, which will speed up Cycles rendering by a factor of 2 or more. The long-wanted bevel profile feature is about to be integrated for both the destructive bevel and non-destructive bevel modifier...

But these are only the tip of the iceberg.

The particle system is about to be modernized and replaced with a new far more powerful one - which will be integrated with the Everything Nodes project and physics so everything talks to everything else in Blender - Houdini style. Hair is also being updated to follow suit.

The list goes on, and on, and on... It's quite overwhelming, actually, and difficult to keep track of all developments at the moment. Blender has traction, and it doesn't seem to be stopping anytime soon.

Finally the outliner is receiving some much needed love. I love C4D's outliner, and really never touched Blender's outliner much, instead relying on other methods.

The latest builds merge Nate Craddocks Google Summer of Code 2019 outliner improvements:

- synched selection (FINALLY!) and drag selection rectangle without the need to hit the box selection key:

- drag over triangles to twirl down and up multiple 'folders' instead of being forced to open them one by one:

- industry-standard shift-selecting with arrow keys to multi-select lists of objects and drag and drop of multiple objects is now supported :

- other helpful changes, such as the option to use the keyboard's cursor keys to navigate the outliner (up and down, and left and right to enter and collapse the scene hierarchy).

Really happy to see these changes. I always miss C4D's outliner when working in Blender! I've been testing the latest builds, and the outliner is finally proving to be a real help in organizing and selecting scene elements instead of being a hindrance.

Additional outliner improvements are in the pipeline. See https://developer.blender.org/T68338

Intel's Open Image Denoise is part of the latest 2.81 alpha build.

Now that 2.8 is released, work has begun on integrating new features from various developers for 2.81. Blender should get regular releases every three months, or so, from this point forward.

Voxel Remesher!

The beauty of grease pencil drawings: they can not only be used for frame-by-frame drawing, but also rigged with bones and make use of Blender's rigging and animation for easy cut-out animation.

And both C4d and Blender are great apps. Keep your license of C4D.

I still use my very old C4D version for the odd thing. MoGraph comes to mind, for example.

I guess it depends on your needs. If you are at all interested in a package that seamlessly integrates 2d animation tools in a 3d environment, then Blender is the only option out there. Nothing else can compare to Grease Pencil.

Cycles and Eevee are hard to beat as far as GPU rendering goes, and the new viewport in 2.8 allows for some pretty neat real-time animation stuff.

And Blender does toon rendering as well with Freestyle. Rendering a 2.5 toon render with Eevee is now possible, reducing rendering times drastically.

Here is a toon render from Blender:

Now imagine combining this with hand-drawn grease pencil drawings and animations. Something which is impossible in any other 3d package.

Plus if you are doing animations, the built-in compositor in Blender will come in handy.

That said, C4D's sketch and toon is very good. It depends on your needs as far as 2d/2.5d animation goes. Blender's Freestyle does strokes, but no toon shading, for which you would need to assign the toon shader and play around with it.

I do know for certain Blender's 2d animation features will only grow and grow from this point forward. I can't see similar functionality being integrated into C4D any time soon - it's not what its core audience wants or needs.

PS these guys created a nice Eevee real-time toon shader, which combines well with Freestyle strokes. Example files are available on their page.

http://www.pantherdynamics.yolasite.com/toon-shader.php

AMD ProRender v2 for Blender 2.8 is released today! Download it for free at

https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/radeon-prorender-downloads

• The Radeon ProRender for Blender plug-in has been completely rewritten for Blender 2.80. This includes many changes to artists workflows:
  • Blender native shader nodes are supported out of the box. Including the Blender Principled Shader node. Most common nodes are supported, but a few, noted in known issues, are not translatable.
  • Additionally, RPR nodes, particularly the Uber node is provided for a more “expert level” shader setup.
  • Viewport and final rendering are more robust and optimized.
• AI-Accelerated Denoiser provides an extra denoiser based on machine learning technology. This is improved greatly with recent versions.
• Adaptive Sampling allows the renderer to focus samples on areas of the render that are higher in noise, while ending early in areas without noise. This allows the artist to apply the maximum number of samples and achieve less noise without increasing render times as much.
• Blender hair geometry is supported as well as “Halo” (sphere) particles.
• A tiled rendering option allows rendering images by tiles, allowing higher resolution renders without using as much VRAM. Additionally, the size and order of tiles can be adjusted.
• Object visibility options are expanded to include reflection/refraction/shadows, etc. Toggling with interactive rendering now works.
• Blender Curve/Text/Meta objects are now rendered.
• An "RPR" menu is added to the viewport to enable different render modes like Ambient Occlusion.
• Volumes are rendered as well as principled volume shader.  Note that volume should be cached. Volumes might look blocky for now, as a temporary workaround may increase volume resolution.
• Shader menu in "Add Nodes" now has RPR Uber, Principled, Emission, and a few other items. This is an optional feature and can easily be disabled in the render settings. 

Today marks an interesting point in time: Blender 2.8 is released at the same time as C4d v21 and its new subscription and license model are introduced.

Blender 2.8 features a complete rewrite of its viewport and GUI, and brings with it a wide range of impressive new features and usability improvements which make Blender far more user friendly than ever before, and brings it into line with industry standards.

A new real-time GPU render engine called EEVEE, which is a new physically based real-time renderer. It works both as a renderer for final frames, and as the engine driving Blender’s realtime viewport for creating assets.

It has advanced features such as volumetrics, screen-space reflections and refractions, subsurface scattering, soft and contact shadows, depth of field, camera motion blur and bloom.

Eevee materials are created using the same shader nodes as Cycles, making it easy to render existing scenes. For Cycles users, this compatibility makes Eevee work great as a realtime preview. For game artists, the Principled BSDF is compatible with shading models used in many game engines.

2d animation is now an integral part of Blender. Grease Pencil is now a full 2D drawing and animation system. This unprecedented integration of 2D tools in a 3D environment will enable you to create next-level concept art, storyboards and animations.

Cycles now provides industry-standard functionality such as Cryptomatte, BSDF hair and volume shading and Random Walk Subsurface scattering. Many rendering optimizations were done including combined CPU and GPU rendering, much improved OpenCL start and render time, and CUDA support for scenes that don’t fit in GPU memory.

CPU and GPU hybrid rendering is now part of Cycles as well.

By the way, work has already begun in cooperation with Nvidia to incorporate Nvidia RTX adding hardware-accelerated ray tracing to Cycles.

The list of new features and improvements is too long to list here, but here are a couple of the more eye-catching ones:

- principled volume shader

- bevel shader

- ambient occlusion shader

- IES lights

- multi-object editing

- view layers and collections for scene and render management

- new dependency graph

- bevel tool and modifier

- text improvements

Read up on the full list of new features here:

https://www.blender.org/download/releases/2-80/

Best of all, no license server limitations or subscriptions are required!

Download it for free here:

https://www.blender.org/

And this is only really the beginning of a new era for Blender and its users. Expect many more improvements and features in the upcoming few years!

Materialize is free now.  Offline desktop application! No need to be online.

http://boundingboxsoftware.com/materialize/

On 1/3/2019 at 9:22 AM, jed said:

Queen Vic saying 'we are not amused' is ye olde englishe mythe.

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.

6 hours ago, Zmotive said:

Two questions:

1) Is that the green body color for the "Compose  Color A" pedal? Seems darker than all the green pedals but I'm guessing there's some type of lighting impact that brightens it up.

 

2) This scene rendered in R20 Physical Renderer?

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

5 minutes ago, RBarrett said:

 

As I said earlier, there were technical reasons for supporting Physical first. This was the best way to get the node editor in your hands as part of R20, so you could start using it and providing us feedback.

 

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.

3 hours ago, RBarrett said:

 

Well, first - it's not my decision. If it were up to me I'd trim the portfolio to just 1 or 2 editions. I can say that pricing varies regionally and in some places BodyPaint 3D is a tad more expensive than Prime.

 

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?

3 hours ago, 3DKiwi said:

 Plus I can't believe it, but to get Prorender I would need to buy the Studio edition (as per MAXON's product comparison page). Ludicrous!!
 

Nigel / 3DKiwi

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.

5 hours ago, Marander said:

 

The good thing is C4D's perpetual, offline license compared to other applications

 

Only LightWave and Cinema are left with complete offline, perpetual licensing systems. These are therefore the 3D applications of my choice. All other 3d applications are node locked, rental only or require online activation as far as I know.

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.

5 hours ago, Rectro said:

Unfortunately for me its much more complicated, my future is uncertain, Iv been very ill this year.

Dan

Very sorry to hear - wishing for a best health and a speedy recovery for you.

Real-time volumetric MandelBulbs in Eevee. Plus tutorial. Looks magical.

4 hours ago, GaryAbrehart said:

Well I don't know much about Blender at all, the info I received was passed to me by someone who doesn't know Blender well (Lightwave user) from one of his freelancers so all a bit second-hand… It certainly does appeal to me considering all those high prices that we pay for licensed software though - might start learning a little :-)

My suggestion would be to wait for the upcoming 2.8 release with its GUI overhaul. V2.8 is going to be a game changer. Eevee by itself will change the way we approach rendering with (near) real-time rendering. The new viewport's performance is excellent, and on par with the best 3d apps out there with render quality options.

The beta is expected in week 2 of August next month. Learn more about the upcoming release here:

https://www.blender.org/2-8/