hvanderwegen

I think a good modeler and Houdini make a nice combo, plus Zbrush /3dCoat and Substance Painter. This could be Blender, Modo, or Cinema4D Prime. No need to invest in Studio then. Just too bad the Houdini bridge is again only available to Studio users.

On 11/7/2017 at 9:14 AM, Midphase said:

 

Houdini looks incredibly powerful, and the indie license seems like an awesome offering. Having said that, out of curiosity I started watching some beginner video tutorials on YouTube for Houdini and I was surprised at how complex and convoluted doing something as simple as moving an object from left to right can be, or creating a simple table. 

 

FYI, this is the series I watched:  

 

 

Same is true for Blender, a friend of mine is a huge fan and has been trying to get me to use it for years, yet every time he shows me how to do the simplest of tasks it feels far more complicated and convoluted than performing the same task in C4D.

 

I find both Blender and Houdini incredibly powerful (and in the case of Blender, totally free), but it is painfully obvious that these tools were not created for an intuitive artist mindset. So for that reason alone, I don't think C4D is in terrible danger.

 

 

That video (the table) merely shows how to create it in a procedural way. I suppose you are more accustomed to a more destructive direct flow of modeling, which is also possible in Houdini. The presenter could have just used separate scaled boxes, or extruded the legs from the base object.

Same in Blender: a table could be done completely non-destructively, but also using quick boxes, or extruding geometry.

The beauty of Houdini is that it is relatively easy to expand on this table object and build your own "table" tool. Everything is nodes.

But that's one of the issues I have with C4d: it is already quite expensive, and the standard answer to many of its shortcomings these past few years seems to be: "Yeah, but just get plugin X and plugin Y and that external render engine for a measly $500 here and $300 there to fix it". And C4d Studio is already one of the most expensive 3d apps to maintain (if not THE most expensive!). And so many aspects of the application haven't been really updated in years, and are quite behind the competition.

At that point one starts to wonder whether that Blender + Houdini Indie + Zbrush or 3dCoat + super fast render GPU engine X combo isn't a much more attractive proposition at less than a third of a financial investment.

"Ease of use" be damned: it's about a productive efficient workflow once the user has familiarized him/herself with an app that really counts. In this most 3d apps are quite equal in my experience, depending on the task of course.

The version 1.6.0 of ManuelbastioniLAB, the free and open source character editor for Blender, is ready for download.

ManuelbastioniLAB is a project aimed to create a scientific and powerful 3D humanoids editor.

• Basic muscle system, based on standard Blender bending bones, in order to offer max portability.
• Inverse kinematic controllers for skeleton rigging.
• Advanced mix algorithm to easily create complex expressions.
• Support for phonemes. Unified expressions for anime and humans.
• Custom rest poses.
• Improvements in anatomy of models.
• Improvements in shaders and skeleton structure.
• Big improvement in usability and algorithm of proxies.
• New fantasy targets.

Watch the video to discover the power of the new lab!

Learn more about this project here:

http://www.manuelbastioni.com

1 hour ago, 3D-Pangel said:

Interesting.  I see a few references to people using cracked software. Personally, I stay away from that as I have a ton of respect for the people who sweat brain cells making this stuff work and therefore feel they should be compensated (of course, I am always looking for great deals....sorry, you offer me 40% to 60% discounts, and I am yours!)

In the old Amiga times (and earlier) as a teen when the web did not exist, my friends and myself did not have easy access to legal software - neither financially, nor from a geographical point of view :-). Local stores hardly stocked any software, purely because it wasn't that mainstream yet.

I recall the local demo and swapping scene (I was member of a demo/hacker group myself :-P )

The demo (or COPY) parties were a sight (and smell) to behold.

Hundreds of zit-faced teen boys all carrying their own Amiga and hardware, setting up in a large hall for the day, and everyone showing off their art, programming/demos, and of course swapping software. There'd be the odd girl hanging around amidst the swaths of boys - obviously attracting a lot of attention. The police never cared. It would be impossible today.

And then at the end of the day at home examining the 'loot'.

But those were good times. Very different today, though. I count myself lucky that I grew up in that first generation of home computer users. Last week a 20 year old guy I talked with about the C64 asked me about "something called floppies" and "cassettes". He'd never heard of those. I mentioned how a single C64 game would take 4-5 minutes to load up. He just looked bewildered and confused, and couldn't imagine how that worked. I must be getting old

In my twenties I stopped using hacked software. I recall working on my first real client project with my last pirated version of Macromedia software, and afterwards purchasing a legal version. That actually felt really good. With the internet granting access to inexpensive software, I did not feel the need to use pirated software anymore. Once or twice I did use pirated software, but only if I was interested in evaluating software that had no trial available.

Nowadays the situation is very, very different: in my mind there's just no real reason to use pirated software anymore. The quality of open source software is impressive. Generally software prices have gone down quite a bit (well, excepting Cinema4d ;-P ). Games can be acquired for next to nothing through various legal channels (HumbleBundle, free-to-play, etc.).

And yet, some things never change: I notice on various forums that young teens still use pirated (often older) versions of commercial software, although it would cost them perhaps $10 a month or less/free to use alternatives. Flash comes to mind, for example. You'd be amazed how many young ones still install Flash 8 up to CS3/4 and create their animations with those older version (Newgrounds comes to mind).

It's sort-of strange, because in my teen years accessibility to good software was limited - while now that is no longer the case. Inexpensive and free/open source alternatives abound, and yet... And yet? Odd. Then again, the human brain only finishes maturing around our 26 years of age. I blame ignorance and naiveté. They're kids. I was the same. You don't know what you don't know.

Still have the last issue of Commodore User magazine which sported the last C4D release for the Amiga on its cover disks.  October 1998 - exactly 19 years ago.

That's how I got into Cinema4d. Well, to be honest I had a cracked version long before that - I was young and naive (weren't we all).

http://amr.abime.net/issue_668_contents

Another free HDR resource:

https://www.hdrvault.com/

One 1.8gb download!

Animation nodes 2017 show reel. A bit like Mograph, but with nodes, although consequently not as intuitive: "Node based visual scripting system designed for motion graphics in Blender". Free add-on, and it is steadily being improved and developed. Actually quite amazing this is free!

https://github.com/JacquesLucke/animation_nodes

Well, without the plugin you'd have to convert your entire scene to work in Blender's Cycles. I think you will find that one or two projects pay easily for that $240 just in saved hours. Your choice!

Blender almost never crashes for me - I do agree high-poly counts for a singular object will slow down Blender a lot while working in Edit mode. A good reason to split up a very complex object into several parts.

But I don't have issues with Edit mode crashing even with high-poly objects. Of course, I have no idea what you consider high poly objects? And I do have 48Gb memory.

I can say that edit mode in 2.8 alpha already boosts performance considerably (also for object mode - ridiculously so). In Edit mode 2.8 Eevee orbiting the viewport is just as fast as in object mode. Editing is still quite slow on a 1 million triangle object, though.

The trick is to hide the parts you are not editing, and then work. The Blender devs intention is to improve this in the 2.8 series.

Funnily enough there's a German guy who decided to create his own "more user-friendly" version of Blender. It is completely compatible and includes the same features, but with a more traditional user interaction.

I am no fan of this version myself, but I have read others (coming from other software) were able to get up and running within minutes in BlenderForArtists: https://www.bforartists.de/

Originally Blender was a commercial application. The company, however, went belly-up, and Ton (one of the original developers of Blender) with the help of the community, "crowd funded" the purchase of Blender's source code and license. 

They then open-sourced it, started the Blender Foundation, and the rest is history. I support the Blender Foundation, and I subscribe to the Blender Cloud - which is actually quite amazing: for 10 euros a month you are given access to online project management that integrates seamlessly with Blender. Not to mention all the other goodies...

Version 2.8 is going to be very, very special. Check out the "future of Blender" page they just got up and running a few days ago:

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

Download the alpha/beta version, and open one of the demo files that showcases Eevee. They have transparency and refraction working now. And more Eevee features are being worked on - basically, they want Eevee to replace the old internal raytracing engine. So Cycles and Eevee - and the nodal material editor will support simultaneous output between the two to avoid having to rebuild the materials from scratch.

But honestly I am really excited about the workspaces. Users should be able to customize the entire GUI tools. Just display a focused set of tools related to the job at hand - something that is lacking in Blender right now. And the new version will support completely customizable viewport widgets - simplifying tool use a lot.

Left mouse button will finally be completely supported in the new version too. ;-P

If you are planning a career in VFX: teach yourself Houdini with Nuke or Fusion.  Houdini is not THAT hard as it is made out to be - the documentation is excellent (in particular compared to C4d's docs, which are terrible), and many good tutorials are available.

VFX such as water, fire, and explosions are very easy to do in Blender, btw. Just look up a bunch of tutorials again. A couple of studios use Blender for this - a well-known one is http://www.barnstormvfx.com/

They use Blender and Nuke in production (Good Wife, Man in the High Castle, Good Fight, Silicon Valley, Outlander, etc.). Pretty high-profile VFX work production house.

It can't hurt to learn both Houdini and Blender. You MUST also learn a nodal compositor such as Nuke and/or Fusion, if you plan to land a job in VFX. And this means more than just knowing which buttons to push: it means learning proper compositing, match moving, 3d mattes, and so on. Nuke is sort-of the industry standard, although Fusion is used as well. It doesn't matter that much though - both work quite similar. Learn one, and the other can be learned quite quickly. Fusion is free for up to 4K.

7 hours ago, blutz said:

 

Free software doesn't integrate itself for free into a product. It doesn't automagically connect itself to the object system, animation system, material system, ... It also doesn't test itself or designs it own User Interfaces and workflows!

I apologize for that thoughtless comment - I happened to be in a foul mood when I wrote it (for other reasons - life and stuff). Never post when negative emotions are coursing through one's mind...

Be that as it may, I would have liked to see ProRender made available to Prime, but it is what it is. I've been playing with ProRender in Blender, and it is fun!

Yeah, I was a bit harsh on them - but mainly because I really see it as a missed opportunity for MAXON to attract a new user base. I would have been interested in Prime with ProRender, and get back into Cinema4D. Now Prime compares very badly to the competition at lower pricing tiers out there (Houdini Indie, Blender, Modo, Lightwave), in my opinion.

What I REALLY DON'T understand is why ProRender is part of all editions EXCEPT Prime/BodyPaint. That makes no sense to me, and leaves out hobbyists again. And Prime is still quite expensive. I mean, ProRender was developed by AMD, so MAXON got a new render engine for 'free' - and wasn't ProRender for "Everyone"? Everyone, except Prime users, it seems.

Well, at least Prime gets the improved viewport and the LOD object. But if MAXON thinks more users are going to be using Prime for game assets - well, think again. If ProRender had been part of Prime it would have attracted a new group of users, in my opinion.

I tested Eevee with an older GTX590 two weeks ago (before I got the 1080), and it worked really well on that card as well. The difference in performance of each GPU for realtime viewports will be similar to high-end 3d video games: a 1080 will be able to cope with more mesh data and shaders than a mid-level gaming GPU. For rendering output I suppose it may take a low-end card 5-10 seconds to compute a frame, while the 1080 takes 1 second. However, I haven't tested this yet - I base this on my experience with the Machstudio Pro GPU render engine some years ago. A complex lighted scene with animated characters would take a couple of seconds on my old AMD GPU. Things should be much faster now with the newer PBR viewports in both Blender and R19. I'll be testing more in the upcoming month(s). Eevee should be receiving soft shadows (for off-line rendering - too computationally intensive for real-time viewport) soon. Looking forward to that.

21 minutes ago, Cutman said:

Two excellent examples of the new viewport. Screw ProRender, I don't ever want to raytrace again...

 

https://twitter.com/the_glenster/st...166250083885057

https://twitter.com/the_glenster/st...169087840915456

 

I hope beyond hope that the viewport rendering improvements becomes an ongoing project and MAXON take this feature as seriously (if not more so) as the ProRender development. A high fidelity Hardware Renderer that comes close to traditional rendered output will be a seismic moment for the industry and allow many more clients to access 3D. I've lost count of the number of clients who aren't prepared for the rendering cost, so projects lose GI and get shorter as a result.

 

It'll be interesting to see just what impact GPUs have on rendering speed of the Hardware Renderer. Are there any MAXON employees here who can comment on if there is much of a performance difference between GPUs i.e would a Titan be much faster than a 1080 or AMD faster than nVidia etc? What system specs affect the speed of the Hardware Renderer the most? Thanks.

It looks good (but still behind Eevee!). The more I read up on ProRender and PBR in R19, the more I start to realize that both are 'works in progress'. The archaic material system is hurting both integrations, and quite messy: PBR and ProRender are not quite up to the MAXON level of GUI standards. It seems (based on CGtalk comments from MAXON employees) that MAXON is aware of these issues - if I warrant a guess here, I'd say that R20 will (MUST!) finally introduce a node-based material system. It is time.

@Greatszalam

Are you on Windows of Mac? Are you planning on getting a new computer, or a GPU box? Most (gaming) mainboards will not handle more than 3 or four GPUs.

5 minutes ago, Greatszalam said:

 

I believe you're mistaken; they are not using Quadro 6000s. The video (and your screenshot) shows that the Quadro M6000s are what they're using. The M6000 isn't old at all!

 

But I do agree that Quadros, regardless of card number, aren't the card of choice for 3d rendering.

Oh wow, I missed that. I was wondering why they'd be using such old cards... Even so, it's not great advertising for the M6000: you could get a GPU box with 6-8 GTX 1080s/AMD Vegas for the price of one M6000. The only advantage of the M6000 is its larger memory size.

Btw, AMD new Vega Frontier car will have 12GB.

This update, in my mind, first and foremost shows that MAXON is treading intrepidly into the future with C4D's development. It is a good update, and most users will find something to their liking here. I also suspect that V20 and V21 will be where things will truly begin to shine.

The introduction of ProRender without a nodal material system is a bit of a disappointment and a missed opportunity - one that probably will be resolved by next year (they really ought to!).

The character animation improvements look great. All in all, a very good update with promises and hints for the upcoming versions.

3 hours ago, Cutman said:

The Hardware OpenGL Renderer, LOD Object Houdini Engine support are the standout features for me and will have me buying the M$A again.

 

Forget GPU rendering Hardware OpenGL or nextgen API viewport rendering is the future and I hope this continues to get some serious attention in future updates to bring volumetrics and as a heavy user of Sketch and Toon I'd love to see the viewport be 100% perfect representation of S&T.

 

ProRender looks nice but very sluggish from the demos and I doubt it was running of low end hardware. I think we need hardware specs and benchmarks ASAP.

 

It is interesting to see (for me at least) that both C4D r19/20 and Blender 2.8 seem to mirror their roadmaps in regards to OpenGL viewports improvements. Eevee is at a more advanced stage at the moment, but I sense that MAXON is keeping an eye out at Eevee.

OpenGL rendering will become ever more a viable alternative to traditional off-line render engines, and it is a veritable relief that R19 includes this (or at least they are off to a good start!).

As far as Cineversity ProRender demo: the presenter's hardware is set up with two Quadro 6000 cards:

I think he might have installed a second Quadro 6000 just for the ProRender GPU demo (otherwise it makes little sense to have two, in my opinion) - and it is an OLD card which is not very well suited for GPU rendering at all. They really should have installed a modern game GPU and preferably one of the newer AMD cards to show ProRender off. My 1080 in Blender with ProRender delivers faster results than those two 6000s combined.

Quadros are generally not where you'd be looking for when you are shopping for a good GPU for GPU rendering. Bad choice to demo ProRender.

5 hours ago, Zmotive said:

Competition: this is generally correct in all areas of creative software. Look at the CC suite: Affinity is the first real competition anyone has seen for Adobe in more than a decade. Why? They bought Macromedia and all that was left was one-off competitors for individual apps, most of them seriously flawed (Quark) or less mature (Pixelmator).

Not entirely true: PhotoLine's been on the market for nearly as long as Photoshop, and its layer stack does things that neither Photoshop nor Affinity Photo is capable of. True layer instancing, 'smart objects', each layer can be any resolution, colour mode, and bit depth, mostly non-destructive editing, instancing of layer masks, and more. Arguably of the three, PhotoLine blows both Photoshop and Affinity Photo out of the water in regards to its layer stack.

The layer stack actually reminded me a bit of how C4D does things - extremely modular. Also a German developer, btw.

I switched to PhotoLine for most of my image editing.

5 hours ago, Zmotive said:

I see Maya, Houdini and C4D (and now Blender) as the closest things to an "apples to apples group of competitors" whose products can cover much of the 3D workflow on their own, but with different gaps / weaknesses. Maya's weakness is stability, and a modest motion graphics toolset (for now). [edit: almost forgot the dog sh*t licensing scheme - not a small flaw.] It's strength is it has a massive and deep toolset that can cover the bases of modeling, rendering, particles, animation, you name it. Houdini's weakness is its complexity but not much else; it can also do pretty much everything you need it to [and the licensing terms are great especially for indies].

You omitted one: Lightwave. It may not have the industry support anymore it used to have, yet it is still a quite capable 3d generalist application. Newtek, however, suffers from the same ailment as MAXON: almost no communication. Lightwave Next ought to be out sometime this year, and will probably add some interesting new features, and a completely overhauled new render engine.

Whether that will be enough...?

5 hours ago, Zmotive said:

Blender's weakness is its user interface and it's lack of motion graphics tools. C4D's weaknesses we all know well and its strengths are clearly motion graphics and its overall stability and approachable UI. But obviously MAXON can't rest on that. 

Indeed, MAXON cannot rest on their laurels. They did that with BodyPaint (and other modules), and we all know how that panned out. And even Blender is making solid forays into offering better motion graphics tools with "Animation Nodes". Version 2 just added fall-offs to their Effectors - yes, you read that right: the developer took its cue directly from MoGraph's Effectors! 

Now, combine this with the upcoming Eevee?

Talking about new versions, the new version of Clarisse looks quite impressive. I am looking forward to use it soon.

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.

57 minutes ago, Fastbee said:

This was my guess with prorender.  Every prorender render I've seen has grain in it.  Even in the official AMD video for prorender I remember seeing some grain in parts of the video.  Using a AMD gpu it probably would be faster, but still slower than cycles with a nvidia gpu.  Cycles really is built well and has great options if you know what settings to use.  Sometimes I get pro renders with cycles in seconds.

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.