Mash

I don't have any links to hand but the jist of it is this; Currently on ETH you're using huge amounts of electricity powering huge numbers of GPU to crunch math. If your math processing happens to stumble upon a coin, you get to keep it, but because this is so rare, many people join a mining team, and you are instead awarded a portion of that coin depending on how much effort your computers put into the task. This is all known as PoW, Proof of work. The new system that ETH is switching to is PoS, Proof of stake. Whereby instead of putting your gpu power on the line, you put up a stake of ETH. Super simplified, its like putting money into a bank account and earning interest on it. These huge ETH stakes are essentially a guarantee that the transactions you claim happened are real, if you're caught trying to lie about transactions, you lose your stake; which at the moment have a starting price of £100,000 to join. Its a bit like if the government said, "we trust you to file your own tax returns, but if you ever lie even a tiny bit, we're taking your house away". You'll be scarred into being honest, and theres a thousand other random people double checking your tax returns who will get rewarded if they spot a cheat. This is immediately the vast majority of the power usage removed. The second element is whats known as a layer 2 zero knowledge rollup. Its a stupid name but all it means is that rather than going onto the blockchain and making a transaction every time you buy or sell something, a third party will instead bundle up 100, 1000, a million transactions into a single bundle, then put those through the ETH system as 1 bit of data rather than a million. Thus reducing the usage and transaction costs by several orders of magnitude. Add these together and you have a system that can handle more transactions per second than all the visa, mastercard and banking systems combined, and without melting the icecaps.

On the eco footprint, that is all about to 99.999% vanish. The switch from proof of work (mining with a million gpus) to proof of stake will eliminate 99% of the energy usage and will make gpu prices plummet. On top of that the level 2 system will allow thousands of times as many transactions to be performed before being bundled up into a single ETH transaction. so yeah its horrific right now, but by the end of the year we'll need a few less power stations around the world. As for NFTs. I 100% agree on what you showed, NFT's in their current state are almost entirely garbage, most often used to launder money or milk cash from idiots. However. NFTs do have and will soon have their main intended use flung into the limelight. Proof of ownership of other items. Currently all you see them used for is "hey, I own this url which points to a crap image that took somebody 30 seconds to make" Very soon you'll find your Rolex watch comes with an NFT so you can prove to future buyers that yours isnt a knockoff. The same will go for any high end designer item where counterfeits are a problem. The whole NFT in gaming thing, that one is yet to play out. The idea that items you buy in game will genuinely be yours to keep, to trade, sure why not. Its effectively bringing the whole Magic the Gathering card system to virtual items. Currently mobile gaming is funded 90% by whales who drop obscene amounts of money on in-game items, either to help them win, or to give them a rare cosmetic look. I suspect a lot of this will be aimed at them, but it could also work out in everyone's favor. Joe Bloggs finds the super stylish and rare tie-dye beanie hat in the new GTA6 game? some idiot with too much money wants it and will pay £10k for it? Sure, why not. 80% cut to the guy that sells it, 20% cut to the game publisher and the rich idiot gets his pretend item.

First thought, you have enabled the create at view centre option in the preferences Second though, youve right clicked a coordinate and selected 'set as default'

It depends what the differences are going be between your different renders. Takes are great when you need variations of the same thing. A room at night, a room in the day. Or a room kitted out as an office then the same room as a dining room etc. You do need to be careful though because it is very easy to accidentally record take data you didnt want, much like leaving auto key turned on for animation. The take system is largely stable, though its weaknesses are that working with animation sucks, and that it is very difficult to manage take data across multiple projects as it is so very much tied to the specific project file.

Honestly, I would just place a circle/square on the label artwork. Add a cylinder or cube in 3d, then adjust the texture width/height until the shape on my texture matches the 3d shape. If your label artwork is say 8000x2000 pixels, then even matching this up visually to within a couple of pixels will get you 99%+ accuracy at the centre of the texture. Beyond that nobody is ever going to tell it isnt perfect because the majority of the surface is going to have a 5-10% error at the top and bottom of the tapered shape anyway, so a 0.1% error in the middle is meaningless.

A lot of you will be working from home, are you by any chance connect to work VPNs? Windows is notoriously naff when connected to a VPN. Drives take a minute to refresh/timeout, local network drives and printers vanish. Windows pretends it cant find a path when connected because you tried to browse the folder before the VPN handshaking had finished etc.

Work on the same files back and forth constantly changing between blender and c4d, or a one off transferral of a model from one app to another? you can move models, textures and some animation from one app to another using a format like fbx or alemic. But theres absolutely no sensible way for you to both work on a full production project with 2 different apps. Its like asking the best way for a native chinese speaker and a native french speaker to write a book together using esperanto.

Because its a question of budgets and whats needed. A hollywood production centre is going to relatively not care about the price of a render node. 500 nodes, 1000 nodes, 2000 nodes... meh whatever. Just make sure it can do everything needed and price be damned. There's also data size to consider; a CPU engine is going to cope much better with 50gigs of alembic data on a 128gig node than a 20gb gpu will. But step down from that to a much more common sized company, or department within a company, and the price to performance is often going to dictate what can and cannot be done. So many jobs will not have GI enabled, or motion blur, because the engine will die a slow death when you turn those features on. Or youll be stuck doing 1080p jobs because quadrupling render times for 4k just isnt viable with the render hardware the company has at hand. On archviz, from what I see, there is a mass exodus away from cpu engines over to unreal due to being able to pump out a full walkthrough in an hour or two as opposed to several days. I dont think cpu is dead. It just doesnt make much sense for the average user other than the fact that their 3d app happens to ship with a cpu engine.

Any examples? I've yet to find the graphics task where 10,000 simple gpu cores are slower than 64 cpu cores. By quite a margin. For the longest time the biggest ace cpu renderer's had up their sleeve was that gpu's simply couldn't do many tasks. SSS, motion blur, large particle and volume clouds etc. But now? Im really struggling to see what cards the cpu engines are holding. All that's really left is memory capacity, but out of core rendering works fast and is stable, and these new data streaming techs will allow them to take a huge bite out of the "gpus cant deal with large data sets" pie. GPUs still have their eternal driver problems where one driver bug will ruin your day, but personally I could never see myself returning to a cpu render engine again. Stick half a dozen gpus in a large case and you have enough render power to push out thousands of frames of animation overnight. The real kicker for me, is that there's absolutely no more "hmm, can we afford to turn on GI on this job?" Or SSS, or AO, or DOF, or motion blur, or area lights, or glows, or blurry reflections, or decent antialiasing, or... Genuinely, every single feature for me is "eh, screw it, why not?"

vram depends 100% on what you want to do. We do all our product animations in single room environments comfortably within 10gb or so. Rarely do we overflow into system ram. If we get lazy and start throwing in 5 million poly hero objects for everything in the room with all internals still in place then we go over this, but so long as you spend 5-10 minutes with the worst offenders to simplify them then everything is fine. Typical project for us is 5 to 40 million polys. 20x 8k image maps, 20x 4k and another 100 low res images. We would set 12gb as a minimum spec for any new workstation gpu,

Bonus good: The AM4 socket is very mature and stable. All the problems have been ironed out. It is currently one of the fastest systems you can buy IT uses relatively cheap and stable DDR4 memory, DDR5 will have early compatibility issues and high prices GPU prices won't crash, they'll just drop down to RRP, there's still lots of pent up buying pressure from people that put off upgrading.

What we do with C4D is frivolous and unimportant to the world. We draw pictures of products which could have been photographed. We draw architectural visuals which could have been sketched. We add special effects to movies which could have been filmed. What we do is make visuals that look a bit nicer than those which came before, for slightly less money. If all 3D software vanished overnight. No lives would be lost, we would all just pick similar careers and continue living with different job titles. The point of sanctions is to piss people off, to the point where they start rising up and demanding that something be done. If all it takes is depriving people of one specific brand of cheeseburger, forcing them to move from an apple phone to android, digging out some dvds because netflix closed and downloading blender; then that isn't such a bad cost. The more companies join in, the more likely the russian people are to rise up against their "democratically" elected leader who has lead them to this situation. If the options are literally a third world war with nuclear armed states, or telling Alexei to download Blender, then I'll even send a few blender usb sticks out myself.

Almost every laptop touch pad has the option of using 1, 2 or 3 fingers for left, right and middle clicks. Unless you got some rubbish that ships with the terrible synaptics drivers.

From our tests, going from x16 pcie3.0 lanes to x8 loses you 5% performance. Going from x16 to x4 loses 20%. The difference between x16 pcie 3.0 and 4.0 is almost impossible to measure. Unless you have a system with a high number of pcie lanes, almost certainly a second gpu will be knocking you down to x8 lanes.

Just replying to tag myself in for replies. I looked into this a while back, and to be honest the quality/compatibility of c4d's gltf export left a bit to be desired. The only way I found to get decent results was to go through a platform like sketchfab and do the export via fbx with animation in the take system. The problems, animation in c4d's take system is miserable. You need to remake materials in the web editor once exported, so if you need to reexport to update things, you need to redo a lot of your material and lighting work. In short, we've put our web 3D plans on hold until c4d improves, or three.js improves, or someone learns enough blender which apparently has better exporters.

In short, its difficult. Just today Im on a job which needs me to match a turquoise colour, for days we've been going back and forth with the client telling me the colour doesnt match, it isnt close enough etc. So they finally sent me a physical sample instead of a photo and... the colour of the product is so far out of the srgb colour space, it isn't even funny. Their photos are miles off reality, my render based on pantone references are miles off, because the srgb version of the pantone reference is also miles off. Is your work going on a screen or getting printed? You may find you literally cannot match the colour for most people. If you want to really match the colour, truth is youre going to have to adjust the render in post production in a properly colour managed app like photoshop, using a screen you know is accurate, and youll need to consider, the majority of computer screens are trash and will screw up your colour representation anyway.

Currently expanding the UK St Albans office, a few roles will be available this year. Kicking off though is a full time motion graphics artist. In short we need someone to use C4D with Octane to product stills and videos. Starting with provided 3D CAD and physical samples, work them up into full photographic product renders and then produce 1-2 minute product videos. Octane not essential, we can teach that, but you've got to be happy taking a brief and running with it. You'll be taking on entire jobs start to finish. Pay and benefits are great for a full time position, pay will depend on experience and ability. Example work: Great chance to get outside of London if you've had enough of the high prices and small apartments. Email me if you're interested or know anyone that might be. matthew.oneill@corsair.com

We're pretty well covered in the UK, most places will have a dozen companies to choose from, though ultimately theyre all coming down the same wires. A bit like having a dozen gas and electric companies, its mostly just a question of back end admin and prices. Personally in a small town I have the choice between ADSL2 (80 down, 30 up) or cable (1200 down, 30 up). I stick with the ADSL weirdly. I'd like more download speed, but working from home its honestly the upload speed thats the limiting factor, and unless you go for the gigabit cable connection, all cheaper 100-500mbit packages have progressively worse upload speeds (10-20mbit). 80 down 30 up ADSL sets me back £20 a month, gigabit would be about £60. I'll switch if and when they stop dicking around with the upload speed. Modem is a netgear wrt7000 reflashed with DDwrt firmware. The default firmware kept killing vpn and voip connections. CAT6 fitted throughout the house. My stats tell me Im averaging 1.2TB a month downloads and 200GB a month up.

R20: Gave us node materials, fields, volumes and the CAD importer, 9/10 R21: Cheap versions removed, Subscriptions added. new extrude bevels and Windows 4k support, 3/10 R22: Lots of smaller bits and general improvements, 5/10 R23: Nodes, but nobody uses them, USD, but nobody uses it, Magic bullet but poorly implemented, 2/10 R24: Online content browser, placement tools, currently useless scene browser, 3/10 R25: So bad, they didn't even give it it's own press release, 1/10 R26: X implemented, X overhauled, X overhauled, dozens of new X tools, X also implemented, 9/10 You can see why so many perpetual owners all stopped at R20. Everything since then has been a bit of an anti climax. Useful bits, but nothing that's going to change your life. R20 was nice for its 4k support, but the job is only 80% finished, too many elements are still low res. You can add bonus points if you happen to need USD support or GLtf export, but they're not complete enough implementations imho. "We don't talk about R25, no no no..."

I read that as Yes, all versions of xparticles will have gpu acceleration. They refer to Fused as the general product name now, as xparticles is just one of the features within it.

They're not mutually exclusive. Of course I can't say whats going to be in the software, but I am impressed by what they've put together. I'd be giving it a solid 9/10. To clear up any confusion, My name is Matthew, in real life my nickname is Mash. My online username is almost always imashination and I cofounded 3D Fluff.

Well, this is the first time in years that I'm actually looking forward to reading the C4D forums when it gets announced.

We still use xparticles + Octane + c4d r20 here at the studio, it works fine, but we're starting to hit age related compatibility issues. If we upgrade octane beyond a certain version, it breaks xparticles compatibility with our older permanent licence. But updating one means we need to update the other. TBH we'll probably move the entire thing over to the latest subscriptions shortly. Plus R26 is shaping up to be a great update...

In short, the online basic elementary knowledge test is just there for shits and giggles. It isn't meant to be taken seriously, it doesn't mean anything, it is essentially a facebook "test your knowledge on the Kardashians!" test, but for c4d. FWIW, I got 92% on it without opening c4d. But the idea is that its testing if you can work out how to find the answer. In the real world, you have google, you have the software, so long as you know how to find the answer quickly, whether or not you know the answer there and then doesn't matter. The trainer test is another matter, obviously you do need to be able to answer most questions students ask you straight away without flipping to the manual every time.

Yeah thats a bit of a crap one. H for Heverything, O for object, S for selection, I neither knew nor cared that ctrl+H would frame geometry