Mash

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/rD6fGP $1600 Grab a keyboard mouse and monitor if you need, or keep your current ones possibly. grab a copy of windows 11 from one of the licence key sites for under $20, eg https://www.cjs-cdkeys.com

just email maxon if youre missing the installers or serial numbers, they'll very likely send you a download link. As for getting a newer version, there will be thousands out there using subscriptions who technically still own a permanent licence. Just ask on the forum here if anyone has an old one laying around they want to make a bit of beer money from. I suspect someone would let you have it for a few bottles of wine as its otherwise just sitting there doing nothing. Just keep in mind last I checked maxon charge an admin fee for licence transfers.

https://github.com/DunHouGo Grab the plugin downloader, then you should find there is a redshift and octane light manager you can install. havent checked it myself yet

A 2015 laptop and a 2009 mac are so far beyond inadequate that it isnt even worth thinking about. If you had a high end computer with a top end geforce 980 card in 2015, a current top end model would be roughly 100x faster. Octane is amazing, but you simply must have a reasonably modern system for that to be of any real use. R18 is fine (though ask around, you can probably find a cheap copy of R26 with a permanent licence for very cheap). R18 doesnt need any registering or online activation, just enter the serial number and it will work. Only the subscription versions need online activation. If youre building a new system, and its primarily for octane, dump all of the budget into a decent spec gpu. eg an 8 core cpu is fine, 32 gigs is fine, pcie 3.0 ssds are fine, stock cpu coolers are fine, just throw it all at the gpu because thats what will matter. A geforce 3080 or 4070 would be a good pick for your budget, then build around that. Current versions of octane work all the way down to cinema 4d R15

it will also help to choose a project scale that suits what youre creating. ie mm for most projects works well, cm for entire buildings, m for entire landscapes, km for space travel.

It depends what you want to do with the object afterwards. If youre just texturing it up and rendering, and dont need to break it apart for animations or exploded shots, then go to the modification tab of the step importer and select "combine by color". This way all identical materials will be merged into a single object, so all your screws for example will become a single model instead of 100's and thousands. Or, if youve already imported everything, press shift + C on your keyboard and search for "combine". The combine Project tool lets you merge things down based on material or layers.

A 4090 is literally double the speed of a 3090 so I wouldnt bother with dual 3090s. Even if youre keeping the existing one you have, after a single year of usage the dual 3090s will have used more in electricity and aircon costs than it would have cost to sell the 3090 and buy a 4090 instead. Personally if I were you I would keep the alienware system for another year or so and just upgrade the 3090 to a 4090. Use your budget to keep on top of gpu upgrades, selling the older cards to fund the new. When you say you want stability, in what regard? Is the entire system blue screening or is c4d just crashing during rendering? Octane is pretty famously unstable. Press undo, crash, delete unused materials with the texture manager visible, crash, enable denoising when rendering certain passes, crash.

What can I say except, you're welcome.

GLB doesnt support quads afaik. its designed for realtime game engine display, and thus tris are faster.

My understanding is that fundamentally the new c4d core has been in c4d for about a decade now, however nothing particularly changed after it was added because of how it was done and the amount of time to truly convert everything over. When the new core was added, c4d was converted to run as a plugin for the new core, so the c4d you see is actually a subset of the new c4d app. As new features were created, they were made to run under the new core. So for example the material node system runs natively in the 'real' c4d whilst xpresso nodes are legacy and thus run in the plugin sandboxed c4d. Off the top of my head, physics, poly modelling, effectors, volumes, the viewport, timeline, mograph, rendering have all been moved over. With R2024 they sort of moved the main object handling system over which is why some stuff is many times faster. However, some parts are still legacy and hold stuff back. In particular sketch, hair, motion tracking, TP and a few other bits. As these legacy parts continue to be shed, more speedups are likely,

Not sure if we're talking about c4d or lw at this point 😮

Well I'll be damned, never knew that was a thing. Here's me extruding splines then booling them all these years.

im also feeling dumb as a brick. How?

Just checking, but you do realise that the depth of those polys is 0.01 micron, right? ie its 0.000001cm thick. Thats a floating point rounding error on a cpu

@3D-Pangel, youve made the same mistake I, and many others have made. The current maxon store website is poorly designed. The current 2024 version of c4d includes redshift cpu, it does not include redshift gpu. If you click the "c4d + redshift" button on the store page, youre then given 2 options, without gpu for one price and with gpu for a higher price. Regarding material conversion, octanes material conversion is about as useful as redshifts. You'll get basic colours and textures applied if you have simple materials, but the moment you talk about layers, shaders, sss or anything else then they fall apart rapidly. Ive not had a single material convert into any engine that didnt need to be replaced or updated. But at least you can tell what many materials were supposed to be.

Then proceeds to not compare them in the review in any way, shape or form.

" Without the denoiser it would be pretty hard to impossible to do almost anything in Octane. " 95% of our renders don't use the denoiser. These range from 1k web video elements to 4k 2 minute long product launch videos, from 2k stills for web pages to 16k print res images for packaging. On top of not often using the denoiser, we often need to add extra noise on top of the video in post production. Just because and old geforce 1080 card can't render extreme torture scenes to your satisfaction doesn't mean other people aren't busy getting on with work. "Octane vs Redshift in 2024, which really boils down to a discussion of biased vs unbiased rendering" I don't think those words mean what you think they mean. There are no more unbiased render engines, they're gone, they dont exist anymore. All current render engines use various tricks to render more detail in certain areas where needed and less detail in others to speed up render times and increase quality. As soon as an engine guides samples towards light instead of uniformly covering the screen, it is biased. As soon as it guides samples to areas of high noise, it is biased. As soon as it blurs caustic rays or secondary light bounces or blurred reflections, it is biased. All render engines are biased, because anything else is a waste of time.

Oh lordy, thinking particles, no idea, I havent used that mountain of misery since the day it came out. Probably your best bet is to not use the particle system to make the particles rotate, but instead put the confetti object in a null and just animate it spinning around the axis you want. That way when you emit the particles they have the animation you want prebaked into them. Just make 3-4 different versions with different rotations to mix it up a bit.

Seems a bit extreme. You're using a light with a brightness of 3400 (your 1000 strength light material has no texture source, so it defaults to linear colour grey, so many of the samples are only doing a third of the work they could be doing) So 2/3 of the samples are wasted. Your material is mid grey, so half the brightness is lost off the first bounce then only half the brightness is received, so 75% of the samples do nothing. Multiply the above together and it means 90% of the samples arent doing anything useful. Adaptive sampling is off so 90% of the samples are flying off into space to do nothing. We're down to 1% efficiency now? 16 light bounces are very wasteful on a scene where only 1-2 bounces can possibly have a meaningful impact. So we're down to... 0.1% efficiency in terms of render time. Youre using geometry to emit light instead of a light. Octane can more efficiently render a scene if the bulk of the light comes from a light instead of polys. When you have this many samples, you can 100% turn the denoiser on. And finally, the scene is so utterly beyond overexposed, you're effectively cranking a noise with a brightness of 5-10 (0-255 scale) up to 100, which is going to exaggerate the noise you see. This is the worst case scenario of worse case scenarios. As for the c4d physical engine version. You're using irradiance caching, this just slaps a bit of light on, blurs it together than adds it to the brightness. Effectively c4d is running a denoiser on the secondary light, something you're not letting the octane engine do. An apples to apples comparison would be setting physical to QMC + QMC with 16 bounces, but you can't because the slider tops out at 8 bounces.

Maybe they should invent some camera alignment tools so the logo isn't sat off to the side.

Can you upload the spheres scene, id like to take a look

I'd take that with a big ol' pinch of salt. Are you telling me that for 8 different tasks there just so happens to be 8 different best render engines? The entire article reads like someone regurgitated some TLDR notes on each engine then just assigned each one to a category. They didnt even get the right prices for each engine, apparently redshift is £100 per month. "Iray reasons to avoid: computationally expensive"... What? 3d rendering is computationally expensive? no shit. 95% chance of AI article.

Show us what you have so far. Personally I would be more inclined to do this with a particle system and just give all the particles some spin from the get go.

a) the realtime live view motion blur is only a rough approximation it wont be fully accurate until the final render b) the cone shape is a visual artifact of the hdr used combined with video compression. the sun and sky create more highlights on top of the ball which increases visual contrast, the video compression them smooshes similar colours together, this means the bottom of the sphere just kinda vanishes into the compression, leaving an egg shape.

@HappyPolygonRS is now the default c4d render engine. This doesnt necessitate the removal of the older render engine as there's little harm leaving the feature as it is, but they naturally will get removed at some point in the future I imagine, probably not this side of 2030 would be my guess. @davetwoOctane is my full time engine, once a year or so I give RS another poke to see if its worth switching, but it isnt there yet from my POV. That said, its numbers will naturally keep expanding now that it is the defacto c4d render engine. The biggest issues for me is that I can keep octane running smoothly with almost any scene; when RS starts getting busy it has a habit of bogging down the entire c4d UI like the old cpu engines used to do. Or you change a material setting only to have to sit there for an entire minute or so whilst something somewhere updates and recalculates a cache. RS is going in the right direction, im just not sure if or when it will surpass the ease and speed at which I can work in octane. Their best bet imho would be trying to trump octane in other areas. Give me a stable art directable engine and I would have reason to use it, but if theyre only chasing realism and speed, im not sure they will ever take the lead there.