briankoko

As I mentioned in my post I am tempted to purchase Maya indie for $280 a year or Blender. I would also donate to the Blender development and Blender Cloud a few hundred dollars a year if I go that route. The indie prices offered by Sidefx and Autodesk are in my budget as a hobbyist/freelancer making under $100k per year. I purchased c4d studio R17 when it came out and have kept my MSA going every year up until R21. At the time my MSA was $640 a year which I agreed to pay. Plus I had access to Cineversity. Unfortunately the price of the MSA increased a few years later but I kept paying. So I have spent quite allot of money on cinema over the years plus plugins like x-particles and training. I have no issue paying for software if it makes sense. But my plan now is to either try to upgrade from R21 to R23 for I believer $999. Or wait until R24 is released and upgrade for who knows how much since price has not been announced, nor do we know if there will be a perpetual R24 release. Or stay with R21 and get a subscription every year or so util my license of R21 gets so outdated that I never open it and either stick with a subscription forever or bail. Or dedicate my time to learning a program with an indie license I can afford or blender. What I would really like to see is a Maxon indie license.

I would love to see some particle and fluid love since Red giant is now part of Maxon. This would make it so we don't have to rely on other expensive plugins for such. Also including Redshift as a default renderer would be very welcome since Maya comes with Arnold and Blender has Cycles. I would also welcome an Indie license and that they keep the perpetual license and make a yearly upgrade or Matainance option available for a reasonable price. c4d is just too expensive for hobbyists or smaller freelancers. I am tempted to dedicate my time to either learning Maya indie for a paltry $280 a year or blender. $719 a year for a c4d subscription or $983 every year for c4d and redshift is insane compared to other options. As much as I love c4d. I just can't fathom paying that to rent software. I will need to switch or keep my R21 and subscribe every year or so to use some of the newer tools like the UV tools I want.

I believe it is still there just moved or renamed. I don't have s24 but this is what I heard. Perhaps it is just called 'text' now.

Wow! you a right! Thank you!

Why is it that Houdini, 3ds Max and Maya all have very affordable and powerful indie versions and C4d does not? When I purchased c4D studio (R17) it came with two years of MSA free. So I paid $3500 and didn’t have to pay a cent for two years. And then the MSA was $650 which as a good deal amount of money but I owned the program, it was mine. Now you can still have a perpetual license but the price isn’t even featured on the ‘Buy’ page. And for upgrades you need to contact MAXON. I feel that it’s just a matter of time before perpetual is done away with completely. Now you need to rent the program, stop paying for the price to rent and you can’t use the program anymore. Now instead of a $650 a year MSA you need to pay $719 a year to rent it. And if you want a modern render engine like every other program comes with (redshift) you need to pay $983.00 a year or pay $719 and rent either Octane, Arnold or something else for $400 - $800 more a year. The last 4 out of 5 smaller vfx and animation studios I have worked with in Los Angeles have artists using Blender for one task of another. Nobody was using C4d, some had in the past but switched. These are generally smaller indie studios and not tied to huge pipelines so they have the freedom to choose what makes sense to them financially, ethically and personally. The majority of the younger artists coming in where raised on blender and Youtube. Or learned Maya in school. Why should they use c4d except if they want to get a job that requires it? Usually at a high end motion graphics studio? While I love c4d, as a freelance artist and hobbyist who wants to continue to play and experiment with a tool for the rest of my life it is absurd to me when I think I will be paying to rent something forever. With Blender the tool is completely mine, though there are a ton of things that make no sense to me in the program such as no logical way of copying a modifier from one object to another without remembering a weird shortcut. Bizarre unintuitive spline tools and the lack of a decent picture viewer. There are tutorials on how to make anything I can dream of whether it is a weekend spent making a spaceship, castle,dinosaur, dragon or modeling characters. There are hundreds of free tutorials for that. Or a subscription to CG Cookie or something. For c4d there isn’t a single tutorial for either of the mentioned things even after decades of the program being around. Maybe a simple gummy bear or dancing hotdog. If I want to make a hundred cubes undulate, well there are a million tutorials for that. Removing Cineversity for anyone not on the subscription was another slap in the face. Do I switch to Blender and Houdini indie and donate a couple hundred bucks a year to blender cloud with millions of great tutorials, assets, movies and tools and helping the program grow? Keep my perpetual R21 and buy a decent render engine and UV tool and be left behind in a few years? Or pay $719 - $1000 a year for a c4d subscription for the rest of my life. Offering an indie license or keeping perpetual with decent yearly upgrade prices would be a decent thing for MAXON to do as well as attract new users.

😆

Great job by Bomper studio and everyone involved. Nice to see amazing character work using C4d. https://www.MAXON.net/en/article/tyler-childers-animated-video-country-squire?utm_campaign=TylerChildersCountrySquire&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_content=1610392901

Hello and welcome!

@Tina Would you mind uploading a frame from your PNG sequence and/or your c4d project? Might be easier to see what is going on.

Thank you Cerbera, I’ll give it a try.

Hi, I've been looking and cannot find a similar tool in c4d to 'poke' a face or polygon like the poke tools in Blender and Maya. Is there a similar tool in c4d? The subdivide and triangulate commands sort of worked how I wanted. please see images for examples thanks for your time

Thank you, double clicking seems to work. Once you do that you have that preset in your 'image' section under stamp. You can then drag and drop other presets over it to replace it with a different brush if you want.

I am attempting to use a sculpting brush preset brush as an image stamp during sculpting. I've seen this done in tutorials and the help document says In the Content Browser under Presets/Sculpting/Stamps you will find numerous stamps you can use (simply drag your selection into the Image field). But for some reason I cannot drag a sculpting brush preset from the content browser down into the stamp/use stamp/Image box so that I can use that image as a stamp brush. But I can drag an image from my finder window or desktop into there just fine thus creating a stamp. I've attached a video demonstrating my issue, not sure what I am doing wrong. sculpt_presets.mp4

Tomorrow my MSA is set to expire. So yeah tonight I will be tossing and turning trying to decide whether to upgrade or not. Aside from the unintuitive interface this is something blender users never have to stress over. My thinking is if I do upgrade to R21, at least I will have it in the 'My MAXON' thing and see if there will be a perpetual upgrade next year to R22 or just hold onto R21 for a bit and get a subscription a few years later. Not sure, the new licensing certainly raises my spider senses and my intuition tells me I won't be happy where this is all going.

I truely hope they keep offering perpetual licenses! I think that would be a smart move on MAXON’s part keel everyone happy. Although I’ve always felt the MSA and upgrade prices were too high for me. The original $650 for MSA was okay. But when they raised it to $725 me and others I know couldn’t understand that. Personally I think $500 for an upgrade to the newest version plus access to cineversity would be reasonable. Why else other than a jab in the ribs pushing you towards subscription would they take cineversity away. That seems crappy to me and lowers my respect for the company. But I love C4d. Along with Houdini these are my favorite tools. They both speak to me as other programs don’t. I’ve been playing with blender for a while now, and although it’s free and the blender institute is passionate and great at what they do I just really prefer C4d as a whole. Its personal taste. Like anything else, what kind of car you’re attracted to or what kind of food or music gets you pumped. I want C4d to be my hub and sprinkle in Houdini indie when needed.

Thanks hvanderwegen for all the suggestions, I really appreciate it.

Blender is very tempting but there are just a couple of things that I really can't jive with in blender. First are the text tools, certainly not as nice as c4d. Second are the curve creation tools, I just can't understand the way to draw and alter curves in blender. And some simple UI things like not being able to hit the 'delete' key to delete objects in the viewport and the outliner. In blender you need to hit 'x' in the viewport and in the outline you have to right click on an object and choose delete. Perhaps you can change the keymap somewhere for deleting objects. And for the life of me, I can't figure out how to use the array modifier properly like in this video, I think I'm just spoiled by how intuitive c4d is.

The new 'My MAXON' system seems helpful. As a freelancer going into different studios it will be great to just download and use c4d. The last five places I've freelances for all had blender installed on whatever workstation I was on and it'd be great to be able to use Cinema. One question though, will all your versions be available to you with 'My MAXON' if you aren't on subscription and have a perpetual of R21 can you use that or can you use a version of R20?

I purchased just one plugin for C4d and will not do that again. When I was running R19 I spent almost $500 on a license of x-particles 3.0 was upgraded to 3.5. Went about just fine using the plugin until I upgraded to R20. Then I find out that I would need to upgrade to the newer version of x-particles for another $400 or so because the license for 3.5 wouldn’t work with R20. It it wasn’t even a year and the plugin I was still learning to use and had for less than a year was suddenly gong to cost almost $1000. Spending that much money on a plugin that I couldn’t even use in the newest version of cinema without having to basically pay the equivalent of buying it twice in a 1 year span has thought me never to buy another plugin for cinema again. On the blender side you can buy a very impressive fluid simulator for $76 ( when it’s not on sale ) and I believe receive free upgrades when they are available. No maintenance or subscription schemes. https://blendermarket.com/products/flipfluids Or Khaos, a smoke and debris simulator for $35 again with free updates https://blendermarket.com/products/khaos-ultimate-explosion-simulator I have no problem paying those prices and knowing the plugin will still be viable and usable 9 months after I buy it. Fume fx, real flow c4d and x-particles are all great but I’ll never pay almost a grand for something that isn’t going to work if I’m ever inclined to upgrade cinema to a new version.

I still have modo 801, I really liked it, but haven’t used it much since I bought C4d. If they could add the foundry’s camera tracker and implement some sort of fluids and smoke and if they could improve the already robust particle system I’d happily upgrade. If modo was a bit more versitile and still reasonably priced it could be a very attractive and dangerous application at a fraction of the price of C4d or a maya rental.

Thank you Rick and Rectro for the quick answers, I appreciate it.

Can you keep your R21 and not convert, and then add a subscription when for instance R22 comes out? This way if you are short on cash or whatever and cannot afford a subscription for R23 you can still use your R21 license or any older license like R20 ?

With the loss of an MSA, can a perpetual license or R20 still be installed on two machines, just so long as only one version of c4d is running? Being able to install on say a desktop and a laptop?

This is great news for c4d and vfx https://www.afterworks.com/FumeFXC4D.asp

I did not contact support yet, but deleting my preferences fixed that particular issue. If I run into another weird issue I’ll likely reinstall R20.