Marander

Very disappointing what Maxon turned into, all the great spirit is gone with the new 'management'. I share almost the same story... As 3D hobbyist, I purchased C4D R17 Studio and kept it up-to-date until R21 with MSA. Just renewed the Redshift perpetual license and XP / Fuse maintanance for the last time a couple of days ago. I will never rent software and I try to avoid online licensing wherever possible, actually it's only Insydium software that is just too good to miss out. If R25 was a killer release I might have upgraded, but the improvements in the last couple of versions are not worth it to me. I couldn't care less for any future Cinema updates anymore, I will continue using R20 (and R21 as long as it still starts, who knows) along with tons of plugins, Blender and other software.

I do hate subscriptions. And I hate online activation / periodic checking. Even though I have R21, I don't use it because when I don't use it regularly it loses the login credentials and I have to look for my password again. And it's a pain with plugin licenses compared to the easy serial system before. Also I don't want to have my workstations online all the time. The MSA for R20 to R21 was waste of money for me. Therefore R20 is the last version of Cinema I enjoy and I'm glad it was a great release (compared to what came after, feature-wise, in my opinion). As a hobbyist I'm not interested in renting software, I want to be able to use them whenever and wherever I want at a fixed one-time cost (except for maintenance for perpetual software which I can stop at any time and still use the software). I paid for R16 - R21 Studio with MSA and purchased almost all commercially available C4D plugins (TFD, Forester, X-Particles, Drive, RealTraffic, everything from Nitro4D and GSG etc.), various render engines (Vray, Redshift and Cycles 4D) and commercial training. With this I can work for years to do almost everything 3D with Cinema, specially combined with Blender. When there was MSA, I was very enthusiastic about Cinema. Siggraph with new MAXON announcements for the upcoming versions were like Christmas and Birthday for me. MAXON as a company with the new management and policy lost all charm for me and sadly I lost interest in Cinema improvements. Online documentation, online asset library, subscription-only features (even including plugins like CV Tokens), no Cineversity for perpetual license owners, MAXON's way of obscuring the rental cost with tax and annual payments, hiding the perpetual upgrade cost, limited bugfix support, that all draws a clear picture to me, not my thing. As someone mentioned, I feel the same, MAXON joined the dark side. With the online checking and subscription, MAXON lost me as paying customer. Also, to me it's clear that perpetual licenses will disappear at some point. Well, I'm only a hobbyist, I understand there are other requirements for enterprises. I'm not mad at MAXON and as mentioned, I still enjoy using the last (and to me best) perpetual version of Cinema.

Why wouldn't it work? VDB contains channel information like density, temperature, velocity etc. (not shading information). This information can be used for shading (for example with a blackbody radiator shader). That's not much work and the same for other simulations (like TFD when it needs to be rendered with 3rd party render engines). But I agree, there is no need for Embergen if one is using TFD already. I guess XP / ExplosiaFX will have GPU support one day too.

Yes you got a valid point there. I'm a hobbyist using dual RTX GPU rigs (2070 & 2080 RTX) with AMD Ryzen 9 processors (16C/32T and 12C/24T) with 64 GB each for Cinema (with Redshift, Vray, Cycles 4D plus various other 3D applications and plugins). I just wanted to point out, that TFD is only very quick when using GPU. Since it doesn't utilize more then one GPU and the simulation is limited to the GPU memory, that's to be considered. Nevertheless, TFD is a great plugin and even on CPU sim it runs well, also the switch between CPU and GPU is on the fly. But you're right, if I would be a professional I would most likely use Quadro cards as well.

By the way, TFD update for S22 is available.

Thanks paulselhi for the info about the future TFD version (standalone software). I saw a preview years ago and thought it was dead since long. Unfortunately Jascha from Jawset is not very communicative and the development process is very slow. Yes, TFD is quick on GPU but that is pretty limited, as soon as the simulation gets more complex and up-res'ed, it will fail back to CPU. I still like TFD (I have licenses for C4D and LightWave) but X-Particles is so much more versatile and well integrated. I fear the future TFD will loose its ease-of-use from what I've seen in that preview. Embergen looks interesting but for TFD owners not so tempting.

There's a Setup and Animate mode in PIM. The PIM rig itself is setup with just dragging the Hip joint in the PIM Hips Link field, select rig type - click Constrain and the rig is done. Everything is placed perfectly (for supported rig types). In PIM you can create IK Targets (all targets with one click). Then you can modify the strength, translation and other attributes of each IK Target. However PIM is more designed for automatic walk cycles, simple crowd animations or specific built-in actions like sitting, holding phone, lift, stairs etc. Therefore I think the Mixamo Rig has a bit different (more universal) use case but I haven't used it yet. Maybe the attached screenshots and attributes help to clarify.

TFD only works on GPU for very simple fluid simulations (depending on the GPU memory of course). On my GTX or RTX cards (8 GB GPU memory), it's blazing fast for simple fire / smoke simulations but when I add complexity or up-rez, it fails back to CPU. Note that you can only select one of the installed GPUs in TFD for simulation. However the Up-Rez'ing feature allows to art-direct the basic simulation on GPU and than add details for the long CPU calculations. With added complexity I also sometimes get crashes in TFD. I didn't experience too many X-Particles crashes but that's because I've only used it for simple particle / smoke / fire / water simulations so far.

Hello Jennifer As Cerbera mentioned, topology is very important for UV unwrapping. Depending on the complexity of the object, usually you just have to mark a couple of seams to properly unwrap With a dense mesh or bad topology (no polyflow, missing edge loops, ngons, tris etc) this is difficult. To have hundreds of auto unwrapped UV islands is not ideal for precise texturing. There is the new tool QuadRemesher from EXOSIDE that auto retopos the object, the Cinema Plugin is just being released now. Simple to use with good results. It helps for example if you used booleans, scans or VDB modeling. A good (subd) topology is still better but requires more modeling work. Also, maybe you could have a look at the Cinema plugin Seamilar which is very easy to use for basic UV'ing and well integrated in C4D, you can see the unwrapping while drawing the seams. RizomUV and 3D-Coat are great too of course. Also you could create separate parts of the object for having separate TextureSets in Substance. You will export separate maps for each TextureSet. Which maps you need with what export settings depends on the render engine but usually you need Normal, Height/Bump, Color/Diffuse, Roughness and Specular or Metallic maps which you load in the appropriate material channels. Cheers, Michael

Yes I agree. Xpresso with new Node system would be nice and it will come. Of course it's nice to have features built-in but for UV mapping MAXON is way too late. I guess most users already have RizomUV which is hard to beat - or similar tools. Same for Bodypaint, how can they catch up with defacto standard tools like Substance.

Completely agree to all you said. The subscription prices will go up if MAXON is successful with the new model. If not, they will start to offer limited time subscription sales. The whole online and subscription disappointment started with VrayForC4D for me. Don't care about the new versions as they require a constant online connection. I got Redshift and was very excited when MAXON bought it (seamless integration, nodal shading). While I'm still glad I have a perpetual RS license, I'm not overly optimistic towards its future due to the direction MAXON is going. It seems the R21 Node spaces are not even ready for Redshift so I wonder if that will require a subscription-only update. I was an e-on Vue xStream + maintenance customer until they went the 'subscription only' route end of 2018. Similar to Cinema, I used to renew my yearly maintenance in order to get the newest perpetual version and I was specifically waiting for the promised new Vue version with Cinema R20 support to arrive. What I got instead is a limited Enterprise rental license for the newer versions, which I don't care about. The new version offered a new UI, a broken OpenVDB and Substance integration and the new licensing model. R20 in Vue support (and fixes for the broken new features) came a bit later, when my rental license already expired. Waste of money for me. Since they went subscription only, every few weeks they offer a massively reduced yearly subscription sale. Seems not to be such a successful model after all. I wouldn't be surprised if MAXON will do the same after some time. Now Cinema R21, biggest disappointment in features, the new licensing and the loss of MSA and Cineversity. Due to the fact that almost no 3rd party plugin works in R21, I would have to pay a maintenance for 3D Quakers for Forester to work in R21 (!) and all this online nuisance, I couldn't care less about R21, future Cinema releases or other MAXON software. Waste of money again. Siggraph used to be a very exciting event for me in the recent years but unfortunately this is no longer the case thanks to MAXON.

Not exactly but sort of. But MAXON confirmed in the Siggraph thread that: *** When you take MAXONs offer for the reduced price 2 year special offer subscription for MSA owners, then you CONVERT to subscription, you'll loose your perpetual Studio license. You can subscribe separately for the full price and then you don't loose the perpetual license. *** I don't think many individuals that read / understand the license terms would do that, I'm certainly not giving up my perpetual Studio license. What would motivate (not drive) me into a Cinema subscription is - a massively reduced price Cinema Indie Studio license (I'm a hobbyist) will full features, maybe render limitation to 4k - honest pricing (not calling a yearly upfront lump sum to be a monthly subscription) - integrated Redshift (I already have a perpetual RS license but an additional seat won't hurt) - kick-@ss features, XPresso and RS materials in new node system, rebuilt UV and Bodypaint toolset - improved particle system or integrated X-Particles - improved modeling tools that don't require the various Nitro4D plugins and HB modeling bundle anymore - additional workflow improvements like seen in R21 - a RT viewport like Eevee One issue I have with the new licensing system is that it will break all the plugins again, now that most of them finally work in R20 (also thanks to the Insydium bridge). Also I feel bad for plugin developers because people with rental software most likely don't want to invest in plugins. I spent more than the Studio price in plugins and render engines for Cinema and would certainly not do that for rental or online activated software. And MAXON still keeps silent about what happens to Teamrender node licenses which were unlimited in Studio until now.

Yes I'd like to know too (I asked this before but it was not answered yet).

Oh I'm sure the offline installer will be gone in one of the next releases "for a streamlined and simplified installation process for the user". Of course pure speculation but we have seen this behavior before.

Perpetual with periodic (every 14 days) online activation is not perpetual to me anymore. Yes, you are theoretically entitled for using the software without limitation but you completely hand over control to MAXON. There are numerous examples where 1) online activation failed or 2) older software cannot be activated anymore. Another downside is that plugin developers now have to implement the new licensing too. And users have to wait again for their various plugins and render engines to be available for the new version. Personally I think in 1 or 2 years the message will be like "...due to the great success with subscription, limited requests for perpetual licenses and to streamline our development we now offer only subscription, to make it easier for the user..." 3D for the Whole World would have been a very cheap or free Indie / Non-Commercial version, maybe with a 1080p render limitation. That could have even been a threat for Blender. Now it's the other way round and MAXON lost a huge part of its positive reputation. The CEO's presentation was a failure, no drive or enthusiasm. When he mentioned something like "my favorite feature in R21... Field Force..." it seemed to me that he has never used C4D before. Very silly argument that it's easier for the user now because he doesn't need to remember his serial. But now it needs a video to explain the new licensing. Easier indeed... There are some nice little workflow improvements I like in R21 - Texture copy dialog options, Timeline / F-Curves optimizations, UI improvements, OpenVDB Caching, Volume rendering in ProRender and the Mixamo Control Rig is great (however is Mixamo not a proprietary and discontinued Adobe technology?) But without MSA and forced online activation I will use the (MSA included) R21 for some things, but R20 will remain my main software and most likely no more upgrades, for sure no subcription. I also own Redshift (purchased last year), I love it and was very exited about MAXON's acquisition but now I look at it a little bit different. Another thing that bothers me is Teamrender... until now Studio offered unlimited render nodes. How is that handled with the new licensing system?