Decade

I used it maybe 6 years ago, for some previs. I remember it was pretty good. It's very much a particular way of working - it will never give you the ability to stylise like keyframe animation, but then it brings certain other qualities that can be hard to do in more traditional animation. I don't remember it being terribly difficult to get to grips with, overall. It does sound like it might be overkill for your needs. I think it could really come into it;'s own with a field of simulated cars, interacting in emergant ways, though I've never tried that.

It's pretty great ! I'd think you'll have a solid grounding in all areas now.

A small update:

Thank you. It's really fun to texture with Substance Painter. I haven't actually painted anything yet, it's all procedural, driven by the normal, curvature AO etc maps which you generate in substance before starting. Got a smaller one done, this is under tree cover, so lots more muck on it:

OK, got a bigger one done today, might do a smaller one later:

Well, I got bored of this project & put it aside, but now my enthusiasm has returned. Started on some texturing with Substance Painter, have to say I love this program, it's so fun to use. Nothing too fancy, as the buildings will be seen from far away. R23 UV tools really helped to make the preparation fairly painless. I'm toying with the idea of trying to do all the rendering with the viewport render, now that it has improved again.

Thanks Rick !

Has 'selected wireframe' from the viewport configuration gone the way of the dodo, or just moved ? I find it much clearer when selecting carefully amongst many objects than the highlighting. I've had to resort to soloing selected then de-selecting the things I don't want to make them disappear.

Unfortunately, as far as I know, you don't get to add the card's VRAM together - instead, the scene has to be completely loaded into each card's VRAM, so you only get the amount of the lowest card (ie a 3080 & a 3090 would limit you to 10gb). That said, with out-of-core tech on Octane & Redshift, you can spill over the cards VRAM, at a performance hit. Still, 10gb-> 24gb - that's a maaasive gap & I think I fancy the card that will go inbetween at some point.

Coming from a 1080Ti, this (the 3080) is the 1st serious upgrade worth considering for performance/ £, especially as I use Octane for 90% of my rendering nowadays. I just have the feeling that 10GB Ram is a bit stingy, feel like if I wait for the refresh (3080 Super etc) or Maybe a 3080Ti with some intermediate amount of RAM, that might be a better choice. 1080Ti still doing decent, so I think I'll wait 6 more months & see where we're at, but a promising card. I also really want a Honda CBR650R... which is difficult to justify from any rational perspective.

I have a cheap Bamboo tablet, which suits my needs perfectly except: From R21 onwards, I have the following issue: - When trying to use the normal alt + lmb, mmb, rmb navigation, the zoom (alt+rmb) doesn't work unless the preferences are open. Instead, it just orbits the camera, the same as Alt+lmb, except when the prefs are open, then it behaves correctly. - When the prefs are closed & the wrong behavoiur is seen, I get 'Alt' displayed at the cursor position & a white circle when trying to zoom with alt + rmb - This only occurs in R21 onwards, in R20 it's fine - This only happens in Cinema 4D; ZBrush, Substance painter etc work fine - I've tried my damndest to disable all the hateful things windows 10 tries to do with graphics tablets & I'm pretty sure I've disabled everything. I've had this issue over a year - anyone ever come across the problem & a solution ? Thanks in advance

I've done some bits & pieces myself (in fact, I did a little bit of moulding patterns for Disney's Beauty & the Beast & some sculpting for a few adverts). But my involvement was mostly the sculpt, then making sure it was a water-tight surface, sometimes with a bit of cutting out internal mass. But I pretty much passed a correctly-formated file on & my involvement ended at that stage of the process.

Can Delta Mush be baked to weighting ? Is this even something that's conceptually possible ? I would love to use it to get better weighting with less effort but I think that most of the character stuff I do at work will go to Unreal Engine, which will only accept joints & morphs. I've been aware of Delta Mush since it started appearing years ago for Maya but not sure if it's something that can potentially pass between software except via alemic/ point cache (a non-starter for the kind of stuff I'll be working on). Thanks if anyone has any insights. Edit: OK, I found that it seems to be conceptually possible & in fact Maya has it implemented: After a very cursory look at R23's deformer & documentation, I can't see a way to bake the Delta Mush back to pure weighting. If I have any feedback, it would be to stress how incredibly useful such a feature would be, now that more & more of us are sending animation to game engines.

Although, with 3D printing, who knows ? We could certainly make a lot of actual things with Cinema 4D. That's not really my focus, but if I had more time it would be interesting to explore.

Yes, and their determination to hide the upgrade means I can't even buy it & get started, have to wait for them to call back. Then after the 30% price increase & difficulty in purchase, they can claim ' we don't see any demand for perpetual & cancel it in a release or 2. I will say, though, that R21 -> R23 is a good upgrade in terms of features & I am eager to get using it, but it's not great value for money & the whole transition has soured my attiutude towards them.

Just be aware & I say this as a big C4D fan, who thinks this is the future of the app - this is an early tech demo & YEARS away from being a fully integrated core. It would be quicker to list the things it does support than the things it doesn't. And to be fair, MAXON makes no attempt to disguise this.

True, we have Autodesk's Arnold & MAXON's Redshift as examples here. They still have to want to be bought out though & there's a fair chance they're happy how they are.

Well, I should probably comment on R23 here ! Looks like a good range of features, great to see Character Animation getting some love, can't wait to try the new UV tools. I'm coming from R21, so a good range of new features from my POV, just need to speak to MAXON UK & see how bad the perpetual upgrade price is.

If you want a really deep -dive on eyelid setups, this is a great tutorial - you can probably get away without having to do any Python in Cinema, check out video 3 around 22 mins on, where he is showing some of the things it can do. Might be overkill though.

I have always used Maya tutorials & translated them to Cinema 4D. 'Stop Staring' is a good book for this, although it leans a bit more towards morph-based facial animation than joint-based setups. Then there are lot's of good vimeo/ youtube tutorials on specific aspects of facial rigs. I don't have a list to hand but I might post back if I remember any particularly good ones.

The premade character rigs can be made editable into full hierarchies of normal objects, at which point I'm pretty sure some parenting could integrate it into your custom rig. For example, for the existing preset rigs, it's quite possible to make them editable & start extracting parts, so it seems likely to me. I know how to do my own facial setups, but I would still pull bits of these if they are good & quick to setup.

3-Tier Pagoda is done, bar the tiles on the bottom 2 floors. Widened the aspect ratio, tweaked the composition slightly.

I'm planning to use it as an opportunity to learn substance painter, although I do expect the texuring stage to be quite time consuming. Thanks ! Anyway, just a small update - A WIP of the top level of what will be a 3-tier Pagoda. The buildings are pretty time-consuming but at least I'm building up a kit of parts & techniques, so it gets a little easier as I go on. Main thing is the roof tiles - every slight variation of roof shape requires a slightly different layout. Thank goodness for cloners & mograph anyway.

Okay, made a bit of an update today - the rocks at the back will eventually be a waterfall. The ground will probably be rendered black in the final thing but leaving it white while I develop it. Got a couple more buidlings to model yet, I think.