FLima

Nah, I do my own rigs inside c4d. Even jf they are usually basic most of the time.. but yeah, sometimes a well functioning rig just “explodes” when I add a new keyframe element 😞 will try to replicate step by step and see what is happening

Yeah, thanks for the headsup. I ran into other bugs as well, but I cant replicate them the same way. one thing that happened with my post above, is that, when I added new keyframe to an already made motion clip, first time things worked perfectil.. but the second time, the whole mesh was destroyed, pushed apart beyond recognition.... I have no idea what happened there... It is a bit of a confusing system, and I can see a lot of potential, but yeah.. I need to do more tests with it before I implement this into production..

Hello Dan (and everybody who is struggling a bit with the same issue I had) I think I discovered a very, very nice solution to my problem. I am not sure if this is only on version R21 of C4D (I will check later on my R18 perpetual license later on) But I realised after I removed the keyframes when creating a new motion clip, a new timeline appears on top of my main character animation, folded, with the name of the motion clip I just created (in this case, Walk Cycle)... when opening, I can see the entire embbed animation from the motion clip in there (the same as accessing Dope Sheet from the motion clip timeline) so you can do your fine adjustments there. So far, nothing new... but of course, you can adjust the settings over there, so there is not really a need to convert the motion clip back to keyframes, since it is already easily accessible from there. But.. when you decide to add a new keyframe element (for instance, rotation on X axis, but you forgot to make a keyframe for that when creating the motion clip. you can leave your motion clip on as a reference for the new keyframe, or not, and animate on your main character on its own timeline (this will be the only animated bit since everything else was taken inside the motion clip): And after you are done, you can simply drag this new animated element inside the motion clip timeline! The new motion clip will automatically contain this new animation setting, in a very non-destructive manner!! of course, if you animated LEFT_FEET rotation on X axis, you drag it inside the "WalkCycle" motion clip LEFT_FEET rotation tab as well.. but if you want, you can drag it anywhere you want, pelvis, etc.. and it will still work! This is just amazing!! Next level stuff. This will definitely help me a lot with my character animation productions from now on. Being able to keep snippets of my animations, adding things here and there and keeping it overwall, being able to match animations,etc.. damn.. I have no idea the level of programming magic that goes into this! But I am so happy this exists on C4D ❤️ Thanks again Dan!

Hello Dan! I am absolutely grateful for you taking the time to explain this! I had no idea about the difference between animation layer/motion clip, etc.. for me, it was all part of the same thing somehow. But thanks to you, now I know the key difference! I will go through this tests before I get on with the animation process (I am doing a personal short film at the moment, with 3 characters, etc... ) so this will definitely save me a lot of time, I can already tell. And I will say it, thanks to your amazing tutorial on youtube, I learned so much more about Motion Clips... an aspect from C4D that i never used for about 12 years I work with the software. It takes the highest amount of care and dedication to make a 1 hour tutorial and post it on youtube. Thanks you so much for your amazing dedication Dan. And I hope you recover very soon from your illness, and be 100% fine very soon!

I am wondering if anyone here uses motion clips constantly, and has developed a proper pipeline for character animation? I am struggling to implement this on my daily work, even though it is super attractive at first. Keeping basic pre-animated loops/sequences in clips, and being able to integrate/blend them independently. My main problem is.. what is the proper pipeline for this? I've noticed you cant add new keyframes to an already made motion clip (like, adding a rotation keyframe to an object that only had position animated) and when you try to convert the motion clip back to keyframes, it is basically unusable, one keyframe for each frame, making it impossible to edit back like in the beginning... So, should I create several copies of the same character before I create one motion clip? I saw the nice tutorial from the C4D user Retro (Dan) and it was amazing! But I am still lost at this part, how to make non-destructive work, that I could adjust back as I need. Thanks in advance!

It is very good to get an inside perspective of the software, from someone who is more experienced with it than me! Thank you Yeah, I can see that these modes are a bit weird to be honest... but I do like the idea of being able to move the bones of the armature in edit mode sometimes (and even changing their type! Like bendy bones!!) and it doesnt mess up the whole rig.. For some weird reason, I feel that the weight paint and bone structure is more effective in here than in C4D. But I might be wrong? But I really, really love C4D's object manager... It feels so more intuitive and well.. mograph 🙂 But I think, having a different option is always good for some specific things.

Thanks!! 🙂 Unfortunately, since the show is quite new, and they will be doing the official opening now in Montréal, I dont have access to full footages yet. There is one making of video that shows some of the acts I worked on And there is... well.. a filmed footage.. of a guy that filmed vertical... and screams sometimes in horrible exposure hehe!! But you can see an entire act I worked on (starts at 8:00).. but yeah, not good quality, be warned 😛

Hello all 🙂 wanted to share this project I did in August/September for Cirque du Soleil's new show, Axel. I used cel shading for everything, with linked materials via expresso (to copy the cel shader's settings to all the other materials) And well, lots of mograph hehe 🙂 I still had only the R18 license, so a lot of things would've been MUCH simpler with R21's capabilities of having different falloff in single mograph effects. But it was a cool experience regardless. For the final render, since I wanted to give it a videogame/pixel art look. I removed all the anti-alias from the standard render, and rendered a tiny image of 288x145 and stretched inside After Effects without anti-alias. It was literaly the fastest post-production process thanks to this neat little trick when working with pixelated style 🙂 Let me know if you have any questions on how to achieve similar effects, nice combination and workflow with cel shader for production, etc.

omg.....! Thank you Bentraje! I had no idea haha! Wonder how it is to work on this way!

Hello Robert! I did a quick test with 3 characters I've created from scratch yesterday, they are similar rigs (not super complex) but there are 3 different armatures. And the viewport had no problem at all. Note that I am using eevee and a custom toon shading, so not sure that would make it faster, but the viewport had no slowdown. One thing to note is that, it is a bit clunky the animation process. Having to switch from armatures to start animating them on pose mode, and not being able to animate 3 characters simultaneously withouh having to enter in their own pose mode. So yeah, there is another limitation, compared to C4D, which lets you animate everything, multiple characters at the same time. Blender feels really good for UV, texture painting and for me, the possibility to have a big control with unrealistic renders and instant preview of what I am working on (which Cinema 4D lacks completely) but it is not a perfect software... it has its own weird limitations, like these multiple armatures animation process, which is a bit weird.

That is interesting... havent tested yet. Will test it during this week and I will let you know!

Ok, not to end on a negative note with C4D... Blender doesnt have dynamic IK for bones haha 🙂 And it is so muuuch simpler in C4D! If you try to find tutorials on how to make bones behave dynamically in Blender, tutorials are around 20-40 minutes, and there is a reason for that. It is such a combersome process... So yeah, not everything is perfect with Blender.

I've been playing with Blender since the announcement that C4D would start on the subscription model... and even though, initially it was a major pain to figure out even the basic things (navigating through a scene, scaling, rotating, etc..) suddenly it all became natural and intuitive. I think this is not a "perfect software" and "wow, it is so much better than C4D" but for at least the things I need, toon shading instant preview, great workflow on grouping shaders and using them as reference to other materials without any problem, modelling, and all the symmetry options.. indeed, it feels like a breath of fresh air. I decided to pay for the C4D new license of r21 for one year, since I depend on the software to work (I still have my r18 license) and I thought it would be a major jump, specially with character animation (which is my main job as a freelancer) and to be honest, it was disappointing... bone glow is a bit of an improvement, but the mirroring of weights, and a lot of things are still super clumky and same as the previous versions. I started playing with rigging inside Blender, and it was just.. so.. mindblowing. Being able to add new polygons or remove them on an already rigged character without destroying the whole thing... fine tuning the weight painting and already having it perfectly mirrored and normalized on the other side without extra clicks.. and, by accident, I also discovered I had rigged a character with the mirror modifier still applied on, and it still worked perfectly!! Just half of the polygons, and completely rigged, left arm and right arm working independently, and even after applying the modifier, all the weight were applied intuitively. And, most important of all, the transfer weight system, in case you want to include a t-shirt on your already rigged character.. it just works!! the weight is transfered perfectly even if the t-shirt has more or less polygons in the same areas. Feels like witchcraft! C4D's VAMP is not helpful on that area at all.. it works nicely for some of the things, pose morphs, etc.. but for transfering weights, at least for me, is 1 out of 10 chances to work. I love C4D, and I dont think I will be one of the guys saying "Goodbye C4D forever!!" I am super thankful that this was one of the easiest 3D softwares to get into back in the day, and how intuitive (much more than Blender) to start making things. The object manager from C4D, the hierarchy and etc, feels so much better, and I will still be using it for a long time, specially when it comes to mograph (which, let's agree, it is one of the best features ever). But I wont be renewing my license next year. I will stay with my R18 old license. And I know this is a big software, that is super difficult to do a major overhaul with features. But I dont know.. I felt that, with the new subscription model, things would be improved at a faster rate. Like a much better character animation system, not just mixamo premade integrations or the premade character rigs... I want to be able to work efficiently on my own custom rigs. Also we need, very badly, a much better Interactive Render Region. The current one we have.., with the refresh rate.. it is just, unusable, specially when working with cel shading. I am hopeful that C4D will catch up, and aware that the dev team has a giant task ahead. I think this competition will be good for everyone. It will help 3D companies to rethink and push boundaries when they see what Blender is offering, out of the box, at a zero cost.

it is weird, I cant get the "help" function to work either. and I dont have this exact plugin Mike mentioned. Also, sometimes c4d crashes/becomes unresponsive while rendering. Im on Windows 10 professional C4D R21.115

Thanks, I will try that Igor. About the Light Node, is the one I am using, but it is inside the asset that is being linked in between the colour node and the final result. Not sure if the asset appears in the file I sent you, but if you look inside, it is the light node I am using. But I think I will give up for now on this, since I cant figure out what is happening. Thanks Igor

For sure, this is the link of the tutorial made by Jonas Pilz, on how to achieve cell shading. The cell shading I want to accomplish I want to have more control on the shadows and gradient steps, a bit difficult to explain but the cell render and the sketch and toon are not specific enough for what I need. I used to use the norrmal materials with cel shader in luminance channel, and copy that channel using xpresso to all other materials I needed afterwards, but itwas a bit cumbersome and I thought that Node materials would be a god sent to organize in big scenes hehe! But, I wanted to know, if possible, what Im doing wrong with the scene/nodes 😞 Maybe I should go back to my initial/old method and give up on nodes?

The original scene was 25 mb and here it wont allow me to upload more than 2.5 or 3mb? i dont remember the limit I got prompted. Can you tell me how the nodes were set incorrectly? If there was any red flags on it that I can replicate, or avoid? I just followed through one of the tutorials on how to recreate cell shading inside nodes, and adapted with colour mix and gradients to produce coloured results, but if you could tell me what thing I should avoid, I can try to see and adapt here. Because Im not sure what Im doing wrong.. logically speaking and based on other node renders, this is what I imagined the node flow would be. Thanks Igor!

Ah, thanks Igor, here it is the scene 🙂 Thanks in advance! SamPorterBridges_DS.c4d

Just as a reference, this is what the main asset, that produces the cel shading effect, looks like: I've just tested all the other materials, and the Interactive render Region behaves normally...

So, since I've worked mostly with Cell shading and pixelated workflow, no anti-aliasing and on standard render. I changed my workflow to now use node materials, since I can control a lot better how the shadows and the cell shading behaves. But of course, I rely completely on the Interactive Render Region to preview what I am doing.. and before, it was already a bit too slow for this tests. but now, sometimes it doesnt show anything at all 😞 I have to keep spinning the camera or move some elements to finally get a preview on what the material looks like? Is there anything I can do to prevent this? Are there any known issues when using node materials and the interactive render region? Thanks in advance!

Crisis averted CBR 🙂 I dont know what happened, i did the change with SDS, placed one inside the other, and changed some settings here and there on their options, and now it works 🙂 it was working by default on C4D R18, but this now fixes my problem, and saves my project!! Thanks!

I will run these tests now. But yeah, the character I've created is low poly initially since it has to be animated, so easier to adjust weights and etc. If i subdivided the model on core level, there will be lots of polygons to deal with and adjust, so I cant do that. But yeah, I will test this subdivision with 1 level, and another one on top. I will report later on today. I appreciate you trying to help me CBR. Thanks for that!

I didnt mean to imply that C4D should be free of bugs 100%, and I am aware the pontential for new things to arise with a new version increases dramatically. But because of this new subscription model, I thought that things would be a bit more streamlined you know? I dont mean to diminish the efforts on software development. Im just stuck in a bit of a limbo now, since this is my main source of income.. and I cant proceed with the character I need to deliver next week... and because of this new license model, I cant download the previous version of R20 and be able to finish my project... so... Im a bit lost and a bit desperate to be honest. About the report, I opened a ticket also on MAXON's website, but I will upload later on today here also. Thanks CBR

Hello! I've encountered a bug that has been driving me crazy over the past weeks. Basically when you create a polygon, and apply hair to it, it will follow the curviness of the polygon, if it has sharp edges (a cube), the hair will have a cube-ish overall shape... But when you put this polygon on a subdivision surface, the hair is follows the new subdivided polygon and it will have a more rounded shape too. This is not working as intended in R21. Sometimes it will behave as mentioned above, and sometimes it will not, depending on the number of polygons, etc..(seems arbitrary, I tried many things to see what is causing this bug) I use Redshift and Octane render, but it is also happening in Standard and Prorender. PS: Is there a schedule for a new update for C4D? This is very frustrating.. there are bugs since launch that hasnt been fixed yet, and no updates ever since? The edge dissolve bug for instance, it is extremely annoying, making us spend extra time on fixing the points left behind every time 😞

I could replicate this one more time, when I was working with symetry and going insane with the amount of extrudes and loop cuts 🙂 But I noticed that at some point, when using Dissolve , some intersecting points would be left untouched (something that only happened with Melt) has anyone noticed this too?