FLima

This is so cool man 🙂 Looking forward to test this! Congrats with all this Everfresh As soon as I saw the racoon (I love raccoons! ❤️ ) i was like "AHhh, i recognize that cutie!!"

Oh, this is amazing! thank you so much 🙂

This is good to know! Thanks for the headsup! Im excited to play with the toon character rig too!! I think that will be implemented into my workflow. (even though it feels a bit like cheating 😞 ) PS: Do you have any tutorials on face rigs? All my facial rigs comes out as nightmare fuel! I've been trying to find a good facial rig tutorial for so long hehe.

I am quite happy with the anouncements overall 🙂 I dont use the premade character rigs, so not sure if I will be able to implement the facial rig to my custom rigged characters? I hope so! For me, one of the big changes is the character solver. For sure, that will make it extremely awesome to transfer animation from one character to another! And the delta mosh! (in fact, I wish I had this delta mosh right now for a project Im working on he he) And funny enough, some of the small improvements, are the ones that I got extremely excited.. like.. auto previewing the F-curve when selecting a specific parameter It seems minimal, but doing some fine tuning on characters, and having to manually find "where is this curve?" a lot of times.. I got used to it, but it was frustrating in general. This and auto-keying changes is also super welcome! I think, the only thing I was hoping to see was viewport improvements, more specifically, changes to the Interactive Render Region, the one we have right now is unfortunately not good enough, or not responsive enough. Specially when working with toon shaders, etc.. it starts refreshing quite fast, but after some 4-5 materials, everything just lags.. and takes a while to update. I mean, the magic bullet and the space screen reflections are nice aditions, dont get me wrong... but I would believe, most people who uses Magic Bullet Looks, would normally use during the compositing stage of a project, before or after some other effects are added on top of the 3D footage... so there is a lot more control without wasting 3D render time, and with more control. Also, it would be cool for us to have some sort of roadmap... specially now that C4D is subscription based, It would be nice to see whats in the horizon for us. Overwall, it was a good presentation, looking forward to the update 🙂

This... and the older you get, the more complex it is to find this balance... Real world obligations, bills to pay, it becomes more difficult to just switch from software to software, even though 3D, once you learn it, it is easier to adapt.. But it takes time, specially when you've been working with a specific software for more than a decade - which is my situation with C4D.

I absolute love your input on this Dan. Have you played a lot with character animation inside Maya? Or any other software? I'm very curious about that. 🙂 My problem with C4D at the moment, well, aside from the subcription price, it is the lack of nice real time visualization on NPR work. I love doing things with sketch and toon, but at some point, the instant viewport render region just gets extremely slow to preview anything... But yeah, I gotta admit, C4D feels like home. I dont need to search extensively through several different forums when I see something that Im not 100% sure how to achieve. The object manager and the way you can organize your scenes, just welcomes you.

There are no problems on paying for software when your income comes from it. But this is mostly true to a one-time payment kind of software. Like it was with Zbrush for instance, I paid around 700 USD once, and every update they had ever since (and long before I had purchased) was completely for free. I own the software and Pixologic continues to support and give full attention to its users. It was a bit of a chunk of money to pay at once, specially coming from a Brazilian pocket.. but knowing this was an investment, it puts me at ease, knowing that I can continue to produce work with it during low seasons. This is different for subscription, where you are held hostage to a continuous payment, hoping that your life situation and job market doesnt change. This year, I had to use my credit card to pay for C4D's subscription for instance, due to several delay payments and no projects at all at the beginning of this year. And it was a bit desperate, knowing that the price is so high, for something that I know I dont really own. So yeah, paying a lot for a rental price, as a indie freelancer, I think it is okay to "cry", as you put it.

@CerberaI am now curious... have you tried Blender? And no, im not from the "Blender" cult hehe, I've been trying it for a while.. but still.. havent really felt "at home" in there. but the ideals behind it, the immense support and heaps of tutorials, always makes me think about it.

That would be the ideal situation, yes. I think, if we werent facing a pandemic, most likely they would fly you over, to work locally on a specific thing. But yeah, you eased my conscious a little bit hehe.

hey... I think you raised a super strong point here. No companies will be "happy" to share with you the complete information on how much they made on a specific project, specially with all the fees negotiations and etc in place. Unless maybe you are part of a team of a big budget production (pixar movie, etc...) and you worked using your indie license. Then a public project like that, sure, i could see a problem.

I would love to know that as well.

Nope, this is only for US. Autodesk changed their terms for each country (sneaky bastards 😛 ) So for instance, in Brazil, we cant make more than 50k per year (in US is 100k) but we still have to pay the same rental price. Also, we have this budget limitation by project, of 100k. There is a sneaky similar limitation like that for Japan users for instance, there was a big discussion around that.

Oh no... please... stop.. I'm almost convinced to sign up for Maya as well haha! The subscription price for me would be 1/4 of what i just paid C4D 😞 But the biggest hiccup for me, is the project budget limit. Since a lot of projects that I work with.. my income, are projects that easily can go over 100k (not the amount that i get paid of course, but it is usually a part of an ad that I work with, etc.., and it has directors, art directors, other 3D artists.. etc..) So my use for Maya would be quite limited. My biggest dream is to test the rigging in Maya...

But doesnt the budget limitation by project affects you? or in UK they have a different limitation? For me, it makes it unthinkable, to use Maya Indie for anything other than small budget gigs or personal projects only.

I dont think I can jump ship to be honest. I tried to adapt a lot of my work with 2 trials of maya, but it feels quite complex to achieve some simple results. I believe character animation is far superior than the one we have in C4D, but yeah, mograph, for visuals and sequencing animations is unbeatable. Also, I like to organize things a lot better in C4D, within nulls, groups, layers. I didnt like the way things are in Maya at the start. Also, keep in mind about the weird and not so obvious limitations. Depending on the country where you are. There is a limit of money you can earn per year, to be able to use it... But not only that, outside of the US, they have also placed limits on how much the total project you are involved can earn (which is extremely shady..) So, not being able to work in a project above 100k, makes it only available to use on small projects/personal, nothing on advertisement and serious CGI work. I think Autodesk is still being "Autodesk" with this, that is why i dont think it is such a good deal.

Wow, the new page looks awesome!! ❤️

I think this is definitely a good take, and I can feel by your excitement that you are indeed enjoying it a lot 🙂 The existence of Blender, by itself, is already a great thing for all of us. Having a complete free software, offering pro level solutions, that competes in a lot of things with paid softwares! I started with 3DS Max 15 years ago, and switched to C4D thanks to a friend, who helped me achieve the results I wanted, and explained to me a bit of Xpresso and etc. The speed C4D offered things and how amazing I could organize my scene, it was something I could have never imagined before. With all this worldwide unfortunate changes, we dont know how will it be for all of us. Maybe I wont be able to afford C4D's subscription anymore (I am already struggling with it...) and the idea that all my files will be locked and I wont have freedom to access them until I pay the again, it is really, really horrible. I understand that this is business, and as a company, they need to survive///but with all this crisis that we are about to experience, maybe it will be a forced change on how companies think, and see us, long time users. Blender doesnt offer me yet great reasons to switch. For me, animation is still a bad experience 😞 And no light linking, etc... the armature/pose switch, feels like a weird and unnecessary step in between.. but I love that there is at least an option, for all of us, in the worst case scenario... to continue to work and produce awesome results. A lot of us integrates different softwares to our workflows with C4D. (Zbrush, Painter, Marvelous Designer, etc) And Blender, for me, is already helping with some of the things, together with C4D (modelling for instance) So thanks for posting your videos and blender info/tips.

I hear ya.. but you can simply click on the objects in the C4D viewport and automatically see its keyframes too. This is okay when you have a very pre-defined and big things to select, but when you have little eyebrown or several small elements, and you want to edit all its keyframes as fast as possible, you need to be able to select it just by name, like you can do it in C4D... it makes no sense why it has to be this complicated in Blender. Also when you want to add a loop to certain keyframes, you need to select individually on which item you want to add the modifier "cycle" for instance... axis X of foot controller. then Y axis of foot controller.. You cant just select a whole group of things and set "repeat forever/oscilate" and be done with it. There is awesome things on Blender, I actually like rigging on it more than C4D, and the auto weight, just WORKS! In C4D , it is always a gamble.. I try so many different auto-weight settings, and C4D never gets it right on the first time... Im now using mixamo to set bones and skins on my characters since C4D cant do it properly... And I think Blender has a very bright future ahead.. but yeah, animation, is not good 😞 A lot can be done by experienced users for sure, but after you use C4D, and see how straightfoward it is, it is difficult to adapt.

I think that is the best approach to have Janine 🙂 And I hope you only continue to learn even more about the software. For me, as an artist, I love to have options. I have 18 years of experience with C4D, so a lot of the experiments I wanna make, it becomes natural, I can think directly about the result I want, and the steps I make are almost instant, since I know the software very well. The pricing thing is becoming a nightmare unfortunately. I am a subscriber, but I think it is extremely unfair to people who has perpetual license, to keep them from using the latest version and updates the software has to offer... Some of the things from Blender keeps me from using it fully though, like I mentioned before, its dope sheet and graph editor, for me at least, is a nightmare. I love making loops, walk cycles and easy repetitions, and with C4D, one click and you can set up a whole chain of objects to repeat, which is impossible in Blender 😞 I love the competition though, I think it will push more and more the paid softwares to observe things that works really well in Blender, like Eevee and the character animation setup. For now, C4D will stay as my commercial software of choice.

Yeah, I dont plan to replace C4D with anything. I am using blender mostly for some character animation, because I really love the auto-weight, and how it just works... But I dont feel that Blender, at least for me, is production ready. The realtime render is a LOT of fun, and characters and sculpting too, but yeah... not there yet

Resurrecting this topic, since I've return to Blender for my personal experiments/character animation.. Has anyone managed to adapt to Blender's Dope Sheet/Graph Editor during animation? I find it extremely clumky... cant select an object by name on dope sheet and automatically select its keyframes.... it has a very weird behaviour. In c4d, the animation process just flows nicely... Has anyone struggled with that also?