christianS

In our institute, a discussion concerning https://copilot.github.com/ just started and I am curious if this makes any sense for us. The question is when this turns from "Supporting the coder" to "Implement what the project owner wants". I didn't look to deep into this, but I guess this is still only for some environments. In our case, I doubt it would helpt with our in house software as it is pretty specific, but if you are doing some python and want a quick solution, this might spit out the code you need. But will AI provide good architectures for bigger systems? Luckily I am not a pure programmer, more in the field of research, so I do not see this as a threat at the moment, but this opens unpleasant perspectives... I mean here in Germany at least, IT jobs are pretty safe at the moment, but it seems automation won't stop at phsysical work....

I got no notification, not before the change, not after it. Only found out here.

Well, of course I checked after having pieced together the pieces here and before letting off some steam 😉 If you now what you are looking for you will find the information. After locking into my account at Insydium I am greeted with: Please note You can no longer buy Maintenance for your Cycles 4D License. To get all these plugins, products and benefits you should buy a new Fused License, or convert an X-Particles License to Fused. And of course it says Only available as part of the INSYDIUM Fused collection in very small letters on the Cycles4D page. Again, If I wouldn't have known what to look for, I wouldn't have noticed. So yes, it is not available stadalone anymore, not even as subscription. Which means I would be forced to pay much more to keep it up to date, a price simply not realistic for me. It will (hopefully) continue to work for some time, but no updates after my current maintainance period. And I guess downloading will also stop at some point. So yes, for me as a hobbyist it is basicaly killed in the longer run. But it is still a good engine and will keep C4D a bit alive for me, but this is really the start of the end concerning Cinema4d for me. There is simply going to be no development.

WTF? Cycles4D Perpetual simply stopped? No email to a paying Cycles4D customer, no announcement on their page, no special thread here, nothing. I only stumbled over this in this thread accidently. Not the kind of business demeanor I expected from them. Shit. I can understand their decission, if it was not profitable. But their (non existing) communication really pisses me off. It is really like nobody cares for the customer, just cash (yeah I know, that's the harsh reality and I should not be surprised; I guess I watched to much Star Trek and am a bit idealistic). That's really sad, as Cycles4D allowed me to stay up to date at least with regard to rendering with my R21. There was something to look forward to... That said: I guess there will be no update to Cycles4D in the remaining 4 months of my maintainance period... I hope they prove me wrong but right now they are just one indsidious company among many. I think they will schedule the next update such that no perpetual user will profit from it. Oh damn, I was soo looking forward to Cycles-X So in 2021 Cinema4D really freezes for non-pro users. First Prime is stopped, then ProRender (a feature we paid for) is removed before it came even close to its potential (and surely this had nothing to do with the fact that MAXON wants to sell Redshift additionally), and now Cycles4D is not affordable for hobby users anymore. Sounds almost like a conspiracy to drive all remaining non-pro users away from C4D. Great 😕 Ah shit. Damn. No excuse anymore to not spend more time in that other software ...

Wishes Indie license Uhm, maybe S&T update? I know, unlikely, but as with some other cool things in cinema, this was top notch when it came out but saw no updates within a decade. Just saw the Toon stuff in Renderman 24 and this reminded me how cool S&T was already back in the day USD / Hydra? Would make sense... a non-destructive, adaptive remesher Expectations Geometry nodes update Some volume/fields stuff More UV stuff

Renderman 24 for Blender has just been released. It comes with a non-commercial version. As always, askNK has you covered: Makes a lot of sense..!

For me this leaves only one conclusion: it will be part of the next Cycles4D update as well 🙂

Looks really great! But as with Mesh Tools, it seems to be part of XParticles if you go by this page: https://insydium.ltd/products/x-particles/whats-new/coming-soon/ I think both tools would make great products on their own. I use Cycles4D, but do not really need XParticles. For me as a R21 user Mesh Tools would be interesting as I will not have access to the geometry nodes. The same goes for the terrain: the geoemtry nodes might also allow to build terrains. So both tools would actually be quite interesting for C4D users without geometry nodes access. Of course, the same goes for X-Particles itself, as geometry nodes might grow into a particle solution on its own. But still, that heavy packaging might prevent getting the tools into the hands of interested c4d users. Also, that OpenVDBImporter might be interesting for cycles4d...

Wondermesh seems like a step in the right direction, but from what I can see there are no options for round caps and so on. But I couldn't try, because installing doesn't work for me. Until now I would have said that installing addons in Blender is very easy and elegant. But I have no luck with Wondermesh. Which of the python files would you select? Slecting the folder doesn't work... Yes, I know that, but when I said outside Cycles, I meant in the geometry, for export... Then you have to unwrap and bake. Or am I missing soemthing? I installed bezier utilities yesterday: https://github.com/Shriinivas/blenderbezierutils This adds some of the of the missed functionality, but it now feels you are dealing with two very different toolsets. It is also very weird that this one only works in object mode. Yeah, some features are nice, for example it is easy to rotate a point with its tangents, preserving the angle between them. So yes, there are most probably solutions for everything, but you realy have to search and cobble things together to have what I consider the basics. No question, in other regards Blender is ahead of Cinema, but Cinema realy gets the basics right, in my opinion. But while I am complaining, the devs might by just fixing exactly that stuff, because let's be honest, the development speed is amazing. And I saw some posts in dev blogs that show they are aware for example of the limitations with regard to curve editing

Hi, I am also currently playing with Blender now and then. C4D upgrade path ended for me as a hobbyist with R21. Especially geometry nodes are intriguing for me. I hoped for something like that in Cinema for years. Now it is coming there as well, but I won't get my hands on it. Regarding the GUI in Blender I have to say it has come a long way. With all the recent Outliner changes you might think they are targetting users of a certain program... But there are still so many things in Blender that still hurt. Recently I needed displacement outside of Cycles. The only way I could find was UVs + baking... In Cinema you just use a 3D noise directly on the displacer. The whole texture system independent of the material system is akward (and 2D only). The whole material management system is also a bit complicated. If you are just used to showing the attributes of the selected item in the attribute manager then you are lost in Blender. Always searching for the right panel or tab. It's the same with settings.... No parametric objects (oh how I miss those simple things) or non-destructive surface generation out of splines (well, at least not without nodes, and that is still limited), but the splines have some built in functions to create surfaces (why is that not a separate object? Why has a curve polygons?). So all the procedural basics I love from Cinema are missing, but I guess with nodes we can kind of build them and there are thousands of plugins that might contain some of this stuff. And then the one topic that pushes me away from Blender regularly: curve editing. I managed to live with some of the quirks. The worst is insertion of points: there is only the extrude option which adds points at the end, an option to insert points on an existing segment at any position without changing the curve does not exist. You realy need plugins for that, as far as I can see. But then there are so many positive things as well. I am kind of torn, would love to do more in Blender, but the limited time I have for that hobby is mainly spent for googling even for the simple stuff. So, what is the best blender forum? Is there one with many c4d guys? Like a "Blender for old c4d farts" forum? Is there a plugin suite that just adds some tools to make things easier for c4d users? I think most of the stuff that I miss can be added easily. I am a coder myself, but actually don't want to do it in my free time as well (well maybe once the kids are older). Well, a lot of whining. Blender is still a great tool, as is C4D (but MAXONS product policy sucks).

The scene manager looks really great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKO4reHoUHI&t=1s I was hoping for something like the new nodes for years, and I like what I am seeing. Unfortunately the killing of Prime ended my upgrade path at R21. Hopefully MAXON decides that hobby users and new talents are also important and should not be pushed completely towards *some other software*. Would love to test this new stuff out at some point. The rest looks also decend!

Hey Frank, Nice seeing new work from you! This looks great. No idea why you hide the webpage. Even though it is w.i.p. it offers so much interesting information. https://www.terraform4d.com/ It answers my first question already: yes, fields can be used (for masking) Cu, Chris

And Vulkan can already be used on the mac... kind of, using MoltenVK: https://moltengl.com/moltenvk/ But I have no idea, how that works and what the user and/or softare vendor have to do for it to work, but the claims on that web site sound good.

Vulkan is actually cross platform, I think... Well actually it was/is supported via OpenCL in some renderers. I am not sure, but I think under Vulkan the OpenCL replacement, and therefore also a CUDA equivalent, would be Vulkan Compute. However, I don't think it has been widely used for production renderers and I doubt there is anything similar to NVIDIAs Optix. But in principle, it should be as suitable for it as OpenCL was. Yesterday, the first specification for Vulkan Raytracing was released: https://www.khronos.org/blog/vulkan-ray-tracing-final-specification-release However, this is more for gaming (similar to Direct X Raytracing). But I am pretty confident, that AMD will push raytracing in Vulkan, now that they have dedicated hardware...

Yep, this is also one of the big remaining issues for me, together with the almost unusable splines (or curves). This feels like a decade behind, at least for me. But the last time I tried it was in 2.8x, maybe this got better as well.

Yep I also have the feeling they are moving closer to C4D in that aspect. Forr me as a hobbyiest cinema reached end-of-line with Prime being discontinued, hence I keep more than one eye on Blender. And one thing that bothered me everytime I tried it out was the combination of the outliner and the attributes panel below it. But the outliner got some much needed love over the last versions, also organizing modifiers, and now, in 2.92 the attribute panel will switch the tab according to the selevted object! Incredible. Didn't try it yet as it is brand new, but this should move this closer to Cinemas attribute manager.