EricNS

You can use the pyro simulation as particle force using a Vector Volume and a Force Field. It's explained in the manual. Search for "Interaction with standard particles" or "Interaction with Thinking Particles".

Could anyone make it work ? It seems to be broken. The render button does nothing...

The example I see from this new Pyro engine lack complexity, volume and definition. It seems there is no scattering, occlusion and translucency,... The result is flat, almost like a 2D effect. It could be a shading issue. I'll give it a try and see for myself... As a reference, here is what I get from Embergen in real time on an entry level 8 GB GeForce RTX3060 - notice the amount of details, the volumetric light diffusion and the realistic occlusion :

There's a page dedicated to it here, with 2 little videos : https://www.maxon.net/en/cinema-4d/features/pyro

I managed to switch from Photoshop to Affinity, but lack of transform tool is always an issue. I can understand that it can be a deal breaker, it such as essential tool. Hopefully the next version will fix this (edit: It did! with the new Live Mesh Wrap)

It doesn't read any scene data. It only use the viewport render as reference. Cinema 4D itself is irrelevant here, this plugin could use any other 2D image. It gives you a bit more control than only text based instructions. The issue for 3D artists is that the result is a thematic interpretation and not a true development of the reference scene. This AI reads the image correctly as "a red car on a grey surface with a dark background", but it ignores the shape of the elements, the structure of the scene. The results are interesting, but unpredictable, and not accurate enough for professional works.

It's not new. In the eighties VFX artists were already complaining about very difficult working conditions - low pay, no respect, insane hours,.. None of the sci-fi classics (say Blade Runner, Aliens, The Thing, etc...) were done without sacrifices. I've worked on a few movies - indies to blockbuster - and it was always depressing, exhausting and not even lucrative.

Thanks guys.

Hi there, Just noticed I forgot to write a "formal" introduction. My name is Eric Smit, I'm a Director / CG / VFX artist living in Luxembourg. Some of you already know me. I was really active in the Cinema 4D community in the 2000s and early 2010s. These days my professional work consists essentially of filming, editing and post-production. If I work on 3D animations it's mostly for personal projects. As time goes, I find myself less interested in realism and "technical" achievements. I'm fed up keeping up with the technologies. I even go back to "primitive" CG with minimal shading and rendering set-ups. The faster, the better. Here two recent contemplative/mystical shorts :

These pages are quite interesting : https://ommer-lab.com/research/latent-diffusion-models/ https://stability.ai/blog/stable-diffusion-public-release This AI can be used to create "art" from simple instructions, but also for texturing, adding surface details, upscaling, generating variations, changing illumination, fixing image, filtering, etc...

Your issue is optimisation, not cpu/gpu performances or ram. Cinema 4D slows down when there are too many generators and deformers in a scene, especially boolean objects. It also struggles with large amount of objects. Optimisation is the only way to improve performance. -Merge whatever can be merged. Keep the amount of separate geometries to a minimum. -Use intensively the Current State To Object tool to bake deformers and generators. -Pass everything through the Polygon Reduction generator and/or the Remesh tool. -Alternatively, if it doesn't cause issue with textures, a Volume Builder/Mesher is a great way to control mesh density (by adjusting the voxel size and the adaptive value). A strong optimisation can increase the FPS of your scene by 10, sometime even 100. If you keep your scenes as heavy as they are, a new MAC, with 64gpu instead of 48gpu, will not make a huge difference. I even doubt that you will notice a difference at all...

Why do you use the Relief object ? It's extremely limited. Since R9, we have in Cinema 4D a Displacer Defomer, the Displacer. You can use any type of bitmap textures or procedural shaders with it. It also supports image sequences and video files. You can drop this Displacer in any geometry.

My wife and I tested DALL-E 2 yesterday evening, just to see what it's all about... The result were astonishing, unbelievable. This AI is more creative than both of us! For every input we gave it managed to generate something interesting. We wrote random stuff like "a horse inside a tornado painted by Klimt", "a tree made of snakes in darkness" or "a Japanese pagoda inside a volcano" and tested a few variations. In a few seconds it created fantastic original artworks. here are a few examples :

In the Bitmap Shader attributes, you can change the Color Profile (Embedded, Linear, sRGB or Custom) To access it, just click on the texture and go to the Shader Properties tab.

it seems fair. But to be really successful, you might want to consider exclusive contents like assets, scripts, plugins, deals, ...