JThreeD

Nice, that's a great feature, thanks for the explanation. I just had an idea while watching the video. It would be interesting to host something like a game of HORSE between the different software. Pose a basic motion graphics challenge, then have folks post a video of how they would accomplish it in C4D, Blender, or Houdini. It could reveal some creative solutions and a fun way to compare the different software. EDIT: Of course, immediately after making the suggestion I find @Icecaveman & @Cerbera duking it out in this post:

Thanks for sharing, I do see you've created a foreach loop with a timeshift in there. I'm aware of what makes Houdini great, and I've encountered the limitations of C4D many times, but I'm just not ready to completely abandon it yet. The venerable Dr. Sassi at Cineversity actually offered an alternative to using the Time Offset in the Step Effector, which can not effect User Data keyframes. He suggested using a Blend Cloner and the Modify Clone parameter in a Plain Effector along with a Linear Field. I think @HappyPolygon had a good suggestion of showing equivalent C4D tools in Houdini, that could go a long way to creating a bridge between the two. Since the Cloner and offsetting clones with fields is such a big thing in C4D, demonstrating the easiest way to accomplish it in Houdini would be an interesting tutorial.

Actually I have a challenge for you, but please don't feel obligated, you are totally welcome to pass it up. In this C4D project, I have an object that I'm trying to offset the animation in a Cloner using the Step Effector (Time Offset), but it doesn't seem to work with User Data. How would you create a similar setup that works with Houdini? 220530-cone_sphere_boolean_test-02.c4d The animation is set to the User Data of the Boole object directly under the Cloner.

Perhaps you can share what ideas you have for Houdini tutorials. I actually taught Maya at a university for a couple years, the most fundamental things I covered were basic navigation, geometry, modeling, and animation. Personally I'm not afraid of Houdini, I just have a lot on my plate between C4D, Redshift, and X-Particles already. The biggest barrier I had with Houdini was distinguishing all the different systems, between SOPS, SCHOPS, MMOPS, BOPS, and BLOPS 🙂 I didn't have the time to make all the distinctions. One thing I really appreciated were the logarithmic unit interfaces for changing values, wish C4D could implement.

I don't have any requests, but I'll gladly watch whatever you have to put out 🙂

I would try logging into your Maxon account and submitting a support ticket with them. They're actually pretty good about trying to help, and if you're on a subscription it's part of what you're paying for. They might ask you to provide log files.

Essentially you want to assign your age parameter to the particle color, add a Redshift object tag, add a 'Color User Data' node to your Redshift material, and then reference the particle color. Here are instructions: 1) xpEmitter > Display > Color Mode: Gradient (Parameter) > Gradient Parameter: Age 2) Redshift Object Tag > Particles > Mode: Sphere Instances 3) Redshift Material > Color User Data Node > Iputs > Attribute name: Presets > Particles > Particle Color Result: If you want to control the color in Redshift, you can make it a B&W gradient in the emitter, and feed into a 'Ramp' node in the Redshift material. This video is helpful, although it's older so the specific steps and UI are different:

In reference to @Cerbera comment about topology, that 2nd level can be important when talking about animation/deformation. If you plan on animating the object with deformers, having even quads can make a difference.

This is a good video on how to assign different materials to cloned objects, which is what I'm assuming you're trying to do:

What you're looking at is an experimental feature or custom tool being built by Pixar for their internal pipeline. This kind of thing is more common in Maya, which offers more obscure animation pipeline plugins, often times at enterprise/studio prices. Maya does have a corrective blend shape workflow built in, which allows you to do something similar, essential create additional deformation on top of a skinned and animated character rig: The closest thing in C4d that I can think of, is the Correction deformer, which offers it's own set of post deformer editing abilities: There may be something similar in Blender, but I'm not familiar with it.

I've used Arnold with Maya. It's a great render engine, but haven't touched it in a long time. With all renderers, there's usually a hair material that can render splines. In Redshift, rendering splines also requires the use of an object tag that has curve settings, which translates curves to renderable objects. Without any research I would assume Arnold does the same. Try googling "rendering hair arnold c4d" or "rendering curves arnold c4d"

Wow, I just looked up trueSpace, what a trip! I actually didn't start learning C4D until 2015, but my first attempt to learn 3D animation was back in 1998 when there was an elective on LightWave in the Computer Science department at my university. Unfortunately it was little more than a review of the manual, and I had no access to the software outside of it. I can't remember exactly when I started coming to this forum, but I remember seeing your posts. I also remember Cactus Dan being a fixture with his plugins. I was actually alarmed this past year when Igor started removing old posts that were still appearing on Google searches, so answers to my questions were turning up 404, but I'm glad to see he's at least kept an archive going back to 2016. Although it can be hard to recognize when things get buried in the past, I appreciate what you, and many others, have contributed to this community.

Brushing up on some X-Particles stuff and came across this tutorial: It includes using data mapping and curl noise with flowfield dynamics. Here's a link to the free FBX/BVH animal motion files that they used: https://truebones.gumroad.com/l/skZMC

I agree, I really like coming to this forum. The layout is nice and the functions are smooth. My only request is to not change it for the time being 🙂 I actually started browsing around the other day, and noticed your 3D Wiki section and Pipeline Tools, I don't know if they're really necessary. In my opinion (and please only take it as an opinion) you could probably save yourself the trouble. I don't know exactly what you're trying to do with that section, but if you're trying to create an online reference for all things 3D, it might be more work than it's worth. On a side not, you seem to be missing Nuke in your compositing section. I ran into someone online the other day doing a live stream in VR of their Nuke workflow, and to be honest, I was pretty blown away what can be accomplished with UV passes. Though when they mentioned the project size, they were talking in the hundreds of gigabytes when it cam to 4k EXRs. Also, I would like to mention, if you're trying to create a home for all things 3D, you should think about hosting an X-Particles section. I started paying for the plugin a year ago and realized it's severely underserved when it comes to online resources. They stopped maintaining their own forum and shifted to Discord, which I think is a horrible option. There's no good way to browse through or search old topics. Personally I think Maxon should just bring them into the fold, I don't know how the corporate politics work, but Insydium seems like they deserve to be better supported by the Maxon community.

The simplest setup I can think of would be to create a bundle of tubes with a cloner, then use a Boolean to intersect the tube cloner with an object. Here's a quick example: https://file.io/IOYHyvA5nhMC The Boolean is very intensive, so it's not a very practical setup, but that's the basic idea. It's up to you to try and optimize it.

Totally agree. When you really think about it, you actually spend most of your time learning and developing. A good graphics card is great for quick turn arounds when iterating ideas, but the final render is not something you actually do that often. So to invest huge cost on something that you likely won't do everyday, is probably not the best way to budget. Render farms are actually very economical and efficient. Here are a bunch or reasons to use a render farm: 1) Frees up your system 2) Cheaper - Upfront costs are way lower than the time & money it takes to integrate multiple GPU's 3) Faster - It will generally still be faster to render on the cloud than most home setups that the average consumer could build 4) Maintenance (Future Proof) - You won't have to worry about maintaining and upgrading your system

If you plan on having multiple GPU's in one system, you need to account for the number of PCIE lanes required by the cards, and how many PCIE lanes the CPU has. For instance an RTX 3090 uses 16x PCIE 4.0 lanes. Where as a Ryzen 3rd Gen has 24 lanes, so you'd only be able to run 1 RTX 3090 at full capacity. Otherwise you could run 3 cards at 8x PCIE, but at a small performance loss, and most likely there wouldn't be enough room physically to connect 3 cards. Here's an article explaining PCIE lanes in depth: https://www.cgdirector.com/guide-to-pcie-lanes/ I have an AMD Threadripper 1950x, which has 60 PCIE lanes. At one point I had an RTX 2080ti, GTX 1080ti, and GTX 1070 connected to it, but the third card had to be mount outside the case using a riser cable. I recently upgraded to an RTX 3080ti, but because it's so big, it completely blocks *3 slots*. I really can only connect 1 other card to the motherboard, and I'll be selling the other 2. Here's an article about how many PCIE lanes Ryzen processors have: https://pcguide101.com/motherboard/how-many-pcie-lanes-does-ryzen-have/ You also need to consider the power supply which was mentioned earlier. An RTX 3090 requires 480 Watts, on top of that you generally want to have 25%-40% overhead, so if you wanted to run 4 cards, you'd be looking at something like a 3500W power supply which I don't think they even make. Guessing off the top of my head, you might need 2 power supplies with one of them mounted externally, or have an open bench setup. Here's a post about overhead: https://pcpartpicker.com/forums/topic/77606-how-much-extra-wattage-should-a-psu-have And to top it all off, you have to consider thermals. I've had my RTX 3080ti trigger the overheating alarm already, and that's with an open case. I have to keep a fan blowing on it directly when I'm rendering in warm weather. When you start stacking cards together, the heat will really build up in a case. The 4xxx series will only get bigger and hotter with more power demands.

I took a look at the file. You need to increase the "Maximum Subdivisions" in the Redshift Object tag to 3 or above. You may also want to enable "Screen Space Adaptive" and set "Minimum Edge Length" to 1 or 2 pixels. Here's a tutorial on using Redshift displacement, there's a section on tessellation at 10:40 It's also helpful to look at the documentation: https://docs.redshift3d.com/display/RSDOCS/Tessellation+And+Displacement

Oh definitely, I'm not blaming the community in any way, it was a very obscure problem. I was trying to make a point that most people would be turned-off being obligated to pay for something that's unreliable. Meanwhile I've corresponded with Maxon over the issue and they were actually able to find a solution, which is a reasonable expectation because I'm paying for it. In other words, paying for the forum will create an expectation that it should solve users' problems, and when it doesn't, people will be disappointed. To be clear I personally don't mind paying a nominal fee to keep this forum going, but there's already low engagement, and I'm worried this will only make it worse. In response to the issue of Maxon not supporting this website, if you guys did regular targeted donation campaigns, it may be a better way for Maxon (and possibly other organizations) to actually make financial contributions to the site. I think the optics of making a donation to a community service would be much better for individuals and organizations alike because there's no issue of employment, ownership, or obligation. Plus it's a tax write-off. When Wikipedia does it's donation campaigns, the banner has a direct link to Paypal. I think making that payment button as obvious and pleasant (dare I say fun?) as possible can go a long way. I'd also like to add that I have no issue with the banner advertisements here as well. Generally they're for rendering & tutorial services that are essentially eye candy, as opposed to gross looking foot fungus click-bait you see on other sites. This forum is filled with people that are in the business of making cool looking things. Crowd sourcing for fun & interesting self-advertisement/fundraising graphics is likely very underutilized in a community like this.

I just saw the notice banner and skimmed through this thread. I don't quite understand what's happening here. Is the entire forum going to be limited to paid accounts? I understand Igor along with others have contributed an incalculable amount of time supporting this website and financing it should be shared among the users, but I would like to suggest a donation drive instead. I've been using this forum for a very long time (this is actually a new account for me as I stopped using my previous email address) and this is the first time I'm hearing about this. I would actually consider contributing financially as a donation, but I do feel a paywall would be detrimental. Would people be denied access to old posts without logging into a paid account? The thing about a subscription that doesn't sit well, is that I spend time answering questions as well as asking questions. Will I have to pay to answer other peoples' questions? When I spend time to answer questions, for me that's the payment to the forum, and I feel like in most peoples' minds the answers are coming from the community as well. Otherwise I would just contact Maxon, since I'm paying them for tech support. To be honest I posted a question last week that never even got a reply, but I've gotten a reply directly from Maxon. I've since deleted the post since I find nothing more sad than an old post with zero replies cluttering up the forum. To the point, I think of it like public broadcasting. It's meant to be free in order to encourage usership, and the tried and true financial model for public broadcasting has been regular donation campaigns. It does require a certain level of internal marketing. I haven't seen any banners specifically asking for donations. There should be periodic campaigns where the forum goes into full donation mode and really try to inform the users that it's needed. I also donate to Wikipedia periodically when they do the banners for it, and although any type of campaign to solicit money is inherently annoying, I find it the most forgivable. We're motion graphics people for crying out loud, we should be able to crowd source some really fun and engaging banners to solicit contributions.

Have you tried adding a Mograph Shader effector to your Matrix object? In the Shader effector set the Scale parameter to -1.

I've worked on a few CAD based projects with SLDPRT/SLDASM files as well as STEP files. Generally the default import settings in C4D are fine. They'll come in tessellated no matter what, and subdivisions generally won't work. You'll notice the objects will all have normal tags, THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT. Do not delete the normal tags, and avoid editing the geometry or it will screw up the normals, and you will get weird shading artifacts. As long as you don't delete the normal tags, you should get perfectly smooth surfaces when you render. If you happen to need more geometry in your object, re-import the the file with higher Detailing settings, and it will give you smoother geometry. You can also play with these settings if you want to tweak it. I've also tried using the volume builder and remeshing, but never got acceptable results. Other than completely remodeling the objects, this is the only reasonable workflow I've been able to find.

I've had a similar issue with R24 that was caused by having too may render settings. Kind of random, but I was trying to assign different frame ranges to separate takes for sending to a render farm, so I had a long list of render settings for each take. It took me a while to isolate, but whenever I saved the project, it would stall for 30+ seconds, which was excruciating because I was saving reflexively due to frequent crashes. In my case I was able to forgo the long list of render settings and it cleared up the problem.

I haven't gotten a crash like that, but I've gotten crashes when switching between single and quad view (middle-mouse click). I'm currently getting weird UI hiccups in the Node Editor. Sometimes the navigation tools (Alt+Right-Click to zoom, and Alt+Middle-Click to pan) stop working and I have to restart the program.

@srek @MighT Thanks, the port inspector is helpful. Looking forward to delving more into the scene nodes. Another feature I think is missing from the node system: When propagating an input port, the user interface in the 'Input' tab of the parent object, doesn't have a way to limit the max/min of the slider that is available in the 'User Data' system.