Xeotroid

If default settings are supposed to be production-ready, then productions should also render with default grey materials with no textures or shaders, because that's the default settings you get when you create a new material. Let's also render at 720p with geometry AA because that's the default settings amirite

Does the new Task Manager and asynchronous/parallel loading (and network saving) mean autosaves of bigger projects should be much more invisible now? You know, previously if you had a 50+ MB project file, any saving would prevent you from doing anything for a couple seconds, and autosaves would obviously be annoying in that regard. Does S26 this improve this? I have to say, all nice and useful changes in this update.

Not just rendering: viewport performance, as mentioned, really needs improvements. On a 5900X, for a two character animation I still need to create low-poly versions of them and switch off pose morphs when animating because otherwise I can easily go from circa 30 FPS playback down to 10 or less. When animating pose morphs, I just need to bite the bullet and do viewport renders more often (or VAMP the morphs on the low-poly versions, which doesn't always look great). And I believe it is not GPU-bound – flying around paused high-poly scenes is nice and smooth even on my old 970. Anyone more technically knowledgeable, how plausible do multi-core Skin deformer and pose morphs sound? It seems like an ideal use-case, since each vertex is affected independently of the other vertices' results, right? It's not like, say, physics simulations or IK where multi-core support sounds difficult and nasty even on first thought.

Thanks for the kind offer, here's a detailed report and an example scene (the video in OP shows the same thing, only with different frame numbers): Scene contents: One cube that has a Motion System tag applied to it. The tag contains the unchangeable "Default Layer" (it can't be muted, soloed, or changed the strength of - it's always there). This layer has three keyframes on frames 0, 20, and 40. The tag contains a second layer, "Layer 1", which is a new layer, it can be disabled, renamed, etc. There can be many of those. This layer also has three keyframes, but on frames 2, 10, and 18. In the tag, the user can switch between different layers, and animating them adds keyframes to that layer. Expected behaviour: When "Default Layer" is active, using Go to Next/Previous Key switches between frames 0, 20, and 40. When "Layer 1" is active, using Go to Next/Previous Key switches between frames 2, 10, and 18. Actual behaviour: When "Default Layer" is active, using Go to Next/Previous Key switches between frames 0, 20, and 40. (correct) When "Layer 1" is active, using Go to Next/Previous Key also switches between frames 0, 20, and 40. (incorrect) The issue is that the Go to Key commands don't take into account the currently active motion layer (in this case, "Layer 1") but only use the Default layer. The timeline still shows the currently selected motion layer's keyframes, so using the Go to Key commands appears to jump to random frames. example.c4d

What's the best way to report a bug in C4D that's unrelated to plug-in development and the SDK? The PluginCafé forum and the e-mail address mentioned here appear to be only for that, not for bugs present in base C4D installation. Other than that, googling C4D bug reports only gives me info about crash reports. In case any Maxon dev comes by here, the bug in question (present even way back in R20) is that the Go to Previous/Next Key commands in the timeline only ever use the object's default motion layer, even if the user is working with a different one, as seen in the attached video. It drives me nuts, and I found out it's still not fixed, but admittedly it is a bit of a sneaky bug. 😃 MAXON CINEMA 4D 2022.04.09 - 18.31.24.01.webm

Yeah, two skin modifiers at once, and the performance gets pretty bad. In R20, I make low poly versions of characters (poly reduction at about 90 % and then VAMP) and then add an XPresso switch to change between visibility and skin enabled/disabled of the low poly and high poly models. As for environment, I only use placeholders, and after a scene or take or whatever is done, I import the full environment. How much of an improvement is R23 onwards exactly? A couple thousand frames, lots of keyframes and a couple of motion layers, and a combined 100k polys makes my (admittedly oooold for this kind of stuff) computer crawl. Wouldn't that create something easily dozens if not hundreds of gigabytes in size? Obviously baking simulations (cloth, rigid/soft body, water) makes sense, but character animation with some basic IK set-up with constraints? IK has a tiny default threshold (0.01 cm) which probably doesn't matter at all for character animation (technical stuff might not like it?). At most you have to look out for priorities when using constraints, but baking doesn't solve that.

There is an option to shift and scale f-curves of individual tracks visually to do what you want, but it's manual, no automatic normalisation.

There is a switch to go back to old layouts in the top right... It won't restore the old icons, maybe that can be changed with a custom theme (I've seen a theme to restore the older, not as dark color scheme posted somewhere already), but those are fairly inconsequential.

I really, really, really hope that's the case, and I hate that I can't be certain if this release is the result of what you're guessing, or if they've committed fully to the lackluster feature, stable income approach. I know this is an industry software package, so they can't reveal too much of what they're merely working on with no flashy showing off, but it would be much more reassuring to me if they went out and said "we're working on this and that, it's gonna take a while". That would probably cause an Osborne effect, though. I suppose scene nodes are that thing, kind of, but outside of mograph (admittedly the thing C4D is known for) and generally abstract visuals, is there a major use for them? The new interface is nice, and it's also optional (the layout at least, not the new icons), but as others mentioned, UI was the least of Cinema's problems. The only reason I haven't jumped over to Blender is the latter's intimidating interface and usability.

Have you tried using VAMP? Merge the objects into a new one and VAMP the separate objects' pose morph tags on to them. If the separate objects and the merged object are identical, VAMP should hopefully produce identical results. Animation tracks can then be copied over. Merging the objects might move the object axis, which can mess up the VAMP when working in Local space. If the models themselves are in the same place, switch to Global space in VAMP options. If it produces bad results, try it again while keeping everything in base pose – for me, the tool works great when it wants to, other times it likes to break stuff horribly when I forget a minor thing. A problem: internally the transferred morphs can be ordered differently. Therefore, if you then copy multiple morphs' tracks and then paste them over, they might get pasted onto different morphs. Reordering them in the Edit tab beforehand doesn't seem to do the trick. In that case, you'll have to manually check if the tracks/values match up and selectively copy-paste individual animation tracks. It's possible this was fixed in a later release, but I wouldn't hold my breath. I don't know if this is applicable for you, I'm not sure what you mean by shape-based animation. I use this for character animation with pose morphs when the morph tag is created before new points are created on the object, which the tag is then unable to access.