Jeff H1

use a vertex map as an alpha for a blend material between 2 other materials? maybe like this?

Original post: Direct link to Gumroad: https://rart.gumroad.com/ Discount code: FLASH80

I've had external drives lose data mainly because of the junky interfaces/chipsets used in some caddys and external hard drive enclosures and usually during boot up or shut down. I too would recommend a fat internal drive for storing all models, textures, references, vdbs, hdr and things in an assets folder. If you want to, get an external drive and do a one way sync between them once a month or so as a backup. As a contingency, I'd look at something like EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard or similar for recovering files that were lost from a screwed partition/drive. For files that were deleted on working drives I try to remember to use Recuva (free version). There are also online backup options like Crashplan (I use), Backblaze or others.

not really. PTEX was introduced awhile ago but never caught on outside larger studios wiling to use it (eg. Pixar and Disney). Only specific software supporting creating PTEX which was Mari, Mudbox and I think 3D Coat. Maya and Houdini supported it pretty early too. You didn't need UVs to paint on large meshes (lots of polygons). I think each PTEX file allowed you to set resolutions of specific areas of the models as you paint. For instance if you have a monster, you could effectively paint in more higher res detail on the face but maybe lower the resolution on say the arm pits, feet or some other part that doesn't need it. One of the big problems with Ptex is you couldn't edit the files side something like Photoshop if you needed to. Also, I don't think you could export out the PTEX maps as AOV passes? I think it's also considered more computationally intensive compared to UVs. These days apps like Substance Painter even give you an auto unwrap function with a lot better packing than before. Even Blender and.. well.. somewhat C4D have better UV tools. You can always use Rizom which is crazy good and has bridges between apps like Houdini, C4d and Blender. The other thing that has helped at least some software is the adoption of UDIMs to span UVs, although some apps like C4D haven't embraced it completely, which is mind-boggling at this point.

not sure why the Grove is charging more to Houdini users than Blender users, at $628.33 for a tree plugin. Houdini Indie costs about half the price of The Grove plugin for Houdini.

I used Fusion quite a bit at my last job. I was able to import whole scenes into Fusion and using the camera with the rendered AOVs I was able to do some additional compositing (lens flare, bloom, cryptomatte, etc). I also had built a full earth in Fusion (3D) with 16k textures. It worked pretty well. Back then the courses I relied on at the beginning were from CMIVFX (RIP Chris) and FXPHD. One youtuber used to post quite a bit of Fusion content but kind of disappeared for a while is Con-Fusion. https://www.youtube.com/@ConFusion/videos While I preferred Nuke when I was using it for some indie film work, Fusion is capable for this kind of stuff. We used Fusion Studio versus the FIR (Fusion in Resolve Studio) because it was more agile. You don't have to create a resolve project and go through that whole process just to dig right into a shot. Also some nodes weren't exposed in FIR versus the Fusion Studio at that time. I'm not sure about 18.5. Back then I thought if you buy Resolve Studio you get Fusion Studio for free as it's tied to the same key (but don't quote me on that.. check for yourself). I didn't try Natron as it seems like the project was side-lined for years and as many lawyers and bean counters Foundry has, I assumed Natron would be shut down eventually. Also, unless it gets more popular over the next few years, Nuke and Fusion have it beat for 3rd party support and scripts.

welcome to Blender youtubers. they have almost no industry experience and have only learned Blender over the past 4 years yet their followers consider them at the pinnacle of their careers (as blender youtubers). 😛 btw, I know the C4d channel you're talkin about. I got some xpresso ideas from him before. i zoned out on the python stuff.

It's something I would more than likely do in post as it may be hard to get it looking good within the renderer (especially as an Environment). I'd output an AOV, use the window as a matte for the photo of the park inside of AE, photoshop or whatever. If you are wanting to do it inside of C4D, I'd say it's better to use a card (plane) with the photo of the park as a material. There will be less distortion or warping as an Octane Sky/HDR/Environment Tag is meant for 360 environments. Place that card outside the window and scale as needed.

try this;

You're fooling yourself if you think Maya isn't adding polygons when you toggle Smooth Mesh preview. Quick way to show yourself is: 1: Add a box. 2. Ensure Display > Heads Up Display > Poly Count (or whatever it is now) is turned on. This shows verts, edges, faces counts in the viewport. First row is total counts, middle row is for selected objects. 3. Toggle Smooth Mesh Preview and watch the numbers change.

yeah I just find it strange how they are going to require AVX2 and yet shit is still sluggish and many functions are still "single core" and slow. If you look at Houdini 19.5, it only requires SSE 4.2 (which is an older instruction set) and it feels more stable, viewport is like butter with lots of data, and pyro sims don't error out as much 😛 maybe it's related to their some day updated scene nodes (maybe 2.0) which require that added vectorization. I wish them well on their adventure!

this means more robust updates from Maxon including that famed re-write? As is stands no current software requires AVX/AVX2. It's all SSE.. with Houdini and Maya requiring SSE 4.2 and Blender only needing SSE 2. Is Maxon putting out additional information regarding why the requirement?

Are you using OCIO color management in your render? You may want to use a legacy setting with sRGB color space.

why wouldn't it help? You apply your clipping material to the cloner. You can then animate either the cloner or the object if you want the effect animated. I know Arnold has the same thing as I remember using it a few years back. I would imagine Redshift has something similar. This was the vp.. forgot to add it the SS

still have it too.. but hey at least we get emails that they are getting rid of those pesky freeloaders so we can stare at this red banner in peace. 😕

It's awkward Maxon sponsors Artofthetitle.com but not Core4D, which some employees frequent.

LW. released their pricing for their new 2023 coming out later this year. For a new user it’s $995. $250 upgrade for current 2020 licenses. $500 for users of older LW versions. They also offer some cheeky pricing tiers where for $1000 an existing 2020 license also gets a tshirt and 5 shares with the company. They lost their fn minds. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them get throttled in social media.

After creating quite a few objects in Blender it can be tedious to use Blender's archaic Outliner. Amandeep released a new Auto-Highlight in Outliner addon. This will move the outliner view to match the object you select in the viewport and highlight the object for you, instead of trying to figure out which collection Blender put something. It also has a Collapse other Collections toggle which will close all other collections other than the one your selected object is in. Apparently he created this after seeing a request in the Blender forum. https://blendermarket.com/products/auto-highlight-in-outliner After installing it, make sure Auto Highlight is checked in the Outliner dropdown. You can toggle Collapse Other Collections too.

maybe maxon should poach some blender devs. 😮

yeah I was looking for a C4D theme and found one based on R25. I had to change the npanel, tpanel and a couple other things so they had transparency behind them or else they had a background all the way down to the bottom of the UI. Goes to show how the blender devs can't even create a floating panel as you have to hide it via a transparency setting. 😜

Switching today to Octane for Blender since I never cared for Cycles. It looks like the Octane network render works inside of Blender as well. Also, they're releasing their Octane addon for Blender soon, so no longer having to download an Octane build of Blender. It'll just be another plugin.

For sh*ts and giggles I found a decent C4D theme and tweaked it slightly. It's enclosed. C4D_2023.xml

I got an email today that says in May 15th you'll be removing limited member mode and deleting accounts that aren't subscribed? Why the change, again?

Octane plugin is coming soon to Blender. No more requiring an Octane build of Blender. XP is also coming. It is a shame Blender devs ignore enhancing basic functionality. They are constantly feature chasing, which works well for the hobbyists... "Oh shit we have great hair nodes!!!" Then again, how many balloon posts are we gonna see from C4D over the next 6 months. 😛

posted on Reddit: They started calling companies yesterday morning (France time).From what they said to us, they will shift towards another opportunity and that the current line of software is not going to receive any new features with exception of bugfixes. And at some point this is it and they will stop development and service.But they did not had more details for the why and what the reason was so far to make this sudden decision. Basically after 31 of October, all license will become like a lifetime subscription (but free) and they will provide the tool to migrate the license to another hardware.After that, all licensed users can keep using it free of charge but without any future updates as long as your os support it. They will surely make an annoncement in the next few days (purely speculation) but yeah something smell fishy (disapearing from all social platform, capital stock bought back from the company last August, changing headquarters adress in february...)