Jeff H1

There are addons which help to fix this. one of them ironically is named QOL (quality of life) tools. https://www.blendermarket.com/products/qol-tools-select-contiguous-edges

In your example you can use SHIFT-G [select similar] to select Co-planar (or Normal). Then Select > Select Lops > Boundary Loop This will convert your selection

anything. welding, extrudes, bevels.. anything. Doesn't C4D require you first to go into edit modeling mode with one hot key (vert/edge/poly), then requires 2 more hot keys (in some cases) to perform a function, like M~O. I know you can change some hot keys but it's still asinine that C4D still doesn't have hot key sets based on function. rant off.. back to the topic... Maya has two different hotkeys. One for repeat last command, and the other for repeat last tool. Here's a quick video on both.

Autodesk shut down the beta years ago leaving many of us pissed off. Another product Autodesk bought and left to die. One of the goals was to have mudbox integrated into Maya but because of Maya's legacy code they couldn't find a way to make it perform well so instead just added basic sculpting tools. I suggested a while ago they should give it free with Maya but never got a response. I can't believe they have the balls to still sell this.

I ran into more stability issues with RS than I ever had with Octane or Arnold. Also, it felt like RS was slower during IPR sessions. Regardless, one of the other things Saul repeats at least 3-4 times a day on RS facebook page, is to lower the memory usage for Redshift to something like 60-70%. You could also take control over how much vram is being used by Adobe apps as well. Apparently Adobe and Redshift have been a bad mix over the past 2 years and Redshift is still saying it's Nvidia drivers. Many people with newer 4xxx cards can't use the old drivers so they're forced to lower mem usage if they want to use Redshift (or shift to Octane or others which don't apparently have this issue). I think it's here:

are you using soft bodies or cloth on these candies? because that will make them look distorted (elongated). should just be a collider or something tag on them.

that's a horrible workflow hack. basically creating one-off versions of the same scene just to render things in passes/takes? but hey, at least they got a bunch of hair assets in 3.5. It's a shame they aren't copying quality of life features from other apps anymore. Yes, blender does things differently and too many people give it a pass (pun intended) because it's free. Does different and free mean we can't call it bad? Different also can inhibit workflow. It's a shame many blender users just blindly defend blender completely. It would be great if blender would quit feature-chasing other apps and started focusing on revamping existing feature sets, like the outliner, n panels, addons with their own pop out windows, easier UI configuration, render setup, and more. shit i thought that was me not using it correctly or something. 🙂

I used LW for years before switching to Maya 1.0. LW was mismanaged for years, just like XSI was. It's no wonder both were eventually sold cheaply.

I don't think it'll happen. Maxon seems quite content with the discontent of regular C4D users over this crappy find. Maxon hasn't commented here, on live streams or anywhere else. I think Chris will keep shilling his plugins and his Maxon One-exclusive nodes on his streams and Maxon is fine with that.. subs are subs. I think many C4D users are blissfully unaware Maxon has done this or cares there is a disparity between "versions". A question could be.. how far will this disparity continue? Will they flesh out Scene Nodes specific to Maxon One licenses, where C4D users have half-assed support? Without Maxon commenting, no one knows how deep rooted the cordyceps grow underground. 😛

Don't forget Maya and Max 2024 were released this week too. H20 is quietly simmering in the background......

It was a "banger" week. Maya 2024, C4D 2023.2 and Blender 3.5 were all released.

It appears gltf import was silently added too. I only caught that while reading the update to C4D Lite ironically enough.

looks like none of the above. 🙂 At least the new commander allows you to quickly see the capsules and assets you can't download or use without a Maxon One account. 😛 ok ok. I'm kidding. The Thicken finally happened though. It feels like they finally want people to use nodes now too. I may check it out before my sub ends.

I saw someone had posted this question on a Blender forum and there was some response.

Isn’t he using the old built in render engine? If so it’s slow as molasses and uses system RAM. I don’t know of many render farms that support it. it may be worth looking into renting a render engine like Arnold or Corona which supports CPU rendering and can work on a 3rd party render farm. Some of those even work faster than the c4d physical renderer. At least that was the case with our old junky trash cans, using Arnold. Some render farms offer free credits when you sign up.

Speaking of Sketchfab (aka FAB), I saw recently that some AI company bulk downloaded all free assets on (sketch)Fab to help train their AI model. https://objaverse.allenai.org/

the simple fact I cannot re-sort objects in the Blender object manager is a perfect example of developers thinking they know better than the user and for me shows they are not "getting there" without sorting these simple quality of life issues out first (yes I unchecked "sort alphabetically" which is a pointless feature anyways). All other apps allow you drag and resort objects in the Object Manager. Since the beginning of many of these apps in fact. It's strange I can drag/sort collections but I can't re-sort objects within any collection. It's bad enough they call it a collection. 🙂 Someone in one of their forums mentioned Groups and requested the ability to add modifiers to a whole group (like C4D). I felt like some of them never heard the word "group" before. hahaha.

the other way to look at is to adapt. Traditional matte painters, sfx and sculptors had to do this as apps like Nuke, Houdini and Zbrush were adopted by studios for film work . I think it's upon us, as artists, to adapt to this. Add apps like Firefly to your arsenal. Learn them just as well as you know your main DCC. Let it be another offering you give to your client, maybe sometimes not letting them know you are using AI. It may be a way to knock out quick jobs or even take on additional smaller work. One concern I could see in the future is our rates. For instance, if a client says "why am I paying you $$ per day when you are having AI do the work for you?" Obviously they're oversimplifying it, but that's what some clients do.

Awesome.. I'll check it out later today!!!

It sounds a bit harsh but the reality is there. maxon conceded defeat with some of its tools a long time ago like sculpting and texture painting. They let apps like Painter, Mari, Zbrush and even Blender develop their respective tools more. Particles.. they did the same thing. They let X-Particles continue to grow while they dropped TP. It's the nature of some of these companies to either buy or develop features then leave them be after a year while they move on to other features. I'd hate to see AI be at the forefront of C4D development. It's so democratized already with everyone and their mother developing free or embedded tools to create AI. For Maxon to try to lump in to C4D (probably as a stupid Maxon One *premium* feature) would be wasteful from an R&D perspective. Also AI (based on the Firefly reference in this thread) would take away from actually doing work INSIDE C4D. Why spend the time modeling, texturing and rendering assets when I can open up a command prompt and type away. However, if algorithms were refined in to C4D to help make more intelligent decisions without user intervention like they've done with Remesher, but across other aspects of C4D that would be helpful. I mentioned before maybe an upscaler in Redshift, or even for imported textures which are maybe only 2k and you want it upscaled to 4k. Having a button a texture node, or stringing in an upscaler node would be useful. Or a tweener, where you could render every second or third frame and at the end, have an AI inside C4D generate and render out the in between frames, which would be faster than rendering the whole animation in RS or Octane to begin with. The tech is already there. There are already some apps that do this.. I think free if I remember correctly. Regarding Xpresso, I thought Maxon said they were done with it? Their scene nodes are the future.. just a long distant future... 😛

at the same time other apps will be updating as well. H20 is around the corner. Blender 4 sometime this year. Maya 2024 and so on. Luckily for the artist, none of these companies can afford to rest anymore and rely on continued subs. Also, a few of these apps have Indie versions (Maya, Houdini) which are getting it into the hands of artists who can't afford the "full" version. I wonder if WetaM and WetaH are still being developed as well.

XP can do it. I used this a couple of times. https://3deoskill.com/shop/freebies-2/ (ivy maker python generator). a video on him making the script;

would be interesting if it worked with fields and effectors.

sounds like a plan then!! These days it seems like shorter videos are more easier to consume maybe broken up based on topic or a logical point in building the asset or scene.

It would be nice to add a smidge of cloner/effectors/fields in the SOP section. Maybe use it to show how to make "cloner" rivets w/copytopoints and such for the barrels or something else? the mograph part of C4D is what's very nice and easy to use. As a C4D artist trying to learn Houdini, I think understanding how to replicate functionality would be nice.