MJV

It looks pretty good but seems drastically too dense in various parts. The neck is so super dense for example. This figure should be able to be modeled with a much lighter cage that produces the same result when subdivided.

Ok I understand now you have a lot more reasons for branching outward than just the OS issue. I guess that was more of last straw sort of thing rather than the sole reason. It sounded like you just wanted a few more good years of using r19 and if that was all you wanted then using an older os would be a good solution, but I understand now you want more than just that. I think you should absolutely pick up Blender if nothing else. I don't think Houdini will give you what you want but they have a free apprentice version if you want to explore a little.

I completely agree, and you're talking to someone who thinks Houdini is a great and wonderous piece of software, I honestly love it, and at the same time it is everything you've said, which is a lot, but that's it. Talk of widening the customer base is a year old and R20 didn't budge even an inch in that direction. That's a little surprising to me but also perfectly understandable from their perspective, given their niche as you said, and I think it's not a matter of dealing with some frustrations or not but simply being clear eyed about what Houdini is and is not. It's a specialized tool for high end particle simulations, and related systems, covering a wide variety of special effects areas for studios and film production companies. Despite its power it was simple enough even for me to get up to speed with in under a year, with the help of people here, to build the pretty complex node based, user input driven model I had in mind for Houdini when I started. A model that afaik would not even today be possible in Cinema because of a few specific limitations in Cinema's nodes system that were never developed or further addressed after the first technology preview, as far as I know. Unfortunately at the same time the most mundane take-it for-granted tasks that one might do in Cinema without even much thought suddenly require complex networks and multiple work space hierarchies in Houdini, leaving the user to educate themselves to understand why it's all necessary. You can't really do anything in Houdini slapdash or just good enough to get-the-job-done. Anything one might do has to be done well enough so that it works and follows the rules of the larger eco system and can be handed off to other departments as a complete asset. Unfortunately nothing I was hoping for ended up in Houdini 20, as far as I can tell. I had a lot of hopes here and there but none of my wishes came true.

If you like working with R19 then I think using a slightly older OS (on a 2nd used Mac if necessary) would be much less of a burden time and money wise than learning entirely new software that probably will never match the comfort and ease of use you experience with Cinema 19. Houdini? LMAO!

Thanks It's not about there being an available workaround for me. It's more that it makes no sense whatsoever to me that they bothered to make a light mixer because Solaris is supposed to be where you stage stuff, but didn't think to make a camera switcher for the same reason. It doesn't make logical sense. Also, I know that there is a workaround for there not being a camera target yet, but that is also a rediculous oversight. These things do no instill confidence in me. Also, not being able to change the camera focul length in the editor? These are basic things that have been in 3d software for 30 years already.

Thanks for the kind offer. It wasn't a mission critical file, so no biggie, but it was just the implications of it sent a chill down my spline. For example, In the context of this thread's original question, it struck me just how absurd it (and the uproar) would be if Maxon decided one day to similarly just completely remove backward compatibility, especially given the stellar record which which Cinema has always been exceptionally backward compatible, and the importance it has in being able to collaborate with others using different versions. Bottom line is I just don't get how Adobe gets a pass at doing this.

Why not just use an older Mac OS and stick with what you know and love?

Did they add a camera mixer/switcher feature in Solaris to go with the light mixer, or not yet? Do cameras have a focus target option now, or not yet? I'm hoping to see more user generated reviews in the coming days and weeks.

Yeah that doesn't look overly complicated at all. 🤪

Thanks. Unfortunately I get "site is not secure" warnings and on top of that it didn't work with the file I tried.

Yay!

On a related topic, I tried opening an Adobe Premiere Pro 2024 file in Adobe Premiere Pro 2023 the other day and it wasn't backwards compatible. It's hard to fathom that last year's Adobe Premiere Pro cannot open something created with this year's version. I wasn't necessarily surprised because it was like that back in the day as well, but I mean, in this day and age and at these prices, wtf kind of total madness is that? 😠😡

They are compatible. 2024 scenes can be loaded in R23. I exchange files between R2024 and R20 all the time. The only issue I ever have is new beveling options were added around R22 or so and of course those new options don't translate backwards. That probably wouldn't impact you. Can't think of much of anything else.

Ah yes you're right that doesn't make sense. 😄

Why do you say that? I think it is in generally true. If there aren't enough pixels to faithfully render the noise, something has to give. Also, small scale noise can easily cause flicker, so mip mapping and other techniques to minimize this can also cause a muddy looking noise. Not saying that's the cause in this case though as I haven't examined the scene.

Thanks CBR for adding this to the discussion. It's hard to imagine how this video could possibly be any more charming. I love the way we get to watch the instrument playing itself while imagining the meticulous care and planning it would take to build such a thing in real life and get it to play. The sound the marble makes at the landing is the chef's kiss.

This is replicated in the old standard renderer of Cinema by using the Absorption Color and Absorption Distance settings in the transparency channel of a standard shader. I don't know how Sketch and Toon plays into though, unless the two are mixed together somehow.

With that here is a test animation based on the baking of just three different dynamic curves which are then variably offset and repeated using mograph and expresso.

We also had this long before there was Mograph or generative AI:

This is the basic premise: ClonerBlendModeMV1.c4d

Short answer is yes you can do it by using the cloner's clones blend mode to transition between different settings in the two sweeps that are a child of the clone.

Good one. Houdini uses Bullet Dynamics which is the same as that still available in Cinema. I stopped trying to use the new unified dynamics in Cinema because it was a nightmare and nothing really worked as expected, and lots of stuff seemed just flat out broken, but as soon as I tried it with the old and reliable Bullet Dynamics it was pretty easy and straightforward and the controls seemed to control things as you would expect. I think you could do the dynamic elements of this animation in either Houdini or Cinema without major differences, but the shading elements would be much easier in Houdini. Working with Cinema sadly forces you to use a separate material for each element, or some other sadistic workaround, instead of just simply changing object or object point colors in Houdini in response to any chosen stimulus. Also, I found no direct way to get an object's direction vector in Cinema and had to build a rig to determine that instead. Also I may have overlooked something but I could find no way to get collision data from dynamics inside of Xpresso, so that would have to be eyeballed or timed out as well. Below is a test I did a few days ago to determine how well I could control the decent rate of the marbles, with one marble hitting quarter notes (180 bmp) and the other hitting eighth notes (360 bmp). In the end I now feel convinced that all these animations you see on Tik-Tok and the like, and in the past, are not using dynamics at all except to get the initial accelerations and velocities that the different curves and circumstances produce. Dynamics is way too variable and unpredictable and hard to control compared to a simple and predictable align to spline animation where the velocities and accelerations are built into the curves, or even a sequence of offset motion clips.

I don't use Redshift but I think a Color MIx node will do the trick as well.

Does anyone care? 🤷‍♀️ Anyway I was thinking ahead to how one would do the step color changes and spins as seen in the original video. For example the ball hits a step and it changes color. It would be simple to do in Houdini by animating objects' point colors while still using just a single global material. Missing stuff like this in Cinema keeps needling at me. It would be so much easier to do this animation in Cinema if things like vector heading and color were object or object point level attributes that could be used directly.

Yes. I can't figure it out.