MJV

Yeah that video is what people are so angry about. 😆 Karma XPU improvements are super important no doubt but they were promised upon release of R19.5, so nothing really new above what was already widely anticipated and expected. Feathers is a super niche feature that won't impact many users day to day. There has to be something substantially more than this or, fair or not, Houdini R20 will be considered a huge bust.

Seriously? Side FX closed down the r20 thread on their own forum because they haven't released a preview, as they always have in the past, and people are panicking like crazy at the complete lack of buzz. https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/86202/?page=26

Oh I see. It has an option to pin on top while floating whereas no other Cinema window has this option. Yes it does seem odd that only this one thing in all of Cinema has this option and nowhere and nothing else does, which seems silly and inconsistent to say the least. However, if you create a specialized tool AM for modeling settings you can leave it floating and it will always stay on top or you can alternatively dock it anywhere in your layout, as I do.

This is already possible, no?

If you Current State to Object the spline and clone that, it works, but of course it's not parametric anymore.

I feel like that video is trying to convince me not to use Octane for Pyro.

No idea. I didn't even know that they had been updated all the way to 2023 until recently. Someone should grab them all before the full server goes down.

Are we allowed to add to this list? My favorite Cinema 4D free plugin of all time is InstanceMan. Just incredibly useful. https://www.roberthitzer.de/projects/instanceman/

This is how to do that: This is an Octane file but works with any renderer. TextureCloneOffsetMV4.c4d

Yes, you can use two or more identical objects as children of the cloner object, each having different UV offsets, and then use blend or random distribution in the cloner settings.

In general you start by putting the texture tag on the cloner object and not the cloned object, but it's impossible to advise you further with the little information you've provided.

I tried to get Octane to work with Houdini without success and neither Otoy or SideFX were very helpful, with both rather seeming to point me toward incorrect or incomplete installation and setup information. Houdini's new renderer "Karma" is similar to Octane, with similar speed and results, and is able to use Material X and is native to the application so I ended up just using that instead of trying further to get Octane to work. That said I still love Octane more than any render engine I've ever used and don't even mind the subscription very much because it is so reasonably priced. Octane's "Universal Material" seems similar to Material X, so I don't know why it wouldn't be easy for Otoy to make Octane compatible with Material X.

Complete waste of time to try doing this with joints. The way to go is with simple rotations and constraints.

I would check the knife settings, selections, hidden geometry, etc.

I've been unpleasantly surprised at how long it's been since Houdini released anything, and how little buzz there is around future updates. Houdini is great for procedural workfows but man there is too much basic functionality missing from that app to be an all rounder, and at this pace of development it's kind of difficult to keep the faith.

I came across this old one I'd saved in my files today:

Thank you Happy Polygon! 👍 It's nice and it works in Octane as well. Not sure why the video was showing it with a volume mesh, I thought maybe it was trying to say it's required, but I found it works fine on any mesh at all. Here was my first test of it: It blends very well and with the different field blend modes it seems you have a lot of control, as long as you're using fields. This gives the Cinema user a lot more blending material options than before I agree it's a nice new feature. Where it breaks down is having to use fields, which is pretty limiting compared to being able to assign different colors to different selections in Neutron and having procedural control over every part of the model. It shouldn't be a big leap for Maxon to add that but I don't know what's on their radar or not anymore, and it doesn't seem any development is happening with Nuetron. Also, I think it would be important to be able to clone fields (currently not possible to clone fields, deformers or effectors) to have procedural control over their placement. Otherwise you would have to hand position everything, which would require manually repositioning them with each modeling or procedurally induced change in the model.

I found this tutorial for blending materials on clones, but we've been able to do that for ages. Were you talking about this or something else? I am interested in blending materials (preferably procedurally) on a single piece of geometry as shown with my radiolarian examples above.

Hey all, so I got this email in my inbox the other day... Isn't it great to know that all the modeling skills and workflows developed over many years are now worthless? Just push a button. What we've always wanted. 🙄 Yay?

Not the same but that does sounds useful and I'd love to see how that works.

For what it's worth, I decided to revisit similar models I had made with Neutron a couple of years ago to see if I could procedurally apply vertex colors to model parts and it seems it isn't possible. As far as I can tell it is only possible to create selections in Neutron and then apply materials to those selections in the Object Manager. It looks like nothing has been done with Neutron in the two years since I last tried it which is really disappointing because it started out looking pretty promising but seems to have since been completely abandoned.

Thanks for mentioning that. In response I tried driving an Octane Render diffuse color channel with a C4D color vertex map in Cinema and it is much closer to the Houdini experience than I thought. I'm not sure how Houdini point colors differ in usage or result from using vertex colors in Cinema. In the image below I used the C4D character paint tool to paint the vertex colors. As far as I know, there is little distinction between points and particles in Houdini, so you have a lot of control system wide and procedurally.

Here are some test images I did awhile back:

I'll try to find some examples. In the meanwhile, can you show an example of how this might be possible on C4D using vertex maps? Maybe it's something I've overlooked.