BigAl3D

@srekI was a long-time Postforum user. Ha. Hadn't heard that site name in years.

Makes me think of the Iron Giant's head after he got blown to bits and it's trying to find the rest of his body. Well done.

I think your test is very close to realistic. My only issue with maybe the gravity or mass of the particles. The chunks appear to made of lighter material than concrete. Aside from that, it looks great.

I feel v7 has improved stability. I can use the real-time window with less fear of a crash. It also renders maybe 15% faster for me.

Don't forget to check out the new material library. Lots of great stuff in there.

I'm running r7 release candidate 3 so it can't be too long now. Still bugs, new and old. I love Corona, but frustrating there are this many issues on a released product. Just have to save a lot.

Here's another one. I haven't purchased anything yet, but they have a decent selections of models. There are some of those janky DAZ "hot chick for guys that live in their mom's basement" models on there, plenty of other stuff too. https://www.renderhub.com/3d-models

@3D-Pangel"Favelas" is the name given the shanty slums that cover all the hills around the major cities in Brazil.

I'm thinking the Inheritance Effector can achieve this. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=inheritance+effector

Great sources everyone is posting here. Some of these sites I had long forgotten. Good to know they are still around.

Too bad Maxon isn't innovating as much as Insydium is. Very impressive. One thing that caught my eye is the lack of jitter in those collisions. Maybe there are more settings to be adjusted than they showed in this video, but the mass, gravity and lack of jitter looks fantastic.

I'll throw in a few that I've used and might not be well known. Many times, these artists that sell on TurboSquid will also sell their models directly on their own site and usually $25 cheaper. Also will give you discounts when buying multiple models at once. I've also hired a person to create a custom model for me, such as a car which is too complex for my skill level. https://www.thepixellab.net/products https://evermotion.org/shop/cat/440/summer_sale/0/ https://doschdesign.com/productlist.php?line=4&subrubrik=94 https://3dmdb.com/en/3d-models/suburb/ Mostly vehicles https://squir.com/ https://hum3d.com/3d-models/furniture/

You don't say what type of rendering you will be doing. If you can't buy a new system any time soon, then I agree that Corona is your best option for your Trashcan™. I have a couple of them and Corona runs great. Of course, the faster the system the faster the rendering, but Corona can run on pretty old CPUs so you can build your own render farm utilizing older Macs. I just switched to an iMac Pro from a former coworker and have the trashcan on my network via Ethernet. Team Render works great. Corona also runs on C4D 14+. Hopefully you have the 12-core version. The Corona devs are still adding features and fixing old bugs, but I use it every day and am very happy. It also has an Interactive Render window and you can set it to it in the actual viewport. It's not going to be as fast as Octane on a $4,000 GPU, BUT you can get work done now while you figure things out. The workflow is similar to the other engines, so it won't be a huge leap if you switch. You can download a 45-day demo with full functions. I think it's cheaper than other options too. I think about $340/year or you can do month-to-month. I have a bunch of images done with Corona on my Vimeo page. If you have any Corona questions, let me know.

Thanks for the replies. Not a huge deal, but sometimes it's faster to just click in the viewport and move stuff. In face, I will sometimes make an Instance of my objects so I can just do a simple click to move or rotate without the concern of clicking on one piece of the group.

Is there a setting to be able to select the parent of a group of objects instead of individual objects? Photoshop has a something like this so I can select the layer ground instead of the individual layers.

I had a 90s flashback to when I first bought Bryce3D. That was the coolest thing I had ever seen. I was into the game Myst and had ideas of creating my own world like that. In fact, I think one of those renders is almost complete so I'll post it here when it's done.

Posting examples of the types of images you are rendering would be very helpful. If you are rendering images that are not 10,000 pixels wide for printing, the built-in engines can provide excellent results and if you learn about adjusting your settings, can still be workable time-wise. Greyscale Gorilla has a ton of videos showing you how to optimize everything using Standard and Physical engines. Here is one quick video that shows a great trick to cut the render time by more than half. In the Physical engine, you can change the Sampler setting to Fixed and the quality to Low or Medium. It can make a big difference too. Again, depends on what you need, so let's see.

What type of work will you be creating in C4D? That is a big question. How big are your scene files? Is this a hobby for you or actual paid work? I'm not an expert on Windows hardware, but I can tell you that new i5 CPU will probably be slower to render than what you currently have unless the i5 is more efficient in some way. C4D likes lots of cores so the more the better. Now if you are going to begin using Red Shift or Octane, the 4 GB GPU on the new laptop may suit you well. At least from what I've read over the last few years. Again, depending on the work you want to accomplish. You should up the RAM in the new laptop and I personally would double the SSD if you can swing it. Try to get the fastest SSD too. It will make your system snappier. I'm sure others will chime in and correct me if I'm wrong.

@deckWell, in all the years I've used C4D, I've never used the Mograph Cache tag. Only the Dynamics tags that already had their own cache. Boom! Worked perfectly. Thanks for the tip! Who says you can't teach an old dog new tricks.

Thanks for the reply. Yes, I thought about caching, but it doesn't seem to do anything. Stays at 0 Bytes. Since I'm not using an actual Dynamics tag, this makes sense. There is no Cache icon. Just a Fracture Object and an Effector. The On Demand option is interesting, assuming there is a Cache to load. I'll do a test and see.

I'm still running r20, but have run into a bug with Team Render. If I setup up a couple simple keyframes for an object moving. Then make it a child of a Fracture Object, add a Delay Effector set to Spring and render using Team Render the delay effect will only partially work, usually skips then stops or not work at all. Using the one machine it works perfectly. Has this always been a bug and has it been resolved in S24? Fracture Delay Team Render.c4d

What about using a low-poly mesh for the dynamic elements and then make the real parts children? This is the technique many use to simplify dynamic calculations. For example, setting up a dynamic car. There is usually a very simply car shape with the dynamics tag and the car body a child. Each wheel has a similar setup with a basic cylinder and the actual tire a child.

Let me start by saying that I don't do enough of these effects to remember all the tricks and capabilities. The goal is to add a large graphic on the road surface so the car will drive over it. I have the car tracked and masked no problem. I'm pretty good with Mocha and have gotten close, but there's always some funky jumps and glitches I can't get around. Since I could export a 3D Solid from C4D to AE, I figured I'd give it a shot. C4D's camera tracker solver doesn't seem to do much with the road, I'm assuming because of the motion blur. Plus, there's a lot of perspective rotation which adds to it. So I'm asking if anyone has an opinion if it can be done solidly and how? I've looked at AE's tracker too, but it only grabs onto the road for part of the sequence. This is driving me crazy. Thanks for any advice.

@csellersNice look and feel with Physical. Of course getting it to render an animation and get it flicker-free is another step. If you don't have a high-end graphics card, I would recommend the Corona Render engine. It's CPU-based, but fast nonetheless. Plus, you can run it on pretty old computers Mac or PC and you can use Team Render to speed things up even more. Pretty cheap to get into.

Glad to help. We've all been there and this is a great place to learn. I've made that mistake many times.