BigAl3D

@JBlongzI'm curious, what is a design engineer?

Well, most dynamics can be cached in one place. If you go to Project Settings --> Dynamics tab --> Cache then hit Bake. You will see your Dynamics tags have changed which is an indication you're using Cached calculations. Keep in mind, that if you change any dynamics settings or move objects, you will need to re-bake the cache or your animation with play back as before and not reflect your changes. Some tags, like the hair tag, have its own cache button. Same thing. Click to bake and again after any alterations. Another tip. In your example of animation interacting with hair (grass), if it takes too long to calculate, you can use simple invisible objects around the legs and feet that are child objects of the actual legs. Give THOSE objects the dynamics tags. This will make the calculations much lighter. You may have to make these simple shapes get close to the real geometry so it doesn't appear the dynamics are hitting air. This is how the dynamic car setups work. A simplistic car and tire shape that handle the dynamics. The actual car is just a child of this simple shape, so it moves along with it without having to calculate all that detailed mesh information.

Baking Dynamics is what I'm saying. Backing animation is a different animal.

I love Corona, but I agree with Cerbera, you can achieve it in most engines. Some render faster and more realistically than others. I assume you not really using C4D r6, ha ha! That's the first version I used back in the 90s. By the way, for a "first exercise" that model looks great!

First of all, this issue is a C4D issue and not a Corona specific one. When I delete the Cloth and Dynamics tags, not only can I render a frame in 15 seconds, but it plays in the viewport at 20 fps. I don't see the need for the Cloth collider tags at all and not sure why half the sheep have the Cloth tag and the other half have the Dynamics tag. The squash effect seems to still be there when these tags are removed. In most cases where the Cloth and Dynamics tags are used, you would Bake the dynamics first, then the render engine just grabs that cached info and renders the image. It also will play in real-time in the viewport and you can scrub the timeline without messing up the simulation. Maybe you can elaborate more on your scene.

Glad you sorted it out, but my brain would be in overdrive trying to figure out why that happened. Just gotta make sure the work gets done first. That would drive me crazy!

Hard to tell from these shots, but is the cutaway using Booles to get that effect? That may add additional time to any render, not just with Corona. Also, it appears your glass material has a lot of refraction in it, which would be slower to render. Window glass has very little or no perceptible refraction. Same render settings between scenes?

That's a good render time. Considering that our iMac Pro with 128 GB RAM renders that scene in about 3:45 and cost way more than your laptop. I'd say pretty good time indeed and considering laptops, in general, are not the PC of choice for 3D work. I forgot that r23 was Apple Silicon compatible, so you're running natively and not in Rosetta 2. It would've been an excellent time if running under Rosetta though. Still gives me hope for Macs to finally get back into the fast computer world when they release the bigger, faster chips. I've heard rumors of 64-core Apple chips in the pipeline. We'll see if they come out fast enough to not be dated upon release. Thanks for trying that test!

If you mean to sweep a circle spline, for example, along your Illustrator spline? If you mean that, then you only need half of that spline. The circle will provide the basic tube shape along the path. That indeed, can be animated to grow along the path. Here's my 10 min example. I know this is a simplified version of your example, but I think this could get you going in the right direction. The variable width along the object is created in the Sweep Object. Water Sculpture.c4d

You know what they say, no pain no gain. Now, there is another thing that just popped into my head. You can grab all your morph keyframes in the dope sheet timeline, hold Alt or Option and drag the last one to the left. This will "scale" the entire set of keyframes to whatever size/time you need. You could do hundreds in a matter of seconds. Maybe that will help your situation.

Technically, you are specifying each camera in the keyframe, as long as the camera you want for the third keyframe, is also the third camera in the list. I just made a quick scene where I had three cameras morphing at 33% intervals over 100 frames. I then added a fourth camera to the end of the list. All I had to do was slide the keyframes back so they were at 25, 50, 75 and add a new keyframe at 100. Doesn't seem that tedious to me. Maybe I'm missing your point.

Yeah, I was more seeing how the HDR and the back plate played together. In that respect, great. Yes, I can see having the sun in the background can seem undesirable, but totally realistic. I did open up the aperture a bit to brighten up the car. I suppose if you were on the far end of the street and faced the opposite direction, you would at least provide more light an reflections on your subject. Also, in the past, I've seen full-range HDRIs that appeared very dark to naked eye, but actually contained all the detail you need when you turn up the brightness. I'm not seeing those types of images much anymore and am wondering if the tools have changed, or maybe the "thumbnail" preview of these files use a more normal light image?

Seem pretty good to me. I dropped a car from a scene I'm working on and it's very convincing, as long as I need a wintry and in-the-shade shot. P.S. Rendered using Corona Render v7.

@JBlongzYeah, I have one for you and you already have it. Go into the Content Browser and find a scene called "Grapes." Just click Render to Picture Viewer and let it fly. That scene is fairly intense using the Physical render engine and reflections, SSS, depth of field, etc. For example, I have an 8-core trashcan at work and that scene renders in about 8.5 minutes. The 12-core in about 7 I think. The fastest I've done is 2 min 30 sec using dual E5 v4 CPUs with 20 cores each. Give it a shot. At least it's more tangible than a random bench score.

If you read the comments on that Lab page, it does nothing to help if you have a r11 file. I didn't know anything was new on that site. I stopped looking after a while since nothing seemed to be added. I'll have to give it another glance.

Gabriel covered a lot of great points. I would throw in a couple more. Just because you have cool software, don't dismiss the importance of actual design and composition. I always tell the younger people I've trained over the years (mostly After Effects), "when your animation stops, it still has to look great." Would also be helpful to be familiar with traditional photography techniques and lighting. Render engines like Corona, which is what I use, attempt to be as real-world as possible. Depending on what you create, make your scenes real-world scale. This will help to get predictable results. Most of those examples you posted are pretty abstract, minus the cool dynamics sneaker stuff. Like they were made for a screen behind a DJ or something. Not sure what the market is for that sort of thing. Start with simple scenes and work you way up. To get to that level of work for the sneaker video, I'm sure there's plenty of Xpresso work in there. YouTube is your friend. Lots of free learning there, plus all the paid learning too. Mograph+Effectors and all the Deformers give you an amazing tool-set to create all sorts of abstract things. Many are non-destructive. I would be careful not to overwhelm yourself with tons of plug-ins up front, otherwise you'll be good at a lot of things, but a master of none. Don't be afraid to post back with a more specific question. There are plenty of people here (some from MAXON) that can point you in the right direction. I've talked too much....

I feel your pain. I occasionally have this same issue using Corona's Interactive Viewport vs. the Interactive Window or final render. Haven't found a solution yet. Good luck.

In a related comment, I think MAXON should fix an issue that bothers me. Like me, many people have sizeable C4D assets and scene files from years ago, or they purchase pre-made 3D models. Every time I purchase a model, usually created in Max originally and saved out in r11 format. This cannot be opened in r20 or later. Luckily, I still have r19 which can open them. Once saved by r19, it is now compatible in r20. Either build in a converter or put out a free standalone app that only serves this purpose to make it compatible with r20+. Recently, I had to use another computer which did not have r19, only r20. I had to stop working find the installer and wait to install the entire Studio version and all the libraries. That's a big deal when you're on a deadline.

I pretty much got it now. You have to bake the entire character group first, then it works. Funny thing is, the Mixamo rigs are already set up with keyframed animation, so that initself seems pre-baked. After baking, I was surprised to still see the joints. I assumed those would be eliminated, but it worked nonetheless. It's slow until you use Render Instances or Multi-Instances. When I do that, the joints appear huge and wacky, so I made them invisible. Still trying to get the Push Apart Effector to work. They just walk through each other.

I'm experimenting with Mixamo rigged models to add to the backgrounds of some shots. I thought I'd try to make a small crowd using a Cloner. Everything clones, but the meshes stay in place while the joints walk on there merry way. Is this even possible with Mograph? I would think it is, but i'm no doctor.

Not a lot, but you can never have enough render power, right? I started with a 2015 i7 iMac, so this trashcan is much better. I just see all those Threadripper people out there and am very jealous. The new Apple chips seem very promising though.

Many render engines can give you photo-realistic renders. With GPU, you are limited on the Mac, but you have a couple of options. For CPU, personally I use Corona Render engine and I love it. It is surprisingly fast for a physically correct CPU engine. It also has decent real-time previews as well. The output quality is fantastic. Pretty cheap to get started and has a 45 day demo. You also get 3 extra render nodes. I have also seem people set up an E-CPU system (external box with NVIDIA GPUs) and use their Mac Pro Trashcan with Redshift and works very well for them. I imagine Octane would work with is setup as well. I wish Apple would have worked with NVIDIA, but we'll see what happens with their new chips. @husmoooEpic seems to have given up on developing Unreal Engine on the Mac. It was coming along nicely with v4, but slowly stopped being updated. Fortnite apparently took many resources away from less profitable areas. I'm not sure of the current status of Unreal on the mac.

Like many others, I'm stuck working at home with the best hardware that was available to bring home. I'm excited what this new ARM chip road Apple is paving holds for production desktops next year. Right now, I'm using a 2013 Mac Pro Trashcan with a: 6-Core 3.5GHz, E5-1650 v2 Processor, 12 Thread / 12MB Cache / 130W There's an upgrade I could do for $350 to replace it with 12-Core 2.7GHz, E5-2697 v2 Processor, 24 Thread / 30MB Cache / 130W Any opinions on the worthiness of this upgrade? I mainly use After Effects, Cinema 4D (Corona CPU Renderer), Photoshop, etc.

The project that finally got me to post this was only 200 MB total, mostly because of an HDR. There were some missing textures from a .lib4d I didn't have installed. I will install it and try again and see if that helps. I'm also wondering if my VPN connection has something to do with this. Maybe C4D is looking at the network drives at my office for stuff. That would certainly slow things down. I'll post and update later. Thanks.

The texture manager window is a great and convenient feature. My issues is, whenever I try to use it, it will take several MINUTES for it to come up. Then a few more minutes to allow me to do anything with it. After that, it works great. I just did it on a scene with only 30 textures, most of them on the small side. That was at least 15 min. ago and it's still not ready. This is the same on small and large scenes. Could it be that it tries and tries to find missing textures that are on missing volumes and just gets in a loop? I don't get it. I'm running r20 and a Mac. Thanks. --Alex