BigAl3D

On 12/17/2020 at 10:46 PM, NWoolridge said:

https://labs.MAXON.net/?p=3258

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

I tinkered with V-Ray years ago, and now I use Corona which is similar. With these types of render engines, it's all about the number of passes. Corona doesn't have an AA setting, just the passes and the Denoiser. Try increasing the number passes. Not sure what V-Ray calls this, but I'm pretty sure it has a setting like that.

Ah OK. You might want to check out Eyedesyn's tutorials and, when you're ready, his plugin Bendy Limbs which is exactly what you're looking for. Don't forget to post your results!

https://www.eyedesyn.com/tutorials/modeling-rubber-hose-style-characters-in-cinema-4d/

https://www.eyedesyn.com/tutorials/rubber-hose-style-rigging-in-cinema-4d/

https://www.eyedesyn.com/product/bendy-limbs-rig-for-cinema-4d/

From all the hands-on reviews that are out now, these Apple chips look very promising.

Let me start by saying that character modelling and weighting is difficult, at least to me. Since you're a beginner, you need to read up on this stuff. To my semi-educated eyes, your mesh has many issues that would make it nearly impossible to bend correctly. Your elbow weights are all wrong. Since the green blends all the way to the orange shoulder, it bends as expected.

Look at the image I posted. I added two loop cuts on either side of the center of the elbow. Also notice the angles. This is so when it bends at the elbow, the back won't stretch too much and the inside won't crunch up too much. The color between  this extra loop and the wrist should be a SOLID color since your bones don't bend. Same thing for the other side or any other joint like that. The center of the elbow is it's own color, but notice how that green blends into the yellow and purple areas. This way, the blended color areas will bend less and less.

If you're going for a cartoon-like bendy arm thing, then my advice won't help you. Hmmm, I don't see the button to upload. Let me check and I'll update the post.

Apparently, I've used up my upload space. Here's a Dropbox link so you don't have to wait for me clearing my uploads.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/tg2jy9mqey6p9ix/ArmRig Weight.jpg?dl=0

Fantastic in every way.

A couple things you could do quickly that will help sell the realism. First is the scale of the floor material. It looks took big which makes the car look small, like an R/C model. Second is the tire sidewall material. There is too much going on breaking up the reflection. I think you need to reduce the amount of texture in the reflections there.

The headlights look fantastic! I agree about the floor. Soften the reflections just a little bit.

Wow. Thanks for the file. I'll definitely check it out!

Just wondering if anyone has used the Drive! vehicle simulation plug-in? Really wondering if it's overkill vs. let's say Magic Car from Nitroman? I don't need to simulate a NASCAR race or heavy traffic, just relatively simple drivebys or a car turning into a scene and stopping next to it's price. That sort of thing.

Thanks for any opinions. Yes, I see there's a demo, but if it's too complicated, didn't want to jump in.

Do you have permission to edit the file on that drive? I'm on a Mac, and sometimes I'll have to Right-Click to Show Info. At the bottom of that window is the Permissions setting. Sometimes it get changed to Read Only. I just change it to Read and Write and then it will work. Might be worth a look anyway.

I believe if you move it, restart C4D and you shouldn't see it in your library, then drag it back into the browser from the new location. I think that would work.

I couldn't find a forum for Team Render, so...

Yes, I have reached out to our IT guy to help with this, but in the mean time, maybe someone here can shed some light.

I'd like to start using Team Render Server since I'm still stuck at home. I also have a VPN to the office network. I can mount the office server on my desktop. So, I'm trying to figure out how to get my three render clients to show up locally at home. I have the IPs and the port numbers, but it won't connect in Team Render Server. Anyone have experience in setting something like this up?

From my previous experience in Unreal Engine 4, the real-time aspect is for your on-screen feedback. Not sure if they've changed this since I used it a couple years ago. For example, I was into creating levels for Unreal Tournament (which they dropped after Fornite took off. Damn them.) and yes the better your PC the more real-time the feedback was. BUT, when I wanted to see the real version of my creation, I had to change the settings and compile the level which included all the rendering of light and shadow. This process is very similar to what the rest of the world does in traditional 3D apps.

Now, I have not used Unreal Engine 5 so there may be a new workflow to save out the GPU renders. Question is, is that GPU raytraced with physically accurate effects? I don't personally know. The engine has come a long way though.

Oooh, thanks for that link. The Uniform Resizer looks interesting. I did however, find a couple of other solutions. One of them was a simple match equation. Since I want to go from small to large, it's LARGE SIZE  /  SMALL SIZE  =  Scale Value for X, Y, X of smaller object. Worked perfectly. There is also a relatively simple Xpresso setup which can also be found in this video:  https://lesterbanks.com/2017/08/easily-scale-proportionally-c4d/

Thanks again!

Not sure this is the best forum for this question, or if I worded the title clearly. So I have an object (model group) that I pasted into a scene and I want it to be scaled to match another model in the scene. Normally, I'd just scale the thing to match. Problem is, I'm using TeamViewer into the office and the dragging can be problematic many times. Two ideas, I thought there was a tool in C4D that you could click the source object and then click on what you want to match or something to that effect. I can't remember what it was called though.

The other thing would be if I select the object I want to scale and I know the Z scale should be 600, I should be able to lock the proportions and just type 600 in that field. The other dimension would scale accordingly. Is this possible?