Fastbee

I like Blender a lot more than C4D for everything, but Mograph and Xparticles. If there is something in Blender that I find hard I find out later I tried to do it wrong. Got to think more Blender and it ends up being easier than in C4D. There is nothing in Blender that drives me up a wall like in C4D. The things that drove me crazy in C4D were lack of multiple UV maps for light mapping, the timeline literally taking seconds to simply scroll or zoom in and out in some cases (now fixed in S22), subscription which I will never pay for, getting something finished then working just as hard to export it because of C4D sucky exports, slow as tar character animation, endless list of stuff in object manager, Blender you click on what you want rarely going to a list, rendering in C4D taking forever for decent results with any of the built in render engines, bunch of tools in C4D like bool which still only use a single core, I'm not sure bool uses multi core in Blender but its fast, making drawing on a character in C4D super hard to set up if not using the magic set up, no decent way to retopo a sculpt, no dynamesh so sculpting could be done decently, C4D material nodes being super laggy, I could go on and on here. In Blender I don't have any of those problems. *mic drop* *Creeps back and stage and picks up mic again* Now to help out others. You need a good video card. What kind of hardware and OS are you running? Click on the object or objects in viewport and all the keys appear in the graph. I find it much easier than scrolling though a bunch of names in C4D. Thinking of scrolling through all those names in C4D is giving me some post traumatic stress. If you want to keep the primatives primatives Wonder Mesh. I hear something like this is going to built into Blender in a future build, but for now the plugin looks pretty good.

What I hope they do with this program is to allow cameras to be imported so I can match my camera up then export sills of the explosion. I don't want to export gigs of VDBs when I can export the final product already rendered in a few MB.

This is a great video to watch all the way though, but I start it where he talks about wiggle bones. It's pretty cool.

Cactus Dan Springy Keys and many of his tools are better than the horrid character animation tools in C4D. I don't know of any plugin for C4D that does anything like that. I switched to Blender because I got fed up with the horridness of C4D character animation and I suggest you do the same if you want to do better and faster character animation (CA). Blender has Springy Keys as well as a ton of plugins that are really cool for CA. The autoweighting is way better in Blender and if it's not good enough there is a plugin called Voxel Heat Diffuse Skinning that does an even better job. I'll leave this here

As a professional it all depends. They might say you have to work with this software or that and that is why you are forced to use Adobe or something else you normally wouldn't. You also have time deadlines which makes you make it faster rater than better. You push yourself to find ways to be faster and faster. If it is ok with the client to use Action Essentials and it's faster that is the way to go. If there is extra time maybe change out some explosions you didn't like so much with a better one that was 3D rendered yourself. If using something like Quad Remesher does a good enough mesh for the render it can save a ton of time. If the auto UV works that saves a ton of time. Even when I work on some hobby project I find myself wanting to work as fast as possible, so I can get it done. If I never get anything done because you work too slow than I feel like I'm not doing anything as an artist even if I'm leaning a lot. Finishing a project 2x, both times as fast as I can finish them, seems to be more beneficial with learning and gratification than never finishing anything.

I made the leap the waters are fine. Animation is smoother. Rigging is faster and less frustrating. Having to use keyboard shortcuts makes you faster at everything. Lots of the tools seem to be simpler and do more. Character animation seems smoother. Rendering with Cycles is way better than ProRender aka SlowRender and Eevee is jaw dropping. The huge number of plugins from the huge Blender user base is great. Help the user base gives is incredible. Sculpting in Blender is soo goood and still being improved upon in every release. The only things I'm sad about loosing are X-Particles and Mograph. If I have something I really want to use X-Particle or Mograph for I figure I'll composite that specific element in. Back years ago I remember trying Blender and not liking it because it felt strange and the tools didn't seem to work right. Now I use C4D after using Blender and it's like C4D tools are made to not be as user friendly. Take a few days to concentrate and make the leap. You will not regret it. Less than one year of C4D MSA can buy all the Blender plugins one could ever want.

I hope they realize even if the hobbyist is not a major part of their income it is the biggest part of their future income. The hobbyist becomes a professional that knows C4D and asks their business to buy C4D for them. Without the hobbyist C4D is going under in some years. If like you say the hobbyist is such a small income stream they can ignore them completely MAXON should have a indie license for those that make under $100k that make the full version of C4D completely free. It's worked well for Blender which is getting a larger and larger user base every year.

It depends. If Alembic works for you that is great. Obj seems to work for solid non moving objects. VDB can be used to export explosions with heat maps and all the other goodies to Blender. There is this great plugin to help with exporting and importing character animations with the joints in an fbx format using Blender here. I've never had anything I couldn't get in and out of Blender and Houdini. For your Z-up and Y-up with the scale there are some settings to fix that in the export and import settings of each program. If you export from Blender and it's always the wrong size and you can't figure out the right export import settings set up some nodes in Houdini to do the operations automatically. One of the best things with Houdini is being able to click on the first node, change what is imported, and have it go through all the operations already set up. I remember in C4D before FBX was fixed it was a pain having to flip the object on some axis to get it to import right side up in Unreal, so I feel your pain. Houdini and Blender have so many options it really is great having more than one way. I even saw an experimental Blender plugin so Houdini files can be used directly in Blender link here. Here is a shop of plugins to help with export and importing into Blender. In the off change you want to import MMD stuff to Blender 2.8+ here is the link. After downloading unzip and go to the "external_tools". In there zip the "mmd_tools_local". That new zip file can now be used to add mmd exporting and importing to Blender 2.8+.

For those interested in motion graphics that might want a free C4D alternative. Link to plugin for Blender. Everything Nodes will be way better than this, but for now it's not bad. The C4D boat was on fire. Now it's about to have the last bit sink into the ocean. It was nice knowing you C4D.

I personally like using Blender with Houdini better than C4D with Houdini. C4D has the plugin for Houdini. Which is great if you have the most updated version of C4D, because that is the only version of C4D that will work with the most recent version of Houdini. If you are not up to date with C4D, like I am, it's nice to have the most updated and fully supported Cycles, Eevee, and sculpting tools of Blender to combined with most updated version of Houdini's UV tools and procedural stuff. The character weighting in Houdini is pretty nice. I work a lot with Unreal so the Houdini Unreal plugin comes in handy. Unreal can accept native C4D files now, which I should try, but with Houdini you can make procedural changes right in Unreal. If I read the post right it means you can only import C4D stuff into Unreal as a fixed sequence. Another good thing in Houdini is how well it works with Blender. Working will with Blender means plugins like QuadRemesher, BoxCutter, eCycles to make Cycles render way faster, Retopoflow, HardOps, Box cutter, and MESHmachine in Blender can be used. Model in Blender, UV in Houdini, rig in Blender or Houdini, render with Redshift to stay in Houdini if you want industry best cloth sims and physics without the file size of exporting or back to Blender for Cycles, Eevee, or Houdini plugin for Unreal. The QuadRemesher really is a game changer and probably the most important one as that makes a nice usable mesh so when making the mesh with anything the topology does not have to be worried about at all. I mention that because if you get that funny mesh that doesn't seem quite right in Houdini after some procedurals, or Box cut, HardOped messiness that makes you think it could be better, QuadRemesher makes it all seem good enough for the time. If you do have the time to make the mesh perfect there is still Retopoflow. If we expand the question to where does Houdini beat C4D to more of where does Houdini combined with another program beat C4D. The answer is everywhere except motion graphics which even is about to change when the Everything Nodes project is released for Blender. C4D also has a nice UI, but that could be biased because I've worked with it for so long. OK, so I don't use Houdini much, but with it's affordable $200 per year indie license I don't need to use it much to feel like I'm getting my money's worth out of it. C4D beat. Thanks everyone for all the learning resources. @Midphase that Modeler 2020.1 looks great. I'll leave this here for those interested in motion graphics. https://youtu.be/UB8R_xPpaSc

I know everyone that works on C4D works really hard, but as I see it C4D has to up development by about 15x. That means there should be an increase of 2000% more programmers to make up for the decrease in productivity per person as more people are hired. The productivity decrease I'm talking about is a general decrease in productivity per person due to things that happen as any group grows bigger. It's not specific to MAXON. By what percent did the programmers working on C4D go up in the past 5 years?

It could be your set up. What kind of rig do you have?

Changing it from R to S then calling it 22 is really stupid. First off people don't like subscription, yet they push it in our faces like this. Second the number should go up by one for every year even if there are updates before that time. This should then really be called R21.5, or R21 April update, or maybe switch it to R2020.4 where the # could go R2020.12 would be year 2020 month of December. As is with the new 2 or 3 times yearly updates with a new S we are going to be at some really high S #s really fast. People are then going to not care because they will be like did that come in S32 or S33. IDK doesn't matter none of the updates have much new for years before they changed to S anyway. As for the updates they look pretty good. Still too little there. Seems they are not accelerating the development at all. Still ignoring character animation. Nothing huge like the days when they would unveil mograph or bodypaint.

Some good updates, but without any character animation improvements I'm not interested.

I remember them saying it's impossible to make the viewport faster and now this.

Let's not loose site of the cause of this whole debacle. This gave me a laugh when I found out people think Corona was started by 5G. I guess Corona Render was being downloaded a ton via 5G in China and this is what you get. 🤣 https://www.davidicke.com/article/564306/coronavirus-5g-connection-coverup https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2020/03/21/did-5-g-cause-coronavirus-covid-19-pandemic/2873731001/

It's the best solution I know. Dan's tools were made for this stuff. C4D's joint tools were not.

In C4D it is possible to have a different part weighted and it not really be obvious in the viewer. Try setting all the weights to zero with all the joints. Now paint two joints. If only the right parts move with those joints weighted right it was a weighting problem. If stuff still moves with weights on zero with all joints there is something else strange going on like xpresso or something.

Poor girl. I give her a 0.1% chance of not going to work for someone else in the future. I only put it that high because she has talent and a good youtube personality. Between Disney owning 75% of the market with their shows designed to brainwash people into only liking Disney and the advent of streaming services that give too much content available to everyone it's almost impossible to make a money with content from your own new business. It's hard to have people watch your stuff even if it's a great piece of art and you give it away. Cattle to the slaughter all to make the wealthiest people in the world richer. I am surprised your work also told you about not drawing mad faces. Really though, I get what you are saying, but I think her point was the work place should not be like that. If nothing else you should feel bad for the slave wadges that Disney pays. For climbing the ladder you get paid little more, but you do get more power. So who climbs the ladder? People who want power and are obsessed with Disney because they have been brainwashed by them their whole life. It all works out though because the Disney machine surveys make the shows into what people want. Nothing new or innovative. Do you think the industry should be like it is?

I'd pm you but your inbox is full.

One is you can reduce the polys that helps in handling it all together. Less polys is faster no matter what you use it in. If it's a character that will be rigged the polys need to be very specific so it all deforms right when moving them via joints. You can't get a crease where there is no poly geometry. It's also better for easy selecting the polys and manipulating them. It also makes it easier when you go to UV the object. It's hard selecting the lines it should be cut on if it's all over the place. Quads also do whey better when using a subdivision object to make it smoother. Specifically in C4D a tool like this could also be used along with the sculpting tools to move some things in kind of the shape wanted then retopo every now and then to get a better spread of polys so one could continue sculpting without really out there geometry to super high density mesh. If all you work with is solid objects and it's never moving it is not such a big deal if it's already exactly as you want it.

The 2080 super has less tensor cores than the rtx 2080 ti so I'd go with the 2080 ti if you can afford it. You don't need the pro card. Faster CPU is better if you do a lot of CPU rendering, or physics simulation, or xparticles, or something that can use a lot of cores. If you are going to do gpu rendering it doesn't matter as much. A fast clock speed i7 or Ryzen 7 would do the job better than a CPU with a ton of cores and lower clock if using it for something that does not use the cores.

Whoever is offering the service is going to be hard up to make cash on it. All that bandwidth costs money. Your profit margins might be really small.

Most of it I would rig up with joints. Get them in the right order and it should all work exactly the same as the real thing. With the chain part get it along a spline then either hand key in when it moves along that spline or xpresso it so it moves in relative space along the spline as the one joint moves.

If you get the geometry right you can use the 2D UVW that comes from the geometry of the object. From that you would hand animate the different particles, alpha, and colors changing over time. This would take some talent to pull off or a lot of time. In art a lot of time spent can make up for decades of practicing art. For something like image 4 I see 3 layers of geometry. One on the top with all the steamers. One under that with the streaks and one under that with the glowy bit. The glowy bit probably does not have to be hand animated. The others might if you can't find a procedural that can satisfy your artistic vision.