Fastbee

I'd try opening the client app on the local machine and try getting it to work that way. When you have a ton of machines you might want the main computer to not be rendering anything because it will be doing a lot accepting and processing images, but with only 2 machines it should not be a problem.

I just tested it again without using Cycles denoise because SlowRender has denoise now. Rendered till it looked like the same level of noise. Prorender: 18 min. 57 sec. Note Fresnel does not seem to be working in Prorender with R19. Cycles 1 min. 4 sec. So 17.77x slower than Cycles. When Cycles gets the RTX out it will be 2x faster so ProRender would be 35.53x slower. Yes it is THAT slow.

The house building tool was made by NItro4D. Sounds like MAXON didn't want to pay to have him update it to work with R21. He does have some great tools on Nitro4D.com that he says will be updated to R21 shortly. The box one sounds interesting.

No one needs MAXON. MAXON is a choice.

As you say it's possible. Lots of work maybe, but possible. As we all know from a lot of fonts we use everyday they do look good big and small. They could have also had all the icons made from a 3D file. Imagine being able to open up the 3D file with all the icons in it and being able to modify any as you wish in 3D then hitting render at any resolution to get the new image map. This would have been a second way to future proof the icons and make everyone happy. They chose a third way. If we ask nicely for the photoshop file with all the icons maybe they will give it to us.

@Cerbera It's a good idea. What I was thinking was to paint the map them separate all the colors into black and white to be used as a map for xparticles. Do a burst mode in xp using the black and white and it should work the same. Changing the colors to b&w is a bit of a hassle, but sometimes you have to do special things to bend the program to your will. What really struck me with this is the realization that Mograph, for being so great, has huge limitations on the way it's going to distribute those objects.

I did a very rough costing based on what I know from when I did some costing for a project. If people here would like to help me make a more thorough cost analysis we have to take each item and break it down into it's smaller components. For example instead of saying materials and parts calculate exactly how much plastics would be needed, find the tools needed for sale somewhere, find some actual wearhouse space for lease or sale, figure out the job professions needed and the going rate to hire someone for that position. A really accurate cost analysis can take a bunch of time. $1M for tools to make the boat. $1M for warehouse space for one year. $2M for materials and parts $1M for 16 people working 1 year. $1M for testing. $10M Docking fees, support vessel, barge to get trash dumped into $4M Research and dev to get the plastics to be usable again $30M Getting plastics recycling facility ready for plastics Everything x2 for mistakes in costing = $100M After the first year it should pay for itself from the plastics picked and recycled out of the ocean. This is why the costing is only for one year and all the one time fees that need to be paid to build things.

If they were future proofing the icons for high res they should have made them vectors. Guess doing things wrong is the way of the new MAXON. Good news is if they are from that image file it should be easy to replace them with the old icons. Take the old icons image file from R20 and replace it.

ProRender. You mean SlowRender

Cycles, Octane, and Redshift all said they will be getting a boost from the RTX. With Cycles and Octane it's about 2x and Redshift is about 1.4x. If you are going with the RTX 2080 go with the RTX 2080 super. It's the same price and better in every way. The RTX 2080 TI is still the best though if it's in your budget.

I saw this today for Blender. https://blenderartists.org/t/scatter/1177672 I really like the way it works because Unreal Engine has a similar way of distributing instances on the landscape. I think I could use the same painted map in Unreal. It is also nice having the colors for the different objects because plants will grow in groups in real life. Mograph is great for changing the motion of objects, but scattering options are limited. Same with hair and xparticles. I found the plugins SurfaceSpread and Scatter it!. Scatter it! seems to be the closest, but still it doesn't have the colors that can be painted. It seems more like throw the objects in there and they are all randomized. I was thinking next best thing would be to use the Nitro4D plugin NitroDraw, but thought I would see what others have found. Anyone know of a easy way or plugin that can be used with C4D to paint foliage in the same way the Blender plugin works?

I'd call it simple more than low poly. It's lacking a lot of high detailed textures that would complicate the image. Sometimes less is more.

I think C4DS is right. I think the new icons are completely vector based and thus have a theoretical infinite resolution. It makes them 16k and beyond proof, but it means the old icons are gone. I work on a 4k screen everyday with c4d and it's great. Didn't even use the largest icon size. I'd personally not have to use icons at all, but MAXON didn't put in my keyboard shortcut preview suggestion so it makes it harder to have keyboard shortcuts only. I'm switching to Blender anyway so it doesn't matter to me.

It's the default setting for the image because they want to show have fast their render engine is. Thing is their render engine is super slow when doing a scene like this when compared to redshift, cycles, or octane. If you are rendering something simple and don't need GI the render engine in C4D is great. Anything with GI it dies.

I just found this. It looks like the bubbles work better than I thought they would. thegreatbubblebarrier.com

A rough estimate from me would be about $100 million. From there the infrastructure could be made where it would be self sustaining by selling the plastics fished out of the ocean and repossessed. This old design The Ocean Cleanup was using was about a billion times less efficient at cleaning plastics out of the ocean. With this old design it would never work no matter how much money was thrown at it. https://youtu.be/D7qNRgezOBU

My idea on a craft that would clean all the plastics out of the oceans in the most efficent way possible. Please try to spread this around. I would really like someone to build it so the oceans can be cleaned up. This is the full video with explanation on how it works. Here is all the 3D parts only. I made it all in C4D. Rendered with cycles. The bubbles were done with help from xparticles.

I do hope we get the challenges section open for everyone to post any challenge. I was thinking of posting some modeling challenges so people could come up with ways to model that object the fastest possible. Whoever was able to come up with the fastest way wins. Everyone could learn new faster modeling techniques this way.

The rig looks nice. I like the HUD elements to control the rig. Morphs can be nice for things, but finding the right morph can be a pain when there are a ton of them. Less morphs the better. If you were to look into the specifics he probably uses a lot of xpresso to get that to happen. When there is a character rig with xpresso it can do horrible things with a render farm to the point where the whole thing needs to be baked out to alembic so it doesn't have 24-50 hours of precomutation to have each node get to the frame it needs to be on. Xpresso is so bad for farms I try to avoid it as much as possible. Even with super simple it can make precomutation times horrid. Hopefully MAXON will continue with the improvements to character animation and have a huge release in R21 that becomes the new standard for character animation.

I hope the challenges section does happen. This way anyone can post a challenge and get them going again.

The big 3 Cycles, Redshift, and Octane have already shown demos that RTX does make a good difference in rendering speed for their programs. With Cycles and Octane we are looking at a 2x increase. With Redshift looking more like a 1.4x increase

Insydium does not advertise it, but they do have a way for you not to have to go online to reactivate the software for a 3 month period of time. If you push them maybe they make it 6 months or a year. Call or email them about it and they will tell you about that option. Hopefully MAXON has a similar option. It would be annoying to log in every 14 days or so. Logging in once every 6 months is not so much a problem. If they make it so the nodes for team render have to log in every few months that is a huge problem. Nodes should only have to log in once if ever. The following quote sounds like they might do just that, but they have not figured it out officially yet. If would make me feel better if right next to the perpetual option was a upgrade price for perpetual users of which old studio users get a lower price than other users. I guess we have to wait. Seems like it would be easy, but there is a ton of market analysis that goes into that one $#. From RBerrett bottom of page 54 of this convo. "MAXON will offer perpetual upgrades, as it says in the FAQ. I can't give you a specific answer at this point as to when those upgrades will be offered, what they will cost or what they will be called, because as it states in the FAQ those details aren't yet fully defined. We'll have more communication on that going forward, based on development progress and customer feedback. As to how long perpetual upgrades will continue to be offered - we're taking our cues from the userbase on that. You seem to assume the fact that we haven't announced an end date is a signal they're ending, but it's more clearly a signal that they'll be continuing. It means we haven't predetermined a sunset date for perpetual - or even that there will be a sunset date. We're still selling perpetual licenses - they're right there next to the subscription option. The only comments otherwise are conjecture."

If it's not going to be animated mograph with some cones could do the trick. It might even be faked if you have the model of the spikes then had them lift through the bottom part. Displacement could be a trick, but the map would have to be perfect. If animating it with all the liquid stuff going on xparticles or houdini would probably be the way to go. It all depends on the detail and quality you want.

C4D has mograph, lots of plugins like Cactus Dan's free tools, xparticles, Cycles4D. The bigger question is where is Blender better than C4D. The answer is it's free, rendering with Cycles or Eevee, Sculpting, Retoplology with free retopoflow plugin, Grease Pencil, probably character animation but I have not tried the changes in R21, post image workflow. They are looking to add a node based particle system in the near future that could make it as good as mograph. At that point the biggest thing C4D has going for it will be gone.

You can. To make it look really good though I'd recommend xparticles. When I think of magical stuff I think of lots of particles. Little glowy bits going different directions and such. Xparticles can also do fire and smoke. It all depends on what you are trying to make exactly. The energy ball specifically could be made all in c4d with no plugins if you just want a glowy cool looking ball with swirls or something.