GazzaMataz

Hi Everyone - Happy new year and decade! I want to pose this question/conundrum to everyone here to hear there thoughts since it keeps being thrown at me time and time again: should you be a specialist or a generalist? I have now been working as a freelance artist for the past 10 years and whilst I originally started out wanting to be a character animator (having studied at Animation Mentor) I have worked as a modeller, rigger, motion graphics artist, compositor, 2D animator and various others roles on projects ranging from film, TV shows, advertising, corporate presentation, music videos, fly-throughs, product visualisation and various other things. This has all been great but as I said I still get people saying you have too much diversity of work on your website and you should specialise. Well I tried this ten years ago doing just character animation and found that one minute I would be working and then doing nothing so I started accepting other types of work and this is how I have progressed. I think it's a similar thing in nature where you get creatures that specialise and then when their speciality no longer works they become extinct. Whereas those that can adapt seem to survive. I think the speciaility scenario is only valid for the big film studios who only hire character animators or compositors who do only that whereas the smaller studios tend to have people who are more generalist. Anyway I would love to hear people's thoughts/experiences on this conundrum. For now I just say I am a 3D artist with character animation skills.

Just started looking into using Volume Builders for very simple object and cannot believe that they are slow to handle even when using simple parametric objects… It seems to require a lot of memory and when closing files takes an age while C4D clears all the memory. Anyone know of speedups?

Got it! Thanks EAlexander :-+ It's not the place I would have looked under Lighting and Rendering 8-P

Forgive me if I have missed somewhere on the forum where this exist already but I cannot seem to find a WIP/Finished Work section like there used to be to show off one's latest pieces... Does such a section exist?

Hi Jed Thanks for this video too will take a look!

Oh cheers m8! I will take a look…

I am trying to figure a way of rigging a truck so that it articulates properly when aligned to a spline. Now I can do it parenting the container to the cabin and rotating the container manually when going around bends but I want this to work automatically without me doing any manual stuff. It need to be exported into something like Unity so I guess I would have to use joints and constraints but I don't think constraints would export into Unity… Bit stumped on this really so any ideas appreciated 🙂

I'll have to send that diagram to a few of my clients - I would love to see their reactions 🙂

Has this role been filled? I worked on some music videos a few years ago and we went to Pinewood Studios to get the MoCap created. Trouble was the studio only used Maya rigged characters and we where all C4D based. Wasn't too much of a problem though since we exported everything through Motion Builder and into C4D as FBX. Although now I would use Alembic as Iline suggested. I know that you can import from MoCap data directly into C4D too - wish I and know how to do that back then! @Iline I would always talk to Bret Bays - he wrote the Character object system for MAXON and he himself is excellent, and his scripts for weight painting are essential. Don't think it was Bret that wrote the Character Object System although he used it extensively in the short film 'The Ottoman'. Think it was a guy from Australia back in 2012/13 who worked for MAXON - that's what Brian Horgan told me 🙂

OK I think that I have worked this out but I thought I might ask here in case I have got this all wrong. Using Advanced Renerer if I wanted to make a hole in something I would add a map to the alpha channel and it would make a hole in my geometry that the shader was applied to. Now when I convert such a material to a Redshift version in the material editor it adds a texture node to hold the alpha map which is connected to a colour splitter. However when I apply such a shader to my model it doesn't work. Now here's the bit that I am not sure about if I check 'Alpha Is Luminance' on the texture node it works. So in a nutshell is this the correct way to do this?

@Everfresh Thanks for that info m8 much appreciated! That make the whole thing sound a bit more viable. I will take a look at PixelPlow, I have only ever used Rebus so it won't hurt to look else where and give them a try. Could say me time and money on the render front.

@DasFrodo That's the million pound question 🙂 And I would probably only use the machine for this particular project which comes up once a year. I calculated that if I was to use Rebus for the project it would cost me approx £500 in render fees each time so weigh that against a new computer at £2k and I would get my money back after four seasons... Seems like a no brainer from that ponit of view.

@DasFrodo I have used Rebus in the past and they do a great service and support Redshift. The problem that I have though is I work on short animations usually between 10-30 secs. Now I normally render out a low res version send it to the client and whilst that is rendering on my second computer I get on with the next one and it works very nicely, although HD version take a lot longer. Usually there are 2-3 versions until the final version is signed off and ready for HD output so you can see I am rendering a lot for each animation. This can add up and eat into costs which means my returns are low. Not only that I use Xrefs on almost every animation and Rebus doesn't accept Xrefs so I would have to convert everything every time for render which can be time consuming. And I would be able to use the converted versions since the Xrefs might need changing. So it is a bit of a pain…

Thanks for the replies peeps. Looks like I will have to switch to Redshift at some stage to fix this since I have a Redshift licence. Thing is I have one render heavy project a year and to complete it I need two machines so that would mean buying another computer with at least two GPUs in it to create the same workflow and that would mean at least a £2k expenditure (not including the extra licences) and I am not sure if the project will return since I do it every year. One other thing is AR doesn't seem to like alpha channels either and creates nasty looks when using DOF I imagine this is the same problem as hair so Redshift should fix this too?

I have asked this before (I think) but my post has dissappeared (probably since this forum has been re-vamped). Anyway I have been working on a big project lately which required DOF. Now using AR as I do most of the time it works fine with most objects except hair... And alpha channels. If I render a hairy object with DOF the edges go blurred. Physical render works but is SO SLOW! I have tired to use Object Buffers but they don't work with hair either. I know that I can select the hair object and under the 'Generate Tab' and change the type from 'None' to 'Circle' but I was wondering if ther was another way to fix this or does R21 have a fix? I haven't tried R21 yet but I dare say that still hasn't fixed the problem. Same problem with using alpha channnels and DOF in AR, you get all sorts of artefacts where the transparenccy should be...

I have just been doing my maths. I have R20 and was due to get a new MSA for £660 ( inc VAT) in August. If I don’t do this I can take out a subscription which will cost me £676 so roughly the same money. Now I also have a Redshift licence which will cost me £205 to upgrade. So if I take out the new MAXON subscription with the Redshift licence that will cost me £945 whereas the old method would be £865 so an extra £80... Mind you I don’t know if there is VAT on the Redshift licence of £205 which would make it £246 but still slightly cheaper,

I think sadly Mac is a waste of time for 3D these days unless the threatened Mac Pro is any good - but I guess that will be expensive. Also I like you point Hrvoje about the cost of investing in a PC with adequate GPUs. If you think about it a couple of GeForce RTX 2080Ti GPUs will set you back the price of a good workstation so if you are planning on four of them it gets a bit expensive…

I have an X-Particles 3.5 license and they are doing an offer today for half price upgrade. But I was also looking at Houdini and that seems more powerful :-) So I am in a dither whether to upgrade my X-Particles or go down the Houdini route and have very little time to decide. So I thought I would ask here what seasoned users would go for?

So what’s gonna happen to ProRender and will future versions of Redshift support AMD GPUs?

Thanks chaps for the tips and it seems that Vertex Helix method has kinda done the trick, I get a lovely object buffer on the hair although the hair changes colour…

Anyone know of a whay to create object buffers for hair? It seems when I apply them to the object with hair and render an object buffer I only get a buffer for the object the hair is attached to and not the hair strands...

Hi Hrvoje Many thanks for this it is just what i was looking for as a starting block for what I want to do. The other good thing about this is that I actually understand the code - which is a good sign :-)

I am starting to learn a little Python and one of the first scripts that I want to create would be one that resets all controller handles on a character rig. So this would be like the reset button on the character component rig that is built into C4D. What this does is reset all the controllers to their original rotational, scale and positional coordinates. This is unlike the rest button which will only reset the object that you have selected. Anyone got such a script that I could look at and modify to suit what I am after?

You sure about that :-) I have a devil of a game with the mirror weights. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't...

So it is fixed - should have worked in the first place! And now it will cost me a full upgrade to get the fix :-) This may seem like a minor fix but for those of use that use C4D character tools it is a major thing!