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Dash The full version of Dash is intended to let artists to build complex environments without having to navigate the Unreal Editor’s interface, working primarily in fullscreen mode in the viewport. It provides readymade behaviors – accessible by typing natural-language search terms into a floating prompt bar – for common scene-building tasks like ‘create terrain’ and ‘apply water’, plus scattering tools for dressing environments. As well as game development, Dash can be used for offline work: for example to create animations, visual effects projects or architectural visualizations in Unreal Engine. You can read more about its features in this story on Dash 1.9, the current release. Polygonflow has now updated the trial version of Dash so that artists can use part of its toolset for free indefinitely. You can now use all of the features for free for 14 days, after which point you have access to the content browser, but not other functionality like object scattering, physics or material blending. The change makes Dash a more fully featured free alternative to Unreal Engine 5’s native Content Browser, with support for asset tagging, and fuzzy, semantic and Boolean search. You can read about its functionality – much of which was added in Dash 1.9, and which makes it quicker to search large collections of UE5 assets – in the online release notes. Dash also integrates with Fab, Epic Games’ online marketplace, and comes with libraries of free IES lights and CC0 assets from Poly Haven. Dash is compatible with Unreal Engine 5+ on Windows 10+ only. Free licenses work in demo mode for 14 days, providing access to the full toolset; then in free mode indefinitely, providing access to the Conent Browser and AI assistant only. https://www.polygonflow.io/try-dash CharMorph CharMorph is a successor to previous open-source Blender character generator MB-Lab – itself a community fork of the popular Manuel Bastioni Lab. Both have now been discontinued: Manuel Bastioni Lab in 2018, and MB-Lab last year, with development work moving on to CharMorph following the release of MB-Lab 1.8.1. According to the development team, CharMorph reimplements “most of MB-Lab’s features”, and uses the same base meshes and character morphs, but does not contain any of MB-Lab’s code. CharMorph makes it possible to create custom 3D characters by starting with one of the base 3D characters included with the software and applying morphs to modify it. The morphs have to be baked destructively before the character is rigged, although it is possible to export them in advance, making it possible to keep iterating on a character design. It is also possible to use CharMorph to modify an existing imported 3D character, including those with different topology. Exported characters can be rendered with Eevee, Blender’s real-time renderer, or Cycles, its main production renderer: you can find more details in the online documentation. Although it lacks some of the features from MB-Lab, such as auto-modeling, CharMorph has a number of advantages over its predecessor, listed on the project’s GitHub page. Key benefits include support for Rigify, Blender’s modular character rig creation system, including for facial rigs, and real-time fitting of clothing. It is also possible to set skin and eye color directly, and displacement is done at material level rather than using the Displace modifier, making it possible to preview the effect in Eevee. But perhaps most significantly, it is possible to use characters generated with CharMorph in any kind of commercial work, including closed-source games. Whereas the base character from MB-Lab is licensed under an AGPL license, CharMorph has three alternative base characters with Creative Commons licenses: either CC-BY attribution licenses, or in the case of the Vitruvian character added in the latest update, a full CC0 license. In a story on BlenderNation, the developers comment that they aim to provide character models that can compete with those from closed-source solutions like Character Creator or Daz Studio, “achieving the level of quality seen in blockbuster movies and next-gen video games” As well as the Vitruvian character, CharMorph 0.4 features a number of other improvements, including the option to download characters or update the add-on directly within Blender. The development team says that it now plans to extend the software beyond humanoid characters, making it possible to create animals and other creatures. CharMorph is compatible with Blender 4.4. It’s a free download. The software is open-source: the source code is available under a GPLv3 license. The individual base characters are available under a range of licenses: the new Vitruvian character is CC0. https://blendercharacterproject.org/ https://github.com/Upliner/CharMorph Yeti 5.2 The update adds two new nodes for resolving intersection issues: Plume, for resolving feather-feather and feather-geometry intersections, and Resolve, for fiber intersections. Other new features include cross-platform file path mapping, following a similar convention to the Arnold renderer, and a new C++ API for evaluating Yeti graphs. The previous 5.1 updates were primarily bugfix releases, and to add support for the current versions of Maya and the supported renderers. Yeti 5.2 is available for Maya 2024+, running on Windows 10+, and RHEL and Rocky Linux 8.5. Indie licenses – one perpetual node-locked workstation licence and one render licence – are available to artists with revenue under $100,000/year, and cost $329. Studio licenses – one perpetual floating workstation licence, plus five render licences – cost $699. Further packs of five render licences cost $399. https://docs.peregrinelabs.com/release-notes Zen UV 5.0 New features in Zen UV 5.0 include the Zen UV Touch Tool, which makes it possible to perform common operations like moving, scaling, rotating or snapping UV islands more quickly by manipulating them directly in Blender’s UV Editor, using an intuitive-looking gizmo. There is also a new Auto Unwrap operator, which provides a bridge to Ministry of Flat, Quel Solaar’s free standalone Windows-only UV unwrapping tool. Workflow improvements include a new Zen Sync operator, which preserves edge and face selections when switching between working modes. There are also new options for selecting intersecting or stretched faces, new control options in the trimsheet tools, and updates to Zen UV’s native UV unwrapping algorithm. Zen UV 5.0 is compatible with Blender 4.0+. A single-user license costs $39. The update is free to users of version 4.x. https://zenmastersteam.github.io/Zen-UV/latest/changelg/release_note_5.0.0/

That is exactly what I thought I was doing wrong but I didn't know how to do it or fix it 🙂 thank you!

You can reference into graph as classic object. Geometry port is under "op" group port. To import use ctrl+drag from object manager into graph, that will create a copy of geometry in the graph itself.

@DasFrodo You are getting just geometry from the cubes without transforms (matrix), transforms are needed.

Hey bezo, thanks for the reply. I don't quite understand what your second approach is. Can you elaborate a bit more please?

You may find some example for iteration in the capsule file pit thread. If the link works, it will get you there + to a comment where more links to resources are mentioned. Great place for better understanding of Capsules + Scene Nodes. 🙂

Use as child Connect object and put all geometry objects there. Or use objects links input (drag objects in OM which you want use into objects links panel), decompose it and transform geometry with iterations of geometries and matrices to clone onto points node. But I think first solution is more understand-able 🙂

Darker background. It's supposed to be space after all.

Maybe I'll do it using Xpresso... boole switch on editor and renderer visibility

Hi community, long time no see 😄 Due to circumstances (life happens ey?) I will probably be returning to C4D. Just to have a look at the new features I have missed out since R21 (which is a lot) I'm trying to do a bit of Scene Nodes. I have some stuff already working, but I'm currently stuck at iterating through multiple children. I have a very basic setup where I want to clone some spline onto the points of multiple objects that are children of the Nodes Spline. However, the spline only gets cloned onto the first cube. The second one is, as you can see, slightly offset. However, even if I change the order of the cubes nothing changes, so I suspect that I'm missing something to do with transforms / matrices / positions. Unfortunately my google skills either suck at this point or not many people are posting about Scene Nodes on the internet. Any pointers, please 🙂 ? Thank you!

@Hrvoje @Donovan K MXN Well... I guess that's one more entry on my suggestions list for future improvements .... I remember people back in R23 when SceneNodes made their first appearance, found a way to import OM objects using some kind of Alembic node ... is there any similar hack ? I have imported a collection of splines from Blender that are impossible to draw-by-hand. In Blender they are parametric but have no idea how to reconstruct them in Scene Nodes so I figured that simple boole of a collection is enough for me for now.... AHA! There's a Classic Object Import ! .... Hmmm... I can't make it have an Output Port... could be a bug ?

@HappyPolygon - You can create sub-assets for the Primitive Op & Distribution Op, but there isn't a way for you to construct your own uber-nodes like them. These are special hard-coded nodes that are looking for nodes based on a specific template. You can maybe approximate this by creating a Nodes Mesh/Spline and using a Switch node to switch which graph you output, managing all of the input ports for your different object types will quickly become more trouble than its worth.

I think they have trial version too. Simply check it. I have somewhere this plugin since bought it many years ago for my R21 commercial release.

You can't reference objects from OM, it needs to be created in the scene nodes context which is, again, experimental, so expect issues 🙂

Hey everyone, thanks for the support! This is the final result I got. I think it's decent, but I feel the rendering is lacking. I need to keep the background bright, but as it is, the contrast doesn’t seem right. If you have any rendering tips to improve the overall look of the image, I’d really appreciate it. Just a note: I only have access to the native Cinema 4D render engines. Cheers, Eudes.

Seems that plugin. is still available tho site and pricing a bit confusing, seems to start at 60 bucks, think I can live without it at the mo, hoping I may stumble across a slightly newer version of cinema at some point.

This is what I get with RMB Should I import a mesh from OM with some other way ? I just drag-n'-dropped it ... (C4D 2025.0.1)

Rmb and convert to op in scene node context

Exoside had a remesher plugin for c4d. Currently maybe not for sale while since R26 c4d has build-in solution. I think it was very cheap.

Properly old nowadays 🙂

Indeed not. Sorry - forgot you were on older version despite it being right there in your profile ! CBR

I obviously dont disagree with anything you say there and only wish I had the skills / experience to achieve it but I couldnt even build your first example, I just wouldnt know where to start, where as sticking a disc on the corners falls within my skillset, I wanted to go with the spline extrude option but just thought i could do a bit more with beveled edges if i built it "properly", it took me a couple of hrs just to build my rather ugly version, but i also knew I would have a result at the end of it where I may not have arrived there trying to go for the lower res mesh and i figured too dense is better than not dense enough. Your last version looks nice and clean but there aint no remesher in R18. I hadnt noticed the tris in my original version but fortunately they turned to quads under subdiv. I do appreciate all the advice and its good to know and see how it should be done even if Im not quite up to it. Many thanks Deck

Sure you can animate deformation, but can not change spline cage "live" because you loose parametrical setup with conversion to single spline cage object. I mean for example can not be changed grid count (from current 4x4x4 to for example 10x10x10) directly. So, whatever you do, you can do just with spline cage 4x4x4 (or whatever you did in your setup)

Hi @bezo, thank you so much for the incredibly detailed guide! I finally got it to work by following your step-by-step instructions. Your explanation was essential for understanding the process. When you say "create just a static object," does that mean it's not possible to animate the deformation? Is there no way to achieve this using an animatable parameter of the FFD? If not, would there be another way to animate this deformation, perhaps using a Spherical Field? Thanks again for your help! Eudes

We could also cheat, if time-saving would be helpful... For example we could just get our original spline, pop it under an Extrude Object, and then put that under a (Z-)ReMesher where we could then adjust the poly count until it matched our corners nicely... Not as good as the manual method (still a bit on the dense side), but more than passable if you're in a hurry... CBR