Leaderboard

You are welcome. Now...let me confuse you some more. Do not be intimidated by X-Particles. I can understand your reluctance to get X-Particles because it is just a massively huge program only because it does so much: particles, fluids, smoke, cloth, volume breaking, volume rendering, grains, dynamics and multi-physics where one physical simulation affects another simulation (like a stream of water hitting a blanket and the cloth simulation on the blanket reacts to the fluid simulation and the fluid simulation in turn reacts to the cloth simulation). On the plus side, XP is very modular. You don't need to learn EVERY part of the program and can easily get amazing smoke effects with just as much ease as you could get from TFD. The only advantage of TFD is that it has its own build in renderer whereas XP really works best with Cycles 4D if you are looking for volumetric rendering. BUT....you have Redshift which is a much better and faster render engine than Cycles 4D and it can do volume rendering as well. Now, XP is almost twice the cost of TFD ($769 USD vs $469 USD) but that additional $300 gets you about 5 more simulation packages (fluids, grains, cloth, volume breaking, and particles) which all work together! Now, you do have to pay an annual maintenance, but XP just keeps growing! I would be hard pressed to find any current XP user who does not feel that they are getting their money's worth from their maintenance plan. Now let's talk about XP training. Bob Walmsley is a tremendous teacher. He is the Hrvoje of Insydium. Clear, concise and he takes you through all the traps and pitfalls that you may encounter when using the program ("So why did nothing happen?") and then explains how to get the program to do what you wanted it to do, why it didn't work the first time and the logic behind it all (which is the most important part). His teaching just sticks. Hear it once and you get it immediately. In fact, I do most of my learning watching one of his tutorials while on the exercise bike. I don't have C4D open...I just listen and it all sticks! He's that good! I have and love TFD....but I got it long before XP ever came out. I am glad I have both as TFD is great to use if you need to add something quick without too much fuss. Now if you want to do something truly amazing, you need to get XP. Almost as powerful as Houdini and infinitely easier and more fun to use. Dave