Leaderboard

There's always a better something somewhere, but sometimes you just like the one you've got ! 🙂 Of course I do have HB modelling bundle, and am fully aware of all the remaining weaknesses in Cinema's modelling toolset, but TBH I don't find any of them too problematic on a day-to-day level. I model an enormous variety of stuff, and the amount of times I am left genuinely stuck because Cinema can't do something remain very minimal and it is exceptionally rare that I find a problem I can't think my way around using the tools that are available to me here in C4D. I guess I have been using it for so long now that I have just found all the ways round the main problems modellers in Cinema typically face. Also there is a general ramp of improvement to Cinema's modelling tools, and there have been enough improvements in that department (some of which were and remain best in class) over the years to keep me interested and... still here 🙂 Also I remain aware of the continuing problems in other software. For example, Max, after 25 years of trying still hasn't got a basic knife tool that doesn't add a ton of unwanted irrelevant vertices whenever you use it ! And a surprising number of its coolest modelling features are 3rd party scripts and add-on shelf tools ! AND your models look like cr@p in there all the time you are working on them ! I could go on, but don't want to derail the thread with a load of largely subjective gripes about every other thing out there ! So it's loads of little reasons really - Cinema is a very visually pleasing place to work, especially recently, the community are great, the cafe is great, the tools keep improving, and I am most comfortable and at home working in its environment, which I still like more than anyone else's. CBR

Interesting topic and replies. Maya Indie price offer is very good and for those who are located in the right country its worth it for sure. Im Into purely character based work, no Mograph so how come I got C4D? Maya was my first port of interest before getting C4D but it was their greedy tactics and steep pricing that put me off right before the last month by trying to lock me into a maintenance subscription where if stopped for any reason that perpetual licence would no longer be upgradable. Then I started looking at MAXON before looking at C4D. Not long after I got C4D, Autodesk tried to get their perpetual customers to give in their perpetual licences in order to have it rented back to them at a discount, I dodged the bullet and felt happy to work with C4D even with its limitations. Many do use these apps as pure money making tools which is fair enough, but there are some that also see these tools as part of their hobbies or artistic output. I fit into both of these which is why I respect the likes of Pixologic, they make a lot of money but they are interested in the art and their customers, they are artists, good business ethics. I had to use Maya 2 years ago and I found it was much better than I had thought it would be. C4D weakest link IMHO is in its modelling and UVs, although its capable its quite some way behind the likes of MODO in this area, shame MODO feels so clinical and lacks C4D user friendliness. Dan

There are no problems on paying for software when your income comes from it. But this is mostly true to a one-time payment kind of software. Like it was with Zbrush for instance, I paid around 700 USD once, and every update they had ever since (and long before I had purchased) was completely for free. I own the software and Pixologic continues to support and give full attention to its users. It was a bit of a chunk of money to pay at once, specially coming from a Brazilian pocket.. but knowing this was an investment, it puts me at ease, knowing that I can continue to produce work with it during low seasons. This is different for subscription, where you are held hostage to a continuous payment, hoping that your life situation and job market doesnt change. This year, I had to use my credit card to pay for C4D's subscription for instance, due to several delay payments and no projects at all at the beginning of this year. And it was a bit desperate, knowing that the price is so high, for something that I know I dont really own. So yeah, paying a lot for a rental price, as a indie freelancer, I think it is okay to "cry", as you put it.

This... and the older you get, the more complex it is to find this balance... Real world obligations, bills to pay, it becomes more difficult to just switch from software to software, even though 3D, once you learn it, it is easier to adapt.. But it takes time, specially when you've been working with a specific software for more than a decade - which is my situation with C4D.

Interesting discussion. I've been a pro freelancer for a long time. One of the main things that is rarely considered enough in these threads is the value of your time. Why am I still using C4D? Do I think it's the greatest? No, I don't - but it provides adequate tools to do what I need. Are there better tools out there for me? Quite possibly: Maya, Max, Houdini, Modo, Blender... What about renderers? I use Redshift. Maybe Octane would be better, or Arnold, or Corona or... The issue is time. There is an opportunity cost for that. I can earn, or I can explore. Every hour I spend learning a new software is an hour of income I loose. That is where the big cost is to me. I'd love to be able to spend time exploring alternatives, but it gets expensive in time, and therefore cost, very quickly. Learning a new package or developing skills in the current one is a tricky balance to strike.

100% agree...and that extends to every manager in C4D. They all just make sense. The managers and C4D's stability keeps me using the program. I did try modo 401 and while the modeling tools were outstanding I just could not get my head wrapped around their object manager (every mesh in the scene was under one item called "mesh" in the object tree -- why?). Likewise, while Blender has made some improvements, it still does things that don't make sense (eg. parametric objects only stay parametric with first activation -- why?). And while Blender now has an OM, you can't drag and drop materials onto items in the OM. I used to take the entire tag architecture of C4D for granted because it just made so much sense. I mean, all these programs are written in C++ which is an object-oriented architecture so a tag architecture should seem like a logical way to go. But it is not. A good test for me with any new software is to see how far I can get using the demo without the benefit of any documentation or training. If you can use it straight out of the box, then you know you will have a pleasurable user experience. I got further with C4D than with any other program. That same experience with Blender was a little "clunky". So, if I may quote Cerbera), Blender just doesn't feel like home. But that does not mean it could never become home. To continue with that analogy, everyone hates to move but when things get too expensive living where you are then you have to move. I would hate to move to Blender, but that is up to MAXON in their pricing decisions on what the hobbyist user means to them. My ideal world? Blender focus on improving their object and texture managers (drag and drop capability, ctrl-copy, etc) and brings them up to C4D standards and Insydium (already in the Blender camp with Cycles) ports X-Particles to Blender. That would get me to move. Dave

Added a new video as well:

Yes, and impressed as I am by the improvements they have made I just can't get with it. I still don't like the interface, the shortcuts, the look of geo, and a great number of other things about it. As of right now, Cinema is definitely where I prefer to be. Having said that, I am not mad keen on Maya's GUI either. And I only don't mind Max's because I have so much experience there myself, and it was where I started. Modo I do like the look of more than both those, but nothing quite as much as Cinema 😉

As there is a severe lack of resources for cutting edge real-time asset creation workflows for C4d and as we use C4D for games I felt the need to give something back to the community, especially as it took me many years to learn how these things all work. (Link below) Hopefully this helps other people and I hope MAXON will push more towards realtime modeling and baking workflows as real-time seems to be the future even for movies and VFX with the lines continually blurring, Plus it turns out that C4D surprisingly has very strong advantages in many areas over the typical real-time Modeling softwares (Blender, Max, Maya) nobody seems to know about in these circles. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- https://polycount.com/discussion/212367/cinema-4d-for-game-art-game-development-resources-c4d-vs-blender-or-max/p1?new=1 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Additional Notes: C4D Has surprisingly many advantages over other software even for realtime / games and its smarter workflows can be leveraged for big advantages that were not so apparent at first, in our comparisons inhouse with Blender it did win strongly overall but is then sadly roadblocked by a couple of key issues: - Lack of multi object UV editing (by far the biggest issue) - Lack of Split Phong by UV splits (Essential for Baking, saves a lot of work) - Lack of Face Weighted normals modifier (Popular and powerful current gen workflow - please add a angle based setting to Bevel modifier) - Lack of Usable Internal Normal / Curvature Baker (not a must have tho but baking curvature could also aid the others / MoGraph guys a lot) We have a successful game modelled entirely in C4D with 95% rating and hundred thousand players, if anyone from MAXON is reading this, please message me if you want a report on pitfalls/C4D marketability for cutting edge realtime workflows, I would be very pleased to help. Edit: Added new Video

What's up people!? Haven't been around the past few years due to the fact that my work requires me to sit behind a pc monitor all day and I would like to do things in the real world as well 😅 But I do want to share with you the first organic 3D model I made in Cinema 4D yeaaaaars ago. I bought a 3D printer and dicided to print it. It's my first mini and 3D print I ever made so kind off proud on it. Hopefuly more (C4D made) prints to show in the near future. Anyway, I hope everyone is and stays healthy in these strange times. Peace out😉

Hi. Iv touched some areas of rigging, setting up constraints. correctional morphs. Feedback in viewport is fast and looks so nice. I had to mainly deal with modelling tasks. My daughter was doing a Graphic Game Media course at college. She naturally came to me for help. They wanted proof she did the work in Maya but also allowed some work to be done in C4D. My daughter didnt know Maya an neither did I and the tutors didn't either lol. I started doing some training for Maya, just basics and using my intuition crossing between C4D and Maya. After a sort period about 30 hours I was getting things done and felt regret that I could not own it outright as I liked it, so didn't pursue learning it further because it was too expensive. My speciality is in Digital Sculpting and anatomy study which opened up to being a generalist, but had always wanted to understand rigging. Going way back my first rigging experience on a basic level was in XSI, then I took a course rigging in Max, this was enough to let me know rigging as a speciality was not for me, it gets way too technical, much deeper when your having to write scripts and rig hard surface objects e.c.t. Not giving up on rigging I then as a beta tester for DAZ3D for all their software range delved into rigging with DAZ3D specialist tools while working with a DAZ3D colleague on a project. I later moved on to Modo where again I touched on rigging characters. I got to rig some cartoon based characters in MODO where some past aspects of Max finally clicked with me. I hit some limitations in MODO and combined it with Messiah Studio, learnt some cool stuff in there, done some rigging training in there too. Next was C4D where it sat bang in the middle between Maya and Modo. Iv seen some exceptional character rigging done in C4D, and some great modelling, so while Maya, Modo may be better in some areas a lot can be said for being proficient in where your comfortable working in. If your working in software that's better but you feel your fighting against it you will not work fast, this is how MODO left me feeling often. This may be where Jay is coming from, he knows C4D well enough and feels comfortable enough to be very efficient with it and get the job done. Dan

Remember you can also bake down objects externally. This is kinda unheard in cinema circles and has a strong learning curve but highpoly to lowpoly baking is the bread and butter of gamedev and other workflows as well. So you can make a highpoly and bake it down to a lowpoly with Marmoset Toolbag and then have a WAY more performant model than you ever could otherwise. As you can see in my first video about welding seams, the Oil Pump was baked down and looked very highpoly as with hundreds of thousands of polygons but was extremely lowpoly, like 3000 or something. This is a lot of effort but speeds up rendering insanely if you really need the performance. (On the polycount.com wiki there is a lot of info about Highpoly > Lowpoly baking) Volume builder is really next level for baking down things. Baking down curvature and AO is also the only good workflow to create good textures. If you want real professional grade texturing with proper damage you need baked maps. You can get so far with proceduals and tiling cubic materials but it dosn't come close to a professionally baked properly textured asset. These are some extremely lowpoly props (no texture, curvature map only) so these are noticeably flawed, but you can bake at any resolution, the closer to the highpoly, the more perfect the result. But imagine how much faster this 80 vert mattress renders than your 500000 vertex mattress. The huge advantage with volume builder is that my lowpoly can be my highpoly. Usually you would need to model both seperately entirely, but here I can basically generate myself a highpoly which is huge.

Awesome! Thanking you kindly! 🙏

With some effort you can sometimes make it workable, but it's usually more effort than most people want to put in. The secret to making it work is to keep the wireframe view on before you take your editable copy, and adjust smoothing / voxel size until you have a continuous edge loop around where your secondary material needs to be. You only need 1 ! Then you can Loop Select that later, then fill Selection to get the contained polys. It sometimes takes quite a while to find the settings that give you that perimeter loop, but they usually are there somewhere, though not always ! However, that has saved me on several occasions in the past. CBR

I wouldn't get too excited 😕 Well it technically can, but actually, in its current iteration you probably wouldn't want to - as soon as you leave the 0% you lose your perfect surfacing, and unless you keep it very low (around the 1% level) this becomes a fairly untenable situation I find. Also there is a great difficulty in making material selections with volume builder meshes, so whilst it is unquestionably brilliant for some things, those things remain fairly limited until we get some more control over that edge flow... CBR

DamageExample.c4d Heres a scene file with both examples but its very fast to setup

Hey hey I recently saw someone finding a way to do this in Houdini, which sparked my interest again of trying to solve the issue and I think I figured it out now and its surprisingly easy. Anyone who is doing a lot of texturing knows that edge definition is the key for realistic models. The Same does count for the models themselves. People usually sculpt this with a lot of manual labor. Now its very easy to add noise to your objects with volume builder to get some smooth edges and cool details but this is always on your entire mesh. So how do we get damage only at the edges? I found out some nice tricks after some experimentation which are actually rather easy to do. There are 2 methods, one more classical with a boolean, one which is volume builder exclusive. You can also get much better results than in my preview as I spent nearly no time tweaking for looks. Also check out my previous Video about Welding Seams: And my thread about GAME ART workflows for C4D:

If such a time ever comes when I leave Cinema (which isn't looking immediately likely) then this is definitely a viable option. Making stuff in Maya might be a bit like painting a hallway through a letterbox, but nobody can deny it has ALL the tools, specially in the modelling and rigging departments, though it is strong pretty much everywhere TBH... I have traditionally massively disliked Autodesk and the things they do, but this sort of exceptionally reasonable pricing definitely makes me dislike them a bit less. But only a bit because I bet they only did it because they felt they had to 🙂 CBR