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Cinema 4D is a great package, but there are so many area that are neglected and should really get some attention, before new features are introduced. Just a quick disclaimer before I start ranting: I am a big fan of Cinema 4D, and the following is not meant to be inflammatory or insulting to the Maxon team, I'm just submitting my frank opinion as constructive criticism. Motion trails are useful, but have some serious shortcomings, and I would love to see a proper arc tracker, like the ones available for Maya, such as the Atools' arc tracker. Also having the pan/zoom tool would be a welcome addition for animation, and long overdue. Cinema's sculpting module could also use some love, like having a "Surface" option for the brushes, like there is for "soft selection" editing. Or being able to duplicate layers - I can't believe such a basic feature isn't available. A basic remesher would be nice, or dynamic topology. PLA is SUCH a cool feature, but it could be so much more, with just a few additions that would allow much more control. Like a PLA brush set, that can allow animators to intensify, tween, smooth, or erase PLA modifications, without having to go point by tedious point to get good results. In my opinion, PLA could be a real game changer for animation, and really set C4D apart from other packages. Even though I'm a fan of C4D's symmetry generator, symmetrical modeling would be a welcome addition and a very useful option. While on the subject of symmetry, symmetrical painting in the very neglected BodyPaint3d would be nice, as well as some general updates and baking options, to make it more user friendly and modern to be competitive with Substance and Mari. In my opinion, BodyPaint3d is a missed opportunity, and could have really been a serious alternative to Substance Painter, like 3dCoat tries to be, if Maxon had kept up with BodyPaint3d and the new workflows emerging in the industry. Also, something must be done about Cinema's rendering. For a few years Maxon was promising a GPU renderer in the form of ProRender, which never got off the ground, and turned out to be a huge disappointment and waste of time. Maxon went on to purchase Redshift, but refuses to integrate it with Cinema as a default renderer, so they can maximize sales, which is understandable, but nevertheless, leaving the Maxon customer base high and dry is unacceptable. The standard and physical renderers were very good in their times, but desperately need an update. Either integrate Redshift into C4D, like Autodesk did with Arnold, or give Cinema 4D users, a viable alternative. Another area that could use some love, would be the hair module. I really enjoy the hair tools, and Maxon was way ahead of the trend, when it came to hair and grooming, but they've allowed themselves to fall behind other hair packages, like XGen, Ornatrix, Yeti, etc. which capitalize on a procedural workflow. I would welcome Maxon to convert C4d Hair to a more procedural workflow, but even without that, it wouldn't take much to stay competitive. Even just a few features to stay relevant, like Strand groups, region painting, more controlled clumping, more intuitive hair material (modifier) stacking etc. Also, C4D's viewport does not handle hair well, and slows to a crawl unless most hairs are hidden, making it harder to get decent feedback while working. Cinema's dynamics system is really lacking, and could use some attention. There are other features that I would like to see, but these are some that have been at the top my list for a while. Thanks for reading, and putting up with my rant 😉.

The only other company which comes to mind is Newtek (LightWave). And that is certainly NOT an example to follow. In a sense, Maxon actually behaves more poorly than even Newtek, because Newtek at least interacted with their customer base off-and-on. This still irks me to this day: BodyPaint was 'da bomb' when it first was released. It was ahead of its time. IF it had been updated regularly, and adopted a PBR workflow, nodes, a proper realtime PBR viewport.... Can you imagine? Substance Painter and perhaps Designer would have been the second choice. Perhaps. BodyPaint was a prime reason for me to use C4D at the time. I still find it absolutely unbelievable how Maxon dropped the ball here. They could have carved out and owned this market segment. But seeing Physical render, dynamics, hair, and sculpt mode receive(d) the same "build it once, let it linger" approach of development, I am not surprised. Still, I can't help but wonder sometimes how different things could have turned out if C4D management had had just a tiny ounce of imagination and vision regarding BodyPaint. What could have been. Oh, the lost opportunities. 😔

Previously I've dabbled with stepped pendulums, just affected by gravity, where the wire lengths increase in a linear manner - you can get nice sine wave type patterns eg here. I once saw a guy on TV - Stephen Fry - with a multi pendulum model doing just this, and he casually made a throwaway remark 'of course if you let it run long enough, the pendulums return to their original start positions' ie in a straight line. I thought 'that can't be true'. I tried (in C4D) all combinations of wire lengths and increments, but all I got was straight line start > sine waves > chaotic movement I once let a sim run for about 75,000F - but just got chaos and no alignment. Then I saw some math online that explained the align trick... I chose a time period for alignment - 20 sec Using the standard pendulum formula, I calculated the wire length to make the longest pendulum do 18 complete swings (period - T) in 20 secs I set the length of the next (shorter) pendulum to do 19T in 20 secs then the next pendulum to do 20T in 20 secs next 21T in 20 secs etc up to 27T in 20 sec for the 10th pendulum In theory, the pendulums should align every 20 sec. I set it running and the alignment was close, but not good enough. The problem was that the simple pendulum formula only works for small angles - it uses the approximation (in radians) of sin(x) = x which falls down over about 10 degrees. The math for large angles is quite complex - I decided to manually tweak my computed values until the weights lined up. So the final result was down to a mixture of python and intuition/guesswork. Works quite well. the pendulums line up every 20s - blink and you'll miss it

While on the topic of BodyPaint... what is extremely disappointing is how silent Maxon is on it (and frankly many other features). Nothing is mentioned about how dated it is, and it comes off as if nothing is wrong with it. In fact, they continue to publish quick tip videos featuring BodyPaint: https://youtu.be/Pm4mtXhBZ_I. Like give me a break. We all love C4D, but something has to change with their constant secrecy. Stop leaving us in the dark.