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Sadly this is the truth now. I also know many developers who have left C4D plugin development. With the cost of subscriptions and the fact that nobody wants to pay to help develop a plugin to its full potential, the number of C++ developers will go down to almost 0. The C++ plugin development market will disappear completely. - The cost of C4D for one reason. Developers now have to either pay a monthly subscription or be eligible to join the registered developer program. If you are a C++ developer then please reach out to support and ask about their developer program. You may be eligible. - Ongoing SDK changes means throwing away lots of code. Anything for R19 backwards needs a re-write. - Every new version of C4D requires building and maintaining a new version of the plugin for customers. - And since Catalina for macOS it is now much much harder to build and release a plugin for OSX. Unless you do it right the OS will block your plugin from loading. - Equipment issues. You have to have multiple machines to be able to build and test these plugins. - Taxes. If you are running a proper registered business you have to do it properly. You can't sell your plugins anywhere legally unless you collect and remit tax to all the different countries in the world. GumRoad and FastSpring do that. But that takes a 8% cut of the sale. - Business costs: If you are running a business then that costs as well. Very hard to break even selling things cheap or giving them away, - New License System: In R20 developers had an easy way to lock to the serial number of C4D. But since R21 onwards every C4D developer now needs to roll their own custom built licensing system. Every Single Developer needs to do this. Reinventing the wheel over and over. It is not easy to do and takes so much time to develop and adds zero benefit to the plugin you are actually trying to sell. - Making C++ plugins for C4D is increasingly become much harder as well. They have a brand new way of doing things that will eventually mean you need to update more and more of your original code. Possibly leading to the inability to have one code base for all version of C4D. - Websites, Support, Documentation, Video Tutorials... the list goes on and on. If you just want to write small plugins that are more workflow oriented and less computationally expensive, then Python is the way to go. But even then you will run into issues as the SDK changes. It takes a very long time to become proficient enough to develop a plugin that is useful enough to even consider trying to sell. Then you have Marketing and selling of your plugin, which is an art form all in itself. For myself I find I am really only able to squeeze in a little bit of dev time here and there. I have an automated build system which is an absolute life saver. But you still need to do websites, videos and support. For anyone still reading this... if you like a plugin or a plugin developer then treat them kindly. Donate where you can, support them anyway you can. Because before long they will all be gone. I see a lot of articles about artists not working for exposure. The act of a plugin developer giving plugins away cheaply or even for free is exactly that. Just to get the word out. But unless they get paid then they will all leave. And they will all leave. It is just not profitable unless you spend 2 years making 1 plugin that hits the ball out of the park first go. But who has the time for that these days. Best of luck to all you devs out there!

+1 on your entire post. Since the release of R21 I seem to have noticed quite a decline in plugin purchases ... that was until I entirely stopped the business due to costs rising way over benefits. My main reason for selling plugins was to be able to get enough income from it to remain up to date with the latest Cinema4D versions. That's one idea down the drain. Now that I had decided to stay with R20, I was looking for the plugins to pay for an Octane and/or Redshift license. Community seems to have decided that's not going to happen. I am stuck on R20 (which I like), but am also finally wondering if I need to get some feet wet into Blender. Over the past few months I have been tinkering to release all my plugins free of charge ... and step away from Cinema4D development entirely. Therefore, I uploaded a free version of EasyUV, hoping to get some feedback to see if it would be worth to make the step to make my other plugins available for free. So far it's been a flop, but it's maybe too early to take conclusions. I have mentioned how I felt about R21 in the past, and seeing what R23 brought us I wasn't too sad I couldn't/wouldn't upgrade. As far as expectations for R25 are involved: I seem to don't care anymore where Cinema4D is heading to. So, maybe it's time for me to move on ... while still enjoying the use of R20.

Hi guys. I want to get a feel for the needs of the community regarding training? It would also be helpful to know what version of software your using now? Thanks, Dan

Sorry, not my area of expertise

The topology of C4D's Remesher is pretty bad. I can recommend Exoside's Quadmesher plugin. I use it mostly to remesh Volume and Boolean models and for this it gives pretty good results. I'm happy to have a good plugin that provides this functionality but I feel it's an essential feature that Maxon should provide. Sculpting, Volumes and Booleans are three artist friendly ways of generating models and they all need autoretopo to live up to their potential. Could an autoretopo algorithm for Volume meshes not be trained using machine learning? Start with a database of models with perfect quad topology. Remesh the models using the Volume Builder and Mesher. Train a neural network by using the remeshed models as input and comparing the output with the original models. Shouldn't this be possible?

Thanks kbar, I checked out what you mentioned regarding the "Surface Distance", and that is indeed what I was looking for. I must have missed this, since this is option is only available on the "Grab" brush and not the other ones for some reason. Regardless I'm glad to know about this function and I'm grateful you pointed it out . Concerning what you mentioned about the sculpting layers, while I appreciate that you've expanded C4D's sculpting toolset, I still don't think it answers why C4D itself doesn't ship with these features, especially since the sculpting module was introduced way back in R14 and has remained virtually untouched since then. I believe that remeshing is an expected feature for modern digital sculpting, and really should be included in any self respecting software that wants to stay competitive and advertises a fully functional sculpting workflow, as opposed to an addendum toolset to modeling. I've experimented with the "Remesh" and found the results to be very unimpressive, especially compared to the auto-topo solutions from Zbrush, 3dcoat, mudbox, the Exoside plugin, and even blender. My point is not to bash Maxon's efforts, but rather to point out that they've allowed themselves to fall way behind the trend, and if they want to catch up and stay competitive then they've got to step it up, especially considering that they introduced sculpting almost ten years ago. As far as Bodypaint is concerned, I respectfully reject the notion that C4D users are disinterested in Bodypaint and it's future development. Your experience with your "Symmetry" addition and it's dramatic change in downloads ratio, should tell you that Bodypaint users are not disinterested, but rather unwilling to pay any extra to gain basic features that are standard in other packages and should come with no additional fee. Also, the idea that Bodypaint was abandoned because users expect live feedback confuses me. Many years ago, Bodypaint was a prominent staple in professional pipelines and had a strong foothold in the industry; Why would it be traded for other programs that are identically deficient? The fact is that Bodypaint has been neglected for years, and I remember 3dKiwi ranting about this years ago and still nothing's changed even up until now. In fact, his Bodypaint tutorial course from about (over) ten years ago is probably still completely accurate. Substance is a relatively new software, but I remember even a few years ago, when hand-painted textures were a bigger market, 3dCoat was much more prolific than Bodypaint, and offered a much more feature-rich solution for painting. Even today 3dCoat continues to stay competitive with the integration of a BPR workflow, smart materials, and masks etc. Blender has also become a much better solution for painting and general workflow, is constantly being updated and developed, and for many is the Swiss Army knife tool that a lot of studios are adopting for the majority of their work. And is also free. I want to reiterate that my intention is not to "hate" on Maxon, but rather to voice my criticism and hope that they decide to up their game. Competition is what motivates the industry, and those program devs that are content to stay in their respective lanes or get too full of themselves, will fall by the wayside to other packages that are eager to dominate and become number one; Zbrush, Houdini, and Blender are good examples of upward trending, highly competitive programs.

The basic functionality that C4D is missing is the ability to have part of a model symmetrical and a part not. For instance when making a head you could like to have the mouth asymmetrical while the rest stays symmetric. It's about workflow. Now we are in a situation where you can have a fully symmetrical model with the symmetry object. But once you make it editable to be able to make an asymmetrical change you loose the ability to still change the parts that you want to keep symmetrical. It's how symmetry works in the sculpting system. It's something you can turn on or off depending on your need. It shouldn't even require similar topology on both sides but make the symmetric changes based on the distance from the plane of symmetry. This is something that I'm sure many people would find very useful, which is why it's returning for over ten years now in these feature wish lists.

I also developed an entire system for symmetrical painting that works using a Sculpting style workflow on top of the existing Body Paint layers system. I gave this away for free for a while too but have recently pulled it all down. Nobody really wants it (although it had over 3000 downloads when I made it pay what you want, but only earned about $7 in donations). Everyone has moved onto other applications. The main issue that many people face now is that they are using 3rd Party renderers in C4D. And you can't paint live on a texture and have it update in that renderer. People using Mari and Substance are disconnected enough that this does not bother them. But inside C4D people expect, or want to, see the final result while they are painting. So no one really wants to setup Standard Materials in C4D just so they can texture paint anymore. And in a world of procedural materials and textures I really don't know many people that even paint anymore at all. If you know people who want these tools then let me know. You could paint using Stamps, Stencils with Symmetry right in the Viewport. These tools have been around since R17. https://www.plugins4d.com/Product/PaintBrushes I am curious to know what people actually want from BodyPaint. It sounds like it is just a new look to make it seem fresh. Internally it is a solid system. But these days do people want to paint on textures or do they want to paint masks like what Substance does? How complex are the models people want to paint? Mari is dedicated and can handle huge models and a large number and large sized, textures. Which is why it has a custom caching system. Can you, or should you, even attempt to compete with Mari? A dedicated tool for the job will always win for painting complex models in a studio setup. And with the subscription model now they don’t even sell BodyPaint3D as a separate application, so even harder to convince a studio to purchase a Swiss Army knife tool like C4D when all they want is a dedicated painting tool.