Leaderboard

Just one other observation.....for a thread on R25 expectations, we are spending an unusual amount of time talking about Blender. In marketing, there is a concept called the "tipping point" - when one event creates a huge change in the market's perception of, interest in, and demand for a product. The tipping point for Blender was R2.8. The fact that this thread is talking just as much about Blender than a new release of C4D is further evidence of that chain reaction created by the release of R2.8. And Blender has only improved since R2.8 with grease pencil, improved mesh editing and further viewport and render improvements with Cycles X and Eevee. Can anyone else honestly tell me how Maxon can compete with Blender? The market momentum is already on Blender's side and the posts from those professionals in the industry talking about how their pipelines/projects need to be Blender compatible show that as well. C4D had some market momentum the year they released R20. R20 was just an awesome release, C4D won a technical Oscar that year and Maxon purchased Redshift. That all went into the crapper the next year when they introduced subscriptions - which, interestingly enough, was right after Blender released R2.8. So that year, late in 2018, was a rather critical nexus point for both companies. Blender's momentum started to increase while C4D's momentum started to decrease. Honestly, lost momentum is a tough thing to get back in the market place and Maxon should really pay attention to what is going on in the market and proceed with extreme caution. The focus now should be on how to hold on to customers rather than how to increase revenue. Yes...they may need to take a loss for a few years if they hope to survive this inflection point towards Blender. Redshift moving to subscription only was NOT a good move. Should Maxon announce that R25 is now subscription only (no more perpetual), then it will only be a matter of time. Dave

It's interesting that you mention viewport performance. Two of the major drawbacks of Blender are mesh edit mode performance and sub-d modifier performance. In fact, v2.8 introduced regressions in these cases! And earlier versions were pretty bad at dealing with heavy meshes. With v2.93 the devs finally realized that mesh editing had become too much of a bottleneck. I regularly test various DCCs how they cope with heavy meshes. Blender did not cope well at all. Only LightWave Modeler was worse. Cinema4D (before the core updates) did a little better than Blender 2.8, but only by a slim margin. V2.93 improved mesh editing to a similar level of performance of C4D 23/24. Perhaps a tad slower for medium-heavy meshes. That said, C4D chokes completely on heavier meshes of 2 million polys when I try to select all of them and transform. Compared, B 2.93 keeps chugging along. Blender is better at dealing with heavier data sets, as far as my tests indicate. But. BUT! The Blender devs have been hard at work this Summer doing a mesh performance improvement code sprint. v3 alpha is by far more performant now, and leaves Cinema4D 24 far behind. My tests indicate that v3 is as about as fast as Houdini in regards to pure raw mesh editing, much faster than Maya, and much MUCH faster than C4D. At this point only LightWave Modeler is slower than Cinema4d. 3ds Max is still king of the hill, though: it munches through heavy meshes without breaking a sweat. It's in its own league, and nothing comes close. The B devs have also been hard at work improving the sub-d performance, btw. As far as sculpting performance goes: Blender already outpaces C4D by a wide margin in my tests. And as you @DasFrodoalready mentioned: B deals easily with far more objects in a scene than C4D. In my tests that is also quite obvious. C4D is relatively quickly brought to its knees with hundreds of objects, while B happily devours thousands. I have to say that I was surprised to discover that 23/24 performed quite poorly in regards to heavy mesh editing, since the core update ought to have delivered more performance? I don't know. Perhaps the upcoming R25 will be the real performance booster update. All in all, Maxon MUST improve C4D's overall performance to keep up with the competition. In particular when the upcoming free option leaves C4D in the proverbial digital dust.

I recently had a super complex testscene with thousands of objects. Just out of sheer curiosity I opened them up in all 3D packages I have available: C4D imported the FBX super fast (under a minute) but the scene was unusable. Barely 3FPS, selecting stuff took seconds after the click 3DS Max took over 30 damn minutes to import. Barely 5FPS, selecting stuff took seconds after the click Houdini imported in seconds, decreased but very, very usable performance. I didn't expect anything else tbh Blender imported in seconds, decreased but very, very usable performance. The UI snapiness took a hit, but that's about it After that I can definitely understand why the Maxon team have been reworking the entire software from the core up. It's insane how much faster Blender is in viewport performance, WHILE doing fancy shader stuff at the same time.

So a 14 year old kid made that Take-Out video in Blender? I am pretty sure that while Eevee helped, that kid has raw talent and could make anything look good in any software. When I was 14, the closest I got to animation was stop motion animation and had to build wire armatures if I wanted anything animated that was more exciting than Hot Wheels cars moving on their own. Kids are soooooo lucky these days. Dave

Actually apart from the improvement in Xrefs and Parent Constraints I forgot to mention I would like to see improvements in the viewport! When doing character work I find that when I have more than two characters in a scene C4D really starts to chug…

The Pro account would help you with what you wrote you don’t want. Why would you even think about the Pro account then?

As no-one else has responded - unless by PM... The person that comes to my mind is https://chriscousins.myportfolio.com/ He's based in the UK like myself - so that maybe too remote for you. However, I do recall him doing some drapery work (Houdini) that looked very good: https://chriscousins.myportfolio.com/queen-adam-lambert-drapes He's a top man IMO.