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So I think it is safe to say that hyperbole is lost upon you and you definitely went out of bounds with your conclusions. Hopefully that rant made you feel better and work out some of your frustrations. But if not, may I suggest you take a breath and calm down while I try to explain EXACTLY what I meant. And to do that, I will start with some of the background motivation behind that post. To me C4D is a place of joy and has been that way for me for 16 years. I love the interface, the stability and the ease of use. I also admire the craft, brilliance and dedication of those who develop it. I do not love renting it. I want to own it. I think we are all wired to prefer ownership rather than renting. Owning puts you in control of how and when you use the software. When you think long term, I want that control to use the software without the burden of paying a subscription. I want that control because I also believe that the locked in revenue provided by subscriptions reduce the pressure to compete on features. We are also wired to think that "subscriptions" mean "maintenance" and under that belief is the assumption that bugs get fixed and feature requests get fulfilled. Well, that is not always the case (just look at Adobe and Autodesk). It won't be until you have a couple of lack-luster releases in a row that you realize "Hey....subscriptions really mean "renting" because I have been paying over and over again but getting no real improvements to the software that are meaningful to me. It is just the same old thing year after year!". Well, it is when that inevitable day arrives that I also want a perpetual license so I have the freedom to say goodbye but not lose access to my work. History has shown that these are not incorrect conclusions or invalid concerns. Subscriptions are the product of management teams that are under pressure from their parent corporations to grow revenue and profit year over year and subscriptions have shown that they can do that. They were not created with the user in mind but rather the corporation. They just sacrifice the individual user and hobbyist in the process. Hey, everyone is doing it so we are stuck. We have no voice to change anything. So forgive me if I just don't enjoy listening to someone telling me that subscriptions are for my own good. I would much rather spend my time in the company of people who care more about the software and the needs of the user than the revenue it can create....and that would be Blender. Now, I am studying and using Blender. While not C4D, I now realize why it is growing in popularity. It has some seriously powerful tools and capabilities. I mean, there are whole Netflix series made using Blender. Not sure I have seen more than a TV station ID, short film or a FUI done with C4D in the popular media. I have never seen a whole series. C4D is one tool in an arsenal but it appears Blender wants to be the whole arsenal. Blender is working its way into production pipelines. It is proving itself in the marketplace and the users are loving it for good reason. If Blender was just a tool for users to "virtue signal" (how you came to that conclusion is a bit of a stretch but we will go with it), then why is Maxon porting Redshift to Blender? They are doing that because it is a growing market that they need to address. It is good business. Now, if you still want to rant at me please do it via private PM and let's spare the forum your vitriol. Now, I will not respond if you do as this post is all the effort your type of response deserves but please feel free to PM me if there is still some more frustration you wish to work out. Who knows, I may (or may not) actually read it but I do believe you need the therapeutic benefits that type of rant provides. Have a nice day, Dave

I've been playing around with Photogrammetry / Photoscanning in the last couple of days and I gotta say I'm impressed by how easy this has become. I've tried two different softwares so far: Meshroom (which is free and open source) Agisoft Metashape (which is 170$ for the basic version) Why am I posting this in the Blender thread? Because I rendered the scan with Blender and I really don't see a point opening up another thread for this 🙂 I think the results speak for themselves. Mind you, this is the second object I scanned and I didn't really prepare much for this at all! Of course, the topology sucks, but that's not the point of these kinds of models, is it? And here's the original: What you see here has been done with Metashape... I've tried Meshroom but it's increadibly slow and also way more complicated to use than Metashape. I'd say 170$ for a perpetual of a software that gives an absolute photogrammetry beginner these results is okay though 😉 The bulk of the time needed for this was just the computer calculating the result. All that I did was walk around the model with an iPhone (video recording) and trying to get every possible angle. I then extracted every fifth frame of that video as a jpeg, fed that into Metashape and let the software do it's thing. I'd say that's pretty user friendly. For the curios, that's the final shots the software calculated. Not all shots that I fed into it were actually chosen by the software as "good enough" and / or "necessary":

Today I've been making some tests with character animation, duplicating some of my previously rigged characters in Blender... and one of them was this crappy dinosaur, badly rigged hehe... I've been following a bit of Pierrick's new animation course called ALIVE, and... got a bit carried away.. one thing led to another and...

@Chris Phillips@FLima They are working on an integrated asset manager. The first version is planned for the V3 release in October. Keep track of Blender's development: https://code.blender.org/2021/06/asset-browser-workshop-outcomes/ And I whole-heartedly agree that this is really going to simplify life for artists in Blender. C4D always got this part right.

I think they're working on a proper Material Manager at the moment, thank god. I've been trying to learn Blender and while its an incredible product I still find myself missing the C4D user experience. However Blender feels like a much more complete program and Eevee is incredibly good. Is Redshift RT going to be C4D's answer to Eevee? Do other 3D apps have an equivalent to Eevee, or is Blender way out in front in that regard?

Maybe you could go for something a bit fun, off the wall and intriguing: "Mission impossible" or "Close Enconters of the 3D Kind"

Agreed that this would be a useful thing to have. But as mentioned above, I would suggest to name it "Workflow translations", or something similar. I find using "versus" immediately includes some connotations related to "competitivism", which this new sub-forum would be the exact opposite of.

Yeah, I think for your situation specifically, Houdini is a whole different beast, and the most powerful software on what it does. No comparison really. For me, it is still a bit difficult to grasp having to move to a different software... I still love working on C4D a lot, in spite of all these horrible decisions with subscription model, and what not... I will give Houdini a shot once I finish my two current projects. I have a friend who just started working with it, and visually, what he is doing... it is absolutely amazing. ----- By the way folks, Here is the final render from my Jurassic Park Scene. The goal for this test was to see if I could replicate a bit of the "stop motion/miniature feel" that I want for my short film, not using Redshift. And it worked superb. Eevee is not perfect, but definitely a great step in the right direction.

Now now, let's not get angry here. What he probably meant is that he watches the rest of the show... but not Daves announcements. Which I can kind of understand. I solely (used to) watch it to get the info without waiting for someone else to just make a tl;dr. He's definitely not making it super exciting that's for sure.