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FLima, I appreciate the long, thoughtful breakdown of suggestions for what you think I should be writing on this forum, I do, but on reflection I'll write what I want to write, not what you want me to write. All that said these accusations of toxicity, anger, shaking fists and becoming red faced are strange to read about as I honestly view this as just a fun robust discussion - seriously! - with everyone making various points, and I've conceded in places where folks make a good case for their POV, including the guy above who had clear and specific reasons why subs didn't work for him. So I said, yeah, that seems fair, I can see why you might not be happy about that circumstance. Then there's the shock and dismay of me returning 'again and again' to the topic of C4D, R25 and subs in a thread that now runs over 30 pages. My god, the sheer effrontery of some guy returning to the subject and making more than one post. Someone call the cops, a forum crime is in progress and arrests must be made. If I make points you feel are inaccurate, you're welcome to advise where I'm wrong or off-base or misguided. This is normally how things work in a conversation in a thread on the internet. But rather than doing that in your fat paragraph you adopt the surfer dude Keanu Reeves persona of whoa dude, chill out, give us a break, you're coming on too strong, all this positivity is way out of line, I simply cannot handle this enthusiasm, please give us a rest from this opposing viewpoint. I'm assuming if I'd said something that you had an argument against, you would have made an argument against it. Instead, it's oh no - here's this guy with his fifth or sixth post expressing enthusiasm for Maxon and R25, and asking for questions and clarifications on why people feel the way that they do. As usual in these release threads five guys post multiple long rants about how Maxon, Dave McGavran, C4D and subs are all collectively a crime requiring Interpol to interview witnesses and gather evidence for a court case with Ton Roosendaal as the crisply spoken prosecuting attorney, but someone expresses an opposing viewpoint hinting that those same five guys are a little bit OTT, and jaws drop, looks are exchanged, someone places Chic's Le Freak (Freak Out) on the turntable, and it's whoa dude, my god, this is too much, can this man be stopped etc etc. The hypocrisy is so comical it does make me laugh. Feel free to compare my positive posts with those from folks saying C4D has been murdered, Maxon must donate to the Blender team for crimes against copyright, subs are a sign of an Orwellian 1984-style future where all of us will live in fear on the streets like those poor bastards in HALF LIFE 2. Evidently by the accounts of people with a level head who have used it, R25 is a fun and nifty release with a thoughtful new UI redo that will take some weeks to settle into and will clear the way for a cool and robust S26. Re 'you must have had a bad experience with a Blender user' - gee, do you think? Cutman at CGTalk has managed to personally crap all over what was once a robust forum though half a decade of toxic posts. He's the highest profile rep yet in C4D forums of what a great and friendly user base Blender has and his record will likely stand for a while. Although Hvanderwegen (cool user name) makes a fine post above and I like his enthusiasm for Blender V3. Re Mazurbr - "When exactly did I insult you?" Mazurbr, you've never insulted me. Instead, you've made multiple posts calling Dave McGavran 'Adobe guy' despite the fact that Dave is here in this thread and is closing in on 100 posts on this forum. Imagine everyone sitting around at a table over drinks, and you point at him and call him 'Adobe guy' to the rest of the room, hardly the definition of politeness. In this light the guy above writing 'whoa dude, please stop it with all these posts expressing positivity, I can't stand this anger and toxicity' seems even more dumb and misguided.

I love Houdini and C4D too. the messages received yesterday, under my personal point of view, it was not an error but has ben sent voluntary to inform all the community waiting for Blender 3 and juts sow the new C4dR25 that also they are coming with a new big release: SideFx is saying: "dear houdini people, we are arriving in one month with a new release and bla bla bla". And now a lot of people are in stuck waiting them. Has been a commercial action. But I not complaint about this, it is good. In any case, I have some notes on Houdini 1) For me it is not an issue to use VEX after spending years developing in C but, please, VOP for me is a real mess. But we cannot imagine creating something using only code and when you put, for instance, a Pyro on an object it is not easy, for a beginner, to understand what happen. The Spehra pbject is modified with new nodes and other two object are addend on your table. Houdini is powerful but sometime, for me, could be simplify. I agree that also in C4D when you befin to include a lot of tags tags, instances, plane effector plus fileoff (why they continue to call it failoff and not field) ... so C4d too, in some case, it is not easy . In that case the node is more clear especially when you reopen a orpject afetr a while 😄 2) I never understood why some node in Houdini has so strange name: polyextrude, polyfill, poly bla bla bla, clip, just for instance. I think that with some user friendly names the product should be more easy to learn and use. Do you want to talk about polydraw? that when you use it the menu is referring to topobuild? a beginner goes in confusion 3) A lot of functions are the same but just with some different default parameters. attrbutewramgle and pointwramgls. Are the same, why two? 4) C4D is very stable where Houdini often crash .. o rbetter enter in "no responding" and you have to kiil it. Blender too sometime need to be kiil .... C4D is fantastic. Unfortunaelly the last R25 version of C4d D it seems a commercial version of Blender 😄

I don't think there's much shame to be had if it takes the rest of us a bit longer than it took those guys ! I had an initial couple of days of maximum frustration, and it took me at least 2 weeks to feel comfortable in 25, and another 2 to make me want to open it on a daily basis instead of 24... Now I'm pretty much converted on a personal level, I do find myself in a new era of (slight) confusion in the teachings, because I have to remember not only where everything WAS, but where it is now AS WELL and one brain map can't be allowed to fully displace the other ! But I have no doubt that too will calm down and 'equalise' in time so that I will simply view working in the 2 versions as like driving 2 different models of the same car. CBR

My workplace installed C4D 25 today! Will test it out, and see what all the GUI fuss is about.

I agree. When I switched to Blender the one thing (other than the Outliner) that I missed from Cinema4D was its material manager. The material list in Blender is workable, but not exactly convenient - in particular when dealing with larger scenes and loads of mats. That said, I am SOOOOO happy with the upcoming V3's Asset Browser. It's going to simplify my life SOOOOO much! (sorry for the double SOOOOO 🙂 - oops!) I really missed the simple drag-and-dropping of materials and other objects into the viewport and on top of other objects 😄 If you want to try it out, download the latest alpha V3 build, and turn on the Developer Extras in the Interface tab. A new Experimental tab appears at the bottom of the tab list in the preferences dialog. Open that tab, and activate Extended Asset Browser. It works differently compared to C4D: assets must be marked for inclusion (a workflow which I prefer over including things by default). The asset browser can be pointed to multiple libraries, including local assets. This first version already works quite nicely, and the devs are planning on improving it further in the upcoming versions. It seems the new C4D 25 Asset Browser takes a similar approach in that it create a library file? Not sure, have to test that when I get access to it via work. Anyway, it is very much true that a proper asset browser was long overdue in Blender. PS I have been testing K-Cycles, an optimized GPU Cycles build for 2.93 and v3 alpha. Rendering is pretty fast on my older 1080GTX - as if I have a new 2080, or so. Together with the new Faster Viewport Updates & Navigation the rendered viewport responds in almost real-time while working on materials. A new 3080TI or so would be nice to get, but they're still way to overpriced and unavailable right now.

Yes, but did they get new icons?

Hypershade is more robust than C4D's material manager. The fact you can open up multiple materials in the same node editor is a great thing. It makes it so much easier to look dev. It's also great for copy/pasting, shared linking of textures. I've been harping on C4D's closed node editors for years I wouldn't get too caught up in Maya's history stack. It's bad. For instance, if you a bevel, then extrude, then go back to the bevel to tweak, it glitches. it's not meant to be procedural at all. it's really seemingly there for undos. MASH sucks. it was half-assed because of Maya's architecture and Autodesk dropped the contract with Mainframe to continue fleshing it out. It's less usable without the addition of true fields and better configurable effectors, like C4D has. The mash editor is very wonky to say it best. Also MASH can bog down Maya quite easily. It also hasn't been updated since it was first introduced years ago, and even the beta forum for it is archived. To this day, nothing can touch the flexibility and speed of C4D's mograph (which subsequently is used for more than just mograph). maya still also doesn't have fracturing. Even with bifrost development.. no fracturing (unless you buy SoUP which is overpriced these days.. and I think subscription too) You forgot to mention the UV Editor/Toolkit. It's a god send compared to C4D's bad UV editing capabilities. Things like cut and sew tools are great. the unfold and optimize tools (including "brushes) makes quick work out of problematic UV shells. It's funny hearing people like EJ talk about how he never dealt with UVs in C4D until its tools were revamped about 3 versions ago. I still don't like messing with UVs in C4D.. he needs to how other apps do it better, including Maya and RyzomUV. Also, Maya's snapping tools just crushes C4D. Simple things like constrained snapping to verts in an axis in the 3D viewport is a must. Retain spacing.. same. There are so many good things about Maya but also some bad stuff.

I think that it is acceptable to charge a small fee. But fist i find the fee to high, second it is just a another treat for the perpetuals. an third: I unfortunately do not believe that this argument is valid. You could senior mangement make do this job, then you can charge even more. 🙂 And The person that sells the license might as well have supported the company for 20 years. But in return doesn't get supported by the company when he wants to maybe sell one of his licenses.

I'm certainly looking forward to checking out v19 : ) I'm very slowly chipping away at learning (some!) Houdini. I started using it because I wanted the terrain features it offered - good erosion simulation etc. It's functionality in fluids / oceans and cloth are also areas I hope to leverage in due course! I don't think I'll ever fully move to it - I'm too late in my career for that - but it's certainly an awesome tool in the box! As Kent suggests: too much to do, too much to learn, and too little time to do it : )

Personally if I was teaching 3D I'd encourage the kids to try all the various apps. Some will click with some, others will click with others. Like the chick who constantly draws anime and flowers might think C4D is the greatest, while the maths nerd with glasses and an overbite will be seduced by the techy weirdness of Houdini. At some point every software known to man will be on sub, and newcomers will look at the rants from folk wishing for a return to the past and simply shrug, "Okay boomer..."

You don't sound that at peace to me. Otherwise why are you swearing and throwing insults? (And, frankly, whining). At least you'e not touting Blender, which is typically the sign of a deeply aggrieved person, based on Blender users usual behaviour on C4D forums.. From what EJ and Chris said in their cool videos, Maxon have provided top quality benefits with this new UI change. Your comment about being a teacher seems a giveaway to be honest, since students are often a lot quicker to learn new things than the teachers, and the teachers are often the ones who sit around whining about new things turning up - ie I used to teach it like this, now I have to teach it like that, etc etc. At this rate if Maya shifts an icon at some point in the future they better be prepared for a long blast from you whining about how change is terrible. Or maybe a bit of a change is okay but too much and you start to panic. Honestly, if you're a teacher you should be able to handle this sort of thing. Teachers are paid to learn stuff, then teach it, and I'm sure you could quite easily learn this new UI if you tried. But if you say you're at peace, fine. Do something positive and start a Maya thread and sell us on the cool benefits of that software, rather than endlessly whining about what are probably fully justifiable changes made to this one. "They simply couldn't because of the UI." Yeah I think if a teacher said to me, "I haven't bothered to learn that stuff yet, can you have a look at it first because I'm scared to do so myself and haven't learned it either", I might also be thrown a bit.

Because it takes a human resource X amount of hours to do the physical work involved. And it produces zero benefit to the company involved because it is transferring the license for a version of C4D that no longer generates any revenue for that company. So you are taking a resource away from the job they are usually doing just to handle this task. I am just talking business here. What would you charge?

Chris Schmidt said it took him about a week to settle with the new UI. EJ Hassenfratz said about the same. It doesn't sound like a big deal to be honest. Also, learning new things can keep your brain fresh. This is why things like Sudoku are popular. Also, the old tutorials aren't broken. They just moved things around a bit. If a chef goes into your kitchen and moves the knives to a different shelf, are you going to complain that the cookbooks don't work any more? That's just dumb.

Correction, fixes until 3 months after the software release. After that, whatever bug your version of C4D has, it is yours forever to keep. Before, Maxon would give support and updates to each release for a year (the acceptable and what is expected for a full priced software) Right now, if you spend the thousands to buy a perpetual license, pray to the gods they will consider fixing a bug within these 3 months. After that "Oh well, it sucks to be you... you should have bought subscription instead, sucker..."

Because it is now possible. It was just a few years ago that software was shipped on CD's. Then USB sticks. Then bandwidth increased world wide to allow for the distribution of software over the internet and finally it became reliable to even allow online updating. With the advancement in cloud services like AWS, and automation tools to streamline development, you can now create a feature and potentially deliver it to customers instantly via an update. But the only way to make that a viable thing to do, you need to become a service. So you move to the subscription model to allow you to eventually push updates to users computers anytime you want. Delivering new features and content. This also frees companies from having to rigidly stick to a yearly release cycle. Allowing them to separate their companies into teams who are able to self manage and deliver content to the users without requiring a full company wide coordinated release strategy. This is how all major web based products work today. Streamlined, automated, able to deliver value to customers instantly at any time. Now this is moving into the "installed" software realm. This speeds up production, allows for greater flexibility in your planning schedules and will eventually allow for updating new features in C4D on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. Which is exactly what Maxon will be able to do now that they have Capsules and the new Scene Node system. Simply by delivering a bunch of assets via the Asset Browser can now give you new features to use in your work. And they can release those anytime they want.

While it does feel that there is a new world of possibilities opening, It is now really confusing what is a normal hierarchy object and what is node and what is material and what is cross compatible Edit: It seems like there was a bug where the Scene root was not visible and the node graph was locked which greatly confused me, switching the scene fixed it ------------------------------------------------------ NODES FEEDBACK: What I found highly confusing is that the right click context menu does not allow you to search nodes. This is clearly the by far fastest way to work with nodes, right click and search, infinitely superior towards clicking the asset browser, searching, scrolling, dragging into view, similar to how other node editors work - but it only allows input and output right now, so its confusing me on top as I search for things which I then can't find. Also what does an input and output even do? The entire design right now is far too abstract and perpendicular to how cinema works. Im a senior artist, game designer, technical artist to a degree, can code but I'm not a data oriented tech engineer who can see through some cutting edge new concepts mixed with older concepts in a freestyle unique way The input comes from where? Data? Fed through what? Where do I input the data? The Output goes where? Theres no object. This is for subgraphs I assume. Why can I then put these on my main scene graph? Where is my node graph in my scene? How do I group, copy, use a graph if it dosn't physically exist in cinema? Where does the output go? Its way too abstract. I'm working in the void. I have an empty scene with a graph in the void, which displays something in the void I can't touch. How do I make 2 if I can't touch it? How do I save it? Is my scene my node graph container? Is my graph canvas a separate hierarchy? Is my scene root not the same as an output on the scene node highest level? So many questions A graph should to have a physical form in cinema, in the hierarchy. This is how cinema works. Each node graph should be started and edited within a node graph object that is clearly visible in the hierarchy, even if its a null that shows only the bare basics. I should be able to create a node graph like any other object. This way you can also have them parallel and have their 0,0,0 center of the object. Your scene should not be misused as an object contrary to everything else. Then the opposite, why can I add node operators into my hierarchy but they don't show in the Scene nodes given they are nodes? Im sure it makes sense to not show it for some reason but its very confusing. An alternative would be to add a button "Create new Node graph" which is a group, or have each scene start with a "New node graph" group and then let users click on and start in that group. This way you have at least an object to give some structure to where they are and that they create something that is not in a void, where its clear that the input and output goes outside the group, and not start on top level which is highly misleading and confusing. Right now its like the object manager / hierarchy would be a cube you can edit. Also some of the tools are super confusing right now, the cloner operator I just can't figure out. I expect to input a cube and get a grid of clones, like C4D usually works. The matrix has all things a cloner usually dosn't have but no amount for clones. I can't try for 20 minutes and then give up to make clones. C4Ds power was always the usability and the UI. I see the potential here and it clearly has power but this needs an UX pass desperately. By writing this essayI slowly start to understand but the first impressions were rather devastating, this is way too heavy and abstract right now 1. Right click needs to be able to search for nodes to speed up the workflow 2x 2. Scene Graphs should to physicalized in the hierarchy to remove the extra dimension of abstraction, or at least rename to Scene Node hierarchy and create a New Node Graph by default, which users can click and start inside, so structure becomes clear. I need to understand in which space I am moving, where it is, starts and ends. 3. Node connections and types need to be more clear 4. The asset browser needs icons, all gray folders are not very helpful 5. Nodes need at least simple tooltips, all C4D features have full documentation 6. Nodes need better coloring, Node operators can be used in hierarchy and look exactly like Nodes which can't be I hope this helps and I'm looking forward to the completion of the new core, overall 25 looks like an important step forwards but it needs some changes. Also the new UI is a little too high contrast but layout wise similar to my personal one. I would just love if you could turn off the animation elements on the bottom not only the timeline