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Finally, light linking for Cycles users. Combined with the rather awesome light groups implementation in E-Cycles, and the faster renderer, well... What's not to like? (Except for that it's not free 😉 A must for anyone working in Architectural/environmental rendering and Blender. It saves so much time. https://ecycles.gumroad.com/l/E-Cycles/launch https://blendermarket.com/products/e-cycles https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sBHOvHTq_g And the new Animation denoising.

I dont know why.. But I dont get all this node crazyness. I dont like to work with nodes as I feel that an artistic task for me, becomes a lot more technical than I would like. But I know I am in the minority with this opinion, and I can see a lot of people doing INSANE and cool looking stuff with it. About particles, agree with Dave, Xparticles is awesome! So much control and brilliant integration with Redshift! But not having GPU, it limits the size of your simulations, and how fast you can preview the results, a sad bottleneck to a fantastic (and in my opinion) totally worth the price. Just saw the Reactions from Jawset, looks super promising! Will download the beta whenever I have time and see how it goes 🙂

Hello all, maybe some of you is experiencing this one way or another But I am finding the stability of each C4D version becoming worse lately. I am now using S24, because it is the latest version before the new UI, and I am in the middle of two long projects, and dont have time to re-learn a new interface, etc.. Also, I dont want to lose my plugins that works with version 24, and not willing to pay after each interaction for a whole new set of plugins, updates, etc.. specially if they are (unfortunately) tied to companies like Greyscalegorilla, who are charging an absurd amount for a useless subscription. To add insult to injury, there is this much shorter support and bug fixes on each C4D version. After 2-3 months, Maxon basically drops the support on a specific version, to push you to a new one, forcing you to pay for plugin updates, more subscriptions, rinse and repeat. My question is, how is everyone handling this? Which version of C4D is working better for you? Is this happening with other 3D softwares too? I know Blender has a LTS version, which is the perfect and considerate mindset for its users, specially productions that relies on a specific version for a long time, and needs to make sure their plugins are working nicely. But how it is with Maya and Houdini? I am kinda exhausted cycling between 23 and 24 all the time, because they all share weird and different bugs that will never be fixed, bugs that depending on a project, I can work around... (i.e 23 has a better integration with Zbrush and stability with Nvidia Studio driver, but has a timeline copy paste bug that makes it impossible to work with characters... / R24 has the timeline bug fixed, but always crashes with Zbrush GoZ, horrible performance and constant crashes with the latest nvidia drivers.. having to always downgrade drivers)

Totally agree. These specialised apps are game changer, and enhance the workflow a lot. Highly recommended for professionals already making money doing 3D Like you mentioned, not for beginners.

That's weird 🤔, I didn't know they did that. Maybe I overflowed them with suggestions last time. 😆 Could be for the same reason they put this on their support page... Let's hope that all this has only to do with the pandemic and will soon revert to a previous state. 🖖

Honestly, I think the problem is Maxon's decision to push out updates every 6 months. That decision of course was made to entice people into subscriptions: "look you get new toys more frequently". But really what it creates is twice as many software tracks to maintain over time. To curtail all that effort, Maxon made another decision to stop support on previous releases after 3 months as they did not have the resources to maintain all those tracks. This worked for them as it allowed the sales pitch towards subscriptions "The best way to stay current with bug fixes and new features is with a subscription". Now, all that would have some appeal provided that Maxon was still holding on to their major claim to fame in the market with each release: stability. Honestly, that is (or was) the big draw to C4D: it was robust. Users put up with the amount of time it took to get new features because with that time came the implicit promise that what was released was 100% rock solid. But look what has happened since R21. Reports of software instability (be they real, inflicted by the user, their GPU drivers, or plugins) have increased. Well, regardless of the cause, it is a fact that good software comes from good testing. Regardless of the development time, beta testers now have less time to test each new release. Plus with all the acquisitions, the testing is not just limited to C4D but to Redshift, Forger, Red Giant integration as well. Less time for testing is not a recipe to improve quality. So I submit that these complaints are a function of Maxon's new business model. Unfortunately, what we have seen over the last few months are two key elements of C4D's reputation in the marketplace come under fire: Stability and ease of use as people grapple with the new interface. Now, C4D acolytes will cling to the belief that all is well and we are all knuckle dragging luddites for complaining. But there is one glaring issue that totally supports just how C4D's controls on quality and UI are under pressure: Missing Icons in R25 What does a missing icon tell you about quality control? Missing icons definitely do not help ease of use so why have those icons not been immediately replaced after 3 months? Does anyone care at Maxon? If you were a customer who just paid over $3000 for a new TV and the remote control had numbers and icons missing, then would you feel comfortable about the quality of your purchase or would you think "Hell, if they missed that, what else is missing with the actual TV?" . There would be immediate buyer's remorse as trust in the product has been lost. It is missing the little things that damage a product's quality reputation. Maxon spent decades building up that reputation and their new business model has set up a system whereby quality can no longer be the top priority that it was in the past. If you disagree with that statement, then please produce some icons. Dave

Not sure if your request has been met via a private PM or not, but I think what would help is if you posted two screen shots: one of the existing C4D model (showing the mesh in C4D) and the other of the actual survey data (again showing the mesh) as well as the data format for that survey data (STL, FBX, etc.). At face value, it is hard to judge the size and scope of the task your are requesting without that information. Just a thought. Dave

Is anyone going to bother using a game engine to do dynamics in C4D? Equally - are many people going to be doing their dynamics in Houdini, then bring them from there over to C4D? If they're making things bounce and blow up in Houdini, wouldn't they just stay in Houdini? Maxon doesn't make Unity or Houdini so I would have figured they'd be looking at a way of improving the dynamics in C4D rather than pointing across the road and telling users to go to another application. Sure, I can see some people saying since Unity and Houdini are so great, why bother using C4D for it or hoping for an improved solution? But doesn't this defeat the purpose of developing anything at all for C4D? I'm not sure why the existence of game engines and Houdini means that C4D shouldn't bother improving what they have.

"Notgrade" will be my moto for now on hahaha!

Interesting post and thank you for the links. Correct me if I am wrong, but would it be unfair to draw the conclusion that you are saying that because Maxon cannot compete on key features, then they should not even pursue a solution? If you extended this same logic to everything else then modeling should go (how can you compete with modo), UV and 3D paint should go (how can you compete with Substance Painter) and 3D sculpting should go (how can you compete with Z-Brush). But...you are placing great promise in A.I solutions and yes that would be impressive. But wouldn't developing the base capability AND the A.I. framework be a doubly huge undertaking taking twice as long? Machine learning is not easy. It takes thousands of iterations to fine tune the algorithms. If I was a financial controller in the company, I would question that approach as its payback period (time from making the investment in the development to seeing that feature have a positive impact on revenue) seems too long. Better to shorten the development cycle by dropping the A.I. and implement a half-way decent set of tools and capabilities. They may not be best of breed but they could generate a pretty good response from users in terms of new licenses. Just a thought.

You are spot on. These updates are now sloppy... and yes, unfortunately it is not a C4D exclusive problem.. but they could at least go back to their yearly releases and longer support of a software, instead of dropping everything and abandoning a version completely, before jumping into the next one 😞 Which version of C4D do you use right now?

RE: Having less support, forcing us to go into this endless cycle of subscriptions and updates, just to get everything working together as intented, getting mediocre improvements in between? You are definitely right about this. Dev don't want to improve on the existing software. Just release a new one. Which is good and bad thing. That's why Blender LTS is a big deal. Even if they keep releasing new versions, they will still fix bugs on LTS versions. RE: I have no idea how it is with Houdini and plugins for example. Same thing with C4D. But the big difference is the updates and bug fixes of Houdini is much more frequent. So its a moot point. Unlike in C4D, where you have to settle for the problem for months despite being in subscription.

Try this one. Random point value of sphere point is retrieved. Use seed value in hash node to randomly change which value is chosen. Min max can be done with some "if" statement but I leave that up to you 🙂 rnd_from_array.c4d