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I have made my 4D Paint Bundle free. https://www.plugins4d.com/4DPaint The newest version is available for R20-R25. But the is also a link to an older R17-R19 version on the page as well. Have fun! Kent

Hm? Actually I prefer not be drawn into (as Cairyn would say) "one of these threads". Also I'm not sure, which insights I'm supposed to share. I assume, I'm being asked as developer and not as a former Maxon employee. So I will keep it more general. From my point of view onboarding new developers is (or at least can be) a difficult task. It almost always takes quite a bit of resources (aka time of already experienced developers) for a significant time. Every developer is different. And like all humans every developer learns differently. Can bug fixing be a good learning path? Yes, I think so. If you have a tenacious and masochistic type of a developer, this can work out great. I do not mean this in any bad way. Maybe in other words, you need somebody with a lot of will to reach the goal. If you have someone with such characteristics, then the result can be awesome, because the knowledge collected on the go is immense. On the other hand there the "this baby has to run as quickly as possible" type of developers. For those a smaller or simpler starter project can offer a better learning curve, as they have better chances to reach the needed feeling of success to keep them going. Also bugs are pretty human in this regard. Every one is different (I hope, now I do not get drawn into a discussion, how theoretically many bugs are identical) and like with humans you can't really judge it by looking at its cover. So it can already take quite a lot of work from an experienced developer to judge, if a bug is suited to be worked on by a beginner (usually you want "isolated" bugs, where the fix has little potential to influence or break other stuff). And afterwards you need an experienced developer to check and verify the fix of the newbie. This can lead to a situation, where it costs more resources than would have been needed if the experienced developer worked on the bug in the first place. I think, comparing Blender and C4D in this regard is misleading and probably also a bit unfair. Open source in a way is way better suited for onboarding new developers. Of course a) the code base is open, so chances to get somebody, who already has some experience, are better. And b) there's a kind of playful flavor in the process, which you usually do not have in closed environments. I do not want to say either way is superior. It's different and the difficulties are different. I don't think, it's a good idea to transfer the paradigm of either to the other. And of course either side can also learn from the other, but chances are the result of such learning process or evolution will not be identical to the other side you started to learn from in the beginning. The constraints are too different to end up with an identical result. I could go on talking for hours about this, but as I said in the beginning, I'm not even sure, what I have been asked for. For example the topic, how many interesting ways there are to make even the best developer have merely no output at all. Although I tend to like the view from the other side a bit more, the many ways you can get productive output from bad developers (or as I would put it, there are no unproductive employees, only employees used in wrong ways). Or the topic of team mindedness of developers, something my breed is probably not really the best in (which on the other hand is most likely the reason, they got developers in the first place...). Just to be not completely off topic: I see nothing wrong in a service pack focusing on bug fixing. And I'm a bit irritated, about certain views for example about the number of bugs in "UI change" release. To me it's pretty obvious, even if there were no features to present, there is way more work going on than visible at the surface. Please, do not misunderstand this, I'm not interested in another discussion if R25 is a release worth its money. Or if the communication strategy is right or wrong. Or Maxon's business strategies. In my view Maxon tries nothing less but rebuilding a skyscraper from scratch without scratching the old facade during the process (better: with as little scratches as possible). Or trying a heart surgery on a living walking human without any support machinery. Not many companies have even dared to try this. For this alone they have my fullest respect. It's even worse for them. Their customers grew used to one of the most stable and backward compatible software products (not talking about DCCs but software in general) out there. And for such an endeavor this luxury turns into an immense burden. Whatever you do, somebody will always be pissed (even worse, most likely rightly so). And I doubt, many can imagine how different, how much more complicated and how much more time consuming this is compared to building something new from scratch. Maybe not even all developers at Maxon did foresee the complexity to its full extend (which is no critique). I mean, hell, I live in a country, where we are not even able to build an airport from scratch anymore. Something which has been done thousands of times all over the globe. Complexity is a bi... and forums can be a bad place to discuss complex topics. Most humans are not interested in understanding complexity. We usually prefer the simple, black/white answers. And, again an example from the country I live in, people can get pretty angry and even violent, if the answers to questions which frighten them are neither black or white (yep, talking pandemic here). I think, same patterns can be seen in the C4D discussions since a few years. Understandable. Inevitable. Certainly not constructive or helpful for anybody. Sorry for being carried away. Probably another reason, why I shouldn't be pulled into threads...

a Modulo Modifier should do it. If it doesn't work, please let me know:

There are simpler ones

I'm not sure what's happening here because I didn't read your node graph, but it appears to be a colour-driven extrusion, along with a sphere to control the mask

I'm a bit confused about what this topic is actually about. If we're comparing what each app is capable of outputting, then that is not necessarily dependent on whether it uses nodes or not. In fact, nodes are not even a requirement for an app to be procedural. Nodes just carry data, and serve some specific purpose. For me, the main advantage of using nodes is scene-readability. I used to create procedural stuff in Cinema 4D, and when I'd open the same scene two weeks later, it'd take me ages to decipher what it was that I had actually done. C4D, prior to Scene Nodes, offered no visualisation of how your data was flowing. In Houdini, regardless of how complex a structure I have made, all I need to do is go through the nodes, top-to-bottom, and in 5 minutes I know exactly what it was that I did. There are other things to be said about node-based workflows, and if we're going to compare nodes between apps, I think we need to compare the implementation of these nodes and how easy the workflow is. XPresso was hands down the worst node UX for me. It was shockingly bad in how it required you to interact with it. Houdini, on the other hand, has by far the best workflow for nodes I've ever used. The UX for it is sublime, just packed to the gills with endless little helpful usability features that make things easier for the user. I haven't tried Blender, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't much closer to Houdini than Xpresso in usability. I've read some not-so-good things about C4D's SN workflow though, so that isn't inspiring too much confidence right now.

I did not want to imply, comparing Blender and C4D would be unfair. Both are DCCs and can of course be compared. I only meant to try to compare the manpower or number of developers directly is in my opinion not possible in a fair way. Or at least be very difficult. Especially when trying to do so based on some chart about Blender or hearsay about Maxon internals.

@clarence Here is the material - attached. Just change the color in the one color node (all the way to the left in the node editor) to adjust. Let us see any renders you do with it. Even though this is built with Corona 7, it is a legacy material until I can read more about the new Sheen channel and rebuild it to be more modern. EA_Velour_v01.zip

"Saved" would imply that Maxon is better than Autodesk or the Foundry. That isn't the case.

Why are you comparing ZBrush against one C4D tool? If we compare both applications, then the advantage of ZBrush is only that it processes the information about the grid with the central processor and in some simplified form, cutting off the third coordinate from the vertices. And also the presence of specialized brushes. But this is a specialized software for sculpting, when the cinema is specialized in motion graphics. Decimation Master is almost the same as Polygon Reduction DynaMesh is an absolute analogue of Volume Builder + Volume Mesher ZRemesher - Remesh works reasonably well on simple organic and hard surfaces. It needs pre-assignment of polygroups or splines to indicate how to close the loops, otherwise you will end up with a completely wrong edge flow. Remesh in C4D gives you a choice of how to build a quad or triangular topology, you can also specify the direction for the flow of edges with splines. C4D also has a method for projecting sculpting from higher levels to lower levels. Brushes, masks and types of symmetry. The listed elements are also in Blender. A new Substance Modeler application is coming soon, which allows you to sculpt in VR. Pixologic is no longer an innovative company, and the market is very competitive Maxon just saved ZBrush from Autodesk or Foundry. Considering that official users have not paid for the application for 10 or more years, they should be proud of themselves that they pushed Pixologic to this step.

Separate.. I'd like to see Maxon invest more steaming time into things like Asset Capsules and the node editor in general. I know it's been talked about on some streams but it just seems like they aren't really investing that much time talking about. They have these great 3D Motion road show streams but it's people using R20. It would be great for Maxon to find more artists using, pushing and even almost breaking the new R25 nodes and tools. R25 appears to be more than a UI facelift, missing icons and bug fixes. Showcase that stuff. I'm not a huge blender fan and use it sparingly for modeling, but a youtuber Erindale is doing these ridiculous streams showing how he's creating everything in Blender 3.0's geo nodes. Granted, blender crawls on the floor like a dying dog, but he's at least showing how much can be done in their geo nodes now.

Yeah but you need a target for each release, or you could just keep R25 in a perpetual state forever or until 3 years later when nodes are finally finished. You need specific date for the next release and then adopt milestones for progress along the way. You need to figure out what you can realistically accomplish in that amount of time. A year is a good number of billable hours to produce a next version. Also, it provides paying customers and the press this idea that the developer is continuing to refine and update their software. Even bad press is press. If Maxon waited 3 years to release a new version, in general they wouldn't be talked about as much while developers like Blender, SideFX and Autodesk are continuing to release on set schedules. The fact that a year passes and a release is imminent with "seemingly" little done is on them. They'll have to take one on the chin, as is seen now with Maxon. Also, lets face facts, people are more whiny and bitchy these days because the internet has given them a place to complain as much as they want with a larger audience to hear it. Maxon could have added X, Y or Z features to R25 and yet some whiny kids will complain it's not enough, or it wasn't the features THEY requested, or the blender kiddies would have chimed in about their free software with little to show that they've done anything in their free software except talk about it online. Lastly, I thought there was something about releases needing to happen at least once a year to appease EU laws since it's subscription or maintenance? I can't recall.

+1 In my opinion, the most important aspect for the main DCC app is stability. And it was the main reason I switched to C4D.

As a c4d user working in a stable pipeline i will always favour stability and efficiency over inovation. For me its more important to correct buggy tools than having a ton of new improvements all messed up. R25 might not have many inovations/upgrades overall but the fact that we can use geometry modifiers nodes in the object manager as standard deformers (the way we are used to) is a huge step (its like adding +20 new tools) but in the end it was resumed to only one line of text in the ugrade list. Capsules make Node functions possible in the Object Manager. This "upgrade" is equivalent to hundreds of upgrades in softwares like 3ds max for example (the other 3d app i use). However, this is not an excuse for all the bugs that are present in this version. The way i see maxon coming out of this release is to at least erradicate most of the bugs and problems that persist over several releases and assuring a stable and strong platform for the upcoming versions. This is a crutial point. That includes not addind more bugs (wich appened in this update). If c4d becomes another bug hell fest like 3ds max then its not worth it. Blender is also full of new features but each time we try to use it here is filled with bugs and crashes. cheers

Jesus Christ, ICM... I've never used ZBrush, never had an interest in using it, never sculpted anything, never had an interest in sculpting anything, and never had a need to. Was this ambiguous from my earlier questions? I also never used InDesign, Illustrator, and probably three or four other programs in the Adobe sub I had, but Premiere and (to a lesser extent) AE received some use. I'll be skipping both for Resolve as it can cut, colour and comp all I need for my needs. Having heard that Maxon are picking ZBrush up, I'm assuming they'll be letting paying customers of Maxon One have access to it at some point. I'm getting that sub with my next iMac, so will have a look when it comes out. But I'm not in a burning hurry to have a look at it, hence me stating earlier in this thread exactly that. But if it's there as part of the sub I'll likely have a look. I have heard the UI is annoying though, and watched a training video on the app a handful of years ago where the instructor spent the first five minutes warning people that the UI was annoying. Go figure. If you're going to 'indulge' my questions, great, but maybe change your tone while you're at it. If not, don't bother. Even better - a possible future path to avoid pointless clashes in this thread, and on this forum - I'll avoid commenting on your C4D posts in future on these threads if you avoid commenting on mine. Conversations on these topics are generally fine but I strongly suspect if we were face to face in a pub or bar we'd find common ground on something within about 60 seconds and would go from there. But being grilled in bold type over something I've never claimed to use seems typical of the hostility that probably lies in the future in these conversations if we keep going back and forth. I'm beginning to question the worth of threads here on Maxon topics where 80% of the posts seem to come from ex-C4D users who have no interest in the app currently, and where people who express an interest are viewed with repeated hostility and suspicion.

Very unexpected. But an interesting development. Might this actually threaten Autodesk’s dominance a tiny little bit? I hope it will lead to a closer (seamless?) integration between C4d, Zbrush and Redshift. And that the development teams can bring cool innovations to all the programs.

Just an advice if you are developing a product or service: never listen to Social Media. Only the angry ones post there. The happy ones never post. As seen in the twitter thread of pixologic: maybe 70 voice angry opinions and create a frustrated impression. But also almost 460 like the announcement thread. So what to make of it?

I'll have a read, thanks - but 'why the heck Pixologic didn't start charging instead of doing this'? I'm assuming it's because they wanted to go to Maxon, instead of charging money and doing it themselves. Ask IceCaveMan how many companies are charging subs these days, I'm guessing he could write us both a long list. Pixologic could have done the same, yet they decided to go with Maxon. Stop the presses. Re 'we in this community dislike what Maxon became' - they're a software company that people pay money to, and some people are unhappy that it's now by subscription instead of the earlier pay-it-and-get-it software model. Am I missing something? I'm assuming charging for software can't be that bad, as you just said it would have been a good idea if Pixologic had done it. One other obvious choice is that they could have easily given all their code to the Blender guys for free, so everyone in the world could download ZBrush perennially in the future and never have to pay for it again. Yet for some reason they chose an option that suggests money will exchange hands and they might make a decent wage and profit, go figure. My comment here (and you should have seen the longer version I just edited then deleted when your comment popped up, as I value your input and didn't want to sour the thread) is coloured by the fact that I've never worked for Maxon, and am not particularly bothered by anything they've done, which makes me an ideal customer of their software going into 2022. Back to IceCaveMan - who I readily concede knows his stuff. What's your alternative to Photoshop? Did you find a good one, or did that app (or others) keep you paying money to Adobe? I'm ditching Premiere permanently for Resolve.

Won't argue with others who feel different but for me this will get chucked into my imminent Maxon One sub, so I'm fine with it. Not sure if I'll be using it in a hurry though.