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Love C4D, been using it daily for 17years, and I only feel like i know 20% of it. Love redshift too. Hesitant to learn blender. every time I try I get frustrated with it. C4D Works and helps me earn a living. Some of the recent updates have really been great. also much prefer subscription model

Yes ! But he's usually too modest about blowing his own trumpet, so I have to blow it for him, figuratively speaking (!). CBR

I already expressed my great enthusiasm for the next release (based on Mat's insight here). Nonetheless, I hope for some specifics 😄 Best Redshift Integration of all DCCs It's the same roof, so C4D should have a premium RS integretion. Materials in the viewport. New node system with all functionality. Material previews rendering with IPR. OCIO-aware Picture Manager. A one-click "Render beauty + AOVs and export everything to After Effects and rebuild there automatically". Add RS Materials to the Content-Library-Assets. Make RS the standard renderer. Remove the UI deadspace in the IPR. Interactive help like in C4D. Redshift RT is still very early und very unstable, but it should become C4D's viewport, some day. Stability This is aimed at C4D, Redshift and mainly nVidia. A "wrong" nVdidia-Driver-Version can cause troubles without end. How to know the best driver for your config? Forum exchange, try and error. Luckily, there are some really stable driver+software-combinations everytime I had to jump these hoops, but the journey is *SO* painful. Bugs This was the only new feature of R25 😄 Come on now, really Maxon, up your QA-game! Also, there should be *much* longer bugfixing-support for owners of a perpetual license. Release cycle Honestly, I'd rather have only 1 big update per year. Less hassle updating stuff, finding working drivers etc. Maybe more time for QA on your side? So far, I can't see any benefit of the biannual release cycle, only that it apparantly forced you to do the fubar R25-release, needlessly so. Performance This is a broad field. I don't want to dive into details here, I want to express a broad wish. Currently, we are confined to rather small/medium scenes. 2 Characters, a landscape tile, some decoration and boom, you're already operating at the edge of C4D's performance envelope. Very quickly, work becomes about managing ressources, not making artistic decisions. And trying to hide the seams of the performance envelope all the time 😕 I wish we had some kind of streaming engine for geo. A unified simulation system. A unified cache system. A clear feedback system, that shows me what is computationally expensive and what isn't. I don't know, if the "core rewrite" adresses any of that, I just want to feel some realtime-magic in C4D. zBrush It has by far the best scultping "feel" of any app I tried. It's a mindblowingly good app, as demonstrated again and again by zBrush-artists. But, for the love of all UX/UI saints, zBrush sorely needs a complete UX/UI overhaul. That's one of Maxons strengths. zBrush-Artists defend the current UI, but Im quite sure that is a form of Stockholm syndrome. Maybe offer an "Easy Mode" alternative, here. A very strong "GoZ"-implementation is also obligatory here. My last point is not software related, but regarding communication. Once, an attempt has been made by Maxon towards more transparency. Anyone remember the three-and-a-half blog posts? 😄 Ok, now do that again, but thoroughly. Just do it like the Redshift team. Have a nice, active forum with Premium sections for paying customers. Talk with us about problems. Listen to our wishes, in a way that we know we are heard. Share at least a broad roadmap for the next releases. This is by far the biggest problem with Maxon and C4D. You guys are almost completely opaque, and that's a severely outdated mindset for a company that relies on the thriving and the goodwill of a community of communicators. And communicators we are, visual, textual, social. Talk to us, please! 🙂

Ah, yes, I forgot my personal wishlist: - Stability - Stability - Stability - Bugfixes - Performance - Stop breaking plugin compatibility - Inbuilt converter of pre-R19 files

You can abandon it if you like, and enjoy your time in Blender, but no need to shit-post Maxon with a load of unevidenced assertion on the way out. A lot of what you say is self-evidently untrue. You are IN one part of the Cinema community right now by being on this forum, and there is Cineversity in addition to Maxon's training channels, not to mention hundreds of thousands of tutorials on Youtube, with new ones being added every day. There are current podcasts, videocasts, and Siggraph presentations from present day and going back years. Geometry nodes are far from useless, and their potential is becoming more obvious with every release. There are literally THOUSANDS of plugins and scripts for Cinema. CBR

Just checking we've all spotted that C4D overlord Chris Schmidt is back from next Wednesday (30-03-22) for the annual resumption of ROCKET LASSO. Thats normally 8 pm UK time and 2 pm CST. CBR

It depends what the differences are going be between your different renders. Takes are great when you need variations of the same thing. A room at night, a room in the day. Or a room kitted out as an office then the same room as a dining room etc. You do need to be careful though because it is very easy to accidentally record take data you didnt want, much like leaving auto key turned on for animation. The take system is largely stable, though its weaknesses are that working with animation sucks, and that it is very difficult to manage take data across multiple projects as it is so very much tied to the specific project file.

The great @everfreshonce gave me this advice for working with xrefs, and it has never failed me: " use xrefs. no files get ultimatively broken by them, if so it’s easily fixable. but you can avoid that trouble all together, if you obey the follwing rules: never ever tick the hierarchy tickbox in the xrefs options, and don’t mess with the hierarchy in your xrefs. only make hierarchy canges in the master file that gets referenced. untick the “relative file path” tickbox in the xrefs options in the file tab right from the get go. there’s a bug with relative file paths in xrefs, resulting in everything gets greyed out (easily fixable though by cutting the xref out and pasting it in again), but still, other weird things also can happen with relative paths, so better just use absolute paths… since you are not working in a team it doesn’t matter anyways. be aware that material changes don’t get stored, so make your material adjustments alsoin the original file. that’s it, if you follow these rules xrefs are perfectly stable and reliable. i have used them in every production since 8 years, never had a single show stopper. and it saves you a LOT of trouble in bigger productions. " Thanks again, everfresh! And good luck, Davetwo! :)

Chris is awesome. Extremely gifted programmer and educator. If you watch his pod casts, particularly those portions where he solves problems people throw at him in the chat window, you'll come to the conclusion that Chris has a Zen level mastery of C4D (IMHO). "Zen level" is a "stream of consciousness" mastery of the software where you just think it and your fingers go to work to create what is in your mind's eye without you being consciously aware of the time or steps required to get it done. That is nirvana for a creative like Chris (and...yes...I am a bit jealous). Honestly, I think explaining it slows him down -- so we are thankful he takes that time for us mortals. To step back a bit: One of the best parts of GSG product portfolio was Signal which I believe was developed by Chris while he was part of that group. Signal just made life easy and while it is true you could do most of what Signal automates for yourself with Xpresso (as I have done in some cases) but still, it was a really handy timesaver to have in your toolkit. I purchased it years ago before GSG Plus subscription program came out. Unfortunately, I can no longer get updates for Signal for future versions of C4D past R23 unless I spend $300/year for GSG's subscription program. Please Chris....if you are out there....do not go subscription. I am happy to pay for updates to perpetual licensed plugins. Also, not sure if there is a non-compete clause you signed with GSG before you left. But if you did not, then please consider the capabilities of Signal and fold those into either existing plugins or something all-together brand new. Just a hope, Dave

Wegner is one of my favourites among the Danish modernists. Your render captures the materials perfectly!

Hans Wegner: Elbow Chair (1956)

Yes, there are some good Redshift improvements about to be delivered alongside R26. The new standard material, significant improvements in energy conservation and rough surface shading, thin film built in, improved material blending,,, and long awaited SSS improvements scheduled to arrive a few months later - fingers crossed. I'm looking forward to all of those : )

As far as vehicle animation goes, well I don't have insights to feature film, but for tv commercials and trade show animations I can say for shure that C4D is heavily used for many years now. I personally have animated cars for several of the top german car companies for over ten years in c4d and never came across any other software here in germany that was used that heavily. There is a slight movement to blender now with even car companies using it or even switching completely, but till now c4d is by far the most used software for car animation in germany.

To be honest, I'd like to see two things in the R26 release: 1) Revert back to the old and proper C4D UI (S24 and earlier). Let's pretend the Blender ripoff never happened. 2) The UI designers (and whoever approved their work), should be forced to write in a blackboard (just like Bart Simpson in the show opening) a dozen times the following phrase: "I promise I won't ripoff Blender again and I won't waste time and resources changing things that are not broken".

That they bring back the old icons...but that is a foolish hope.

Wow...and that diatribe was the edited version! Really, it is okay to be unhappy with C4D and that is one of the nice things about this forum and its moderators but to bring up some social media hot buttons and then say it is not a political post? Honestly, this is not the place for it. Dave

Would be cool if those leaving c4d for Blender would share some concrete examples of what they find better about blender, instead of just making empty assertions all the time.

R20: Gave us node materials, fields, volumes and the CAD importer, 9/10 R21: Cheap versions removed, Subscriptions added. new extrude bevels and Windows 4k support, 3/10 R22: Lots of smaller bits and general improvements, 5/10 R23: Nodes, but nobody uses them, USD, but nobody uses it, Magic bullet but poorly implemented, 2/10 R24: Online content browser, placement tools, currently useless scene browser, 3/10 R25: So bad, they didn't even give it it's own press release, 1/10 R26: X implemented, X overhauled, X overhauled, dozens of new X tools, X also implemented, 9/10 You can see why so many perpetual owners all stopped at R20. Everything since then has been a bit of an anti climax. Useful bits, but nothing that's going to change your life. R20 was nice for its 4k support, but the job is only 80% finished, too many elements are still low res. You can add bonus points if you happen to need USD support or GLtf export, but they're not complete enough implementations imho. "We don't talk about R25, no no no..."