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We are very happy to inform you that the latest release of U-Render is online! Release 2022.4 brings a brand-new package of features for Non-Photorealistic Rendering (NPR), Screen Space Global Illumination (SSGI), Multi-materials, Sharpening filter, an easy-to-use installer and a free assets library. Non-photo-real rendering (NPR) focuses on enabling a wide variety of expressive styles for digital art. In its very first version, it offers many new features, such as color gradients, specularity, emissive, rim light, normal / bump, but also mask, displacement and overwrite lines. The lines drawn can be applied scene wide or on a per-material basis allowing enhanced artistic granularity on the style applied. Screen Space Global Illumination (SSGI) allows creating a more authentic looking real-world lighting environment by adding indirect lighting within the screen view area. Multi-materials helps to save time with cloned objects and numerous materials to manage. Release 2022.4 introduces the sharpening filter as well. This helps for printed rendering, when details are needed to be shown. In combination with DOF the sharpening filter boosts the focused area reaching much more reality and eye-catching effects. U-Render has also improved the installation process with an easy-to-use installer. Furthermore, this release offers Cinema 4D S26 support. Read more here: https://u-render.com/news-2022-04-release-2022-4/

Interesting. I never knew the origin. It seldom surprises me when dev branches converge back to the same source. Sorry. I was late to the party and didn't read enough posts backwards. I get it now. This is a "you could already do this with plugins" argument. +1 to don't care. I'd rather good plugins become native. I've been burned by too many developers that abandoned their work. I've been very slow to adopt 3rd party plugin solutions at this point for that very reason. EDIT: I should also mention... the labor involved in supporting a piece of software is a burden I would never wish on a single human being (or even a small team). Its much easier for a large company to bear that weight when it can distribute resources from several departments. I'm not sure everybody can appreciate what it takes to just keep things working year after year.

Hello, Here is a new projection UV added to the plugin, the Radial projection allows to unwrap along an arc like this : Have fun with the UV ! 😉 https://code.vonc.fr/projecteur-uv

I have some doubts this can be a general strategy. Even worse, I'd say, it's probably a good way to get you into deep trouble. My main argument would be code tending to rot. My second argument would be the time needed to get developers up to speed. But lets sort it a bit and split it in maybe three parts. The simple case, Capsules and Assets Capsules are isolated entities and they are not even code. They are Scene Nodes setups. Lets say more generally they are assets, just like maybe object or material assets. But in this special case they are assets built upon a system which is still in flux. Take the examples Maxon released with their first release of Scene Nodes. Multiple of them stopped working in the next major release of C4D, simply due to partly minimal changes in Scene Nodes. To stay on top of such things can take a significant amount of manpower. Actually in two or three ways. You need people test all the assets. You need people to adapt and fix assets. And on the other side one also would want the Scene Nodes development to pay attention to changes and reduce the amount of havoc caused in the first place. Staying compatible is a major undertaking. It's one of the reasons, I think, C4D's development slowed down so much over the years. And it's probably also the reason, Maxon still calls Scene Nodes a tech demo. Because despite all planning in the world, in projects complex like this, there will eventually come the point, where you realize, compatibility is not an option, if one does not want to sacrifice too much potential. But ok, so, that's still the easy part. Yet, my prediction is Rocket Lasso will most likely need to come back to those capsules in order to adapt to things happening in Scene Nodes in future releases. Features delivered by code Now, lets look at actual coding. And here I'd like to split into isolated features (which in most cases also means rather small features) and more complex deeply integrated features. In first category lets say we have a simple Cube generator object. In the latter we have something like a particle system. More important for my point, in the first case (Cube) we have rather little and probably also easy to understand code. In the second case already the amount of code will have risen, as well as the complexity thereof. Either can obviously be done as plugin (as both such plugins exist), so you may expect them to be isolated enough to be done by outsiders. Simple Features Well, I'd say, in the first case (cube) maybe. But keep in mind, Maxon is working on a new core. Stuff does not only need to be touched, if you want to extend it. It also needs to be touched, if the surrounding ecosystem changes. I have read so many times on this very forum "Now Maxon has released the new core, why is stuff still slow?", "Now there is the new code, from now on all development is a piece of cake and will be much faster" (rephrased and over simplified). But that's not how software or its development works. Stuff needs to make use of the new core and this does not happen just like so or by soothingly talking to a feature, trying to convince it to simply expose the power now available the new core. In fact all stuff needs to be adapted. And this is hard work. In many cases, stuff is probably easier to rewrite from scratch, than trying to massage an existing code base into a new environment. But rewriting from scratch also means risking compatibility. For some unknown reason (probably it will need multiple generations of software development scientists to figure out the secret behind this), users tend to like those features best, which were never planned or developed to work like so. It was rather a happy accident, the feature developed turned out to work also in a rather peculiar way or context. And users are really good in finding such peculiar ways and stick to them (and why shouldn't they? If it works, nice). But when rewriting a feature you can not only take some original specification and simply set it as a goal. No, you need to find out about all those shortcuts and peculiarities, users came to love, and the sum of all that is now your new specification... And similar to Scene Nodes, such a "new core" is also a living thing and moving target (or rather moving foundation). Listen to plugin developers. How happy they are, they need to touch their plugins with almost every release, currently. Back to my Cube example and relatively little and simple code, where you can probably assign an arbitrary developer to the task to adapt it to changes. But still, the developer will need extra time to understand first. You need testers and QA to make sure, everything's still working as expected. For a Cube probably still manageable. But the amount of time and effort needed is already more than would be needed, if the original developer could do it her- or himself. But it also needs to be done in a certain time slot within the development process and release cycle. The original developer may not even be available during that time. Externals do not sit around and wait for you to come with an emergency request, because eight weeks before release somebody in QA or QC realizes some of the changes done elsewhere unfortunately also broke the Cube... Oh boy, sorry folks, this gets way longer than I had planned... Complex Features Last category is the particle system example. Of course all of the above applies to this as well, multiple times worse of course. But it is even worse worse. Worser worse, I'd say. Already the development of such a feature is a completely different beast. Not only because more code needs to be written. Not only because this code will also be more complex. But the number of "contact points", of stuff to interact with, rises a lot. You do not only want your particles to interact with other particles. You want them to interact with objects. With splines. With hair. Maybe with volumes. Maybe with Fields. Certainly with animated systems. Materials should probably be able to pick up information from particles. And so on and on and on andonandon... So, here you do not need some arbitrary programming guy to implement it, but you need somebody with some deeper understanding of the entire application (from user's perspective as well as from a development/code point of view) in order to pull off the feature in a neat way in first place. Developers from the street usually do not have such. And it really takes time to build up such experience. Not only time for this single developer, but the developer will ask questions to the developers sitting around... And if such knowledge got built up, I'd already say, it's highly questionable, if you want to see someone like this leave after a single project. Because getting the developer up to speed was such a high investment. And then chances for such feature to break by external changes (external to the feature, I mean) is A LOT higher. The number of possible implications to understand is dimensions larger. And chances to break the tail by fixing the nose rise immensely. The time need for any adaptions/fixes is also higher. Reducing chances to meet a suitable time slot with some external you'd like to re-hire, even further. But still not done... I promise, I'll come to an end, regardless of how much I forgot to mention, while writing this. Would probably be good to plan such posts beforehand. I apologize! Beethoven vs. Cheetah Finally, code is not like code. In my point of view, you can very well compare it to human languages or music and maybe crafted art like symphonies, poems or paintings (eh, by no means anybody should compare any code I have ever written to a beautiful symphony. That's not what I wanted to imply. Cacophony would probably match my code better). Code always contains patterns of the brain, which created it. I think, this is also one reason, why so many developers shy away from showing code to others or get mad, if somebody touches their own creations. In a way you reveal your way of thinking. And for most of us developers (except any developer reading these lines, of course, or except those few geniuses, who somehow were gifted by their genes) this also means showing to the world how utterly stupid we are. But for the point I'm trying to drive home here, this also means, it is not always easy to get into another ones thinking. And applying changes to such an building of thoughts, is very often like some ape trying to beautify the Mona Lisa. Nothing against apes. I really like you tree hugging, banana eating monsters. The ape can hold a brush, but chances that the majority of spectators will find the result any more pleasing, are rather low [Edit, what I actually wanted to say: You could let Bach, Brahms or Vivaldi finish a Beethoven symphony, chances that the result will still sound like Beethoven are minimal]. Same with code. And the building of thoughts gets more complex with every iteration, because the new dev didn't know about or see that nice shortcutting backdoor, which would have made the change rather simple. Instead he bought a bunch of wood and dangled a new staircase and an entire level of own thoughts on top of the building... and this is another reason, why code rots. Again, I apologize for being carried away. I certainly lost three or five points, I wanted to additionally mention, why it is in most cases a bad idea to just buy a piece of code or temporarily hire some externals. Yet, I hope you at least got an idea, why it is maybe not the best idea. And maybe not as productive as one might think. Edit: Oh my, briefly read over this post. Half of it are not even sentences... 😞 Maybe I'll proof read and correct tomorrow. Sorry! Edit 2: Fixed a bunch of typos and corrected some sentences, added headings. Deliberately did not change the "wall of text". a) For lack of time reasons and b) because maybe this topic should only be read by people willing to invest a thought.

Sorry kid.. NAB is live this year. - Remeshing on a live stack is useful for presentations, like what he was doing.. LIVE. He was showing the speed and usefulness of the updated Remesh function. HIs purpose wasn't to needle d*ck every nuance of using a remesher and remind the audience about the importance of collapsing stacks and so forth when approriate. No need. Your points go back to even the "old" remesher or poly reduction functions. It's obvious.. captain. BTW, you're trying too hard again.

Don't know if you'd had time to catch up on the NAB stuff yet, but there you will see Chris using ZRM at the top of a live stack, including volume builders / Meshes (!) and then using the live calculated result to apply new simulations to ! Timeline doesn't have to be at zero any more either to make these changes - you can tweak all the cloth and rope stuff while it's running ! And then, at any point, you can stop the playback, change settings in ZRM, wait a few secs for it to update, and you're away again ! I have been mightily impressed by what he is getting away with leaving parametric in a quite a few setups I have seen recently, with more to follow no doubt, tomorrow (wed) at NAB when Chris is diving a little deeper into these things... CBR

Chris Schmidt's slightly extended exploration of the new simulation things at NAB yesterday is up, which is a typically brilliant and speedy presentation, showing some equally brilliant and quick-to-do sim setups. His bit starts at 3:04:09 CBR

that was fast 🙂 Its a really interesting piece of software. I had the chance to beta test a little bit and must say, that in the most regards it is a great upgrade to the viewport rendering in C4D. Also really nice is its support for object and material passes, SPAO and a depthpass. Unfortunately it is subsciption only now.

Sounds like you just described Maxon. - They are pouring lots of $$$ into R&D, but it is exactly that... R&D, so you won't see anything externally for years because that is just how it is. You go through lots of iterations and research before you would show anything externally. - External updates to customers. They are getting them twice a year now as actual releases, and also releasing service packs throughout the year to fix issues. - Not exactly "open" betas, but they have a lot of beta testers who give loads of feedback. If you opened up to thousands of users that would just create too much noise and not be helpful. - They are constantly hiring developers, if you know any then send them here: https://www.maxon.net/en/about-maxon/careers - Germany had the most amount of holidays in any country I have ever worked in. Not sure what "Harry's" post is, but I never had any issues with taking time off when I worked there.

I made this thread to provide common ground for any bugs/misunderstandings/issues users may find. I made it to restrict the flooding of new S26 threads and keep other threads from getting buried.

As I have begun to dive in to Unreal 5 with zero previous experience with Unreal (or anything like Unreal), I am finding ALOT of tutorials. But a vast majority of them are very game-dev centric, or assume an existing knowledge of Unreal, are for older versions, etc. If people find something that was helpful for beginners that aren't necessarily looking to develop games but rather bring Unity in to their 3D tool set post them here. For starters there is the prolific Winbush. Alot of solid beginner stuff, as well as working with C4D:

It's fair point. 🙂 I did also wonder if there might be a way to get the map it generates out of there usefully though... hmmm - will investigate that later if I get a minute CBR

I also see the mention of plug-in alternatives and kind of go, "Yeah, so...?" There are plug-ins for all sorts of bits and pieces that C4D doesn't have, including the already mentioned fluids, particles, and other stuff. Big shrug. I'd prefer them all native, and suspect that eventually (it'll probably be a while with the fluids) we'll get them. ICM does make a fair point about the plug-ins offering alternatives and that will suit some, all good, but it doesn't suit me. I honestly prefer the neatness of having the one app, the one manual., the one variety of reliable sources for tutorials, you get it, you've got it, you own it. And yeah I do phrase the subscription C4D as being something I 'own'. The food I buy which goes into the fridge is usually digested and down the drain a few weeks later but it's mine and nobody else's. C4D is cheaper than my grocery bill and I spend more time in front of it than I do sitting at the table eating. That noted I'll probably also get Houdini later this year as the Apple Silicon version is in Beta. That will give me two programs to chip away at. This might provide some comical observations as I compare which one is easier to use than the other. Slightly off topic but it will be funny to see what R27 holds in September as Rick or someone mentioned that (a) it's obviously a shorter development cycle, and (b) staff in Germany get a long Summer holiday (some guy on Reddit posted a rant on the C4D page, 'no one gets holidays as long as those guys do'). I'm jealous and would like to move there.

Interesting. Every time I come to Core4D I see a big U-Render ad...lol I thought that was for everyone, but maybe it's just because I have a U-Render license. As for U-render being like Eeveee, I would say right now U-render is closer to Element3D for After Effects than Eeveee I'd say, although it's not as good as Element3D yet. If they do follow through with their roadmap, it should get better than Element3D and Eevee. Overall, I think U-Render is going in the right direction, although I think they don't have their priorities right: I loved the NPR material, but I think they should have fixed some basic features first, like their motion blur (for example, it's impossible to get a correct motion blur in an airplane propeller) and some transparency issue (for example, the horizontal fog effect conflicts with transparent materials. Also, animated textures alphas are not read correctly). But if you don't need a correct motion blur and can live with the transparency issues, U-Render is AMAZING.

Looks like a really great update. Congrats to the team and everyone involved with this release.

Both are developed by the same person. Q seems to do a better job with poles, I've read. *Edit* see his FAQ: https://exoside.com/quadremesher/quadremesher-and-cinema4d/ So Zremesher in C4d is actually QuadRemesher.

Z-Brush has been far ahead of the auto-retop game for years. I actually considered buying Z-Brush many years ago just for that feature alone. Are you telling me that Quadremesher and/or C4D's legacy remesher can produce equivalent results? Or are you simply upset that we got a better version of what we already had?

I'm curious why no one at the 3D Motion Show was doing anything with Scene Nodes. Was there not enough of an update in S26 to warrant a presentation on it? Can Maxon provide an update on the status of nodes in C4D? R27? Looking at the Maxon guys here.. not the ones who haven't touched C4D in a decade.

Did not yet dive deeper in what this 2022.4 release would bring. But now that GPU prices are getting slightly less expensive (juuust slightly) I was maybe looking to get an RTX3070 and a U-Render license for my R20. Then I noticed they went subscription only. That's just the last straw for me. I am done.

I have misst this last time. This is awsome! brilliant! It needs much more Attention.

VERY cool to have all those new projection modes in Cinema. I look forward to giving this a spin 🙂 CBR

Yes nice piece of software! Raytracing next please ;)

Oh god, that case is horrific, im not surprised your poor computer is baking itself to death. You have a giant 200mm fan at the front, and a slab of solid metal in front of it. 3 large fans at the top... and a giant slab of metal in the way. There is zero chance of having a powerful system in this case that doesn't cook itself like a Sunday roast. Grab any of these cases and all your problems will fade away. Fractal meshify or torrent Corsair 5000D airflow (make sure its the airflow version, not rgb) Lian Li Lancool 2 mesh (make sure its the mesh version)

Looks like it is no longer for sale for C4D anymore, which make sense.

Hey Dave, Redshift is my 'daily driver' so I can help here : ) Sample file attached. As Cerbera suggests getting a good render of this effect depends on multiple factors - but basically: Radial anisotrophy on the material for the stretched radial highlights. Subtle bump mapping for the radial and other tone bumps etc. Lighting and reflections that show it off - a HDRI dome light would be your easiest option. Setting up the radial anisotrophy in Rs is not so obvious - see the attached file for a simple example. 1. Create a C4D shader node containing a C4D shader set to gradient - radial. This is the key element. 2. Pipe that C4D shader into a Rs texture node - and then into the material 'Refl Aniso Rotation' input. 3. In the material node adjust the Reflection > Anisotrophy to something other than 0. A couple of points to note: You can add and adjust knots to the radial grad to change the effect. You might even want to add some subtle turbulence or noise overlays etc using a layer shader. In the Rs texture node > Advanced tab set the Filter enable to 'None'. This avoids any artifact from the hard edge of the radial grad. As you can see I've also added a simple radial bump map to the material. Consider the texture map a bouns gift : ) You'll also need a suitable HDRI to light the scene. I've used a low res one from 'PolyHaven.com' called 'Aristea Wreck'. I hope this helps. MDA_Rs_Cymbal_220425.zip

Are you using Redshift? If so there is a bug in nVidia drivers that has some problem managing memory, and it gets unresponsive and I see the weird viewport stuff. This is an nVidia bug and S26/RS3.5 do not fix (as it is nVidia's bug). The recommended workaround is to set RS memory usage to 50%, and it also seems having Adobe apps active (in particular After Effects) makes this bug worse.

You can try "What the Font" app on your phone. Put the rendered text on screen, point the app at the text, and it will give you a pretty accurate guess and others that are similar. Oh they also have a website. Just drag a pic of your text and see. https://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/ I'm pretty good at identifying fonts after 30 years in the business.

Oh, looks nice. I will definitely put it on my list. So, thanks in return.

regarding the rather harsh comments on the simulation stuff: this is the first iteration, sure it isn't there yet with marvellous, maybe it never will, since marvellous is a specialized tool for just that task, so it's not really fair to compare. i remember a lot of you asked for a unified simulation system, now you see the first bits of it and then it's all shit because it isn't perfect yet? to me it's a promising start, still a lot to improve, but overall it's much better than what we had before and the underlying tech allows it to become as good as vellum. (in theory 😉 ) and yeah, judging something by hitting play with default settings is like opening up a new file and hitting render to judge a render engine. solid approach.

one thing from that hasn't been mentioned anywhere, but might be big deal for the character animation folks:

Perhaps you'd like to speak to the manager of Cinema 4D?

maxon can be so happy that there is Chris Schmidt. He really is miles ahead in presenting the features compared to Maxon itself. The new release is the best for some time now advancing stuff that many users really need. besides the nice modeling addons. I really like the zremesher. maybe one of the more important changes is the task manager imho. depending on how good it works this really can be helping not to loose data, just because you changed the cloner to a high number by mistake. The cloth simulations seams to be the beginning of a new unified physics system wich is neat. For redshift CPU. We will see, if maxon just added another not used render engine to c4d (there already is a history of that 🙂 ). besides making redshift usable for any hardware this move obviously tries to ad a not to good usable renderer to the cheap base version of c4d 🙂 we will see how this plays out.

Starting to see that core rewrite show some payoff. Noodle sim test with splines Multi cloth sim:

As always, Chris Schmidt does a great job showing everything.

Make sure to check out the free tutorials available through Epic's website: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/learn Sign in with your Epic account and click on the Learn tab. They have full courses for beginners that go over the UI, project file structure, how to import assets, how materials work, etc... I'm not interested in designing games, only in the real time cinematic capabilities of the engine, and it has blown my mind so far. Once you understand the basics, make sure to check out this tutorial by Pwnisher to get even more cinematic results at render time.

I watched a bunch of these: https://www.youtube.com/c/pinkpocketTV I'll say upfront - they aren't great tutorials: but it did get me acquainted with the idea of Megascans and setting up a sky/sun system very quickly. After watching a lot of game centric tutorials and not feeling it with Unreal, this opened my eyes to the fact that with UE5 you can just dump stuff in and get it going quickly. I found it liberating. Also - this guys stuff seems pretty good in diving deeper into understanding Lumen https://www.youtube.com/c/WilliamFaucher