Leaderboard

Many thanks Cerbera and sorry it's taken me so long to reply. Work arrived to spoil my fun so I had to shift focus to laying out a newspaper (my bread and butter) Now I'm back in model mode and will follow your guidance Many thanks once again Kevin

If you have HB modelling bundle, retopo is a breeze and a joy, but even without it Cinema is capable, if not stellar in this area, particularly in latest versions, where we have the relax mode for the brush and magnet tools and we can project poly pen to underlying meshes live as we use it. I can't answer if 3D coat is better for this, never having used it, but the fact that I do retopo pretty much every day, and have never felt the need to leave Cinema to do it must say something... CBR

95 polygons in total. Much harder than I thought to keep the poly count down. Have gone for a simple hard-surface style LED model. Hopefully other people have brighter ideas than me! 😉 LED_Model.c4d

Thanks anyway! Well you know, sometimes I just need to write stuff down in order to break it down and find the solution myself. Maybe this helps someone else in the future... Laters, kws Btw: did end up, not using selection objects but rather "inexcludedata" in the user data. Keeps my object manager a bit cleaner...

Wow...that certainly puts into perspective. So despite how scene nodes may have improved since its "tech demo" days, you do have to ask if it is catching on with the users. IMHO: Blender geometry nodes seem to be catching on much faster --- so it can't be a "If I am going to learn nodes, I am learning Houdini" type of reasoning that keep people from diving into C4D scene nodes. So what keeps adoption rates low or slow? Is it lack of attributes? Is it too big and too complex? Is it too unstructured? Are scene nodes the 20-ton elephant in the room that is just too big for the average user to swallow: "There are 50 ways to do this simple thing and each iteration requires a minimum of 20 nodes" I would imagine that if there were some case studies, they would be all over the news section. But a quick search yielded nothing. It has been well over 2 years as I think they were officially announced with R23. Fortunately, Maxon has still been investing in modeling tools, Redshift CPU --- improved cloth simulation. R26 was a much-needed update so some respect there. But it does leave me wondering what the end state is with scene nodes. Too early to tell? Maybe. Dave BTW: I am starting to put my toe in the Houdini waters. Soak time is required as there is a lot there but there is a structure and a methodology that is slowly (very slowly) becoming evident. But....and here is the difference....once people make that transition they become passionate about Houdini. it was that excitement and enthusiasm from Igor and others that got me interested. Definitely not seeing that same level of energy from C4D node users.

I do believe C4D has as much features in Blender in nodes. The main problem is there's no significant audience using C4D nodes. Which means lesser tutorials/community reference. There is a documentation. It does have some info but by and large, it's just theoretical. There is not practical examples. Example of practical examples are in https://www.tokeru.com/cgwiki/?title=Houdini where you can literally just copy and paste the node set-up and use it on a project. It's cheap, yes but it helps in easy integration. Anyway, I still stand by my sentiment on the idea of leaving xPresso to rot. It's already an existing node base system why make another node system when the existing one is already working already well. Even if we have the argument of having a new core, why not make the xpresso easily transferred to the new node system. Like convert this xpresso to new node system. And call it a day. I still explore C4D nodes but not on a production capacity. It's too risky. Not enough references to feel confident to play around and troubleshoot around it. Also, still no attributes in C4D node system. I don't get it. That's the main thing about Houdini nodes from Day 1. Attributes. They already have a reference on other existing software, why not leverage it. Even blender nodes uses attributes. *sigh