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I've been longing for more performance in C4D for quite a while. Now I decided to just chew my bank account and go for a RTX4090. I now have a 2080 Ti for Desktop apps and viewport display; the 4090 is dedicated for rendering and GPU-accelerated tasks. Since I've been working on a huge project, I was still staying in C4D S24, giving the new versions only peeks of interest and curiosity. Today though, I have finally set up C4D 2023 properly and took the new system to the track. Just... wow O_o Rendering Scenes that rendered 12:00 minutes on my 2080 Ti are now finished in 00:52 seconds - Same settings! Rendering on both GPUs is actually slower, because the 2080 doesn't finish it's buckets in time. The Redshift benchmark finishes in 1:20 (room for optimization left, I don't know how to set the bucket size in the benchmark command line) IPR Using a dedicated GPU for IPR makes everything SO much smoother. Yay! There's a little lag before the IPR starts to refresh, but it clears up almost immediately. Seeing this, I'm not even so sure about Redshift RT anymore, to be honest. New C4D GPU features Cloth is SO much fun! I'll have to relearn the system, but I'm already quite confident that I can use Marvelous for designing cloth, but simulate directly in C4D. That would make the whole workflow so much easier. A lot to dig into, but very promising. I'm so looking forward to fire stuff Dave has been teasing 😄 X-Particles Nexus stays interactive even longer on the 4090. Still no Houdini, but the Particle situation is improved immensly It's still early, but all in all, this really feels like the huge performance jump I've been craving for. After a long period of mediocre updates, C4D now feels fresh, powerful and exciting again. Kudos! 😄

As far as I know with the latest OS release some C4D glitches on M1 Ultra have been solved as well.

The blackouts we experience in my city since yesterday must be sheer coincidence! 😅 Joking aside; the 4090 certainly draws a lot of power, but it is actually more efficient than the previous generation: https://www.notebookcheck.net/RTX-4090-review-roundup-reveals-class-leading-performance-W-for-the-GPU-as-it-is-up-to-70-faster-than-the-RTX-3090-at-4K.662445.0.html

Amazing!! Thanks @Cerbera!

Ok! Then provide some samples in the asset browser, please. I think it's always a good idea to let users dissect examples or to give them a good starting point. Especially when parameters are sometimes somewhat unclear (like lower substeps make for a more bendy material)

The stiffness is primarily governed by number of segments in surface - generally speaking, the thicker and stiffer you want something to be the less segments you want in it. A default size Plane object, given 40 x 40 segments and a bendiness value of 0 and a thickness of 1.5 behaves quite like thick leather for me. Whereas if I up the segment count to 200 x 200, and up bendyness to 100, and reduce thickness I get a much thinner-looking material with correspondingly more folds, and floppier movement. Here's an example scene which shows the difference. I left the planes parametric so you can experiment with different segments. Cloth thickness vs segments.c4d CBR

Ok, some potentially better news ! Previously I had been adding my hair to the sweep on Frame 1. I just thought I would try something rather unintuitive and add hair at the end frame of the animation instead, and that appears to have worked, in that now the hair respects the growth and distribution modes ! And more than that, it seems to be updating per frame in a more sequential way, rather than the per-frame recalculations and redistribution we seemed to be getting above... Here's a scene file of that working you can try in S26. Hair growth working.c4d Less successful with dynamics though, which don't start calculating / drooping until the draw-on rope animation is complete. So that is turned off in my file. CBR

AFAIK that is supposed to work if the growth doesn't start at zero - but with literally any value above that it should work, and does for me in 2023 as seen below. The problem that we have even if it does work is that the hair seems to update every frame, which might ruin the continuity of any animation. Also, in render I can't get the hairs to appear in anything other than a fixed direction, regardless of what the growth is set to (Normal, Random etc) and seemingly regardless of hair distribution mode, which also seems linked to the fact that the sweep is changing. CBR

Captain Disillusion has dropped another great one, this time it's the Horrors of the Alpha channel ! CBR

This one actually left me a little confused. The general takeaway seemed that hes suggesting premultiplied is better because its somehow done more of the work already, and that straight alphas need more internal calculations. But that seems to be missing the biggest downfall of premultiplied, in that the alpha channel is pre-baked against a specific colour. This is ok if its all alpha'd against black or white, but if theres more than one colour in the background then youre screwed. Straight alphas on the other hand are only ever merged with their own colours and will work against any background with no fringing. Premultiplied alphas also fare badly with soft transparent parts such as fire, smoke etc.