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Poly is a new web-based AI-driven texture generator. It is a text-to-image AI that will produce a material based on a prompt and an available Style preset. It needs about 30 seconds to generate a texture. The result will be previewed on a 3D sphere object along with the corresponding Ambient Occlusion, Albedo, Normal, Roughness and Height maps ! You can use Poly to upload and edit your own images and make them Seamless, Upscale them or even produce Normal, Height, Roughness and AO maps using AI. The app is free to use but the subscription plan lets you choose more styles and unbounds you from the maximum 2K resolution to up to 8K.

Something I hadn't realised. Though I think others have discussed it already, I just didn't grab the import of it. Some of the new capsules Maxon have come up with are available to subscribers only. So if you've bought perpetual, you won't (I think) get access to those. But also - some of those subscription-only capsules are restricted to those who are getting the full Maxon One subscription. So if you're subscribing to C4D (like I was recently, and probably will again at some point), you'll get a lot of the subscription-only capsules, maybe most of them, but there will be a few that you won't get because you're just a C4D subscriber, and not a Maxon One subscriber. Whatever. Maxon's developers have to pay the bills somehow, fair enough. So I guess they're trying to add incentives to go full Maxon One. But I dunno if I'll ever need Maxon One even if I resubscribe. There's not enough time in the day to learn every single one of those apps, and I'm trying to move away from AE to. maybe something like Autograph, if they get it going, or Fusion, if it does what I want it to. A C4D sub annually is a bit over $1000 AUD a year. A Maxon One sub is a bit over $2000 AUD a year. So yeah, I dunno about that one. A Maxon guy on a Twitter thread (deep in one of EJ's comments threads, I think) noted that the Nodes UI overall wasn't done and they were going to continue to add stuff to make it easier to use. This was in a comments thread where the poster had written, you know, Houdini does this, it would make things easier if you did it with C4D, and the Maxon guy had said, yep, fair comment, we're still adding stuff and that particular suggestion is on our list. All this will be looked at by me at some future date, after I get a few weeks to ponder what Houdini is doing, and after I play with what Blender is doing, sometime later this year. Bitwig is currently fun. Chris's latest C4D run through with Rick B. is below.

Beautiful ideas, nice work...

#CGGG 006 | Flight Paths

It's not infrequently that I need thicken / shelling type functionality, so I'm slightly envious of this latest tool. For many years I've been using 'Solidify' from what was Maxon Labs and that's been a decent start for a lot of things. I'm assuming the new tool is 'v2' of that? What I do know is that a robust shelling tool is a tough challenge. So well done to the dev's for tackling it. Fortunately there are some new and powerful modelling tools around such as Plasticity - with it's Parasolid kernel - that are a great compliment to poly based work.

Surprisingly well I would have to say, specifically Advanced Mode... It is different to and better than any method we have previously had for coping with the tricky ones. I can still find occasional meshes that fox it, but it's a lot harder than it used to be. CBR

Redshift's Flakes-Shader is really nice, too. (A similar solution was already available via OSL, not sure if this is different at all, but much more convenient) A caveat: The Flakes-Shader goes directly into the material, not via a Bump-Shader, like every other thing. I know, I'll forget that at least 30 times 😅

#CGGG 005 | QuadNoise

One small detail I forgot to mention: The label image should be saved in landscape orientation. That is, the long dimension should be left to right in order to match the cylindrical projection orientation in Cinema.

Depending on how many keyframes you have (or how fat your fingers are), clicking and dragging items around your timeline might be a little clumsy. If you know exactly how many Keyframes you need to move you can select all your keyframes then click "Move/Scale" [ Timeline (Dope Sheet) > Functions > Move/Scale ]. Leave Scale at 1 and set Move to -200.