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(Probably my first original 3D article) This is a list of 10+1 useful yet overlooked or unappreciated features in C4D. 10) Scene Nodes Scene Nodes made their debut with R23 as an experimental feature drawing developer resources resulting R23 and the next couple of releases deprived from any major features. Due to its unusual for C4D UI, workflow and intuitiveness standards most users tried to stay away from it in a “let others figure it out first” response. None-the-less Scene Nodes are here to stay despite many people’s beliefs it would soon flop. Now many users do not hesitate to use Capsules but still quite few will spend time making their own, propagating the belief that SceneNodes maybe are not that powerful to produce what they expect or compete with other systems like Blender’s GeoNodes or Houdini. The Truth is that behind the scenes more and more people are working with SceneNodes and soon tutorials and new Capsules will be popping more frequently as witnessed with the last couple of releases. 9) Polygon Reduction This little generator is rarely used. Due to its name and function most users will rarely even considering using it because “Who wants to compress their geometry in a pile of ugly mess anyway, especially when Remesh is around to do it better”. Actually the Polygon Reduction can come in handy in abstract modeling, weird animations and my favorite: as an indirect uniform instance distribution. Polygon Reduction has a useful Preserve 3D Boundaries option. So when the Object Surface distribution mode of a Cloner fails to satisfy and you end up hitting the Seed value for half an hour to land a distribution where you don’t have intersecting instances, try to populate your surface uniformly use the Polygon Reduction as an instance in Vertex distribution. If the scale of your instances is not an issue throw a Push Apart Effector. 8 ) Sculpting Although not as powerful as ZBrush is, if you don’t want Forger because you don’t work on a tablet or don’t want a subscription to ZBrush, then this is your best alternative. It includes all the essentials for sculpting plus many advanced tools. It’s a quite complete tool case. Probably the most invaluable feature is to turn your sculpts to a Displacement Texture using the Bake Sculpt. Blender boasts its recent 3.5 release about its VDMs (Vector Displacement Maps) after ZBrush later this year made it possible to copy sculpted details as brushes and reuse them while C4D had it all along since R15. Plus the very useful and overlooked Projection tool. Which can also project tubed meshes ! 7) Camera Calibrator Tag This is another tool most users haven’t ever used myself included. It is used for Camera Mapping and provides many useful parameters and options for a quick camera placement from a reference image. It’s basically the equivalent of Motion Tracker but for still images. 6) Tension Tag The Tension Tag is placed in the Character Tag menu so most users that aren’t concerned with Character Rigging overlook it and don’t know it can also be used for modeling. Although you can achieve the same effects using the Displacer Deformer, the Tension Tag is more preferable for animations when the amount of deformation of a polygon from its initial state alters the Weight Map of the object allowing for local effects on regions of structural stress. Try doing this Reaction Diffusion without Fields! I think it’s faster too. And we have the Tension Tag to thank for this since R17 (I think). 5) Feather Object Right in the middle of this Top 10 list lies the Feather Object. I don’t just rarely see projects that use feathers. I’ve just never seen any feathered projects ever. And I’ve never used that object myself either! I might have seen a scene or two during MAXON’s demo showreels but you never know what percentage of those scenes are C4D. It’s a quite interesting generator with many parameters carefully designed to model any type of plume. It’s also a generator that doesn’t work on geometry like the Hair object but on guides. It essentially generates guides for guides. So if you want to turn any hairy model into a feathered model just put the Hair object under the Feather oblject! (also works for splines) 4) Instance Object Who uses Instance objects, right? Cloners create instances themselves by default why should I need an Instance object ? Maybe it’s used only when you turn a Cloner to an Editable Object. The truth is that the Instance Object can make your scenes a lot lighter when you don’t use a Cloner yet you do use a lot of copies of the same objects. Most users overlook it because the first thing that comes to mind when you need a lot of something is to clone it with the Cloner. Probably the Instance Object is what makes the Cloner work in stealth mode. I'll let the Master Shapiro show you one practical use of this object. 3) Smoothing Deformer Oh the Smoothing Deformer! With a bent tube as an icon (a flat iron R25+), it doesn’t really excite. Also the name doesn’t excite either. Usually users when they want to smooth things out they’ll use the Subdivision Surface generator (SDS). But what if you don’t want to increase the number of your polygons? Yes you guessed right. But wait, what are the Relax and Stretch modes? Stretch will try to maintain the overall shape and volume of your object. So any hard edges will be preserved while polygons try to be of homogenous area. The Relax is the most interesting one. People ask all the time how to make stills with realistic cloth wrinkles and will resort to cloth simulations or even sculpting… Look no further, this is your salvation! With just a few mindless brushstrokes with the Brush tool this deformer will blow your mind. 1) Plane under SDS. 2) Plane without SDS, just play with the Brush (Mesh->Transform Tools [M~C]), 3) SDS again 4) Just apply the deformer in Relax Mode. 2) MoSpline Turtle My favorite. MoSpline is not a rare tool on users arsenal. Who doesn’t like those sexy curves, and the icon is the most elegant in the whole app (talking about the old one). But the Turtle mode is just absent from any C4D project I’ve ever seen. It’s like it doesn’t exist… I guess people see those unintelligible symbols and delete the poor tree before a virus turns C4D into Houdini. The Turtle mode is highly unappreciated. Although it does have room for improvement in its capabilities, what someone can achieve with it is quite impressive and there is no other way to do it (except maybe coding it in Python). Anyone with affection for fractals appreciates this tool. Unfortunately most people love only the colored Mandelbrot type fractals. Line fractals deserve some love too! 1) XPresso Well, what did you expect? Although a lot of users do use XPresso, still very few are well knowledgeable with it. Most users relate XPresso only with Thinking Particles and this is the main reason most users resent XPresso, because it doesn’t deliver easy, fast and intuitive particle setups. There are also many shady corners in XPresso that are rarely used in scenes so most people don’t know how they could even be used. What for should someone use Dynamics nodes or Hair nodes ? Who knows ? Anyhow, XPresso is very powerful tool if you know how to use it, and it has an overlooked cousin feature the Driver Tag that developers made just for those who don’t like XPresso. Bonus Feature Pyroclusters The most underappreciated feature ever. Today it’s totally outdated because we have Pyro. But if you don’t have RedShift or any VDB compatible renderer what will you do? Just look at those clouds! 0 voxels, 0 GPU RAM needed. There are some preset shapes you can use like box and cylinder which I have no idea what practical purpose they serve but the Hemisphere can be used to see clouds from below. The downside is that you don’t have the flexibility Pyro offers because you need a particle setup, and sometimes particles are not enough so you have to use Thinking Particles which leads us back to XPresso. Other limitations follow like that they are not compatible with VDBs because they use apperceptive 3D shading algorithms instead of voxels, so you can’t export them to an other application and that PyroCluster does not work in conjunction with the depth-of-field functionality. Other than that, if you work natively, Pyroclusters can provide some comfort when you need some fluffy clouds or smoke. This is a special case of under appreciation because people do not appreciate the ingenuity used for this one-of-a-kind feature. I should be making a YT video 🤔

I controversial because I'm having a hard time to accept what I see. If this was true then 2-minute papers would certainly make a video about it. Rumors claim that it's not really an AI but a real person modeling on-demand behind the API. Does anyone care to try and give us a review ? This is the most expensive AI app I've encountered so far billing 6$ for a trial instead for a free trial. https://kaedim3d.com/ The only competitor is https://make3d.app/?ref=theresanaiforthat

Not a big problem to create on a small scale, but this caught my eye as a hard and quite Interesting challenge to do on a larger scale. It's one that I thought would be quite suited to Houdini, but procedurally generated, randomly oriented, non-intersecting, Y branching tubes are a very tough call! Here's an initial shot at the non-intersecting tubes bit... close, but work to do!

RMB on Input and you can add nested ports

OK I've finally got my way around the numerous disappointments and came up with this: lattice.c4d to open it you need the best plugin in the world Network.7z from Noseman There is one more step you can do to make it a bit more parametric : use the Segment Capsule from SceneNodes to be able to control the number of intermediate control points of the vertical splines. Now that I look the photo again I feel like an idiot because the structure has nothing to do with what I just upload... Anyway see also this branched structure.c4d Only play with the Seeds inside the cloners, do not increase the number of clones more than two... it gets crowded. And a spin-off which I think is even better branched structure with network.c4d this also needs the plugin

If you need to scale then you scale. Using the Plain Effector you did not scale, you where moving all points towards the Z-axis. linear field.c4d

I think MoSpline's Turtle mode will be of great use here if you can work out how to address it, which isn't exactly intuitive. But that is one of the few spline-based systems in Cinema that supports junctions within a parametric / animating system. CBR

hmmm interesting times. The rate at which these A.I based technologies are improving is insane. just comparing the latest version of mid journey to previous iterations, it's getting harder and harder to differentiate. while modelling is obviously more complex than creating a 2d image if the trend continuous i see very usable end results in the not too distant future, while this could end up being a useful tool to quickly iterate rough ideas it is a little worry in the grand scheme of things for people like me who model for a living.

''We put it through QuadRemesher or similar" ! I'm certainly having a hard time 'liking' what I see, whether I believe it or not ! At the moment I dislike it because it is not good enough to be usably practical and is cynically / greedily overpriced, and when it IS good enough to replace modellers like me I will hate it for that reason and the way it devalues human effort like nearly all this art-based AI does ! CBR

+1, useless and largely overpriced

As we can see in the demo video, there are different "Generation" quality. My bet is that "Standard" is totally AI generated, while the expensive "High" and "Ultra" involve (human) optimisation and retopology and require a much longer processing. A few things potential users should be aware of : 1. It can't, for now, generate high details realistic models, just very simple "cartoon" objects. A realistic horse, for example, will be dismissed. 2. It doesn't generate textures (which makes it useless for me. Texturing is extremely time consuming, even more than modelling). 3. As indicated in the manual, it requires multiple views to generate good results, ideally: front, side, back. The background should also be clean and monochrome. Theses limitations make this service worthless for me. Paying $300 a months only to be able to generate 20 pathetic untextured low details models is insane.

It's not a rumour, it is clearly indicated in the "How it works": "An input image is submitted and passed through our AI algorithm for reconstruction. The output mesh passes from our Quality Control pipeline to make sure that flaws are eliminated. That process aims to eliminate most of the unwanted technical characteristics of the generated models (i.e. tris, n-gons). A Quality Control team member will check and improve the output where necessary for the 3D model to match our quality standards. Yes, our algorithm is not always perfect, and we want to ensure the output quality is always up to a high standard. The output is returned to the user for further editing and the addition of textures."