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Per-Anders Edwards is Oscar awarded developer, designer and artist. Widely known as one of the duo of brains behind MoGraph and highly innovative individual . Born in Sweden, currently resides in California. He worked in many design agencies, Maxon and currently works at Mercedes Benz Research & Development North America. Apart form designing and programming, he enjoys playing the guitar, painting and has interest in tech policy. He also loves annoying Sam Altman. We are very happy to present Per and are very thankful he opted to give us this exclusive interview! Describe yourself in a single word : ) Serendipitous How did you get into C4D development and 3D in general? I got into 3D early on in childhood, not that I was some precocious kid; it’s just that I grew up in the 80s and 90s playing Elite on my Acorn Electron and Outrun at the arcades. CG was fresh, a big deal flashy thing wherever it appeared not just for me - it was a part of pop culture, in the Cinemas, magazines, even on the news on TV. This was an era of relative to today at least tremendous tech optimism. Tron & The Last Starfighter were milestones of course I remember well and of course Red and Tin Toy, the amazing work Pixar brought out setting the bar again and again and of course then Terminator 2, Jurassic Park in the 90s. 3D CG was even showcased in science museums heavily, I remember seeing an early VR headset at a museum of nuclear science in the north of England in the early 90s. It was hard not to be into 3D CG when you’re surrounded by a million voices telling you how cool it is, when you’re immersed at a formative time. Fortunately for me my dad was every bit into technology as I was and he brought one of the first 8bit home computers er… well… home. He and my brother wrote an accounting program with it but once I got a hold of a computer I wrote a painting application and versions of space invaders, then little 3D toys based on my own logic. It wasn’t till the early 90’s when I got a Commodore Amiga I got my first taste of a DCC thanks to the magazine Amiga Format having Real 3D (later to be Realsoft 3D) on a cover disk. I managed to create a few animations, but raytracing was sloooow. Things picked up a little when I moved to my dad’s Mac and first got to play with Bryce, Ken Musgrave and Kai Krause’s idiosyncratic take on 3D and UI. Also not fast, but faster and fascinating. Over time the interest petered out though with the life and needs of a growing lad. It wasn’t till I was working at a post production house in North London and we were using 3D Studio Max for little CG stings so I had to make a few videos for clients that needed 3D elements that my interest was rekindled. When enough of the clients begged that I become a freelancer because they wanted to work directly with me (and save a penny I’m sure) I decided to pick up Lightwave as the tool for when 3D was needed. A choice made based on the readily available community, there were plenty of other freelancers who I’d bump into constantly who used it in London. When I moved to America in the early 2000’s I decided to shift to just 3D work, and to see what else was on offer as a fish in new water. After testing just how quickly I could work in all of them I found I was fastest in Cinema 4D, it even aligned with my needs using the After Effects when I looked at how they were updating their timeline, to me it was the most artist friendly 3D tool at that time. That’s not to say it was perfect. The software development then came as a necessity, there were missing tools I was used to having and when you’re a freelancer time is money. You have to be able to work fast, so I started to fill the gaps. Which area interests you most? Stepping away from C4D for a moment. For me in my own personal projects right now I’m enjoying the world of VR and AR. While it’s not exactly early days they’re still in that charmingly awkward phase of UX development where nothing is really set in stone and everyone’s as incompetent as each other at it, and this makes for many opportunities. What other apps are you using and what for? I use a bit of everything. You have to be adaptable to be a freelancer and you should always be enthusiastic about the field you freelance in. These days I find myself encountering and using Blender more and more. When it comes to development work then of course my main weapons of choice are IDE’s and text editors, VSCode, the Jetbrains tools and the occasional forced under duress use of Nano etc. Unfortunately more and more I find myself being sucked into the world of Jira, Excel and PowerPoint. Which learning resources you used and would recommend? Oof, opening a big ol’ can of response here. I have many thoughts on learning. Different tactics work depending on your initial passion for the subject. Sometimes you have to learn something you don’t really want to, sometimes it’s just an internal need that can’t be satiated enough. Use every one! This is your passion or at least interest. It’s like you’re climbing a cliff, you need every handhold available to you as you scrabble your way up. As a technique I found that answering other peoples questions without assumption was very successful and would recommend the same to anyone. It’s great because you’re forced out of your comfort zone and ways of thinking, to research and do things you haven’t done before, and your answers are documenting your progress for you in an analytical way. If you try this then take on the QA mindset and never assume when you’re learning - always make sure you test and do the thing yourself before you respond, you don’t want to be the blind leading the blind. When it comes to growth mindset and learning I’m a believer in the value of routines rather than goals. It’s not really about introducing structure, instead its because they really help overcome fear of failure. Failure is a huge positive potential that’s mostly squandered. Especially in the arts failing means you have improved your discernment to the point that you can recognize that failure for what it is! That’s a good thing. You keep working at it till you figure out how you can fix or avoid the mistake. The more success you have the harder it is to fail. But you place that expectation you think others have of you on yourself and I really found this a lot the more I worked at Maxon, the mindset there and the lack of free time and building my own voice and and and… well and it exacerbated my own introversion and risk aversion which in turn reduced my ability to learn and progress and I would say while I was successful I capped my own potential. That reduced my value to the company. Once I left I found it incredibly liberating to bring in routines where there was no pressure for success. To focus on the exact opposite of what they always tell you to - quantity rather than quality! The quality comes anyway of it’s own accord anyway, you can’t help but learn and improve faster if you’re failing faster too. You build that critical discernment. Just remember the mantra of “No pressure!” (beyond the commitment of starting, of it being routine of course). You don’t need to produce a lot, it doesn’t have to be good or successful in any way, it can even deviate completely from the plan, you need only do and take the first step each day. Success, learning, a loss of perfectionism and entering a growth mindset are byproducts. We all subconsciously build ego around success, then try to repeat it and avoid failure. This fear of failure is perfectionism and that stops growth, you no longer want to take risk, or try anything outside of your comfort zone and eventually it’ll stop you completely, it’s a prison that shrinks your horizons and world. It’s incredibly important for your own spirit to recognize and avoid that outcome, break perfectionism for your own happiness. An example of routine that fits the bill is the morning pages from Julia Cameron’s “The Artists Way”. A great book well worth reading if you haven’t already. It’s a fantastic starting point, from there you can find your own routines, your own daily “me” time, whether it’s exercise, or even if it’s a process you introduce to your work itself. Do you think talent is overrated and can be offset with a lot of hard work? I’m on the side of nurture on this. I don’t believe in the idea of innate talent, I do believe in certain innate aptitudes that can help, for instance having larger but skinny hands makes playing the guitar easier, but also that you have to put in the work. Those who seem “talented” simply put in all the work that you don’t see, even if it’s their first time trying something, they put in the foundational work required to quickly pick up this new thing. That could be physical fitness, mental flexibility, mechanical understanding. It can even be the work others put in, like giving them a solid support structure, financial security so they can take risk. It’s all like putting together a recipe, you can make a pizza base if you have cauliflower, chick peas etc, but it’s much easier if you have wheat flour, salt, water. Bear that in mind the next time you see someone for whom it seems easy. How did you imagine and conceptualize MoGraph? When I was hired by Maxon at Siggraph I agreed on the provision that they would also hire my at the time coding partner Paul Everett. Paul had mentored me on the C4D API and C++ then joined forces with me writing plugins. I wanted to develop plugins that could do certain things that you could not with the only scripting language available in Cinema at that time C.O.F.F.E.E. Together we’d released two top tier plugins “Mesh Surgery” a modeling toolset that innovated workflow simply by being completely interactive and realtime (a novel idea at the time and for the processing), and “Storm Tracer” a fast volumetric particle rendering system. Paul had a storied history developing his own plugins before he met me, and shortly before I joined Maxon I’d written an extensible node based compositor in Cinema called Spider (which was never released). It was this background that lead Maxon to approach me. The first project we did was MoGraph. I wont go into the full background of the project, however suffice to say the original desire from the company wasn’t exactly what they ended up with. In fact they weren’t even after a motion graphics toolset, more of a procedural modeling tool do fill a recently opened gap with some ideas talked about doing text transitions. Thing is, I’m a 3D graphics freelancer. I know what I wanted. Knew what was great and what sucked about using Cinema 4D, and critically I knew what took time and what I needed to be much easier to achieve. So I had my own set of goals and fortunately for me Paul was right on board. in the end Maxon was happy to trust us to do what was right and that we knew would be better than the original brief. Paul is tremendously intuitive at coming up with novel ideas himself, I’m very focussed on workflows. To me you as a user shouldn’t be forced to make decisions that a good design should do for you, there’s no excuse as a developer other than budget, after all we can do anything. Also I just want an easy life as a user - laziness is a great driver of innovation! So I came up with the Effectors system (I still regret the naming, but often what you do in development ends up sticking) and Cloner as a solution to some of the workflow issues I faced when dealing with particles. I wanted to have ”particles without particles” a directable solution, so this was embedded throughout. Paul meanwhile took this idea to the Matrix object where you could feed in an actual particle emitter and apply deformers to the particle axis and the MoGraph text object where you could explode and direct elements of text at all hierarchy levels. I’d make a spline deformer, Paul would make a displace deformer and so on. We built a whole load of procedural modeling and animating objects, deformers, tags and shaders around Cinema’s brilliant but slow Object System. We were very symbiotic and spend time together on each piece of code, I added the Thinking Particles integration to the Matrix etc. At the end of the day these ideas solved problems I faced as a 3D artist, with workflows that were at the time as intuitive solutions as I was able to create with the knowledge I had then. Once people saw what it was coalescing into we agreed that Motion Graphics was the ticket, and the name MoGraph I just threw in there because I was tired of constantly typing MotionGraphicsModule. It was obviously a highly successful collaboration between ourselves and Maxon. MoGraph was only the start of course, that first developer meeting we had in person I set out a map for the future they’re still following, organization, design department, new core, nodes etc. having worked extensively with Cinema’s object system I had… opinions. I had a headline feature in every release from 9.6 onwards. In fact my tools and guidance helped the company grow 2000% over the time I was with them, and even though I left some time ago I still occasionally recognize one of my or Paul’s old shelved tricks being unearthed as new feature content. Your best advice for newcomers, tip or trick to pick up? People skills, be genuine - will open doors that a 5 star portfolio alone will not. The trick there isn’t in being friendly and likable when everything is going well, anyone can do that. It’s in being able to deliver bad news but make your client still love you for it. Where do you see yourself in 5 years? Drinking fresh mango juice. Thoughts on AI? Tremendous tool but also highly dangerous. From a UX perspective it’s implicit design which always makes Undo the whole workflow, something I’m not keen on. Experience has taught me that a professional knows what they want, to achieve that the tool should enhance their control, not take it away. In general it’s a magnifier of human behavior. In particular when it can be used for profit of one kind or another - it’s a magnifier of greed. As such there are very real risks and ethical concerns around how we use AI. Our policy makers are far behind the ball on this one, and unfortunately people like Sam Altman put on a circus and leverage the general ignorance on the topic to gain advantages that would see the rest of us deeply disadvantaged. The bogeyman of sentient and agentic AI (or AGI) is nothing more than that. It’s a tool to legislate away competition and build a moat for these people. Deep learning, machine learning is currently architecturally incapable of reasoning. It’s akin to a lossy encryption algorithm with a fuzzy logic key. It is tremendous at recall though and this is enough to fool many when they underestimate the size of its training corpus or do not understand the tokenization and importance weighting process. The real risks are human and economic, the potential for dystopia at our own hands. Even the E/ACC crowd identified this. I’ve always fought for artists. It’s for this reason that I put myself firmly on what I am sadly fairly certain will end up being the wrong side of history and back them in their fight against generative AI abuses, corporations scraping their work. You might say being right but on the wrong side isn’t much of a strategy for success, but it’s about compunction and I’ve only ever gained by supporting people. Top 3 wishes for C4D If it isn’t clear by now I make my own solutions 😄 In a more diffuse way I would hope that it continues to do well and enables new generations of artists to achieve. The best good you can do in the world to make it better is to enable others opportunity. If you could send a message for Maxon, what would you say? Hey! I charge consultancy fees for that you know? 😉 They know where to find me if they need the introspection and understanding of what’s really going on within their structure and what they can do to resolve the problems they face. Message for Core4D? Keep being awesome! This forum is tremendous help and eco system driver for C4D. Tell us something we could not possibly know about you but you find important Client first! It’s pathological with me. When Warner Brothers approached me to head and build their virtual sets department and when AWS wanted me to join their top sales team in a very high level role I dissuaded both from hiring me because I simply felt my complete lack of experience in those fields would be a huge detriment to their goals. Oh I’m sure the seven figure salaries would have assuaged my conscience a little but that little voice in the back of my head is always gonna be screaming “you’ll never get repeat business that way”. Since then no surprises I actually have more experience and contacts in both worlds, you never know what the future might bring! Life always has a way of working out. If people want to contact you? They can and they should! https://www.linkedin.com/in/per-anders-edwards/

Thanks for the tip with the Legacy Bump Sampling Technique. I just tried it but it doesn't seem to change anything in my example scene, unfortunatly. I'm curious if for example Octane has the same behaviour, i will try and write an update here soon.

Hello, Here is the first step of the central reservation and sidewalk :

*Shakes 8 ball "Acquired by Adobe in 2025" *shakes 8 ball some more The year is 2030. Unreal engine continues to grow and becomes the defacto render engine for most 3D work due to the balance of realism and render speed. c4d is still going fine and profitable, but blender has become the number 1 app due to the fact that it has been 7 years and the c4d student licences still don't work, thus there havent really been many new users. Octane 2029.2 still crashes every 3 hours, if you ask for tech support they will still blame your psu and gpu drivers. c4d 2030 still has no particle system, 90% of all new c4d features are now provided by Insydium which now has a higher monthly cost than c4d itself. 2035. C4D is now available as a plugin for the Insydium Suite. 2037, Adobe adds a new feature to Photoshop that people actually asked for 2039, Yīngyǔ xiànzài bèi jìnzhǐ, yīnwèi wǒmen de zhōngguó bàzhǔ rènwéi tā wéibèile rénmín de yìyuàn. Xí huángdì wànsuì

Relative to the actor and writer's strike, then yes for US movies it will be a lean 2024 summer season for VFX in the big blockbuster movies simply because live action production had to shut down. But with that said, it will NOT be that bad for feature length CG animations because those movies are planned well in advance with voice acting talents locked down ahead of time. Not sure what the ratio is of reshoots (or re-rather rewrites) for a CG animation is relative to a live action movie but I would have to imagine it is a lot less. Therefore, I have a higher expectation for character animation in a 100% CG movie to be less impacted than for VFX animation in a live action film. So, anything from Marvel (given that their process depends on re-shoots as they actually budget for it more than most other companies) will be impacted. ....and of course, anything with a short development timeline (like advertising and TV) will be less impacted that anything with a longer development timeline (like movies, etc). Plus, there is streaming which can tap into global content not impacted by the strikes in the US. The only big summer 2024 summer blockbuster I would bet on would be MI: Dead Reckoning Part II simply because live action finished on that prior to the strike. Dave As an aside and not intended to derail this thread: Is lack of Marvel content during the summer of 2024 necessarily a bad thing? I only mention that given how poorly MCU's recent movies have been doing along with the rest of the movies coming from Disney: $1B loss in 2023 for all Disney films across all of Lucasfilm, Marvel and Pixar with bigger losses in Disney+ AND nothing to base a big Christmas 2023 toy campaign on. These missteps do not just impact movie revenue. The bigger golden goose getting killed by making movies no one wants to see is the toy market driven by these IP's. In fact, the initial strategy of Disney buying Lucasfilm and Marvel was because Disney (while strong in the toy market for girls with all their Disney Princesses) had no strong presence in the toy market for boys. So, they give a Star Wars reboot in 2015 with very little Luke and lots of Rey and kill Han off right away. Sorry, I just don't see a big draw for little boys to play with Rey action characters. What were they thinking? Also, word is that when the Mandalorian Season 2 ended with Grogu going off with Luke Skywalker, Hasbro was pumped!!! Now there was a toy merchandising opportunity: Luke training Grogu!!!! Pure gold. Nope, killed that quickly in the "Book of Bobba Fett". Hasbro was pissed as they pay a premium to Disney for the license to sell those toys and they have nothing to sell. On the Marvel side, they killed off Iron Man, turned Captain America into an old man, made She-Hulk stronger and more in control than The Hulk in "She Hulk", and made Thor look like a buffoon in "Thor Love and Thunder" in comparison to Lady Thor. So not much useable IP left in the toy market for boys from Marvel. I think Disney forgot their market and the simple fact that young boys are more likely to want to live vicariously through strong male oriented hero action characters. If that was not case, then Mulan would be selling like hot cakes into that market. Again, what were they thinking? But getting back to movies.... Anyone pumped up for the "Marvels"? Yeah....my point exactly. This movie is projected to tank badly (based on pre-ticket sales and theater bookings) well below the worst performing MCU movie which was The Hulk in 2008 ($264M worldwide gross). This probably explains why Kevin Fiege is already "soft" announcing a re-boot of the MCU ahead of "The Marvel's" release in November. These execs are realizing that they killed the golden goose in Phase 4 (also known as the "M-She-U"). I guess Disney stock price hitting a 10-year low can be a bit of a wake-up call. Well, that is what happens when you lose sight of your market. Not sure that is possible with SW or any other Lucasfilm property given current management. So how do you make a million-dollar franchise? Easy. Buy a billion-dollar franchise and give it to Kathleen Kennedy.