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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/

Dominik Ruckli returns with one more interesting tutorial on scenenodes creating a highly demanded feature in C4D: Growth Geometry Although it still doesn't reach the level or customization of Houdini I admire it for the level of complexity and final quality. Previous attempts making something like this lead to a dead-end due o a fail-safe built into C4D preventing cyclic reference on certain generators, before finding a useful script generating new particles on constant radius from previous particles... that proved slow on computation but Dominik Ruckli's setup is faster.

@LLS One benefit you'd get in Houdini for this type of scenario would be direct support of volumes. Scene Nodes doesn't have volume nodes so you'll have work with a combination of classic C4D and Scene Nodes. Regarding multi instance: Of course Houdini has instancing. Regarding volume builder: I've never done any direct comparisons but I would assume it is pretty much the same. In many cases Houdini isn't much faster than other tools. But since there is automatic caching and a nice workflow to work with disk caches you often get better perceived performance over all.

Thank you! Yes, it is a bit clunky, and I find things that you can do in Cinema without thought take a lot of set up in unreal. But I'm addicted to that speed!

Hi there, thanks for the interesting questions. I’ll do my best to answer : The whole of the original MoGraph Module as it was known back then was designed, architected and coded by just us two, that first release I think including testing to release was maybe 9 months. Of course that was only the start, I was with Maxon for 15 years and as time went on more people become involved in the MoGraph project, it took a lot of work to make that happen. As for till done, well MoGraph is never done. I did my best to ensure Cinema was the best tool for motion graphics artists in all areas so that workflow goes through everywhere, Fields for instance I added later and was designed to unify a set of disparate workflows. The other projects I worked on were all sorts. I worked with David on the Character Animation tools, VAMP, updated morph system and stuff like that, the MAX UV tools were mine back in the day, the “Powerslider” (mini timeline) was one of mine, doodle, lighting tool, viewport interaction model and camera navigation, spline tools, lots of the UI and general UX including core concepts about interactivity, mouse behaviors etc. (though Tilo is the real genius behind most of the modern UI code in Cinema), there’s a bunch more I don’t even remember and even elements that were just lifted from my older plugins by others. While I wasn’t always working directly on MoGraph I got to touch a lot of the application and form a lot of the workflows that I hope make it a good choice for artists. Ok so the node based compositor was known as Spider, it was functional, realtime, fit into the Cinema 4D Post Effect system but lacked many of the nodes required to be what I’d call complete. It was akin to maybe the compositor you nowadays see in Blender. Yes scene-nodes were a long time coming and still a long way off where I believe they should have been.. I’m in my 40’s, that little painting application was programmed in BBC Basic which was a combination of self taught and learning from listings that used to appear in Magazines and you had to meticulously type them out, I must have been 7 or 8. I remember earlier on in London messing around with TurtleGraphics LOGO to do things on the classroom computer which was fun, I used that to make some early for me motion graphics, color line fills. I have a fine arts degree, I really had almost no education in IT. While there were classes I remember that the selection system for which classes you could take meant that it became an either or and I picked the options I preferred doing. I did take a one or two semester IT course in 6th form but they weren’t interested in teaching auxiliary courses to a high standard so I didn’t get much out of it, in the end I used it to build an FBM screen saver and a UI system in MS Basic (slow as heck). I really only do programming out of necessity. There’s something I need then, I do it. Waiting around for others to do it for you is a recipe for disappointment. Oh I don’t have favorites when it comes to programming languages. They all have their positives and negatives. C++ might be the one I continuously go back to, but only because that’s what so many people want or need. In the end the real difference between your experience with different languages isn’t the language itself so much as the API’s you’ll be dealing with. Some are well written and documented, others are a disaster of boilerplate and lackadaisical documentation, usually a sign that the author really wanted to use a different programming language entirely. In the Oscars photo I am front row, second from right.

I have no idea how I missed this interview ... Ah, yes, I was having a surgery... Can't wait for the next ! (interview) @PerAnders Only you 2 coded the whole MoGraph or you were the Lead/Senior developers of the team ? It wasn't mentioned in the interview for how long you worked for MAXON. How long did it take you to complete the MoGraph module ? Where you kept working there to maintain the tools for next releases ? What other projects where you involved in ? Was it complete ? What kind of compositor ? AE/PS style ? I guess SceneNodes where in the ideas shelf for decades The interview has many bio omissions and the story of how you got in to 3D somehow confused me because we have some similarities... How old are you? I too got a copy of Bryce when still 11 years old but my father wasn't in to technology so I got to know how to code after I got in university. In what language did you code your painting application and how old were you then ? Are you a self-taught programmer or did you graduate from an IT University ? Info is somewhat confusing because you shift from programming as a child to a graphics artist in early adulthood and then shift again to programming as a permanent career. What's your favorite programming language ? Where are you in the photo ?

Thank you for that further insight into the process of the Oscar selection committee (Honestly, how many people can speak to that in this world! Just being interviewed would be an award in and of itself). I would imagine that it was a bit of relief that the selection committee made the decision on who would be the award recipient as theirs was an unbiased decision that no one could argue with. What a relief. Also, as a Senior Manager for Cisco, I fully understand the challenges of leading in a technical company -- particularly a diverse team including people from many parts of the world (I have people in 4 different countries) and many ages (one employee - a data scientist going for his masters in AI - fresh from college). Sometimes it is hard to navigate the political waters of any company unless you have crashed your boat on the rocks a few times. Failure is a great educator. And sometimes you can't prevent those for whom you feel some responsibility for from driving their boat directly at those rocks at full speed. I have cringed at what some people have said to others and wished I could take away that moment but there are times when that may not be the best option. Jumping in can sometimes make things worse for everyone. It is sometimes better to just be quiet, let the moment pass, and wait for the "teachable moment" in the future. Also, it is always better to praise in public, but correct in private. Pretty confident that whatever the outcome or the events leading up to it, both you and Paul grew from those early days at Maxon. Thanks again for sharing! Dave As an aside, I need to try that mango juice! Really....that is your goal in 5 years! Must be good juice!!! 😁

Hi, thank-you for the wonderfully kind words. You know ego, I talk about what I know best… and then I don’t stop talking! : D That’s a great question. So to answer, at the beginning absolutely you’re right, Paul was my partner developer and we shared the development burden equally and did a great deal of brainstorming together, I of course additionally architected the vision and within Maxon I because I had negotiated us in as a package deal, he was my ward. To my great and ever lasting shame and in no small part due to my own naivety and inexperience in a role that I did not realize at the time was lead I was not able to protect him fully within the system and he and Maxon parted early on, as seems to be an ongoing motif with Maxon - acrimoniously and in my estimation entirely unfairly. From then on I built up, maintained and updated MoGraph as well as of course implementing general workflow through many areas of Cinema to strengthen that Motion Graphics experience. However don’t believe for a moment that’s a sole lonely act, I would have failed completely if I hadn’t been able to build up a team, vision and direction and it had ended up just being me on my own every once in a while throwing out random tools that no-one used! While I was primarily responsible for MoGraph, Maxon is a company of over time an increasing number of developers. In my speech I mentioned those key, who had been instrumental in being a part of the MoGraph team helping bring my hallucinatory visions to life adding feature (such as Dynamics which Ole provided) and providing support in other ways, technical and design. At the same time It was also always something I had to fight for, far too hard against a great deal of resistance, I would have failed if I had not had the support of a few key players especially in the US and among our distributors who saw first hand the value return. Now as for the award itself. Well when the Academy Award came along the Academy itself interviewed many people, both in an outside of Maxon and made their own decision based on the testimonies given and their own incredible industry experience, and let me tell you just meeting those guys alone was an honor, serious industry heavyweights and incredibly fascinating minds! They decided exactly who the award was to based on their own evaluation, which fortunately for me, saw true.

I think it would be fair to mention DITOOLS and JENNA in the history of MOGRAPH. Cinema 4D's MOGRAPH didn't appear "from nowhere"... MOGRAPH had two ancestors : the DITOOLS and JENNA Cinema 4D plugins. These plugins had both advanced deformers and generators very similar to the MOGRAPH tools. MOGRAPH took the idea further with the system of effectors, but the basic functionalities were already available in DITOOLS and JENNA. When I tested MOGRAPH back in 2005, everything felt extremely familiar including the tabs layout. We could see were it came from... Remotion's DITOOLS included: -A displacer, the "DiShaper". It worked with both procedural and bitmap textures, in any projection. It supported normal and depth maps. -A cloner, the "Dicloner". It included all the famous cloning method (Polygon, Vertex, Edge, Random, Area, etc...) and selection tags. It could modulate the clones parameters with tags and textures. It was a very powerful cloner even capable of generating TP particles. -A spline deformer, the 'DiSplineDeformer". This was exactly like the MOGRAPH equivalent. -And dozens of other tools, like the "DiTessa" (parametric tessellation), "DiSplineGen" (texture based spline generator), DiParserSpline (formula based spline generator), "DiParametric" (Formula object generator) or the Placement Painting (a clone painter). Per-Anders actually discovered these type of parametric tools with DITOOLS, as you can read in my 2002 thread on CG society: https://forums.cgsociety.org/t/english-resource-for-the-ditools-plugin-available/649184 "I’ve already learnt tons about these tools that i doubt i would have done by just experimenting alone… they’re just darn useful and i never did realise just how powerful they were!!!" JENNA had also strong mographing tools. There was NICKL (procedural shader displacer), ITERATOR and ALLIE (advanced cloners). The manual is still online, for the curious: https://davidpatrickfarmer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Jenna_v2.25.pdf I'm not writing this to dismiss the work of Paul and Per-Anders. MOGRAPH is, without a doubt, an excellent tool. But it's sometimes important to put things in context, to acknowledge the programmers who paved the way and were never in the limelight. It's just like mentioning Lorentz and Poincaré when we talk about Einstein's Theory or Relativity.

As someone who joined later when MoGraph bedrock was already done I felt privileged to be mentioned, it was quite a bit of work to test and help build MoGraph all around. Annoying others in the team, that comes effort free for me