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Today I was fooling around in the new release and the possibilites are certainly mind-boggling. Here's a particle stream that drives a volume builder which is displaced at rendertime for super-fine detail. Nothing special, but it was super-fun to make... and it plays in the viewport in the 20-30 fps range, which is very fine 🙂

I only watched Chris‘ video about particles so far... my first impression is really good! It's elegantly designed: a limited set of building blocks, but with endless possibilities. I love the shared use of forces, fields, vertex maps, it's so powerful and versatile. And I applaud the simple, visual setup in the object manager. Very well done! 🙂

If we added everything from the start you would have to wait months more. We delivered what we think is a great release that is very usable. Additional features will come.

I didn't even began to try breaking the next NDA and you've already spilled the beans ! (kidding) Liquid sims for September's release everyone !!! hahhaahahaahahaha ok, enough... Personally I'm good without the liquid sims because with particles and volume displacement I can now fake visualizations like these:

*cough* liquid sim ?? That's one big area we are still 'missing'... CBR

dear members, we now have 7 videos on Youtube channel! Hop over and subscribe even if you are not into nodes, it will help the channel grow which will help us make more quality content, thank you!

This is an awesome release and I'll be re-subbing after the September release comes out.

It's a wonderful release, adding a boatload of functionality to simulation and a solid first step to bringing our particles up to date, and fully integrated with other simulation components - as Chris was at pains to point out the possibilities now are mind-boggling ! I think a lot of people will be very happy with this release, except possibly the guys who make X-Particles; it will be interesting to see where they pivot next. Of course all the attention is rightly focused mainly on the particles, but I was pleased that there have been good updates in other areas, a few of my own suggestions have been added to modelling functionality, and RS got a lot of love and improvements, not least being the toon shader stuff. The new Connectors functionality and workflows are so much easier to work with than the old system, so that is very welcome too. So all in all, I am loving this release... CBR

SOM too:

I'm keeping my eye on Chaos Vantage for exactly what you're talking about. It's currently only serving up VRAY, but Corona is supposed to get support and accessibility in it's next release. So I'm hoping this is somewhere between Cinema and Unreal for client walkthroughs and quick animations. I know about Twinmotion, but the appeal of Vantage is not having to do any alterations to your normal Cinema scene in regards to lighting, materials and Cameras. Just waiting for that. I love Unreal, but it's a haul to get full scenes or interiors going properly.

It feels like there is still a long list of stuff C4D really needs to add and sort out but with this release I feel now that the development train is strong on track to get there. Particles must have taken a long time to develop, design, test and everything. Now that it's here they can furthe develop it and also turn their eye to the other areas that require improvement.

The volume displacement is behaving nicely in animation. You can even animate the displacing noise itself, which - again - offers so many new possibilities. A bit slow to iterate on, because you need a full rendering of the animation to assess the animation, but cool nevertheless... Only downside, it's totally not-intuitive to setup 😕

I don't think this will work for C4D. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_point_method

Dave's trolling powers have also levelled up. https://x.com/dmcgavra/status/1778434672134914467?s=61

Try implementing it. And make sure it runs on CPU, GPU (not just on NVIDIA), ARM processors, all operating system, correctly deals with ACEs,...

You can create a Vertex Color Tag from a texture using scene nodes. The Vertex Color Tag can then be used to control particles in whatever way you want. Image 2 Vertex Colors_0003.c4d It's quicker if you can do without UVs though Position 2 Vertex Colors 01.c4d

This latest Particle addition is a welcomed update. Pretty sure Maxon have probably been working on this for a while , I applaud them for their persistent and hard work. The particle capabilities are very thorough. Though after watching Chris Schmidt's 4hr preview, I noticed a few important aspects were 'missing' so to speak. Maybe I missed them or maybe the functionality is there but not as obvious as it is in X-particles for example. One aspect was the ability to emit from a texture, this is something I'd imagine is easy to implement and also something I use a lot. Very surprised this functionality isn't there from the start. Secondly was the ability for particles to follow a 'flow path'. I'm amazed this wasn't included and I do hope that this functionality will be available in a recent update. While I will use the new particle system wherever I can, I don't think I'll give up on X-particles just yet unfortunately.

The OM is arguably one of Cinema's greatest strengths, and its userbase are rather attached to it, not to mention, used to it, so I think it makes sense to introduce such a powerful new system via an innately familiar interface, and using its workflows and structures. I like having all the particle stuff there in the OM where I can always see it and (mostly) what it is doing without having extra windows floating about. That's not to say I couldn't also see it working in a nodal context, but I have to say I kinda like it where it is... CBR

it is completely possible to build ur own particle system using scene nodes. however, this current particle system is built to work with the unified simulation system that cinema4d has built. this allows the particles to interact with cloth, pyro, rigid and soft bodies. these use a system known as position based dynamics, which if it were a node, would have everything connected to it. bifrost in maya has a node that does pbd. right now the philosophy of cinema4d is to provide the intuitive tools in the object manager, and allow for more custom systems built by technical artists in scene nodes. c4d users are used to object manager so it is still valuable for alot of these things to be implemented in object manager. but if the user requires more advanced setup, scene nodes is available and works really well with the overall c4d architecture.

sorry, i respectfully disagree. there is simply no way objects in manager can have better overview of all connections and dependencies which are within objects. There is a reason why nodes are used in premium particle apps. don't get me wrong, i love the new stuff just seeing missed opportunity here. i also would want to have fields as nodes too. at the moment it looks like there are two apps within one fighting each other and divide between them is widening.

just finished watching the 4 hour vid by chris. just amazing! congratulations devs and thank you for this amazing release! keep it up maxon!

I wonder how many of the new particle features were inspired from my suggestions to Maxon... But watching so many long-expected mechanics to finally get implemented can only make my eyes water...

Really cool release, with lots of goof stuff! EDIT - Holy S***, this release is even chunkier than usual. Hats off to the devs, they've done a great job with this one. RocketLasso is doing a live stream with some Maxon folk (probably Rick?) later today.

That looks like a splendid release! Particles! Volumes! Toon Shader! I hope Chris Schmidt will make another one of his in-depth-videos for this one.

Maxon feature iterates these days with releases due to subscription. Cloth, Sim, Pyro etc all where updated after release frequently over 2-4 releases.

While that's certainly true for the old stuff, they continually improved new tech over the last releases. Like Fields, Nodes, Universal Simulation, Pyro...

By the way, I'd love to have a centralized manager for caching and baking stuff - either to improve playback performance or to just bake things down for eternity. Right now, the tools and options are scattered across the interface. I know nitrobake, but I'd love to have something native with guaranteed compatibility...

My guesses and expectations for the new particles: Good performance Properly embedded in the new universal simulation system Somewhat basic feature set at launch, but deepened in the next releases Natural behaviour (I hope for good presets/starting points) Easy, intuitive UI As for x-particles - in hindsight, it makes a lot of sense that they broadened their portfolio with Terraform, Taiao, Cycles, Meshtools, etc. Perhaps they knew or anticipated this move by Maxon. Yeah, well, it's quite obvious actually, as particles are so immensely useful. in comparison to my expectations above, i think of x-particles: Performance is mediocre at best, even with the GPU-Nexus-Acceleration It's somewhat isolated in C4D, interactivity is possible, but it often requires jumping through extra hoops It's packed with features, to the point where it's all too much. I kept learning and forgetting stuff at the same pace 😕. I guess it will take some years until C4D's new particles fully replace x-particles. But maybe it's a lot faster with a fresh new concept. We'll see soon 🙂 In my experience, it's a lot of work to make things behave natural. Just some rain with turbulence? It never feels quite right, I feel like I always have to fight that damn thing Watching Bob Walmsley's great tutorials make it look easy, but I keep getting lost in the tabs and sub-tabs of this plugin. It doesn't help that there is no translation for my native language available, which sucks at this price.

It really isn't a port of any kind, it is a new development from the ground up and any similarities to TP are simply due to it being a particle system as well.

They get all of Maxon One for that hundred bucks, including all the Red Giant stuff, Redshift, ZBrush and whatever else gets chucked in there. And I actually do see the logic of it as a business decision. Clearly less people will be signing up to this higher price than before. The people that do sign up will be paying higher than before. Those people will probably also be more keen on sticking with C4D and using it as a career, versus the percentage (I won't say 'handful' as it could be many) of people who wanted to test the waters, were half interested, but view the hundred bucks as an obstacle. So they go away, Maxon has less work to deal with managing it, and they probably still kinda / sorta make the same dollars. I could be wrong. Dave can pop in here with a big spreadsheet showing earnings and interest and projections if anyone really wants to get into the dollar logic of why they put the price up. When I sub again it won't be at the educational rate so in a number of ways I don't really care about this. There are a few references to Blender in that Reddit thread but I would frankly view it as newsworthy if a C4D comments thread pops up anywhere online without at least three guys telling us how wonderful Blender is. Blender is pretty cool, and I have this on a lot of authority because the past five years of scrolling C4D threads everywhere have usually carried a handful of folks giving one sentence comments or five words or even just two words mentioning Blender, like "There's always Blender...." "You could always use Blender..." "Or, there's Blender..." "Blender is free!" and so on. This was all useful info the first time I heard it but is maybe less effective reading it the 5000th time, but this is just me. And I do think Blender is cool. But it's very janky and even the non-janky bits sit tightly alongside the bits that are janky, all of it managed and sorted out by a particularly janky Object manager. The Reddit thread does have a quite fair comment from a teacher who noted, in NZ a lot of the kids at the school where he teaches are poor and $100 is a week's groceries. This is fair enough and if he's going to learn and then teach them all Blender, I guess they'll all be learning Blender. If this is a good thing for everyone I'm not sure what the problem is. People say we live in a world of dramatic exciting change with AI and new free software apps and entire industries changing, and who knows where we will be in five years etc etc? In reality I know exactly where we will be in five years, threads will still be bubbling along at a low rate with some folks expressing satisfaction and some dissatisfaction at whatever Maxon has just done, every online comments thread here and on Youtube and elsewhere will have another five to ten guys writing "There's always Blender..", "You could just use Blender", "Maybe it's time for Blender?", and this will be the state of affairs for the rest of our lives, with neither Maxon nor the excitable Blender fans ever changing.

the performance is still being boosted with every version. matrix object is now 10x faster.

A particle update would be exciting to be sure so bravo if that is the case as it does point the way to even more exciting simulation possibilities in the future...in particular liquid fluids. So, any guesses as to what his next "cheeky" Twitter post will be? Honestly, he could have a lot of fun with this if his tweets were less obvious. For example, how about pouring himself a cup of coffee? Not CG...a real cup of coffee. No message, No tag, just a cup of coffee. That would definitely leave us all guessing. Nevertheless, like reading the stars in the sky to determine the future, he has successfully cultivated a bunch of "watchers" on his X feed of people trying to figure out what is next at Maxon. Very clever indeed. Dave

yes, also very excited to see what's coming in the next release. I believe it's maxons own new particle system. This would combine very well with an updated viewport and faster C4D in general. I would assume the viewport will be able to handle massive particle counts. Or I like to at least hope. But a new particle system sets the grounds for further simulation systems coming in the future. And perhaps one day, we could even advance to a muscle simulation system. Either way, I'm one of the believers that the future of C4D is bright and in good hands.

nevermind again... sorted by moi self... xP doesn`t like RS motion blur...