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It is true that you can't drive the creation of particles with map, shader or noise yet. But there are two workarounds. You can either drive a polygon selection with map/shaders/noise and use that to restrict the emission, or you can emit evenly and instantly kill particles based on a map/shader/noise. Here is an example. The shader field drives a vertex color tag which is then used to set the particle colors on emission. Particles are emitted into a first group where there color is checked. If the it is below a certain value the particle is killed right away, if not it is moved to a permanent group where it will happily continue it's particle life. In case you wondering where the animation is coming from, that's set in the Shader Field with the remapping graph to cycle through different grey values of the texture. This is not the most efficient way as the buffers need to be cleaned up more frequently than needed, but you can achieve the intended effect. kill_by_map.c4d

Ok, for anyone else using Octane, I discovered it works only if you select Render Instances in the Cloner settings as follows:

To the realtime discussion as someone who just burned 2K EUR on a Renderfarm with broken renderings. This was 10 years ago: Go figure where it could have been today. Pixelberg was a huge chance Maxon missed back in the day. This is 4-5 years ahead of Eevee. The guy also relesead a normal editing tool a decade ago. He was a game TD who tried to bring realtime workflows to C4D and disappeared with R18 becasue he thought Maxon would go realtime with viewport rendering. Pixelberg needed a lot of work but it also used PBR game maps from Unreal and Unity so you had equal look in all three. Was a cool effort

Courtesy of Silverwing VFX, I think this might help with Octane / mograph colours... CBR

NAB has started

Not sure what currency that is but we haven't raised prices.

the problem with real time rendering is that it will never match what unreal engine does. not because c4d isnt capable of doing such thing, it’s just that DCCs arent built the way game engines are built. the reason why unreal engine is so fast is because of the amount of viewport optimizatios it does to get rendering at that speed. these optimizations wouldnt work for a DCC, where accurate data is needed. for example, unreal, just like almost every other game engine of old, does insane amounts of LOD optimizations, eliminating alot of geometry data for performance gains. mesh shading is another use of this… combine with a bunch of other optimizations in the viewport and other areas, unreal can get those speeds. but these types of optimizations dont work well for any DCC because loss of data is not a good thing for a program where data is needed to operate on for modeling/animation/simulations. game engines are always built to look ‘good enough’. DCCs are built to look accurate. therefore, c4d cant truly compete with the real time market. its not its purpose and a market thats not really needed imo… techincally, if maxon wanted, they could make c4d into unreal more than any other DCC. it has directx12. and directx12 supports mesh shading… c4d also has multi instancing, which unreal uses a similar tech to make high geo environments… the tech is there, but the purpose is not…

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

PSU: Youve specced an SFX sized one, thats smaller than a normal ATX size and will been needlessly more expensive, go for a cheaper atx size. ram: it will work, but may I offer an alternative. Ryzen systems love ram speed, it can give 10, 20, 30% more performance. The problem with your 4x32gb 128gb kit is that ryzen cant run 4 slots of double sided ram at full speed, so even if youre buying a 5600mhz kit, the motherboard will run it at 3200mhz. The ideal sweet spot for modern ryzen systems is 6000mhz, thats the fastest 1:1 sync speed you can do with the cpu. What I would suggest is sacrificing a bit of ram capacity and instead go with 2x 48gb sticks for 96gb total. Dont bother with the 2070 gpu, it will be a waste of time, sell it and cash in its value. SLI is dead, ignore it, no consumer gpus are made with the connectors anymore. Multiple gpus can be used, just plug them in, no SLI is needed. However, keep in mind the space and power requirements. Most 4090 cards are 3-4 slots. Does your case choice provide the 8+ slots of vertical space needed? We run dual 4090 cards as render nodes in older corsair 680x cases because theyre one of the few cases with the vertical space needed. 1 large ssd is fine, I would just pair it with a cheap 10+TB hdd for storing archived projects and running system backups in the background. For the case, personally I would go with a simple front to back airflow case. Sheets of glass are not friendly to system temps, nor are 90 degree corners. Im a fan of the corsair 4000d airflow. cheap, looks decent, very nice performance (disclaimer, i work for them) Noctua D15 is a great cooler and will cope with the 7950x perfectly fine. Little point overclocking the cpu as its already running up against power limits by default. AIOS are fine if you want to pick them, but go 280mm or 360mm, Ignore 240mm and lower.

As the 7950X is unlocked for over-clocking, if you intend to do that than you might want to rethink the fan based cooler and move to liquid cooling. Even without over-clocking, the AMD spec sheet recommends liquid cooling for optimal performance. Personally, I am not a fan of over-clocking from a long-term reliability perspective. One other thing I tried to find out about is whether the 9750X supports 4 or 8 channel multi-channel memory configurations. If it is 4, then you are well configured. If is 8 (which I am beginning to doubt as only their older CPU's support that....I think), then you might want to consider 8 x 16Gb modules. Relative to wedging in an older GPU.....my understanding is that the memory configurations need to match for most programs to appropriately manage passing data to both GPU's. I could be completely wrong about this. Given that it is 5+ years old GPU, my gut is telling me that it may be more trouble than it is worth. Relative to additional drives, a separate boot drive is nice but you may want to consider either an internal or external RAID 1 SATA drive for long term - and cheap - asset storage. I hate cluttering my high-priced SSD's with assets that I am not using. Not sure if fluids are in your future, but those caches can get huge (more than 300Gb are easily possible for a 30 second animation) and you may want to keep as much free space on the SSD for holding multiple versions of cache until the job is finished. After that, delete them and moved the finished scene to the SATA drive for archiving. Another option to consider is cloud storage --- though I have never looked into the long-term cost-benefit analysis of renting cloud storage vs. my own RAID set-ups. Another consideration to throw into the mix is that upload/download speeds from the cloud can match the R/W speeds from a SATA drive provided you are on a premium service plan from your ISP. There have been debates on this in the past...which I hope not to repeat here. Given the cost of the system, have you also considered putting some money into a very good combination surge protector/UPS. Your UPS needs to provide at least 85% of the wattage coming from your power supply for however long you think you will need to complete a frame render, exit the software and power down safely. I have separate UPS for the monitors and my workstation as they each have different power consumption needs. I also have a separate one for the modem/router/IP phone. Kind of nice to be on a conference call, have the lights kick-out then tell everyone that we need to wrap this up in 20 minutes before I go completely off-line. Of course, if you have high confidence in the reliability of your power company, a UPS may not be justified....but still think about a power conditioner/surge protector. Dirty power is always an issue (run the clothes dryer, and you get a spike. Refrigerator or boiler kicks in, you get a spike, etc). It all helps with longevity. Overall, your configuration and price are very good! You are definitely getting a monster for a fair price (IMHO). Dave