Cerbera

I am working on a long term film project at the moment in which I have never met anyone else connected with the production, but it seems to work really well, and as long as communication happens properly I think it's perfectly feasible to recruit and manage modellers / freelancers like that. In fact the sort of job you are offering is exactly the kind of job I would like, and if the opportunity to work remotely was a possibility I would be the first CV in your in-tray. What I can't do is relocate to the States :) But there may be many people like me who would happily adjust their working hours so they were up and working when the client was even if they are over the other side of the world... CBR

I've had a look at your file. You seem to have used SDS edge weighting instead of proper geometry for some reason ? So whilst it looks 'OK', the topology isn't very good, because in most cases you only have edges flowing in one direction (wings / tail fins etc), and are relying on weighting alone to make it hold the shapes under SDS, which (in most circumstances) is not considered good technique. The main body particularly is suffering from very uneven polygon distribution, and there are complex poles / triangles on curves elsewhere that will cause shading problems under subdivision (prop nose cone and wheel axle ends for example). You should eliminate the triangles completely - there is no need for anything except 100% quads in this model. The phong tag is also set incorrectly for various surfaces, wing stands showing the problem most severely. This has probably happened because of options you left on during bevel commands (break phong rounding), and you should turn off 'use edge breaks' in the tag to fix the problem. We should also consider at this point the wisdom of combining all the objects into one model - really you need to get the phong tags correct on all the components before you do this (or consider just leaving the parts separate), as now they are affected only by a single tag, which makes altering phong on a per-piece basis much more difficult, and may even result in you having to redefine edge breaks over the whole model. The UV mapping, on the other hand, is done much better, with only the prop blades needing some additional work to get distortion-free UV's. Oh, and the main body has the UV's mapped in reverse, so you need to flip those bits of mesh in UV edit. Hope that helps CBR

Nice one Dan - you really nailed the 'permanently worried' look of the character. Great job all round... CBR

Yeah, nobody said this was quick or easy ;) There's a lot in C4D ; it takes decades to master it all... the main thing is to be having fun while you're doing it, whatever level you are... CBR

Ha - yes, good spot :) I fixed it now.

There haven't been many tutorials on advanced C4D lighting since this classic at Critical Mass by Chris Morris. But now there's this one, by Konstantin Magnus, which thoroughly and helpfully breaks down the complex lighting setup in his Atrium scene, which I thought was very useful, so am linking here for anyone that hasn't seen it... CBR

No, you won't get any particle action cheaper than XP. Wait til they have one of their 50% off days. CBR

Thanks, Kitefly. I use a few different techniques to lose complex poles. You can spin edges, which sometimes helps, you can cut in more geometry so that less connections happen in one place, or you can bevel the pole point, and resolve its new geometry to quads. Sometimes I can instantly see how to solve them, but more often have to try several different ways to find the best one. CBR

Yep, screen caps, and display tags so I can see some Isoparms, and some bits wireframe. No progress this week - been away from it doing client stuff. Work resumes soon hopefully ! CBR

No need, just ask your friendly admin @Igor to move it for you. Except I've just done it, so no need to do anything ! :)

Welcome to the cafe. This is posted in the wrong place really, unless you are offering payment for C4D work. There are a lot of musicians and composers in this community already, me included, but someone might want to collaborate, and if they do, this should be posted in the The Lounge. Also, we only need the one post, not the 2 you have already made ! :) CBR

I'm with @VECTOR - just model it - looks like a very rewarding little SDS project. CBR

Yeah I'm not even slightly in the 'leave camp' at the moment. Happy with R18, happy with R19, looking forward to 20... Oh, and deliriously happy that knife tool finally works like a charm :)

Oh that's excellent :) Nice find. CBR

Judging by their recent tutorial output they have more people doing it than ever before. But I agree with @Cutman and suspect it's a bit 'all hands on deck' just before a release.

Well you'd have to ask MAXON about that ;)

Not yet I don't think - they usually come out a few weeks after the event.

It's a nice tranquil scene, and I like your light rays. For me the jellyfish look a little 'plonked on' ie not enough part of their environment. Could you use (or reduce depth for) an environment fog to make them blend in a bit more ? Also there is something wrong, aliasing-wise with those tentacles. Not sure what. CBR

I enjoyed @RBarrett's presentation at Siggraph, and it was nice to see him elucidate a little more on how the new core relates to modelling tools, now, and more comprehensively, later. He also went into PR settings a little more, and the viewport which was all very interesting.

This cat is worried about AI. So don't look at this one. CBR

Right let's all go and look at some emergency kittens lest we sink beneath the hopelessness of it all :)

I'm guessing my old little GTX650Ti with its slow and tired 2GB isn't going to do very well with PR then ? :(

No they'll just lobotomize us, put us in pods, and use our bodies to generate electricity. Unlike the film, they won't bother with some elaborate matrix to keep us happy - our happiness will not be among their list of concerns :)

No it's not looking good is it :) CBR

Well that's annoying, or quite helpful depending on your point of view. I thought artists were largely going to keep their jobs during the AI revolution, but it makes sense that more technical jobs like face modelling, UVing, Rigging, and animation might fall to our soon-to-be machine overlords, especially if they are producing nice all-quad solutions that usefully work later on down the pipeline. When I filled in one of those 'Find out if your job will be replaced by machines' surveys earlier in the year, it still seemed to think that 3D artists would largely keep their jobs, but this article seems better evidence to the contrary, at least in (what is at the moment) a fairly narrow range of 3D tasks. But even if AI can model anything it is shown, it still has to be shown something, and humanity is still likely to need our human minds to imagine things that don't exist yet. So it might be that AI becomes great at modelling and UVing (yes please!) meaning that artists can spend all their time being creative rather than being creative and then having to physically or virtually create their inventions. So it might vastly reduce technical skills requirement for 3D artists, but I doubt it will replace us entirely. But that's still not good news, because once this sort of technology is commonplace, the sort of skills we have spent years diligently acquiring may be made irrelevant almost overnight. But this is still 'only' AI, machines intelligently working in a very narrow band of specific tasks. We need to fear it far less than AGI (Artificial general intelligence), which might be in its infancy at the moment, but is a far more deadly enemy when it works, because that sort of thing could truly threaten to replace ALL our skills, if we manage to make its goals so closely aligned to our own that it doesn't try and eradicate us as soon as we turn it on. Let's not get into that one - there isn't time :) So what is the take home message here ? For some it will be 'evolve or become extinct', but for me it's very much 'enjoy it while you still can' ! :) CBR