Cerbera

Welcome to the cafe 🙂 May your learnings be excellent ! CBR

Nice 🙂 We could improve it though if we were so minded... See that judderyness / stepping in your volumetric light, particularly visible at the very top where the godrays are prominent. Don't know what you rendered in, but if it was physical / Standard you can fix that in the visible tab of the light by reducing the Sample distance down to something much lower. Very much adds to render time if you go too silly with it, so best to keep it as high as you can without getting any visible stepping... CBR

Now is here by Clannad is one of my favourite pieces of music of all time, but I can't really see why the cafe is the right place for this sort of post. CBR

Thanks Bob that was a very interesting post to me - don't suppose we can have that node tree a little bigger can we, so old duffers like me can read the text ?! 🙂 It's a very nicely constructed model, which is not what often see from Houdini, so interested in how long that took you to put together. I must confess to smiling at the examples you gave for how parametric is great here - noting as I did that we could also alter bevels and selections later in Cinema 😉. And I'd like to know what happens if you alter something topologically fundamental near the bottom of the stack, does it work with all the stages above it, or do some of those nodes need redoing to make it work ? CBR

Welcome to 3D in general and C4D and the cafe in particular 🙂 It's a lovely place to be... Make sure you've had a read of our 'How to Post on the cafe' bit, but then you're good to go, and happy learnings 🙂 CBR

Indeed. Thanks @FLima. A lot of people worked very hard on those tools. CBR

Excellent 🙂 Let's use this thread to discuss the exciting new things in it, and see if we can do so without mentioning the S-word, which I hope we can all agree has been comprehensively covered elsewhere... CBR

Yes it's surprisingly seamless and pro-looking isn't it ! 🙂 CBR

Oh excellent 🙂 Pm sent... CBR

Yep, don't miss the start folks - it's big Dave McG with exciting things to say... For those in the UK, that's 4.30 pm... CBR

Even though it is sometimes the bane of the drone flyer's life (see 'ground effect') that vorticity coming off the back of blades and wings is a beautiful thing... CBR

You gotta be careful, lest these things get out of hand... Lovely job there by Nick Shaheen, so just sharing here for the general amusement of anyone stuck indoors... CBR

We don't have that tool unfortunately, and i have to say I too have never seen a plugin that does this, but that is not to say it can't be achieved with either Xpresso, or other scripting. But I am not the best person to advise there so will have to leave it to those that are... CBR

Are the objects in question inside a cloner ? CBR

There are already a number of threads discussing subscriptions. There is no need to go round it all again here. Please can we keep this one on topic - comparisons between Houdini and Cinema. Cheers CBR

Welcome to the cafe 🙂 It's one of the best resources out there, so you're in the right place... Happy learnings ! CBR

Anyway, let's not derail the threads - and this one is all about the music 😉 CBR

'Word' (as I believe the young people might say). I find it very hard to believe they were 'armed to the teeth' as well ! If anything, they would have been sitting down peacefully, having a protracted discussion about philosophy, or trying to get some sleep during Colonel Steinbach's annoying racket while he was misguidedly trying to subjugate them ! 😉 CBR

Very nice result... CBR

Lols, yeah, that might start out calm enough, but you're gonna end up quite stressed when it all kicks in 😉 Great tune though. CBR

Is that policeman touching an exterior surface without gloves ? 😉 'Bout time we had a thread on this with some levity in it. CBR

The reduction in work while all this is ongoing is quite disturbing and more than a little stressy for those of us who make most of our living from 3D. My workload isn't quite at zero, but it's has definitely dropped off. I also had a job that disappeared on me half way through doing it... I was lucky (or unlucky) enough to have spaffed quite a lot of my savings on a new PC just before all this kicked off. With hindsight, as nice as it is to have a shiny new toy to be stuck at home with, I can't help the feeling that I might have needed those savings for other things... There will be additional knock-on effects too. I tried to order a new ipad for my mother yesterday only to find they were out of stock everywhere (UK), with no expected stock date for the foreseeable future, so that could be an issue for people trying to get new hardware for months after this is over... Challenging times ahead by the looks of it, and best of luck to all of us in it 😕 CBR

Considering the old-school-ness and correspondingly rather limited capabilities of Pyrocluster, the last 3 seconds of that are actually getting pretty passable, but the preceding seconds could definitely benefit from some extra love... I would increase PC quality settings a bit in addition to the advice above, at the expense of longer render times, and then get some lens-flarey, glowy post action going to obfuscate the flames, which I'd say are the weakest part of this at the moment... and I would try and remove the darker bits from the edge of the flames because they are making it looking 'pre-composited.' which is something we should avoid if we can... Also I think you want an orange light (visible / volumetric or otherwise) up the back there so the light on the craft itself can approximate what is happening below it. CBR

It's true a lot of film / VFX guys want Houdini as their main tool. But that doesn't mean Cinema is a toy anything... CBR

There are key differences. Houdini is almost entirely parametric, so most modelling and anything else can be done via nodes, which is as advantageous to some situations as it is disadvantageous in others. But it has ultra-powerful particle, simulation, smoke, fire , water and ocean sims - and huge complex mograph-like systems, and all eminently user-codable - you name it - all can be done there, and it is ludicrously cheap for the power it offers. So while, yes, there is some crossover in functionality, and they are both DCCs, they are not really in direct competition with each other - Cinema is not trying to be fully parametric, and shouldn't do, because some tasks, for example modelling, are 100 times faster with traditional pipelines. Imagine having to add and setup a (sometimes quite complex) node for every single stage of modelling a form ! There is room in a workflow for both apps. To use a blunt little tool of analogy; If Cinema is like hand-painting a beautiful picture in a nicely lit studio, Houdini is like trying to paint a hallway through a letterbox - ie a LOT harder initially, but capable of great great things once mastery is achieved and you get used to its way of working... if you have both, a TPR and some decent post, you are pretty much ready for film VFX. Personally I tend to fall asleep while I am learning Houdini, so I remain largely Cinema-centric where I already know most of the things, and modelling is all nice and familiar and no more parametric than I want it to be... CBR