Cerbera

Do you mean HUD ? If so, all your options for what that can display are available by right-clicking it, so just go through them, and see ! If not though, you can get at least get the result in the VP by piping the result text string directly into the text input of a motext object if that's any help... CBR

Excellent - please put that in your profile so we don't have to ask every time ! - That's the data that appears to the left of your posts that you should have completed when you joined the site.... go to the home page, find your name on the top right, go to your profile, then find the edit profile button, click that, and set your version there. CBR

Welcome to the Cafe 🙂 Please make sure your profile shows the version of Cinema you are running - we need that to answer any questions you may have properly. Otherwise, happy learnings ! CBR

Excellent tutorial, covering a very useful technique 🙂 Only thing I would add is to point out that you can draw splines directly on objects using sketch tool and polygon snapping... CBR

Welcome to the cafe Don. May your learnings here be great and frequent 🙂 CBR

Hello and welcome to the cafe 🙂 CBR

Yeah, if you guys only knew how much time and effort Igor puts into these things 🙂 Hopefully we are improving all the time, whilst continuing to still make the cafe feel like 'home'... Lots of exciting new things in the pipeline too ! It's gonna be a good year for the cafe... CBR

Lovely stuff 🙂 I do like those fascinating machines and that ultra clean stdio style look... CBR

That's going live now guys... CBR

Those that know have missed him while he's been away, but the good news is that the annual hiatus is over, and after a 4 month break Rocket Lasso is back later today ! For those that don't know Rocket Lasso is a 2 hour live video cast that happens on Wednesdays in which almighty C4D Overlord Chris Schmidt takes on your various VFX and Cinema problems and we all get to watch for a bit 🙂 You can support him over on Patreon or via his website, and he'll be live later at 2 pm CST (8 pm GMT) over on Twitch or via his Youtube channel. So just a general heads up about that. If you haven't seen him before, the video below shows why he is excellent, and someone well worth watching if you are even vaguely into learning, pushing boundaries and generally having fun in Cinema. Here he is explaining the new Field Force Object in R21 more thoroughly than anyone else ! 🙂 Happy watchings and thanks Chris for coming back for a second season ! CBR

Very cool 🙂 CBR

Dammit - came back to make the obligatory 'my New Year's Resolution is 1920 x 1200' joke, but @C4DS has already beaten me to it 🙂 CBR

Indeed. I shall add my good wishes to the general pool of hopeful goodness 🙂 CBR

Not all models do need it. And if all models were built to the same high standards, there would be less need for it still, but they are not, and we live in a world where stuff often has to be done faster than might be ideal, which means working with 'minimum standard' meshes. For example, CAD programs (from which a lot of client models originate) seem to operate in a way that is largely oblivious of quality topology (optimised as they are for design-helpful speedy iteration), or even basic poly rules - they will do literally anything that produces a viable (ie renderable) surface, and that is usually massively unhelpful for anything people might try and do later with that mesh, in a program which is different to the one it was originally made in; if they try and subdivide it, it fails - if they try and add bevels, it fails, and if they try and use half the selection and modelling tools, they will be battling uphill constantly, and fighting topology all the way because few of the tools can work predictably where edge flow is terrible or non-existent. Sometimes you get meshes that were inexpertly modelled, and that might be for 'valid' reasons, like if something was built without animation in mind, but then someone decided it had to move ! Indeed it is most usually character animation where loop placement suddenly becomes crucially important. Likewise, if you want to use Subdivision, there are even more strict polygon rules, and not following those will produce duff, imperfect or inconsistent (across apps) SDS results. Usually this applies most to heavily curved or undulating surfaces, or to surfaces where there is a mixture of rounded curves and proximal ultra-sharp corners and planarity. Interestingly, in this last of circumstances, there are no automatic tools in existence (not even quad re-mesher or instant meshes) that will do as good a job as the experienced human modeller doing it by hand, which is why people like me are still in a job despite them ! And yet we too welcome these tools because they make our job a lot faster and eradicate a lot of the more tedious aspects of the poly-pushing. Or, you might start a model in a very painterly / artistic way, with sculpting let's say, which allows very fast shape dev and iteration, but when you finally get your finished form the polys won't be in a particularly optimal order, having been mercilessly shifted about in the sculpt and you can almost always improve that by retopologising the base mesh after it. Also if you are baking new sculpt information, and the base mesh you started with doesn't adequately describe the final form (like if you used sculpting to pull out some horns from the head of a demon for example), so you are getting loads of stretched and uneven polys everywhere, then again, retopo is the only thing that can save the day, and return your mesh to usefulness further down the pipeline. There are also texture and UV-based reasons why topology should be decent. The short story there is that very unevenly distributed polys (even 100% quads) tend to produce sh*tty UVs prone to excessive texture distortion. But again, I could find you examples of circumstances where even that doesn't matter. And, in the interests of fairness, I should point out the corollary, that there are occasional circumstances where quality of topology genuinely doesn't matter at all. For fully planar surfaces, for still shots or where there is no deformation animation, and no SDS involved, then your surfaces can look like a proper birds' nest of technical errors and still 'work' in that they give a flawless rendered result and have taken very little time and effort to make, which can be helpful or even necessary with tight client deadlines to be met. Each job we undertake requires a different level of adherance to various poly modelling rules. The confusion and difficulty for beginners arises not from the rules themselves, which are surprisingly few and simple, but from knowing which ones apply in which circumstances, and why. CBR

Yeah you're overthinking this. If you're a client, they just want to see cool sh*t you've done before. They generally couldn't care less how you did it or what systems you used. Unless your client is some agency or 3rd party looking for a specific skill set, in which case they tend to ask, so again the showreel doesn't necessarily have to showcase it - just be good enough that people want to enquire further. Make your show reel generally the best stuff you have ever done, edit it impactfully but tastefully, get some cool tunes behind it, and it doesn't need much more thought than that to be honest ! 🙂 CBR

Lols 🙂 CBR

If I'm mainly a modelling specialist (from the UK and who wants to work remotely), but can also do other stuff on your list (UVs / Procedural modelling), does that interest you at all ? Being a night owl, I do tend to be up when you are ! 🙂 CBR

Very nearly posted that myself 🙂 Interesting that Arrimus views it as important enough to be an entire paradigm shift. CBR

Still very much on a Gothic theme, this time we're making an SDS Polygon Quatrefoil you can use with your Gothic Archways etc... We'll UV it nicely while we're at it, so enjoy that... CBR

That's fair comment - surprisingly that information is not on that page ! 🙂 I'll suggest they improve that ! CBR

Righty - it was about time I did another one of these, so this time, let's make ourselves a 4-Way Gothic Fan Vault in just 30-odd easy steps ! Of all the various vault types this is perhaps the most challenging to model so hopefully I can help to show how best to get started with your under-structures... You can use these techniques as the basis for this sort of thing... This is all-quads but no SDS, and medium poly density so stands up to some fairly close camera-work and with a few small modifications is suitable for turning into a MoGraph maze of them if needed... anyway - enjoy. Ref Image Here. If you'd like Part 2 where, where we could make some fan struts, and a plinth centrepiece and sort out the UVs, let me know below ! CBR