Cerbera

Do you know for sure it works with R16 ? You should contact the developer - they are best placed to advise you why it might not be working... CBR

I think you'll enjoy it when it gets there. Fox don't seem to know what a good thing they've got, so aren't promoting it properly yet, hence lack of rollout and rubbish reference availability - hopefully they'll sort that out and get it everywhere ! CBR

Oh excellent - they're as good as I hoped they'd be ;) Always nice when the wires are as quality as the render... IQP are impressed. We should award you a '4, no more' badge forthwith - what do you think, @VECTOR ? CBR

Nope - not a comedy, though it is much more self-aware and light-hearted than proper ST, and there are some jokes early on. For me it feels far more like 'real' Star trek (TNG, Voyager etc) than Discovery does !

This has been discussed at great length in various other threads, so I'll summarize... Houdini is amazing and outshines Cinema in pretty much all the VFX areas. And Houdini Indie is possibly the best value VFX software of all time. But for me at least, Cinema wins hands down for non-procedural modelling and general simplicity / ease-of-use, and for that reason I think the 2 apps work well together rather than being in direct competition. Sometimes you don't need bells and whistles and smoke and fire and you just want to model something, and Cinema remains where I'll be going for that :) CBR

Yeah, lovely renders there. I'd also like to see the wires :) CBR

Thanks AB. I have got the coons mesh and all the lab stuff, but haven't been using it here so far - but you're right - it could be ideal for this sort of thing. When I've nailed the form I may well go back and retopo it before doing the paneling, and will have a decent chance to try it then. CBR

Hey Cafe I guess there'll be a few trek-heads here, and I'm definitely one of them. Whilst I'm not a great fan of what they're doing in Star Trek Discovery at the moment, I am enjoying Seth Macfarlane's rival space saga 'The Orville' on Fox considerably more. It was only a matter of time before I felt the need to model that ship, but apparently I am one of the first to do so, because there is real lack of decent reference images and blueprints, so I have been furiously screencapping the episodes until I had enough to work with. So here we are, near the end of stage one, when I am less fussed about immaculate topology than I am finding the basic shape, although I am at least all-quads. There's still a lot of tweaking to be done to get even the main shape perfect, but I thought I'd post a fairly early stage so I can share how it changes as it develops. There's some pretty challenging panelling to be cut in everywhere, so that'll be next, after I've built the main center section and major armour plating panels. I'm trying to do alot of it with OpenSubDiv, but it remains disappointing that I still have to limit this to sections I can texture with standard projection, because it still doesn't work with UV's in R19. Hopefully I'll be taking this all the way to photo-real render, but as I'm fitting it in around other work it may take a little while... CBR

I quite like this, and the track's fairly bangin' as well ! Nice skulls ;) I like the overall lighting ideas, and the development of them through the video, but there's a couple of things I think would improve it... Your black isn't black enough - certainly could be darker for me... 5 minutes is a hell of a long time to be staring through a fixed camera. Although your lighting FX do change and evolve to some extent, I worry that they don't do so enough to hold interest for that amount of time, and some radically different sweeping camera moves round the model might break that up a bit ? There's some bits where the skulls go 'particle-ized' which have a welcome different look - I think you could do with more of that. Hope that helps. CBR

Oh that's quite helpful - nice one - I'm always turning those on and off :) CBR

I am a long term user of Cinema's UV toolset, and while, like everyone else agrees, I definitely couldn't call it brilliant, it is 'adequate', and I have yet to find to find an object I couldn't decently unwrap once I knew all the tools well enough. But that said, of course it could be easier, there could be better tools, and I'm sure we'd all be grateful if there were some more :) The plugins that already exist are pretty good, and do cover some of the things you mention... I use Seamilar II, which does brilliant UV seaming, auto-unwrapping, and a whole load of other useful stuff. And although I don't use it myself I am very impressed by the tools in UV vonc, which includes the awesome 'UV relax' brush. But always good to see people thinking about ways to improve things, so will give some thought to additional UV features I'd like to see, and in the meantime will offer you my general encouragement in your plans... CBR

Nice :) Can we see some wires ? CBR

Indeedy. Have a good one dude, from me and the cat. CBR

Lovely job :) Enjoying all the detail, and your attractive clay renders. CBR

Oh did I ? Your memory is working much better than mine :) CBR

I don't think this has been linked here before, but it should be, so I'm doing it anyway. If you're making an epic space ship, or a jet fighter, or anything that requires ultra sharp angular panels on organically curved surfaces, then this presents a serious modelling challenge if you want to use SDS. Of course there are things to help, like SDS edge weighting, OpenSubDiv and Cinema's incredible bevel tool, but sometimes we just want some amazing panelling really quickly... So, where we don't have time or skill to model these things in, traditionally, it's into Photoshop we go, for a potentially lengthy image design process while we try make a map that will give us our panelling independently of the geometry via bump, normal, or displacement material channels. For this to work well you need to spend a lot of time, get a lot of detail in, and use a very high res map. OR you could just go here and pick up JSplacement by Windmill Arts, which will do it for you in about 30 seconds. This neat little app runs on pretty much everything, and generates randomised but controllable 8K pngs eminently suitable for material panelling. It consists of several subroutines for making various different types of panelling, all of which are very useful, and controllable enough to produce some really decent results. Here's the various types of map it can make: Classic (left) does straight panels and lines. JS2 (right) does more circuit board style elements. Velvet (left) specialises in panels with a lot of symmetry control, and Dotgrid (right) does exactly what its name suggests, for when you need windows and portholes etc... It's all scalable and you get a new random result every time you click. One mode even lets you load in custom sprites. And you can combine maps in a layer shader for some truly complex and highly detailed results. I have found it to be a little buggy on occasion (Windows), but nothing a quick restart of the app can't fix. Needless to say, with this sort of help you could knock up a Star Destroyer in weeks rather than years ! Here's one test panel (deformed plane, 5 x 5 segments, L3 SDS) I knocked up in 3 minutes flat using 3 JSP maps layered in the bump channel, with a just small amount of parallax for a speedy 2 minute render... It's even more impressive if you use it with sub-poly displacement, so just linking this here so everyone knows where to get it... What, you want a little icing on an already fairly impressive cake ? OK :) Here's cafe avenger @turboniko, with another excellent tutorial on using this with displacement and AO to make an awesome glowy edge circuit board type whatsit... JSP is free, as is Niko's lengthy and thorough tutorial, but please do tip / support them both if you find this useful. Anyway, enjoy... CBR

Ha ha - oh yeah so there is ! :)

Very nice :) CBR

I still think your main brick texture is just wrong - you never see that sort of mega-regular brick pattern in classic fantasy castles, or real castles, come to that... CBR

Oh I've already had a discussion with the developer in a previous thread :) It's bad news - with this current version it is still based on Cinema's boole function, and the topology remains terrible. Apparently they are working on a new boole tool that maintains quads so there's hope yet ;) CBR

The biggest problem in this is the textures and the lighting and the lack of sense of scale. The castle / stone / roof textures are just not realistic enough. If you want those to look real you need some high res high quality photographic castle stone / roof tile textures. And those should be mapped on so that there are no discernable repeating patterns, and then further variation can be added to simulate damage and wear. Or you can get reasonable results from the brick shader if you spend enough time with it, making sure patterns are not spottable, and that you add weathering effects. And then there's the lighting. You need to give a sense of scale, and the impression of size in your scene. In yours I worry that the model is not detailed enough to give that impression, and the placement and relative scale of other things in the scene doesn't seem correct to me. The crenellations particularly seem wrong, both modelling and texture-wise. If the white things on the ground, for example, are meant to be individual flowers, then the castle is tiny in relation to them. The trees look like young saplings, yet come near to the top of the walls. The lighting itself seems vague and muddy. There should be a single strong directional sunlight, and a bluer ambient light dome filling in the shadows from that. Physical Sky and GI is often the best way to achieve naturalistic lighting, so that's the first thing I'd try in your scene. You can also add fog and atmosphere there, which all contribute to the sense of largeness. Here I am trying that on this really old WiP model of Hogwarts main tower I did a few years ago. Texture-wise I'm using photo textures on the right tower, and brick shader on the main hall. Atmosphere and depth and lighting all coming from physical sky, with a photo BG. Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, I can still see tiling patterns on my tower, so that could be better, but the overall effect is not too bad. Here's a closeup of the hall, so you can see the sort of variation the brick shader can give you, although if I'm honest I was never fully happy with the way that looked either. There are opinions on both sides to the argument that modelling to real world scale is better when using physical sky, so that might be something to consider as well. CBR

That is one shiny kiwi ! Unless he has regular access to a bottle of sleek'n'shine conditioner, I'd be turning that hair specular down a bit ;) CBR

For most plugins you unzip the file, and then put the folder within it under the plugins folder in your C4D preferences folder. You can find that by editing preferences, and clicking 'open preferences folder'... CBR

Ooh yeah - I like that :) Good job ! CBR

Ditto here. And I positively hate its modelling - takes far too long to do the simplest things and looks almost as awful as Maya in the viewport. Has driven me mad every time I've tried :) CBR