Cerbera

Yep, and they have every right to continue to do so if they feel Maxon continues to release weak updates ! All the opinions from all the people are valid (the ones doing hate for hate's sake tend to be transparently obvious, so exclude themselves !) and should be heard by the community and by Maxon ! Leaving any software is a big wrench if you use it every day, or have done for some time, so I think it's understandable that long term users drop a rant or 2, and a bit unfair to label them cowardly for not jumping ship earlier... I imagine most of these people love Cinema like I do, and really don't want to go, but voice their opinions inthe hope they may be heard if they say it enough, and who can blame them for that ?! CBR

I have to admit the new UI took me a lot longer than I thought it would to fully get used to, and I am still not as fast in it as I am in the previous versions, but it has, at last, begun to feel a little bit more like home. I know it's a big shock to begin with, but the nice things in it do shine through in the end - the VP for modelling now, for example, is an absolute joy, and has never looked clearer, cleaner, or more attractive IMO. "A typical model, yesterday". And although I never thought in a million years I would say it, as I flick between 24 and 25 now, 24 does feel a little bit 'toy-town' or 'yesteryear' in comparison. CBR

Looks like the latest from melodysheep is shaping up to be a very good one 🙂 CBR

Indeed, welcome to the Core 🙂 That's a lovely bit of rendering there - show us the wires so we can see what the modelling looks like ! CBR

Yep, was just about to say exactly the same ! Comparing apples and oranges. CBR

Ah we may have lost something in translation there - I didn't mean literally hard work ! 🙂 Just that we should make it obvious from the start that this is an area for interested people to compare and contrast and see workflows they wouldn't normally see in software they don't (yet) use... CBR

Good idea, but yeah, I agree with Dast, in that we might have to work quite hard to make it not a pissing contest ! 🙂 CBR

Lols - no sorry I meant wireframe / lines mode images, so we can see your modelling !!! 🙂 This sort of thing ! There are people here (me not the least of them) who enjoy the wireframes as much as the final images ! CBR

That is indeed excellent, and lovely renderings. Only thing missing is the wires ! 🙂 CBR

Yep, sorry to hear that is the case, but pls let's leave the post here so others can see that - I guess you won't be the only one who has assumed that would be fine... I'll retitle it to reflect that, but perhaps we should leave it in this section where its advice is most pertinent., @Igor ? CBR

Ooh - very nice 🙂 CBR

Pika-wotsit lookin' good ! 🙂 Could we see him in some brighter, multi-directional lighting, and get some closeups of that fur ? CBR

Not sure it's entirely fair to say that there are less modelling questions / discussions here recently - I have certainly had things to answer on a daily basis, and the forum has been generally a bit quieter recently, presumably because of 'holiday season' and our recent domain name change. Meanwhile I have more modelling students than I have ever had, and a decent flow of constant modelling work for use in Cinema pipelines, so I can't quite share the opinion that this is a sinking ship - I genuinely don't think it is, and as much as I admire Blender, and understand people's reasons for learning it additionally, or outright defecting to it, I am not as pessimistic about the future of modelling in Cinema as others seems to be. The modelling toolset has continued to improve with almost every version after R18, and speaking as someone who uses it all day every day for client work, it remains 'up to the task' in my book - sure, there are still gaps in the toolset remaining, but those gaps do get smaller, and so far they are nothing like large enough to make me consider the full jump to something else. The focus might be more on procedural workflows at the moment, but I remain hopeful and relatively confident that regular modelling / development has not stopped and the importance of traditional modelling workflows is not forgotten as it moves forward. Having said that of course I do see the wisdom of keeping abreast of what the others are doing, Blender and Houdini most of all, and I will watch this and all the other Blender threads with ongoing interest. CBR

Yes I too am very much enjoying and learning a lot from this one ! 🙂 Mododo's approach is some seriously 'out-of-the'box' thinking ! It's taken me a little while to wrap my head round exactly what was going on there ! CBR

Wonderful though it is, I am not sure Ricochet is going to help here if you require intersection-free spaghetti ! I only saw his 2 hour demo of it the other day, and didn't see any way to avoid that, which isn't to say there isn't one, but just that I didn't see it, so there may or may not be, but it's probably something you'd want to find out before spending the 80 dollars... However, Chris Schmidt is probably the man with the answer given his pioneering other work into softbody splines, which he is able to tie into knots without any intersection, so I suspect that should be the basis of your setup here too. So I think you need to start with an evenly segmented helix spline, to which you will apply a softbody tag and set a collision margin radius therein, which will be half the distance of the n-side you will use as the profile spline in a sweep with that helix path. Then you'll be needing a lot of those, so would transfer that to a cloner setup once you have made enough variations of the original spiral. However, needless to say, dropping those into a container volume in vast numbers is going to be a seriously processor intensive / viewport killing operation, so I suggest you shamelessly cheat wherever you can in order to get those numbers of clones and dynamics calculations down. And the best way to cheat here is to fill your volume with a smaller 'inner version' of itself, and then for you to fill the gaps with your spaghetti. For example, in this jar of corn niblets I modelled earlier It would have taken around 150,000 niblets to fill the entire jar. But because I placed an invisible-to-render to but visible-to-dynamics collider cylinder right in the centre of the jar I was able to take up all the volume at the centre of it with void space, and reduce the amount of clones I needed to under 8,000. Of course the camera can't see into the centre so that's all the win in terms of efficiency. The bad news here is that this method is not quick or easy, and will require quite some level of experimentation and time to get settings right, but I don't think there is any method in Cinema that is if you require zero intersection. CBR

You're in the perfect place for it 🙂 Enjoy ! CBR

That means S24 / Cineversity will stop working on 24th Jun, and R21 won't. CBR

Your my.maxon.account should show you which licence you have... CBR