BoganTW

Blender is fine. They're leaning more heavily into documentation, bug fixing, and all those things you listed, and since you can still use and download every past version from prehistoric times up to today, seeing features changed (or even dropped) maybe impacts different when guys like Maxon or Autodesk do it. But I wasn't a huge fan until recently, and it just took a little while to have things sink in a little before it clicked, if you use an app that you prefer, that's good too. I think C4D will be more 'complete' a year down the track than it is now, but there's still a bunch of stuff Blender can do that C4D can't. And vice versa.

Yeah, I didn't follow the forums super closely but I recall a few people were unhappy with where things were going. I think anyone using C4D for paid work will be fairly happy at the moment and likely getting happier in the near to medium future as more features roll in. It's a bit sad to see Modo joining the same club alongside Vue and Softimage XSI, but I guess not every app sticks around forever.

There's a few threads on the Luxology forum and some of the orphaned users are already talking about Blender. One Modo user even paid $400 maintenance to the Foundry a week ago.

On reflection, learning three new keys to replace E R T probably won't be the end of the world, I'll use the Blender shortcuts and I'm sure it'll start to stick in a week. Everything else is feeling very solid and with that out of the way I think I'm good to start expanding my knowledge of the app.

I might need to go in and change some preferences. After assigning the industry keycap, I tried the quick method of right-clicking on the move / scale / rotate icons on the left of screen to reassign the move / scale / rotate to E R T, as this had worked for me before. Blender seems to add the new ones there but also keep the old ones, as the old ones are listed as 'shortcut' and the new ones are listed as 'shortcut cycle'. I'm used to E R T so I'll see if there's a way to fix that. But the gizmos for all three choices appear automatically rather than free floating so that's an improvement. This was the other UI presentation. It's worth a watch but particularly for the bit at the end where they give you a big page full of the many improvements they likely plan to spend the next few years on to better what's currently there.

That's really useful, I'll let you know how I go. This whole 'here's another new version, and it's free' upgrade process is something I'll happily get used to. And I just saw that the Foundry have ceased development of Modo. https://community.foundry.com/discuss/topic/163616/the-end Sad news. I wonder if Nigel is content to sit with the version of Modo that he has, and how many Modo users in general might shift to Blender. Edit - here's one guy who did. https://community.foundry.com/discuss/topic/163625/thoughts-for-the-modo-diaspora

Yeah, I wouldn't think the industry keymap would be an issue. I've been similarly happy to watch older C4D tutorials despite them using the earlier UI, as there's little difficulty translating the new to the old, and vice versa. All those add-ons look great. I'd heard of some of them, but most are new to me, and I like how each will push my daily use of the app back a little towards what I'm familiar with. I was happy with the navigation I'd set up but the rotate issue was annoying so your recommended fix looks good. I'll wait till the new version drops next week and set that one up accordingly.

Blender. I set up E R T for move/scale/rotate and 1 2 3 for the navigation, which is how I did it in C4D. (Chad Ashley's video on setting up preferences, plus a couple more recent ones, were helpful). Rotation is different as you have to immediately specify the axis with a second key stroke, otherwise it free floats, though I might be missing a trick there. Courses are cheaper. I'm seeing fully fleshed out courses on various topics going for $20 or $30. The CGCookie guys did an excellent looking bundle of several redone courses for 4.2, and the whole batch of them is $90 total. There's more training. C4D has the Maxon Training Team, a few guys like Polygon Pen making modelling videos when he can, Chris at RL, Tim Clapham doing a good Hello Luxx course every six months, various YouTubers, and a handful of courses popping up on Udemy or Skillshare or whatever. That's all good and useful, but I'd say Blender has at least 5 x the quantity of courses coming out, or higher. The annual BCON list of presentations just had two different talks on improving the UI, one with Andrew Price making some smart points, the other with five guys including Pablo Vasquez discussing how they'd just spent a year working on UI improvement, and were about to do the same thing for the foreseeable future. C4D has better UI but they showed the before and after for the Blender colour picker - a minor thing in the scene of things, I know - and the before had a jankiness that I found off putting, and the after had the intuitive layout that I associate with C4D. C4D is still even higher here but at a certain point other elements become an elephant in the room beyond how super polished you can make the UI, and C4D has sat rigid in that territory for quite a while. I don't view Blender as 'better', I just view Blender as different, but its difference now strikes me as interesting and intriguing rather than off putting. Even though C4D has the word 'Cinema' in the title, I suspect I was gaslighting myself into believing that C4D was an all-purposes app and it would settle into being fully featured for generalist use. I no longer believe this to be the case. I think C4D is certainly expanding its toolset, but I think it's doing this under the guidelines and purpose of using these tools for mograph above all else. The above isn't an exhaustive list at all, and I'm not closing the door on C4D, which I still like a lot, but if I sit down and try and make a short film over the next year and change with the tools available both, I'll get further ahead with it in Blender than I will in C4D, despite the improvements finally coming into the latter. I've been interested in learning nodal workflows for a while. Nodes landed in C4D more than six years ago, but what can you do with them yet? And how widespread is the training for it? Meanwhile the Blender Geometry Nodes developers and users are just getting on with things, and still adding functionality and improvements. In the Blender UI presentations they made it clear they were aware of their shortcomings in usability and design and were dedicated to improving things. The jankiness in Blender is going away with each release, and the functionality is getting stronger. Blender 4.3 comes out Tuesday next week. I'll follow what C4D brings to the table in the near future with some interest, but it's an interest that sits just below my interest in learning how to settle into Blender, and I think this is a healthy place to be, as I don't need to wait for important feature improvements, or worry for now about budgeting the cost of the app. I'll stop this ramble here for now.

Yeah it's pretty clear that Maxon doesn't care too strongly about the educational market. The cancelling mid Semester thing, as you described, was bananas. What were they thinking? I've had a couple of months spare and have had some time to play with one of the rival 3D apps. It's sinking in and starting to click a bit. Guess which one.

Editor Rob Redman published his own C4D tutorials for a while, and did a nice MILG volume on modelling. Sad to see the mag go but nearly every magazine I used to buy has gravitated to online, or vanished.

If that suits you, that's perfect. Particles, pyro, redone dynamics and softbodies and the upcoming fluids are all from the new regime, not the old one, so the devs are clearly adding something, but I think it will take another year or more before everyone can look at C4D and view it as being fully changed and beefed up from what had come before. As Mash once pointed out, you used to see or hear bugger all from the Maxon heads back in the day, so I view having Dave doing an interview and appearing super focused on where C4D is going is an improvement. If you have R20 perpetual and it mostly does everything you need, you'll save some bucks by not subbing and you can put the cash towards other apps or whatever that might fill in the gaps.

Shrug. The impression I get is Maxon is convinced C4D is a tool people should use for paying jobs, which will cover the cost of the app (or better, it'll be tax deductible as you use it for work), and all the stuff they chuck into it like capsules and the many hundreds of assets and the Red Giant Suite if you need it is geared towards that end. The money they make from it then gets poured into a growing series of updates, fluids before the end of 2024 being the latest. People that are busy working in 3D (and I'm not) will just get on with it, and people that prefer to tinker with personal projects will wander off to Blender, or Houdini if they're especially stubborn. I'll still resub eventually but a few more months wait while they top it up with some extra features won't hurt.

A cool takeaway from the interview. Another good update to the particles fairly soon, and within a few months another long requested simulation update in the works that they haven't talked about yet. Dave makes it fairly clear that it's fluids. Very cool.

I view it more positively. Maxon are likely getting feedback from all sorts of places, a bit more nuanced info won't hurt and can help. The Reddit thread has some useful back and forth and I think some of the comments and suggestions are being taken seriously. I'm just surprised so far there aren't five more people in that thread posting 'Blender is free' as it wouldn't be a C4D thread without some of that popping up.

Maxon has started a thread on Reddit requesting suggestions for future C4D features. Worth noting if you're interested, the link below takes you to the chat.

They should make it so even Maxon One subscribers have to pay additional to get them - call it Maxon One Pro Plus Ultimate - so the number of people globally who get to check them out is less than 50.

If they're still looking for someone to oversee that stuff before they head off to build it, the final result ending up in C4D could be a while away.

I'm yet to watch it but he apparently spent 18 months on his own plugin, then found out last minute that Maxon had their own similar one coming in. I can kind of see how this can happen without automatically assuming 'Maxon bad', the NDA's must be a major thing, but Dave and Maxon should pay Chris to do some extra C4D stuff and maybe not keep it locked up in Maxon One.

There's endless whining under Maxon's 'special announcement tomorrow' post on Twitter, but it shows some particles in a tube so it's clearly not just ZBrush. I'm off to bed and I'm guessing the new C4D release will be unveiled by the time I wake up. Someone start a new thread for it please. Fun times!

They could be busy preparing something bigger than usual, or bored and getting something moderately interesting ready. I hold the middle ground and anticipate some decent new tools, maybe something updated nicely, then similar or bigger stuff in Nov/Dec, March.April, July etc etc.

Last year's release came out September 14th or thereabouts. Maxon are at IBC from September 13th to 16th. Noseman and Jonas have an Ask the Trainer session scheduled for the 19th. https://www.maxon.net/en/event/ibc-2024 So my guess is the new version will pop up late next week. No idea what will be in it but there's every chance there will be a decent assortment of stuff, and then something nicer could drop in December or Jan or Feb or April or whenever. Maxon no longer sticks to cramming everything into the September release and the long awaited particles came out a handful of months after C4D 2024 had appeared. So who knows anymore.

I was talking about Motionpunk's thread on Twitter, but fair enough. Has C4D / Octane been crashing for you much?

That's probably a fair guess. The luminaries in the thread who were all grumbling somewhat are all heavy Redshift users too.

Might be worth a longer discussion but I'll wait a few weeks till when next months release hits. Maxon are probably now trying to balance investment on new features with investment into doubling back and fixing bugs or polishing up what they've already added. I used to see and hear that they were doing a decent job of this, but long threads on Reddit and twitter with responses from some major C4D users like EJ or Chad Ashley) all basically argue the balance is a bit off at the moment and C4D is in a much more crashy state than usual. The question is whether the subscription cadence is diverting the devs from keeping the overall application tidy. No time to go back and fix that longstanding bug or make the app less crashy, we need a few new features in 8 weeks time. I'm not thrilled but also not bothered by the price difference between C4D and the other apps. It is what it is and anyone can decide if they want to pay it to sit in the room with a functional C4D license for a year or not. I want to give the new particles system a try and check out the training that Noseman and Chris Schmidt have done for it, so it will be worth a play for me. But again I'm not liking the reports from longtime C4D users that app stability has become a lot worse as of late. That's a pet hate of mine and has me holding off for a little bit, while not jumping ship altogether. I've looked at Houdini and find it interesting and have looked at Blender and find it full of minor annoyances that bug me in comparison to how C4D does stuff. But Maxon need to sort out whatever is making C4D crash more than usual. Chad Ashley agreed that it's become worse, Maxon need to make it better. And then second on the list after that is the long long list of features that C4D has needed for years and which the core rewrite was meant to open the door to. I'm happy to wait and see what this coming release and year brings but like probably many others I'm not going to wait forever.

I was going to post a big thread about MotionPunk's long Twitter thread on C4D crashiness a few days ago, but I won't. I'm hoping next month's C4D 2025 is an improvement. The new core has had a year to settle in and posts on Reddit and Twitter about how much buggier the app currently is are discouraging. I'm hoping they can smooth this out a bit before I resubscribe. Despite the expense I think C4D and Redshift are a good combo, but having C4D build a rep as one of the more crash-happy DCC's as of late is not where I thought that core rewrite was headed.