BoganTW

Just found an uncropped image of dear Lena Forsén. Phwoarr. I'm moving to Sweden. The NAB show in a fortnight must be where Maxon dump particles on us. Even the graphic is a bit sparkly. I'm thinking of champagne bubbles, though given all the pent up excitement I wouldn't rule out something else either. Back to researching more pics of Lena, her pink feather boa is quite nice.

I tried the first and last videos. The brief music is way too loud compared to the narration.

Those sort of jokes would just be depressing or annoying, especially the one going, 'here's a really great release... ha, fooled you!'. The list of people who would laugh at that one isn't a long one. But I expect Maxon to announce Noseman has started a new donut company or that they're changing the name of C4D to 'Barry Fitzgerald Redwolf, Private Investigator', because marketing told them it would be a good idea.

Don't get Maxon started. It only gives McGavran and the devs the chance to mess with our heads, the same way a fisherman will playfully poke a Canadian snow crab with a stick before hoisting it into a sack and taking it home to the wife to make a slow-cooker bisque with croutons, pepper, tomato and shrimp.

Someone get the Maxon guys drunk immediately, if one of them is spilling the beans, it shouldn't be hard to get the others to crack. Something new is coming and it's got particles in it somewhere! Hang on, I think we figured this out a couple of pages ago.

You might see this, everyone else is generally seeing what looks like a new particle system on the way. They've said a few times that all sim stuff is now unified, so you can bounce soft bodies off a rigid body dynamics sim while warming it up with Pyro and throwing some string or noodle simulation at it. Shortly you'll hopefully be able to spray it with particles while it does so. I'm really hoping that by the end of next year the whole sim will be able to be washed away with a flood of water, because that's another one for the big list of stuff Maxon seem to be finally tackling.

Yeah nothing in the world will matter by 2028.

Awesome. Paul is a really cool guy and has been the friendly face of C4D for such a long time. I'm sorry he is leaving Maxon but really hope he lands in a spot he is enthusiastic about.

Someone's had fun designing the new icons, check the cool little apple logo in the Object manager.

Dave's retweet five days earlier, the statue melting, also looked like particles, maybe. But this is all cool and I'm glad new tech is finally coming into C4D after a length of time I never want to think about again.

Given everything you've said and listed and described, I have no idea why you're shoehorning animation students in a high ranked animation program into learning C4D. If they go for a job anywhere to animate anything serious, that company will be using Maya. I like C4D as much as you do but when I visit CG catch ups in this city, the crowds of kids who are all showing off their mograph stuff are all using C4D. And the groups of folks fussing over their animation reels and going to talks from visiting guys from overseas studios, including Disney, are all exclusively using Maya. I haven't been to one but I suspect if I visited a VFX nerd get together locally all the guys obsessing over their fire and explosion and water sims for reels would be using Houdini. SideFX comes out here all the time so someone must be using it. Dave McGavran should send you a free C4D mug for your efforts but if $100 for Maxon One is a bad deal for a class full of high ranked animation students, possibly they should be learning animation on a standard animation app like Maya instead. You've listed lots of reasons why they should and not many why they shouldn't, so this is probably something you need to sort out more than Dave and the guys at Maxon do. I do think C4D will have its animation tools and everything updated and made competitive sometime by 2028 or so, so in a few years C4D might be a fighter in that field again.

Is Maya doing motion graphics now? And all this is to do what? Make motion graphics, or something else? If you're teaching those students of yours how to make animated shorts and stuff that would appeal to job openings where they're trying to do Dreamworks / Pixar / animated character stuff, Maya might be the best choice there. You could skip all the reasons you listed and just add another. Most other animation students in the state or country are probably also using it and students diving in will find things 1000% easier if they do what everyone else is doing. If the students are trying to learn motion graphics, the above list of negatives just comes across as whining. They can either get over it and learn the software and become competitive, or do something else. You've probably specified in earlier threads exactly what you're teaching these students so I apologise if I don't have immediate recall of it. But if it's a generalist course there's likely no burning need to use C4D. I still think as an intro to CG that C4D provides one of the easiest ways in though, as it's easy enough to get started and begin making things with. I haven't followed the UI of every other 3D app out there, but I would not say C4D has a bad UI, which is really the main point. It has a nice cleanly laid out UI and it's easy to grasp and use. This is unless you prefer the old pre-R25 look, which I can't fathom at all but a few people here and there apparently do. If they buy the software post-graduation they won't have to worry about how students get treated at all. They can just do what everyone else does, subscribe, use it, maybe make money from it, or don't. The $100 for Maxon One for a student is dirt cheap because of the opportunity it gives them - try out Maxon One for a year (or two or three) to see if you can get proficient at everything it does, and whether it points toward an enjoyable and practical career path for you. Folks who try it and find themselves nodding and seeing it as the way forward will find the $100 well spent as it's given them that info they couldn't have received otherwise. Meanwhile, folks who spend the $100, don't really click with it, and decide that a different app or even a different area of CG is preferable, now again have some really useful info they can run with and use. They didn't click with C4D so probably motion graphics isn't for them, so they should probably jump on the Maya train or (if you prefer) Blender. I think a lot of folks use C4D for a reason, and there are also a lot of people out there who don't use C4D for a reason. Both reasons are legitimate, but I just question how many people in either camp are there simply because they couldn't afford $100. You might feel the number is really high, but everything I've seen suggests to me that other considerations are likely taking precedent.

Teacher goes up to a bunch of students, beginning of the school year for a two or three year course. The class looks at him. "Hey kids, this year we're going to learn Cinema 4D! It's really easy and intuitive and does a lot of cool stuff. it's my personal favourite." The students all look at him. "One thing though, over the life of this two/three year course, the software does have a fee. It's hugely cheaper than buying it and you can use it as much as you want, plus you get lots of other cool software like Zbrush bundled with it. But it's a $100 a year. You pay the $100 and you can chuck all this software on your laptop, it'll be easy and fun to learn, and you should be able to make some amazing stuff." The students all look around at each other. No one says anything. The silence feels like it might go on forever. "Or.." says the teacher "..as an alternative, we can all learn some software that isn't quite suited for career work, and it's a bit less intuitive, and it's not my absolute favourite, but it's free. That one's called Blender." The class as one breaks into an enormous YAYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!! People jump up and cheer, papers fly around the room, the kids are dancing arm in and everyone is cheering with joy. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief and sits down to learn Blender. This will be amazing and a happy ending for no doubt everyone but I do kind of wonder how all those kids are going to fare when they're out looking for a job and they tell the recruiters about all the free software they used rather than the paid ones like Photoshop.

Maybe some students are okay to pay $100 for a year of Maxon One? I get that every student claims poverty but they'll also probably be spending five times that on their new iPhone. So this won't change anything then. I agree with you here for sure. It was a long WTF? moment and an apology from top brass didn't really change much. Maybe they could have waited till the semester break? If they're learning animation to go work at Pixar or something, do they need to learn C4D? Maya would be the better bet there. Equally, if they're one of the various students who really wants to learn C4D and AE so they can do cool Mograph all day, is the $100 for Maxon One for a year really going to put them off? It's a once a year thing, so maybe they could ask their parents to help with that one? Fair point. ZBrush looks like a useful purchase for Maxon, so it seems even smarter here to just push everyone towards Maxon One. The ZBrush nerds get C4D with it, the scattered C4D folk here and there get ZBrush on their available apps. That would probably be more enticing than all the Adobe apps I get but never touch because I'm subbing to the Adobe Suite. It's now getting bundled with an app you just described as a 3D cash cow, and you think this means it'll be going the way of Lightwave 3D? Not sure if I see the logic. You make an excellent argument in many respects but realistically anyone who will dump their choice of app over a $100 annual Maxon One sub was probably always destined to go to Blender anyway. Anyone who is already keenly using C4D on a student level and wants, uses or needs the Maxon One stuff, isn't going to be put out by a $100 fee annually to get it. I'd love to pay $100 annually for Maxon One. I'm about to go to the grocery shop shortly, to buy some more groceries, and if I add up the costs of the groceries I also bought yesterday, I'm pretty sure it's over $100. This time next week I won't have much to show for those grocery purchases, and I'll still be without Maxon One. Ultimately, like many other things Maxon does, the biggest visible impact will be on some message board threads where people rant for a bit, otherwise folks on both the "I like this!" and "I hate this!' sides of the fence will all shrug and probably just get on with their lives over the next week or so. If C4D is not an option to teach compared to the wonderful alternatives of Maya and Blender, you probably shouldn't be teaching the students C4D. Alternatively, set up some classes where if folks are really into doing high end FX with nodes, they can use Houdini Apprentice, and if they really want to be a Pixar animation rigger, they can try out Maya, and if they really want to spend all day posting colourful abstract GIF's of swirling circles on Instagram, they can shell out the $100 and sign up for Maxon One. I'm not sure why any of these options need to be accompanied with much angst.

They get all of Maxon One for that hundred bucks, including all the Red Giant stuff, Redshift, ZBrush and whatever else gets chucked in there. And I actually do see the logic of it as a business decision. Clearly less people will be signing up to this higher price than before. The people that do sign up will be paying higher than before. Those people will probably also be more keen on sticking with C4D and using it as a career, versus the percentage (I won't say 'handful' as it could be many) of people who wanted to test the waters, were half interested, but view the hundred bucks as an obstacle. So they go away, Maxon has less work to deal with managing it, and they probably still kinda / sorta make the same dollars. I could be wrong. Dave can pop in here with a big spreadsheet showing earnings and interest and projections if anyone really wants to get into the dollar logic of why they put the price up. When I sub again it won't be at the educational rate so in a number of ways I don't really care about this. There are a few references to Blender in that Reddit thread but I would frankly view it as newsworthy if a C4D comments thread pops up anywhere online without at least three guys telling us how wonderful Blender is. Blender is pretty cool, and I have this on a lot of authority because the past five years of scrolling C4D threads everywhere have usually carried a handful of folks giving one sentence comments or five words or even just two words mentioning Blender, like "There's always Blender...." "You could always use Blender..." "Or, there's Blender..." "Blender is free!" and so on. This was all useful info the first time I heard it but is maybe less effective reading it the 5000th time, but this is just me. And I do think Blender is cool. But it's very janky and even the non-janky bits sit tightly alongside the bits that are janky, all of it managed and sorted out by a particularly janky Object manager. The Reddit thread does have a quite fair comment from a teacher who noted, in NZ a lot of the kids at the school where he teaches are poor and $100 is a week's groceries. This is fair enough and if he's going to learn and then teach them all Blender, I guess they'll all be learning Blender. If this is a good thing for everyone I'm not sure what the problem is. People say we live in a world of dramatic exciting change with AI and new free software apps and entire industries changing, and who knows where we will be in five years etc etc? In reality I know exactly where we will be in five years, threads will still be bubbling along at a low rate with some folks expressing satisfaction and some dissatisfaction at whatever Maxon has just done, every online comments thread here and on Youtube and elsewhere will have another five to ten guys writing "There's always Blender..", "You could just use Blender", "Maybe it's time for Blender?", and this will be the state of affairs for the rest of our lives, with neither Maxon nor the excitable Blender fans ever changing.

That guys has done Cineversity stuff and the occasional Maxon presentation for years, he's probably among the testers I guess. But this all looks cool. A few new tools over the next couple of months and hopefully a nice chunky release in September will give me a lot of stuff to play with when I re-sub.

Latest McGavran post on Twitter has some more particle stuff, and the screenshot under his post (with icons) is interesting.

I'm resubscribing to C4D later this year, but TBH if I was going to take a year of from subbing and enjoying new features as they rolled out, I'm glad it was this one. My sub finished March 2023, one year later and the cool new features added across that 12 months are not that many, with the Core update being the biggest. I guess(?) the next 12 months will be a lot better? But this is what I thought 12 months ago. Have been busy with other stuff so it was a timely break. I've tried Blender and kinda / sorta like it and will continue to learn it, but I'll be treating it as an accomplice to C4D and will ultimately try to get benefit and use out of both. I'll give Maxon a bit longer to get some more C4D features under its belt before jumping back in. Blender is pretty cool but the clunky areas here and there bug me, not the least being their Object manager, which I find somewhat annoying, rigid and counterintuitive. I think we have the chunkier releases for C4D coming April and September (might have the first of those wrong), so not long to go, unless the current reality is that new features come whenever and the September release is the only hallmark release of the year.

Dave's LinkedIn bio could read Adobe - helped our team develop blah blah blah Maxon - CEO, led the company through an important period, helping our team develop blah blah blah Core4D - Chief shitposter of dank memes and GIF's, caused 3DPangel and other regulars much angst, accompanying increase in Twitter / X likes and retweets.

I knew you'd pop your head in here, Derek McGavran.

Linked to what?

Well, his most recent tweet of stuff from Andy Needham - lots of coloured particles swirling around, nothing more, nothing less - seemed to suggest the same. Particles will be great to see and it's just one of the long laundry list of items C4D needs to sort out, so hopefully the devs don't turn off their machines and go to the pub for the next six months to celebrate.

Dave's Twitter feed does suggest something interesting is on the way. Check the oblique post he made on January 23rd, for example. Either way happy to see the C4D engine revving up a bit.

I doubt it.

Always enjoyed seeing Paul in the live streams, he came across in both those and in stories I heard here as a very friendly and likeable guy. He has such a great enthusiasm for artists and I suspect he was an invaluable presence in many ways.