BoganTW

Training team hype for Thursday September 14th. I think we'll see what's up the day prior on the 13th. Join the Maxon Training Team for an exciting #AskTheTrainer Special! We already know the exciting topic, but we’ll wait to tell you about it. Just one hint: It’s going to be exciting! https://www.maxon.net/en/event/ask-the-trainer-special-september-14th

It's about two and a half weeks away I think.

Fair enough, but since the thread is titled C4D 2024 ETA? you'll have to forgive a few of us for drifting back over to the topic of C4D and away from the topic of whether Blender will or won't replace Maya at US training facilities preparing students to work in the professional VFX industry.

I was going to post something similar, Mash saved me the trouble. The guy that runs Nodefest here in Melbourne - they've had EJ and Tim Clapham doing presentations showing their C4D stuff - used to work for Animal Logic in Sydney. He worked on one of the HAPPY FEET films and told us he was driven to pack up and leave after he'd spent more than six months in a team working on just one shot. The mograph scene in Melbourne is fairly robust and a number of people work down here doing exactly what Mash described, following a brief and doing it from start to finish. The last time I visited a monthly catch up (there's a local mograph group that meets in the same building where my filmmaking buddies catch up) a young woman told me, yep, most of the people here doing mograph stuff are using C4D to do it. There's also a high profile game and FX training school in Melbourne, they use Maya and when I've spoken to grads there at various talks for Houdini (or Maya or whatever), they've usually gone, yeah, I've trained as a rigger, hopefully I can get some rigging work now that I'm trained up in it. Horses for courses. I'm not expecting C4D to be a main tool on the next five Marvel movies, but equally I don't see the mograph folk locally dumping C4D and going all in on Maya to do their Mograph stuff.

If I had the time to dive into all of them, Maxon One would be great, but my time is heavily split right now with a lot of non CG stuff filling much of it. I don't see C4D taking a back seat as much as I see all the other apps have joined it in the front of the vehicle. With the announcements they have to devote time to everything, so we get overviews of all their apps. When the 3D and Motion Show / Siggraph etc presentations hit, the majority still feel like C4D, with a heavy chunk of ZBrush and some Red Giant stuff alongside them. Whatever, anyway, we'll know what's up in a few weeks, and I'm expecting C4D to get at least some cool new stuff.

I don't see that happening. They have a bunch of developers whose job is to develop for C4D and not ZBrush, and the roles probably aren't interchangeable. Also, if C4D has been successful, and ZBrush is successful, maybe they can develop for them both and have twice the success, rather than just developing for one of them and coasting? I would have thought the incentive to give big updates to C4D would be so C4D users would keep using it and some people would subscribe to it. The alternative is C4D users stop using it and people stop subscribing to it. So there's your incentive. This is nit picking a bit though, I remain in agreement that Maxon needs to sort some things out and C4D is [cough, cough] 'overdue' for impressive updates that the user base has been patiently waiting for for a long long while.

That's one way to describe the deal being offered to general C4D subscribers, I'm not sure if they should focus on this in the advertising though. Edited to add - I'm moaning a tad but I'm still keen to see what's forthcoming with C4D. They've built the foundation. Time to unveil what they're building on top of it I think.

They've already developed the node system, and they've said many times that any new stuff that gets built from here on will be done using the node system to build it. So even if they just keep on building things, and using the node system to build them, they'll eventually / gradually deliver on the promise of scene nodes. This is unless someone thinks Maxon will never build anything interesting in the future, and everything interesting they'll ever do is in the past. But as usual with Maxon they're absolutely taking their sweet time about it. R20 with the nodes was unveiled in August 2018. For anyone bad at maths, that was five years ago. Nigel Doyle left - complaining that C4D development had turned into a cactus - just before R17 came out, which was over 8 years ago. So if he ever gets bored, in just over 18 months time, Nigel can come back to the forum here and go "It's been ten years since I departed, let's see if C4D development has progressed as much as I predicted back then" etc etc. That would be pretty funny. I pretty much agree with most of the positive and negative comments about nodes above from everyone else. They've done some cool capsule stuff, capsules and a decent manager showing them off probably wasn't the entire extent of what people were hoping nodes would be five years down the track. There was promise of a new Object manager coming in to combine everything in a cool new way. We're still waiting. Shrug. These threads are always the same, but I'm kind of / sort of hoping for a big C4D 2024. At any rate, Maxon sent out an email at the beginning of this month noting that their EULA was changing, with some new license terms and updated things. They specified and their IBC 2023 announcement notes So those two notes combined should give you a solid idea of when C4D 2024 is coming in. I remain interested in C4D but am not even going to think of re-subbing until around April / May next year. That should theoretically give them some time to pull their finger out and release some solid updates. You'd hope. I'm also not thrilled to see any C4D features paywalled behind the Maxon One sub, as I'll never be subbing to Maxon One, but I guess that is what it is.

Good interview thanks.

Martijn's stuff is amazing, great interview thank you.

McGavran on where he sees C4D in four years time - still Mograph focused, or competing in the other obvious and hoped for areas? Throw us a bone. Tim Clapham on anything, he's always worth a listen. Plus - Noseman BREAKS HIS SILENCE! The world's most controversial 3D trainer spills the beans on his shocking secret life.

Davinci is truly great for editing and general post stuff. The Fusion page can certainly composite, but one thing I'm learning with all these various software mainstays and their alternatives - the ones you subscribe to, the ones you can buy, the ones that are free - is that you get whatever the respective feature set is, but you also then get, or don't get, whatever the tutorial ecosystem is that accompanies it. So, just on design and artwork, Adobe means you have to subscribe to the Cloud to get whichever software from them that you're after, but you also get thousands of tutorials and hundreds of good to excellent tutorial channels and courses with it. And for my purposes I'm starting to now see that as being nearly as important as what the software can do. Fusion can composite and there are a handful of courses or videos out there showing a few things, but you'lll then see long Reddit pages with various posters unhappy that it can't do whatever Nuke or (in some instances) AE can do, or you'll have some guidance from one guy on one channel, but not much more. Whereas if you say 'okay, I'll composite in AE' the big problem will be to decide which of the many tutorial guides to watch first. I've actually moved towards doubling-back and learning / relearning all the Adobe stuff I never really 100% knew, which will keep me busy for a while. This is a longwinded way of saying I recommend you do a rough mucking-around render-to-Davinci post experiment first, and see whether you end up going 'yeah, this looks fine', or whether the process makes you slap your forehead and pick AE instead. Here's a guy below doing some stuff in C4D with Arnold and then sending it to Fusion.

They probably will do this, and in fact maybe one or two extra dedicated folk will take his instruction to heart and copy his Python methods for the rest of their working careers. Shrug.

No mention of Apple products being affected even though the M1 doesn't support AVX2. I'm assuming the Apple Silicon architecture does what they need it to here without AVX2 being a part of it. I wonder if the below means a chunkier than usual update is on the way? Changes are expected later this year, so it is highly recommended that users anticipate these updates and their impact on your pipeline.

I'll work something out. I just got a few thousand back on tax, so I'll likely be re-subbing early July, plus settling into Houdini a little as well.

I was also disappointed to see renewals don't get a discount, would have been tempting. But it is what it is. Shrug.

I remember subscribing at some point in the past. Clicking on my user name icon (top right of screen) tells me nothing about whether I'm still subbed or when my sub might be expiring, or when it expired. I'll have a look and sort it before the June 1st deadline but just noting that the info doesn't appear easy for me to see at a glance.

Nah. Folks who use other DCC's and who aren't interested in Lightwave won't care. Folks who are using Lightwave and who have been antsy about its future will be happy to have a target for them to throw their spare money at, in the hope of keeping the sinking vessel afloat. See the official Newtek forum where various people are already jumping in to buy the package with the hoodie and get some shares chucked in with it. Beyond that, I dunno what they're meant to charge. How much are permanent licenses for most DCC''s? Maxon charges something like that new user price annually. Older users can get the next version for half that price, people who just bought it can get the new version for a bit over a couple of hundred. The folks now running Lightwave will need every one of those dollars and more if they're going to get anywhere. It'll be interesting to see if they can offer anything that differentiates them from their competitors, other than being old and requiring a lot of work to catch up.

I would not put Maxon at the top of any ranking where speed and several others things are concerned. Was just looking at it the other way, from the dev perspective. Who has the more bucks to pay devs for ongoing work, McGavran / Nemetschek or the bloke who just bought Lightwave? I would have thought the former. Maxon are chugging along, and will continue to chug along, and I don't think hiring a few more devs would change that for them, they'd still chug along in a Maxon way. Maybe having Lightwave UK based makes it attractive for devs who live just down the street, with work mates from the same neck of the woods. I'm sure that doesn't hurt.

I liked this bit from the interview. As you can imagine we have been bombarded with interest from developers that want to be part of the next chapter and we are in the process of determining the shape of our future team. If there's that many 3D app programmers floating around some of them should go work at Maxon, which despite lagging behind wherever it's lagging behind, would surely be further ahead of things than Lightwave is. Maybe those programmers just want a cool Lightwave t-shirt or something.

Yeah, it is kind of bananas. What he really needed was a morning sit down with a business advisor over pancakes and coffee with a guy in a suit looking at the situation like you did and explaining it while the two of them poured cream and maple syrup over waffles and hot young waitresses scurried around taking people's orders. Instead he's wandering the street while a cold wind blows, tumbleweeds roll past towards destinations unknown, and a loud saxophone honks and blarps on the soundtrack. I have no current use for it but would have still bought a polished up release of it. It's a topsy turvy world we live in.

Huh. A writer friend in Melbourne told me over a year ago he was splashing out on gear to start doing films in Unreal. I should message him and see how he's going with it, he was buying a very beefy PC from memory.

Chris Schmidt is usually worth a look but I've been too busy to watch. And I'd watch anything Tim Clapham does, but I haven't seen him do a Maxon show for a couple of years or more, probably because his own work (more fun than mine) keeps him busy too. I did meet Tim in Melbourne a few years back and he was truly the nicest guy ever.

This shows dedication to the cause. Some council planner who enjoys 3D should commission a Polygon Street or Loft Nurb lane.

I've always been happy to see good books on CG apps, but every time I've bought one I've made it made a dozen or less pages into it, then returned to watching video tutorials online instead. Pradeep's book does look like a worthwhile volume though.