BoganTW

I agree with Dave’s post just before - there have been so many threads in the past where it was noted, ‘Maxon can’t look at updating such-and-such a feature until they address the underlying core performance and object handling, this or that feature really requires the internal architecture to be sorted out before they can address those other issues’ etc. I’m probably paraphrasing badly but this was noted more than once. Some threads here and on Reddit are downbeat because they think the release is ‘just a speed increase’, but I suspect they’re missing the bigger picture. Everyone can read between the lines but I suspect the Maxon devs are happier this release is behind them rather than ahead of them. And even with a couple of less feature heavy updates here and there, generally the releases from last year on have shown a lot of promising stuff finally arriving, so I expect C4D 2024 to help this process along quite a bit. There were posts years ago noting that a Bodypaint update would likely require a big internal rewrite before they could look at it. We seem to be finally arriving at that station, so who knows.

I think they did more than that to speed things up with this one.

Someone pointed out (here or elsewhere) that since Sketch and Toon doesn’t work with Redshift, it’s in an awkward spot not working with the default renderer. I hope they do an update soon, soon for Maxon meaning in the next two years or less, hopefully not longer than that.

I think last year Maxon were adding quite a few features in the weeks and a few months right after the 2023 release, including Pyro. No guarantees obviously (it’s Maxon) but it seems a pretty good chance the same thing will happen here. Maybe the speed boost comes first, possibly some cool stuff to use it with comes after.

The Effectatron guy above is very negative in his video. This update wasn’t his cup of tea I guess.

Well done Maxon, quite a nice release, and that speed issue has been long complained about. Great to see it fixed. I think talk of past releases versus the current trend should note that as we get various updates through the year as well, the September releases aren’t as chunky. They used to stockpile every change and wait till September, now we get a few good releases each year and sometimes some sudden surprises. Not a problem for me but I’d be curious what the Maxon One exclusives for C4D now come to. I’ll be resubbing sometime in 2024.

Training team session for this week is Noseman and Chris Schmidt. I expect Chris will probably drop a Rocket Lasso overview of C4D 2024 the same day, and we'll probably get a Chris / Rick Barrett conversation sometime later. I'll be in Korea but will be keen to watch whatever they're dropping.

It's also the same artist linked each time - @joe_ihdt (aka Quasar) - so TBH I'm not sure what the mystery is. We now have two videos in this thread from Quasar of that character rig running nicely in C4D - the one Dave originally posted, as a 'before and after' example - and the one you've now posted from that same artist, who is again using that same rig, the one he used to demonstrate how nicely things are apparently running in the new version of C4D. So possibly they're both 'after' videos, with both demonstrations running on C4D 2024 rather than C4D 2023, and both benefiting from whatever benefits C4D 2024 is giving it. The Instagram video was posted in June so maybe he's had the new C4D since then. Dave McGavran's C4D peek this morning is interesting. Particles? https://twitter.com/dmcgavra/status/1700138201782891003?s=20

Looks like the core is finally coming along a bit.

You're a week off I think. Various Maxon presentations at shows and the 'exciting' Maxon Training Team presentation mentioned above are all listed for next week, not this one. It could come earlier as who knows really, but all the signs I'm seeing point to next week. Maxon did just release the new Cinebench a couple of days ago. https://www.maxon.net/en/article/maxon-introduces-cinebench-2024

I'm hoping the whole C4D 2024 cycle over the next 12 months is a chunkier one than usual.

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.