BoganTW

Quite cool, well done Dominik.

Ok cool thank you Igor, much appreciated.

This is an underrated comment and quite funny.

If anyone has some top quality beginner Houdini or Blender tutorials that they'd like to point out as being useful and helpful, feel free to mention or link, happy to have a look at them.

Really great work Igor. Houdini and Blender are running neck and neck for me btw. Interested in both. One guess what this will likely mean if I learn them both to a decent degree.

Houdini pie menus are a bit more fun visually than the ones in C4D, which I remember looking at once and going "No thanks." The Blender ones also look alright. I'm surprised Maxon with their UI focus didn't jump at the opportunity to do something cooler with their pie menus. They could have even added a video about them to their new features reel with a 3D pie bing eaten, big letters saying NEW PIE MENUS etc

Pie menus are cool. Houdini definitely has some nice ones. I'll add those pie menus to my Blender install when I start it and see how it looks. Note re Houdini - I've been very impressed with the training videos I've seen. They have a lot of quality training for it, so both Blender and Houdini are in the running.

Maxon and C4D are fine for what they are, but are they offering a compelling reason for a subscriber on the fence to stay rather than investigating alternatives? I'm not seeing it. I'm going to try out Blender from this months later release, and will use 4.0 (due at end of year) to judge how I feel about it, and will try Houdini from the current 19.5, and use this year's later release 20 to see how I feel about that one. And that will give me a half year of watching whatever Maxon bring this year, plus whatever the reaction is, to make my judgement. My current job wraps up in about 10 months or so, which will give me more time thereafter to dive into whichever one I ultimately pick. No rush.

I never see Modo discussed a lot though they do have their own forum. Might be an interesting exercise to Youtube search C4D TUTORIAL, HOUDINI TUTORIAL, BLENDER TUTORIA, MODO TUTORIAL and put the search results just for the last month, it might be indicative as to what's up and what's not.

Blender has some nice new releases imminent, a new version later this month, some chunky releases (including 4.0) for later this year. Houdini has a big release 20 on the way, long awaited on the official forum. Nine Between has just started a good get-into-Houdini series, and SideFX takes the training aspect very seriously, lots of good tutorials get linked on their official page. C4D seems to have hit its stride with a good cadence of awaited bits and pieces finally being added, see the past several months of good new features dropping on a regular basis. Yet they have so much catching up to do. So I expect notable releases and new features from all three apps this year. Beats me which one will become my preferred option, yet two of them are certainly cheaper than the other. This might be a matter of consideration when I make my eventual choice.

The GSG guys are now putting together good long form videos on different aspects of Redshift, nice to see. The TutorialCells training channel on Youtube is about 200 videos in to a thorough deep dive on all aspects of C4D, he's now demonstrating Mograph rigs and will be building up to bigger projects. The Maxon Training Team have almost too much stuff to watch. Yet C4D has been making promises for so many years. Things are coming, the core rebuild will be worth it, just you wait and see. 3DKiwi left the Cafe when R17 came out as he thought Maxon were taking their sweet time getting things done. That was in August 2015. more than 7 and a half years ago, soon to be 8. Some dynamics and pyro things are starting to appear, yet the full sheet of required re-do's or upgrades are all in the indeterminate future. Meanwhile Houdini (for all its trouble) has all the stuff you need to do anything, and Blender (for all its faults) has a ton of specialised, nicely focused features and add on that are letting people do a ton of cool stuff. And some of the trouble in learning Houdini might be fun when tackled in the right way, and some of the faults with Blender are probably overstated by me here too. Some of my issue has been work related, in that I've had a busy day job that kept me out of doing 3D stuff other than occasional moments on weekends or in the evening. So it has been fun to dip in to C4D and try stuff out. But Now the renewal time has hit I can see several more months of my job taking my time up before I'm free again, so I've canceled the automatic renewal for C4D and will press the button again if and when I want to. And with that decision made it clears the space for a few months for me to look carefully at both Houdini and Blender. So I'm going to play fair and try both of them out, then will do a careful comparison as to which one I like using the most, which one lets me do the things I want to, and which one seems to be doing in the right direction. Watch out C4D, this means I'm going to chip away at both Blender and Houdini until they click a little bit for me, so I feel more comfortable with the workflow with each. Then I'll do my comparison and make my decision. I'm not going to write super negative stuff about Maxon or C4D, see John Dickinson's funny Twitter posts this past week - he had finished a months long Blender modelling project, then imported the model into C4D just for texturing and rendering in Redshift, and noted that the current C4D set-up felt like a joy to use, it had greatly improved from when he left it a year or more ago. That was nice to see. And I'm not going to burn any bridges, C4D can be fun, Houdini can be amazing, Blender can do some great stuff. But the annual cadence of C4D licensing charges is reliant on me enjoying my time with it, and seeing that development is moving at a good speed. The time I didn't get to take using it as much as I would have liked is on me. The methodical, opaque, and still far behind the others development status for C4D is on them. So we'll see.

My C4D sub is up next week. I might re-sub down the track, might not. I have a few months to play with Blender and Houdini before deciding whether a re-sub is worth it. It's all a matter of deciding whether I care mainly about Mograph stuff, or whether the extra things that Blender and (obv) Houdini can do are of greater interest. A re-sub will potentially be on the cards down the track, but several months or more off to let Maxon add some more features to it won't hurt.

Yep. I'm not sure if I used Chris' last Rocket Lasso plugins (the splines) so not sure when I'll find a chance to use these ones.

Yikes. Hopefully not everyone will go the AI route. I'm pausing my C4D sub in March for a month or two at most (first 12 month sub finishing), and restarting it again in May. Gives me time to catch up on some other work, and then can go back into another fun 12 month sub right after.

Yeah I think you're right. I go back and forth between preferring light and dark TBH. Has the forum been dead the past fortnight or is this just me?

Windows only, but looks fun for sure. https://www.cgchannel.com/2023/02/project-dogwaffle-team-ships-howler-2023/

GSG are offering a free subscription to their big Redshift training series. This was originally selling for hundreds a year or two ago. Worth a look.

Interesting news from the presentation. Left Angle have been speaking to Maxon about getting Redshift working in a friendly way with Autograph, and are also discussing C4D being able to export USD to Autograph. Nothing announced or confirmed but they say it's being looked at, at least.

Cool, finally an up to date run through with it. Left Angle did a live webinar with the software and answered a few questions. They haven't popped that video on their official channel yet, but RevisionFX have done so. Here it is.

I have played with the demo, which has a generous 90 day time till expiry. It's interesting but Ryan Summers is promising some in-depth twitter thoughts on his first week with it shortly. The Autograph Reddit page is starting to get a handful of comments - Left Angle just did their first update to the software - and the most promising comment till now is this one. Honestly, I've been enjoying it a lot. Most everything you would instinctively do in AE is all there while taking away issues that have caused headaches for so many years. Still some little things here and there that I come across that throws me in for a loop, but overall I've been really excited to really get a good grasp on Autograph!

Turn on the auto translate to follow with subs. This is a long play with Autograph, hosted by Lionel from the Maxon Training Team care of the MotionCafe channel. Funnily enough, this is from a year ago, but the software still seems identical to what's out now. They are doing a new live stream on the 26th.

Autograph has a point tracker and a planar tracker. From their Reddit page, in response to a guy asking about basic tracking - "We are currently working on the integration of a camera tracker and camera mapping features to make clean plates easier."

Ryan Summers has posted a long thread of impressions on Twitter. I've linked it here twice but all that comes up each time after I do so are ads, so I'll let others go find it (@Oddernod)

A solid online help for Autograph is here. They have an icon on various pages discussing differences between Autograph and AE / Nuke, which is pretty cool. https://www.left-angle.com/public/doc-autograph/dev-master/welcome.html#migrating-to-autograph General consensus among everyone is that the software is overpriced and Left Angle have misjudged things there - ie if they had launched at a third of the price, they'd likely be getting more than 3 x the sales. Ryan Summers (@Oddernod) has chucked up some threads on Twitter and is trying things out. There's also a new Reddit page up for Autograph, with a sole post from one guy lamenting the price. I might have a long read through the documentation before I muck around with the demo. Maybe in the interim someone will drop the price a bit.

I will try the demo. There's a couple of months to get under the wire for the (still pricy) annual sub, with the option in a year of taking the hit for the remainder of the upgrade price to perpetual.