BoganTW

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.

Fair enough. Although if grains are doing what he demonstrated above, and Maxon are continually working on sim stuff, I don't see any reason why the sim stuff for the rest of this year will be restricted to just more rope, soft squashy soft bodies, and pyro. But yeah, who knows. With the frequent tendency of these DCC's to all for some reason release updates on the same day, I wouldn't be surprised if Maxon drop another update later this year on the same day Houdini R20 gets unveiled.

Grain dynamics were apparently a feature of C4D 2023.1, and were yanked back out of 2023.2, unless I'm misinterpreting what he's getting at in this video. If they're out they'll presumably be back later this year.

It'll be nice if they can keep it chugging along.

Are they still adding back updated icons? I'm guessing the answer is yes but would be nice to know for sure.

Not true at all. Rick talked about it in the Rocket Lasso live stream three posts up, and he noted they try and give the majority of capsules and freebies to regular subscribers, and there's just a few that are kept exclusive to Maxon One. I was a regular C4D subscriber and I thought I was getting most of the Rocket Lasso offerings, the grid one was certainly there. I thought it was quite cool as the day Chris would announce it, it was there in the content browser ready to be played with. So in that light it worked quite well. I was just less thrilled to see a few C4D goodies like that kept for Maxon One only. But as I noted above they probably have their reasons. And I confess Rick did not seem super thrilled in the live stream when he observed there were a couple of bits and pieces they were keeping for One subscribers only, and he said they tried to lean towards giving regular users the big majority of those assets. So I'm not going to super bash Maxon over it, they're freebies of a sort and they notably have been chucking new content (models or textures or Rocket Lasso stuff) at users at a steady pace. But I just want to give them several months of sorting things out and hopefully adding some useful bits and pieces before I sub again, and in that window I'll be looking at Houdini, Blender, Bitwig and Davinci, over a couple of months apiece (wish me luck doing any 3D stuff with the latter two). Once I've had a solid play with all of those I'll likely be in a better mind to look at C4D again and Maxon will have hopefully pushed the whole app further along where it's meant to be going. Their updates seem more chunkier and more frequent these days, even if the latest one perhaps wasn't the biggest.

Something I hadn't realised. Though I think others have discussed it already, I just didn't grab the import of it. Some of the new capsules Maxon have come up with are available to subscribers only. So if you've bought perpetual, you won't (I think) get access to those. But also - some of those subscription-only capsules are restricted to those who are getting the full Maxon One subscription. So if you're subscribing to C4D (like I was recently, and probably will again at some point), you'll get a lot of the subscription-only capsules, maybe most of them, but there will be a few that you won't get because you're just a C4D subscriber, and not a Maxon One subscriber. Whatever. Maxon's developers have to pay the bills somehow, fair enough. So I guess they're trying to add incentives to go full Maxon One. But I dunno if I'll ever need Maxon One even if I resubscribe. There's not enough time in the day to learn every single one of those apps, and I'm trying to move away from AE to. maybe something like Autograph, if they get it going, or Fusion, if it does what I want it to. A C4D sub annually is a bit over $1000 AUD a year. A Maxon One sub is a bit over $2000 AUD a year. So yeah, I dunno about that one. A Maxon guy on a Twitter thread (deep in one of EJ's comments threads, I think) noted that the Nodes UI overall wasn't done and they were going to continue to add stuff to make it easier to use. This was in a comments thread where the poster had written, you know, Houdini does this, it would make things easier if you did it with C4D, and the Maxon guy had said, yep, fair comment, we're still adding stuff and that particular suggestion is on our list. All this will be looked at by me at some future date, after I get a few weeks to ponder what Houdini is doing, and after I play with what Blender is doing, sometime later this year. Bitwig is currently fun. Chris's latest C4D run through with Rick B. is below.

I bought the Cafe nodes training when it was there, and (could be wrong) it might have been on Youtube for a bit as well, as some of the recent Cafe training ended up there in 720p versions before they changed their mind. Funny comment in the earlier thread There was a guy online who had done a good long Scene Nodes video for Youtube then on his website he said that a full Scene Nodes training course was coming from him. I wrote to him, hey, can I buy it, etc. He wrote back, he wasn't going to bother recording any further videos on it until Maxon finished their development. This was something like a couple of years back, and a fair point as it's still in development and Maxon have done another UI change for it. Rocket Lasso does periodic videos with it, Noseman does videos for it, not many others. Tim Clapham did a video a few months back on Scene Nodes, below, and the comments below it on Youtube show that most people still haven't got their heads around it. Sometime this year or next Maxon should just pay Chris Schmidt to do a Nodes from beginner to hero course, and either have Chris then sell it to make some more bucks, or put the whole thing online for free. Or, if they want, the Training Team could do a multi part series (like they do on Redshift, C4D, rigging etc) just on Nodes, here's how to get started. here's what you can do. And I appreciate a fair bit of this is already out there, but it's scattered all over. The learning process is part of what I want to see in any 3D app's ecosystem, Maxon are doing a good job with most other aspects of C4D right now, but the Nodes training for beginners isn't extensive. My general guess is once that Scene Manager is done and they have their Object manager replacement there for everyone to see, we'll get more training showing us what's what, but I'd guess this would be in 2024 or later, would love to be wrong.

Solid update, even the Maxon site shows some extra love in the update pages there. Hopefully they can keep the cool features coming at a decent rate through the year.

I expect H20 to be a chunky one. New C4D node Ui improvements are very nice. Bitwig has a really great nodal interface for its Reaktor / Reason style synth window. They're a German company I think. Some of the Maxon guys are into (or come from, or play) music, so they've likely already seen it. A Bitwig feature Maxon should copy - the help windows where the features demonstrated can actually be tweaked onscreen, so if you go into the help page, you're dealing with a live feature that can be tweaked and adjusted, alongside the text and guides that explain what is going on.

The usual weird quirk of timing continues with Blender's new release coming out the same day. Both releases look fine, and both show a snapshot of what each developer is up to, what they're evidently interested in, and where they're going. C4D continues to polish the stuff they're polishing, Blender continues to add the stuff they're adding. I'll be largely off the forum for the next couple of months while I learn Bitwig, will drop back in after.

Yeah the new node UI looks a lot more appealing. Even Paul in the video is going, modes are really great, but some people have found it a bit confusing, so we've changed stuff so you might find it easier now. Shrug. Good news, I'll have a look someday.

The lovely Elly at the training team just confirmed new feature announcements for later this week, in just a couple of days.

NAB this year is Saturday April 15th to Wednesday April 19th. Maxon is there for all those dates. Their ad copy says "this is where you'll find a renewed path to clarity and confidence that takes your work in bold new directions." https://www.maxon.net/en/event/nab-show-2023 And the headline at the top of the page says NOW GET READY FOR WHAT'S NEXT The only way they could make it any clearer that new features will be demoed there would be if Dave and Rick wrote the message on a baseball bat and Noseman then thumped readers over the head with it like Robert De Niro in The Untouchables. The April 2022 features last year were shown off just a few days before NAB, so my guess is late second week of April we'll see Maxon's new bits and pieces, I could be wrong though. Or we could get them even sooner. Maxon have a 'very special' @Ask the Trainer episode for March 30th, topic yet to be revealed. Hopefully it'll be more worthwhile than the very special episodes you usually get when you hear those words. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_special_episode

Yep, this is where the UI focus from Maxon pays dividends, they don't want to make things a painful experience and they do want things to work smoothly and for the Ui to be a pleasant and engaging thing to use. The flip side though is the high focus on this occasionally makes it feel like you're being served by a waiter who wants to make sure you sit at the nicest table, lets get you a good seat sir, here is some really good cutlery, I'll make sure the view is good, volume too loud outside sir, let me adjust it, now let me adjust the air conditioning, this table will be nicer if I make it 5cm higher, now let me give you our cleanest menu, excuse me while I turn the light down to make your surroundings more pleasant, etc etc etc, and then you look through the window and over the street the folks who arrived at the restaurant just over the road are aiready through their first meal and starting on dessert. So there are ups and downs with all this. Blender has a ton of crazy geometry node stuff that maybe isn't covered by the C4D nodes yet, they have a big assortment of cool modelling tools, they have tons and tons of add-ons, and a fat marketplace full of endless goodies being thrown at you for free or for $20 or whatever. These are good points, it's all a matter if you can handle the slight clunkiness and Blender way of doing things. I've decided I'll be happier knowing Blender than not knowing it, so I am testing it out. Houdini I plan to watch Igor's first new video this weekend. I dunno where all these respective apps will be in 12 months time but even if it rockets forward C4D is still so far behind in some respects that a bit of a breather won't hurt, a bit like watching a long marathon on TV and deciding to return to it a few hours later as the racers are all slogging up a tall mountain and there are probably more important things to be doing outside, in the garden, or perhaps during a nice long stroll down the street to the shops to buy a coffee and a banana cake from the cafe where that cute chick works on Saturdays.

Glad they dropped the price,

Cool thank you Igor, will check this out shortly.

I think the implication was that we'd be getting a new Object Manager that does all the same old stuff, but has an additional layer of visibility and access to whatever node stuff is going on, and seeing various Node things get bundled up into Capsules does feel like kind of a first step. My astute technical description of their presumed goal with it is that any new C4D Object Manager should be one where everyone largely goes, okay, this is pretty cool, rather than one where everyone goes, bloody hell, what were they thinking? This would potentially take a while to figure out. The Blender object manager is getting there, has some okay features, but still feels more rigid and less fluid than C4D's.

The node stuff in C4D will be fun and useful once they get it to where they're taking it to. It could be a low number of years away though, for all we know. Rick Barrett did a video a long time back where he was talking about Scene Nodes, and mentioned that a replacement for the C4D Object Manager was on the way, and would eventually show the full Scene Node workflow in the way that they had planned. "That's coming soon!" he said cheerfully. I forget if this was either two or three years back, maybe two, but it's been a while. And then I look at Blender node stuff and they have their material nodes, and a massive amount of Geometry Nodes, and Houdini has their own great node workflow, so I can either keep waiting for the C4D node stuff to mature, or start learning the node workflows that have already matured. C4D needs a new updated particle system and part of my (just moderate) interest in re-subbing would be to play with a C4D that has gained some of the features we've been waiting endless years for, but as noted for 2023 I have Blender and Houdini to look at. Blender has so many similarities to C4D (including the interface) that I'm able to learn it in bits and pieces. Houdini I've played with but I really want to put aside a solid three weeks somewhere to just do Houdini and nothing else, for the whole method of it to sink in.

Seems a bit harsh. I think the people who would like C4D's nodes and capsules stuff to reach maturity is bigger than the list of C4D users going, yeah, that will do, it's all good, you can leave it like that, thanks. Same with Bodypaint, the users going, maybe you guys could update it a bit, is bigger than the list of users going, I know it's a couple of decades old now but you can probably leave it where it is, thanks guys. Obviously there will be posters going, hey, I use (insert other app) for painting instead, I'm not bothered if C4D ever does it any more. But this is harsh and if Maxon stuck in a modern workflow to replace the old it would be nice to see. Though I confess I've never done any 3D painting so it's nearly moot to me. Side note, when I randomly Youtube searched 'Blender nodes' or 'Blender material nodes' this past fortnight, there were an absolute ton of tutorials available on Youtube and another big batch available to buy (cheap) just on node stuff. Outside the Core/Cafe node training though, there was one guy who advertised a c4D node course over a year ago. When I wrote him he said he wasn't going to bother recording it until it was clear Maxon had finished the node development, as what would be the point. I will probably resub to C4D in the first half of 2024 as my current job will have wrapped by then, and I'll be at least curious to test out whatever tools Maxon have chucked at it over a year. I'm less certain if Maxon will be getting resubs from me after that. I should generally have my head around Blender and Houdini a bit by then so it will make comparisons nice and easy. All three apps have strong points - I'm increasingly impressed by how much stuff is being chucked at users on the Blender market. Some guy uploaded a cheap but very nice cloud sim, pick from 200+ volumetric clouds of all types, fill your scenes with them. Where's the C4D equivalent? Maybe it's on the way. Blender is just about to rebuild their animation and rigging tools, they announced a two or three year project commencing now to do it. I have not looked at Houdini's rigging at all yet.

Yep, Blender and Houdini already do a ton of stuff that C4D can't, so if it's a race C4D currently isn't coming in first. But I do like C4D, it's hard not to, it just gets frustrating waiting and waiting for certain new features to land. All good, I'll be learning Blender and Houdini this year but also keeping an eye on all three, and if I get the urge to jump back into C4D in a year or two the money saved on not subbing for a while will make it easier. There were a ton of Tim Clapham tutorials I always meant to do, but time has been an issue. Anyway I'll stick around and see what happens.

The past year of various C4D updates has been very solid, with the modelling tools and all the nifty new simulation / dynamic stuff being released. When C4D finishes their big core rewrite and gets everything up to speed I'll have another look at it. That might take some time though.

True Jim Cameron quote - "Pyrocluster really saved our bacon with the explosive climax! Maxon doesn't need to update anything, those fireballs were photo real." I kid, cool to see C4D being used like it is there. For general design and some modelling C4D is a sweet tool.