DasFrodo

This is why I love InstaLOD. It's not AS important for offline rendering but if you're going to create realtime ready models, like we do right now mostly, then it's your best friend. If I have a product, let's say a motor with a bunch of screws and hex nuts and whatnot, I will select the main body and set the max sag to the highest I can get it, and solely control the detailing by the max angle, which I set very low. Then for the smaller details like screws, I set the angle to something like 22 degrees and control mostly by lowering the max sag. This way I have precise control over which parts get how much detail. In my experience controlling with max degrees works better with cylindrical and "organic" shapes. What working with max angle as "main constraint" also helps with is that cylinders that are inside each other will get subdivided evenly, instead of unevenly. What I mean by that is this: Subdivision controlled by max angle, subdivision is even Subdivision controlled by max sag, subdivision is uneven Controlling the subdivision with max angle is scale independent since a cylinder will always be 360° no matter if it has a radius of 500m or 5mm Controlling the subdivision with max sag is scale dependant since it looks at the distance between the CAD model and the generated geometry So if you want perfect overlapping cylinders without the disgusting artifacting from above, use something that nicely divides 360° like 45, 22.5, 11.25, etc. for max angle and don't use max sag or turn it up so high that max angle is mostly the more aggressive setting that decides the geometry shape The cool thing about InstaLOD is that you can do this for every single part in your assembly, and get instant feedback. C4D just imports the entire thing in one detail setting wether you like it or not. So you end up with either reimporting and mixing and matching (which can take A LONG time depending on the size of the STEP) or living with not so great subdivision. It cannot be understated how much a tool like InstaLOD helps making great CAD conversions.

If you want REALLY good CAD conversion I can recommend InstaLOD. It allows you to have fine control over every single object in the STEP file, set detail settings for every single one, automate repairs, clean up the materials (so you don't end up with metal.01, metal.02, metal.03, metal.04, ...). etc. There is a free version currently, but you have to request a license manually. https://instalod.com/fsl/ We're using the tool for over a year now for all our CAD data needs and you wouldn't believe how much time and nerves this thing saved us.

I don't think people understand how futile this backlash is. This stuff is going to happen, and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it. I'm not even trying to be cynical here. Imho that's just how it is.

Uh uhm, yeah. I used goddamn once in a post. I am swearing so much. Please, think of the children! Speaking of "thread cops". You do realize that I'd have to arrest myself, do you?

I'm just going to pretend I did not see the last sentence, but I'm inviting you to reread what I wrote, and count how many times I "swore".

No, this is on Maxon. If it is that hard to find where to give feedback or report bugs, then they failed. Guess what pops up first when you Google for "c4d give feedback". This forum, this thread. With non personalized search engines like duckduckgo it's even worse. If you search for "C4D bug report" once again you find nothing usable. The first thing you findi s a goddamn link to Chaosgroup and how to report bugs for their C4D plugins. It should not be this hard to give free feedback to a company for a software that people pay money for. In a hypothetical scenario that some user wants to give feedback, what do you think, how long will they look for a page on Maxons site to give feedback? 95% will drop off immediately after they don't find it in the first 5 google results. It is absolutely beyond me how Maxon moved the entire Redshift community to this forum and completely ignored the overall C4D community. The situation is bad. Thing is, all Igor is doing is trying to keep this site alive. It's the only reason why we have the paywall.

I doubt they will do that, and if they do, it's not going to last long. Nobody in the Blender Ecosystem will pay this much for the tool. Well not nobody, but definitely not enough to make it worth the development cost.

Heh, seems like they're branching out. Smart decision I think. Them bringing their tools to Blender is huge, because it's still lacking a good particle system / tool.

Idk what's happening there, but it looks weird 😄

Something weird is happening with the teeth there I think?

That's... interesting. Last time I searched for it I either didn't find anything or I found something with it that makes it useless for what I needed it. All I can remember from last time I tried is that the transform tools were not sufficient for me.

I miss the transform tools from Photoshop. Especially Perspective and Freehand Transform. These are unfortunately dealbreakers for me in many cases.

https://parsec.app Stupidly easy to set up. works with a surprisingly shitty internet connection (~10mbit up on the sending end is already enough for decent quality). Almost no input lag. If you have a good connection you almost don't feel like you're using a remote PC. I've mixed up my local and remote PC by accident multiple times when I had Parsec open.

lol I still remember when I tried out Houdini a while back. Looking at a node, opening a dropdown, reading. "What the f*ck is a PolySoup?" Houdini has a couple of these really weird special words for things 😄

People haven't switched away from CC due to the simple fact that there are no alternatives. You can replace single softwares in that package but guess what, once you need more than just, for example, premiere (and you will need AE as well), you have to pay for the full package. Adobe is just shamelessly abusing its place on the market and they have been for ages. That's why people hate it. Their releases are god awful every time. Their development pace is pathetic for a company that big. And they gobble up good software. Substance / Allegorithmic used to be a great company. The software is still good, but the ecosystem and the forums went to absolute trash. And now recently they bought Figma. Might not mean much to many, but it's another thing that undoubtebly will be ruined by Adobes greasy hands. The difference between Adobe and Maxon is that Maxon does not have this luxury. They, unlike Adobe, do not own the market. I can decide to not pay their subscription prices and go to Autodesk, which is cheaper. Or I pay nothing and go to Blender. And in the Blender ecosystem I can get a hundred plugins for the price that would get me one big C4D plugin like X-Particles.

I was a C4D user for over 10 years and I ditched the software when I switched my job. I am pretty much a hobbyist 3D-Artist at this point and I had no issues whatsoever switching to Blender. I just cannot justify the price Maxon is asking for. If they had an Indie pricing, which people have been asking for the second they announced the subscriptions, then maybe I would have come back. But I haven't been using C4D for so long now that I really don't care anymore. Anything I want to do I can do in Blender, and more. The only thing Blender sucks at, for my usecase, is MoGraph. There is just no competition here compared to C4D. It's sad but it is what it is. I'm not even surprised they got rid of perpetuals. They all do, once they go subscriptions. It was just a matter of time. At least it took them longer than Substance, which was less than two years until they completely scrapped the perpetuals. I'm just glad I jumped ship when I did.

The biggest issue I have with geo nodes is that the average artist can't do much with it. It's just too complex and low-level. I'd argue even Houdini is easier because it has tons of Nodes that are just a collection of other low level nodes. Blender needs something like this. It needs easier, ready to use nodes that do the basic stuff like arrays. Yes, you can build them yourself (if you have the skill). And yes, there's already tons on the web. But you have to find them first, they are not updated automatically etc.

I'd look like this as well if someone jammed a spoon in my brain. Poor guy, didn't have to end like this. But I guess that's what you get for being delicious.

Thanks for the reminder. I want to take this opportunity to say f*ck Adobe. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk

What are you talking about? Especially with 3D printing you can easily use Booleans for pretty much everything, since topology doesn't matter at all. There is no shading errors to worry about. All that matters is the raw geometry. Unless your topology is uberscrewed with some reality breaking polygons it will print just fine. I've done this stuff for years.

Would it though? I was under the impression that Glow / Bloom not only appears because of atmospherics, but also defects, smudges, dirt, small scratches and manufacturing inaccuracies in the lenses.

Would be interesting if there was a "not anymore" option.

Random Flow is really cool. I recently got it as well. THIS artwork was made within the first couple of hours.

I live by the same mantra. Better safe than sorry 😉 storage is cheap enough.