everfresh

yeah, the walk cycle is a bit wonky, but hey, the surface of that floor seems slippery enough for it to be somewhat believable :D btw, you can render out a hair pass as post effect and then combine it with the object buffer...

as mentioned by myself and many others in this thread ease of use is still c4ds main strength. it seems to be particularly popular among designers and generalists, also people who usually don't have that much of a technical mindset. as for myself i've learned to like the technical aspect of things through learning c4d, and only because of that i have the perspective of being able to flirt with houdini. if it wasn't for c4d, i'd be scared sh*tless even looking at it. what makes c4d still worth every penny for me is that i'm able to produce stuff very quickly, so the money i make by using it doesn't remotely compare to it's price. so at least to me c4d is still a very good deal, although i'd also like them to step up their game. i don't do much vfx stuff for work, or have the need to incorporate the most fancy procedural eyecandy imaginable to the stuff i usually do. sometimes a little bit more funcionality would be nice, but i can usually get by with a plugin or another idea to solve the issue. even though i'm not that happy with c4ds pace of development these days, i'm still happy to use it every day. i believe houdini can be a huge time saver for complex stuff, but for the simple things c4d is still unbeatable in productivity IMO. so right now i don't think houdini is that much of a threat to c4d, even though a lot of c4d users have picked it up, i believe most of them still use c4d for the simple day to day work. for me it isn't an either or kind of question, i see houdini as an addition to my toolset, not really a replacement. if houdini ever manages to get near the ease of use of c4d it will be a threat, for now it's more like apples and oranges. others with a more technical mindset and more sophisticated needs might see it differently, but the fact that c4ds userbase is still growing tells me there's still a place for it.

understandable you're makin a cut, man... sorry, couldn't resist. my wife would slap me now :D when i saw the features of that 16.5 demo a week ago and the whole presentation a couple of days later it made me think. houdini really has become the one-does-it-all DCC software and i will pick it up again soon i guess... i was playing around a bit with it about 2 years ago and i just gave up because it was so complicated, at least to me. also my computers struggled a bit with it, got a bunch of crashes. and that's basically what made me stick with c4d, ease of use and stability, regarding features c4d falls behind rapidly, not just in comparison to houdini. i will wait for the all-mighty r20 release, not that i have high hopes for it, just because i won't be able to learn houdini that fast and i need something to get the work done. and to be honest, c4d does everything i need it to do for the kind of work i make my living with, but it's just too tempting to see how much fun all those fancy houdini features could add to my spare time. long story short: good luck, maybe we'll meet again on the other side.

looking good. but why the split between the turntable and the packshot? also if you made the packshot a little smaller, it wouldn't look so sqeezed into the frame. always try to give the elements in your designs some room to breathe, if you want to show the details, rather mix in some close up shots ;)

nice work. some framing and camera moves seemed a bit odd, and the animation could have been snappier. also some center of gravity issues in the character animation. but all in all very well done for a first short.

i'm sorry if i misunderstood. like i said, i didn't want to sound negative, i just assumed since you were talking about using katana as well in your film project post it was directly related. my bad.

katana is looking awesome from what i've seen so far. the first time i've seen a demo of it my jaw dropped straight to the floor. but i have my doubts the whole katana/mari/renderman and probably nuke workflow is practicable for your planned community film project. the way i see it you might be stuck then with one or two people having to do all the look dev / texturing/ rendering and compositing. even if you can get the foundry to give away a few temporary licenses, people would still have to put some time and effort into learning a software just for that one project, and probably will never be able to use it again because they simply can't afford it. i have my doubts that you can get many people here excited about that. i get that you want to establish a professional film studio pipeline for this project, but i think you might be shooting a little too high here. i don't want to be negative, just trying to be realistic. most people here are comfortable with C4D, and some with 3rd party renderers like arnold, octane, redshift and such. you wrote in another post that you can imagine different scenes being rendered with different renderers, how are you going to make sure the look is really consistent throughout all the shots. not that it's not doable, just means it will be again an extra effort that has to be made and probably will slow things down. again, i don't want to talk anything to death here, and what do i know really, those are just my thoughts on it, maybe others see it completely different.

looking better... but i still think the mountains on the right could blend much more, the black parts of them are too black for objects that far away IMO... took the liberty of painting over them a little to illustrate the difference.

i would also be in, but only if i can identify with the story and aesthetics in some way, and only if there's a talented and experienced director having the final word on everything. having something like votes on important decisions will lead to a nightmare. i've worked on community projects before and have a rather bad experience, people being too kind to each other and approving low quality work from participants just too keep the "good vibe going". if something is not good, people need to be called on it, regardless if it might hurt their feelings. otherwise the outcome only can be a pile of . also i would suggest to keep it really short, something around like 3-5 minutes. the shorter it is, the higher the possibility of delivering a top notch piece and being able to finish it. i could help with character design, modelling, texturing, rigging, animation, lighting, comping and sound design. the time i can dedicate of course depends on my work load and how much i'm into the story and mood of the project.

looking really good, great work... looking forward to seeing more of them. i agree about the mountains on the right, i think it would help if there would be more fog/atmosphere in the distance so they blend a bit better with the sky... i usually use the depth pass to tune in the distance fog in post.

the only real need i could see for that is for projects like this, where you need to combine realistic elements with toon stuff... but you could also just have comped the bottle in in post. for cel shaded toon only i guess my go-to solution will always still be standard renderer, i tinkered with my toon shader setups for years, and i really love the possibilities. and standard renderer usually renders full HD cel toon setups within seconds... but sure, always good to have options... ;) still waiting for my card, the shop i ordered the card had a delivery delay of several more weeks, so i cancelled the order and ordered elsewhere today. i hope i'll get it this week so i can start having some fun with redshift.

very nice... good to know you can also build toon shaders in redshift...

if you're doing a short completely on your own, perfection tends to kill productivity, so one needs to make compromises here and there, perfectly understandable... been there a couple of times ;)

i like the lighting and mood of that poster a lot, very well done. however, i think the title should either be at the top or at least leave more room to the bottom, seems a bit squeezed in there. the title is an important part of a movie poster, so you might wanna give it some more room to breathe. also the finger poses could use some more love, and i'm a bit confused by the reflections/glow of the fingers on the back of the phone.

thanks guys, really appreciate it. did some facial expression tests the other night...

thanks @Smicksus yeah, there's some fine hair on the hoodie to make it fluffy, other than that i used a fresnel masked with a noise, that also helped a lot selling the fabric feel. @frankm the problem was that i had a hard time getting clean edges everywhere while still preserving the very fine hair details when using heavy DOF in post. also hair buffers render out buggy with physical renderer, you get a lot of unwanted artifacts. also i needed the hair depth map to be perfectly sharp, so i had to render out the hair buffers separately with standard renderer and then combine the hair depth with the position pass in post. but that alone didn't cut it, still had some jaggy areas here and there. i ended up rendering out everything at 2x the size and scale it down again to the actual size later to get the clean edges and keep the fine hair details. render times remained about the same, since i lowered the render settings accordingly. also the position and depth passes need to be 32 bit in order to get clean results.

started to work on something different for a change a couple of weeks ago, no cel rendered stuff this time... had a lot of fun building the materials. was a bit tricky to get the post DOF right in conjunction with hair, but fortunately i found a solution that works perfectly. all physical renderer, no GI. car model by vector.

thanks guys, really appreciate the feedback. :)

the character is c4D, the rest was done in after effects. for sound design i used logic pro in conjunction with a neat time shifter plugin. really had a lot of fun at every stage of this project. :)

damn... that's really amazing work! i think you came pretty close to the real one, definitely hit the spot regarding his personality.... and the hair is probably the best hair i've ever seen in c4d...

same here, prorender doesn't excite me at all, at least not yet. although some renders i've seen look nice, they all scream CG, loud and clear. can't put my finger on it, but everything i've seen so far rendered with it is far from looking photoreal. and renderfarm pricing has gotten so affordable over the last couple of years i simply don't care that much anymore if a render takes 2 or 20 minutes a frame. but r19 holds a lot of other features (actually it's mainly the small improvements) that will be of great use to me.

it really is kinda scary, igor. every society in human history has failed because of greed. and throwing oil in the fire (oil being capitalism) doesn't really solve the issue (who would have thought?). but the problems with all other systems stay the same, unfortunately greed has also destroyed communistic and socialistic systems. it's always just a matter of time until the greed of a few destroy the dreams of the many. and people without or just a less defined version of that genetic defect are always the ones that loose. it's always the same, history repeats. i'm stunned we even made it that far. and no matter how well thought through the blueprints for any possible new society might be, greed will always be able to sabotage the whole thing. in the simple words of an even more simple president: sad.

doesn't change much IMO... it's just that we will be able to produce stuff faster, if stuff can be produced faster/more cost effective, more stuff will be produced. the budgets of our clients won't shrink because of any automation that might be coming, if anything it will be the opposite. if people were told what we can do today a few decades back they would have also thought they soon might have no job anymore, but we all do have jobs now, even though we can produce things 10x faster than 20 years ago. so nothing to be afraid of, more productivity just means more time for creativity.

nice modeling!

thanks :) @Greatszalam i don't even have a reddit account... i'm already unable to cope with all the social media accounts i have, i just realised for instance i didn't even post it on twitter... but i'll look into it. @grain thanks, means a lot :)