hvanderwegen

And Blender, of course. A superb off-line perpetual license with full access to the latest betas (with full access to the original source code) and a one-in-all version (no silly "premium" or "entry-level" versions with various pricing to deal with). The one-time entry fee is quite acceptable as well. No serial number or activation necessary. And no dongles either. Best license scheme ever! ...sorry, couldn't resist. Very sorry to hear - wishing for a best health and a speedy recovery for you.

Real-time volumetric MandelBulbs in Eevee. Plus tutorial. Looks magical.

My suggestion would be to wait for the upcoming 2.8 release with its GUI overhaul. V2.8 is going to be a game changer. Eevee by itself will change the way we approach rendering with (near) real-time rendering. The new viewport's performance is excellent, and on par with the best 3d apps out there with render quality options. The beta is expected in week 2 of August next month. Learn more about the upcoming release here: https://www.blender.org/2-8/

Nope, rendering is absolutely free in Blender. As are various other render engines, such as AMD's ProRender, which is also completely free to download and install in Blender, unlike ProRender in Cinema4D. Climbingair is correct in stating that the Blender Foundation offers a Cloud subscription which gives access to extras such as a library of HDRI images, textures, a wide range of tutorials, full simplified access to all the Blender Foundation's open movies and the production files, and much more. For example, you also get an add-on to integrate production management software ("Attract") which allows you to manage your 3d productions with shot management for example, and with a team of people, if needed. Your Blender settings can be synced across devices as well via the cloud subscription. Perhaps what you were told is that Flamenco is part of that same subscription service? Flamenco is a render manager/computing infrastructure managing tool developed and used by the Blender Foundation for their latest open movies. But to be clear, you can set up as many render nodes as you like with Blender, of course. Flamenco is more of a dedicated server-based render manager for more complex projects.

Blender's community and the developers seem to have a zest to it like never before. Hardly a day goes by without some interesting new plugin or news item - it's incredible to watch, and during this summer it was hard to keep track of all the new developments. And with the new GUI overhaul 2.8 is receiving I think traction will only grow and grow. They have an official news channel "Blender Live Today" now with a likeable and enthusiastic guy, which I think is a great idea. They've been broadcasting the entire Summer.

New Eevee demos: New Disney Zootopia hair shader implementation, which is also available in the latest 2.79 builds. And the new version of Blender's 2d animation tools are about to be merged in time for the August V2.8 beta release. For those who aren't aware of the new 2d animation Grease Pencil, the Blender Foundation produced a 2d short animation to develop the 2d animation tools to "production ready" level. "HERO" showcases the 2d animation tool set and its capabilities quite nicely. There's is nothing equivalent on the market today: 2d and 3d animation tools are completely and seamlessly integrated. More info about these 2d animation developments here: https://code.blender.org/2018/07/grease-pencil-status-update/ https://code.blender.org/2017/12/drawing-2d-animation-in-blender-2-8/

Tangent Animation's newest feature animation, "Next Gen", is the studio's second animated film. Rendered 100% using Blender Cycles, according to a source at the studio (it seems this film was also produced using Blender). https://www.weibo.com/tv/v/e843ea96a612b86d41927e3cf3aab574?fid=1034:e843ea96a612b86d41927e3cf3aab574 Interestingly enough Netflix paid 30 million to pick it up for Western audiences: https://www.cartoonbrew.com/feature-film/why-did-netflix-pay-30-million-at-cannes-for-the-chinese-animated-film-next-gen-158348.html Tangent Animation's first animated feature (also done in Blender) was "Ozzy": https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5770430/ "Next Gen" looks and feels much more advanced than their first film.

Check out the current state of Eevee in the upcoming v2.8 version (this Summer / Autum) Amazing. The hardware specs are nothing out of the ordinary: D18-0105 - i7-8700K / 16GB / 500GB SSD + 1TB HDD / gtx1080 / Win 10 Remember, this is real-time viewport stuff! Check out 2:56 where real-time refraction is demonstrated.

@3D-Pangel Blender underwent a complete rewrite in its 2.5 cycle, and that initially wasn't that stable. Tools at that time were flaky, but the entire reason for that was that 2.49 did not support n-gons - which changed with that rewrite. The old internal raytracer then was replaced with Cycles, and several years were spent on making it as robust as it is now (similar situation compared to C4D's ProRender right now). The GUI was improved quite a lot as well, but a number of the 2.5 GUI targets weren't reached, and work on it saved for later. For example, layers are pretty limited compared to other software, and the outliner can't compare to the one in Cinema4d. And my main pet peeve: the more tools are added via plugins, the more convoluted the GUI becomes, because it is not (yet) possible to easily create workspaces with custom tool sets (which is one of the strengths of C4D's interface). Blender V2.8's GUI is being reworked, and one of the things I really like are collections: the concept of layers is taken to the next level, and objects, lights, cameras, etc. can be easily grouped and sub-grouped using "collections". These can work as layers, or as an outliner, or both, and it simplifies scene organization a lot. The old layer system in Blender is quite limited (no more than 20 layers, no sub-layers, etc.), so I am looking forward to this. The collections will be hooked into the render layer system as well. Otherwise, Blender already offers quite nice scene management tools, and I miss some of these in C4D. Give and take, I guess. No 3d app is perfect. The other thing I am looking forward to in V2.8 is Eevee: real-time opengl rendering that is meant to replace the old Blender internal raytracer. Eevee is a bit of a game-changer, and it already works quite well, although V2.8 is still in alpha (meant to be released later this year). Google "Blender Eevee" on Youtube to see what I mean. I am very excited about this development. Anyway, I wish MAXON would be a bit more open in regards to its roadmap. Having access to public alpha and beta versions and an open roadmap are two things that made me switch for most of my work to Blender years ago. MAXON's secrecy can be stifling, if you ask me. Although I realize open source institute and a commercial company like MAXON can't be compared, really. Still, a bit more openness would be nice. Interestingly enough Newtek released a new version of Lightwave last January, and they decided to replace the old raytracer (which was still REALLY good) completely with a new CPU-only path tracer as well, similar to MAXON. It is a half-successful endeavour so far: Lightwave was always quite artist-friendly, and nice render results were easily obtainable. That changed in this new version. The GUI is confusing, the default settings resulting in long render times, and being CPU only means the user's hardware options are limited. More troublesome is that, in contrast with both Blender and Cinema4D, they ripped out the old render engine completely. That is a big mistake, in my opinion. Old scenes won't render the same anymore, if at all. Anyway, 2018 is revving up to be another interesting year for 3d applications. Real-time rendering is now already used (Star Wars, for example), and we may see the end of slow render engines for most of our work.

@3D-Pangel Agree with everything, except for you comment about Blender's instability. In my years of working with 3d software, the two that stood out for their robust stability were Cinema4D and Blender. Houdini is doing pretty good so far as well, but I haven't really gone very deep yet in it. Lightwave is/was rather crash-prone. Blender V2.8 is going to simplify and streamline the GUI. Even a Blender 101 for beginners is being worked on. MAXON and other 3d app vendors should take note, if they haven't already done so. For example, one of Blender's modeling disadvantages is that it is not possible to edit multiple objects. That is now being worked on, and already solved - the other day a demo was uploaded how this issue is going to be past tense in 2.8. And widgets will make things much easier as well.

I can only compare to Blender. ProRender in Blender is nicely integrated, easy to use, and is reliable. Hardware acceleration works very well, and a library of common preset materials makes it very quick to set up scenes. Denoiser is built-in. All in all, works just fine. When I compared the C4D version a while ago, I was struck by how shoddy C4D's implementation of ProRender was/is compared. I found ProRender in Blender to be much easier to use and setup. Having said all this, C4D's ProRender integration should be much better in V20. I regard V19 as a public alpha/beta version.

For me the masked (stacked) brushes are the one thing I missed in the previous version. And the multi-threaded brushes really give Krita an enormous speed boost. I experience no lagging, nothing. With my Wacom I don't even need to touch the keyboard anymore. The right-mouse click widget take care of that. I am very impressed with this release.

A major release with major new features and improvements: improved vector tools, SVG support, a new text tool, Python scripting and much, much, much more! Amazing this is open source and free! Get it here: https://krita.org/en/item/krita-4-0-0-released/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-CY4hmkg_I New features include... multi-threaded brushes New Text Tool Improved Vector Tools based on SVG Python Scripting Improved brush settings dialog Colorize Mask New Filters: Height to Normal map, Edge Detection, improved gradient map, Improved helpers (isometric grid, pixel grid) Bigger brushes Saving in background Masked brushes Wet edges Shape Library A Ton of Fixes And much much more

If you can model nice in one application, you can learn to model just as nicely in another application after a couple of days of learning the tools. Each 3d app has its own advantages and caveats. I'd say it's a good idea to become somewhat software-agnostic.

It stings a bit to realize that ProRender users on other platforms (Maya, Blender, Max, Solidworks) all get the latest version directly from the ProRender site for free, while MAXON users are forced to wait for a proprietary integration that is quite expensive. As far as nodal materials are concerned: come on, this is 2018. MAXON NEEDS to integrate nodal materials to prevent it from becoming a laughing stock in this area. ProRender is literally screaming for material nodes.

Of course! Pure polygonal modeling is just as simple as it is in most other 3d apps. But in Houdini every modeling step is retained in the nodal view, and each node remains editable until you decide to collapse it.

If you're lazy (and cheeky ;-P ), download the official Blender shader ball here: http://archive.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-261/blender-261-demo-files/index.html Open in Blender, and convert to an obj file for use in C4d. It's actually a pretty good shader ball scene (if you can stomach the Blender logo - perhaps replace with MAXON's logo?) This shader ball comes prepared for transparent and sub-surface materials as well. Here's a ProRender test. It demonstrates the transparency additions, and reflection objects in the environment.

Lucky for us then that the open source alternatives have become true competitive options. And commercial alternatives offering low priced perpetual licenses are always available as well.

Agreed. While v20 might be "the Holy Grail", MAXON ought to remind itself that Blender V2.8 is just around the corner, and I have to say that Eevee is looking mightily nice. I did a quick test: Guess: which is the 3 minutes Cycles render, and which is the 6 seconds Eevee OpenGL render? (PS I did scale these down by 50%) Good times ahead indeed. The Eevee version is real-time in the viewport, btw. Also of interest: the latest 2.79 builds of Blender silently introduced combined simultaneous GPU and CPU rendering! With a modern high-end CPU render times are 40% quicker to finish. Even my old i7 920 shaved off 4 minutes of a 17 minutes scene of mine. Game changer. And all for free. It felt like a late Christmas present. :-) Strangely enough, no trumpets announcing this - if this were MAXON, they would wait for v21 and proclaim GPU+CPU rendering to be the next revolution in their marketing. And increase the MSA ;-P

What bugs me a bit about the Affinity products is that basic functionality is missing, and users have been requesting these things to be fixed for years now. For example, TGA and WebP export are missing, no arrows for vector lines, the custom bevel layer effect looks terrible (obvious banding), no vector fill patterns, layer thumbnails cannot be scaled, no option to use ctrl/alt-clicking layers to create selections, curves lack controls, nested filter layer masks cannot be selected in the layer stack, ... It's quite a list. I do understand these are young applications, but they keep adding larger new features without improving the core functionality. Well, no app is perfect.

Except for PhotoLine, of course. Affinity Photo still misses some core features that are part of Photoshop and are also available in PhotoLine. I have both, but use PhotoLine for general image editing much more than Affinity Photo. Arguably PhotoLine's layer stack is much more flexible to work with than either Photoshop or Affinity Photo. Unlimited layer masks, adjustment layers can be applied to any layer, including layer masks and layer mask groups, each bitmap layer can have its own image mode, resolution, and bit depth set (which are retained even after switching the entire image to another image mode back and forth), smart objects (called "placeholder layers"), real-time referenced layer instances, colour profiles per layer, non-destructive throughout, and even external Photoshop compatible plugins can be applied non-destructively on placeholder layers. Not to mention an opacity slider with a range from -200(!) up to +200! Multi-layered EXR files are also supported. And vector drawing is built-in as well. One of the strengths of PhotoLine is its interoperability with other applications: it is possible to define links to external (image-compatible) applications, and send a bitmap layer or vector layer/group to an external application, work on it, and after saving PhotoLine automatically updates the layers. Super handy. Painting tools in Affinity Photo are better, but there is a bug in Photo that makes it impossible to draw precise strokes without wobbles (Windows). It is nice to be able to edit 360degree panoramas, though, in Photo. But neither come close to Krita for digital painting. Get PhotoLine, Affinity Photo, Krita, and Affinity Designer/Gravit Designer/Inkscape for vector graphics, and you have more than you'd ever need for general image editing and illustration at a fraction of the cost of becoming a serf in Adobe's digital serfdom. For 2d animation get the latest build of OpenToonz (blows Animate CC out of the water), and for video editing/effects Resolve and Fusion (and Natron). If you are an illustrator/comic artist you would do yourself a disservice if you'd not help yourself to a copy of ClipStudio EX. Brilliant drawing 'feel' - and the traditional frame-based animation features are pretty good, and ClipStudio exports directly to OpenToonz for production-proven 2d animation project management. The only missing link at this point is a good affordable alternative for InDesign. That's the one remaining Adobe application I still use for my own work. QuarkXPress is too expensive. Hopefully Afffinity Publisher will be an acceptable option. Trouble is, InDesign is really good at what it does, so I am not expecting Publisher to be able to compete. But we can hope. :-) Otherwise, all of Adobe's products are replaceable with inexpensive and capable alternatives.

I think a good modeler and Houdini make a nice combo, plus Zbrush /3dCoat and Substance Painter. This could be Blender, Modo, or Cinema4D Prime. No need to invest in Studio then. Just too bad the Houdini bridge is again only available to Studio users.

That video (the table) merely shows how to create it in a procedural way. I suppose you are more accustomed to a more destructive direct flow of modeling, which is also possible in Houdini. The presenter could have just used separate scaled boxes, or extruded the legs from the base object. Same in Blender: a table could be done completely non-destructively, but also using quick boxes, or extruding geometry. The beauty of Houdini is that it is relatively easy to expand on this table object and build your own "table" tool. Everything is nodes.

But that's one of the issues I have with C4d: it is already quite expensive, and the standard answer to many of its shortcomings these past few years seems to be: "Yeah, but just get plugin X and plugin Y and that external render engine for a measly $500 here and $300 there to fix it". And C4d Studio is already one of the most expensive 3d apps to maintain (if not THE most expensive!). And so many aspects of the application haven't been really updated in years, and are quite behind the competition. At that point one starts to wonder whether that Blender + Houdini Indie + Zbrush or 3dCoat + super fast render GPU engine X combo isn't a much more attractive proposition at less than a third of a financial investment. "Ease of use" be damned: it's about a productive efficient workflow once the user has familiarized him/herself with an app that really counts. In this most 3d apps are quite equal in my experience, depending on the task of course.

The version 1.6.0 of ManuelbastioniLAB, the free and open source character editor for Blender, is ready for download. ManuelbastioniLAB is a project aimed to create a scientific and powerful 3D humanoids editor. Basic muscle system, based on standard Blender bending bones, in order to offer max portability. Inverse kinematic controllers for skeleton rigging. Advanced mix algorithm to easily create complex expressions. Support for phonemes. Unified expressions for anime and humans. Custom rest poses. Improvements in anatomy of models. Improvements in shaders and skeleton structure. Big improvement in usability and algorithm of proxies. New fantasy targets. Watch the video to discover the power of the new lab! Learn more about this project here: http://www.manuelbastioni.com