hvanderwegen

That... is weird. Yes, pre-2.93 Blender's raw mesh editing performance left a lot to be desired. It is one of the main common complaints of Blender users, including myself. Release 2.8 actually introduced edit mode performance regressions compared to the older 2.79 releases. While navigating the viewport was no longer an issue (it was in 2.79 with heavy meshes in edit mode) 2.8 up till 2.92 performed WORSE than in this regard. 2.93 performs more or less on par with Cinema R23/S24 in my testing. Better, actually, because Cinema completely chokes on transforming a 2 million scanned mesh object with all faces selected, while Blender chugs along nicely. Not fast, mind, but still workable. Anyway, release V3 is by far more performant. The developers had a Summer sprint focusing on improving raw mesh edit mode performance, and it really paid off. I could not believe how much this improved within only a month or two. Overall a performance boost of 10-18 times compared to v2.79. In my testing Blender V3 alpha is about on par with Houdini (little bit slower with smaller selections, faster with larger selection sets), faster than Maya, and much faster than Cinema4D 23/24. The king remains 3DS Max, however. It kills all the contenders. PS in sculpt mode Blender is as smooth as Max in transforming heavy selection sets. Cinema4D can't compare with Blender's sculpting performance, so not much help here either. When Blender v3 is released, and unless the upcoming Cinema4D R25 improves mesh editing performance dramatically, my tests so far indicate rankings of raw mesh editing performance as follows: 3DS Max (by a wide margin) Houdini (smaller or bigger margin over R3 Blender depending on selection set size) Blender R3 Maya (small margin over 5 and 6) Blender 2.93 Cinema 4D Blender 2.8x - 2.92 LightWave (by a wide margin) Keep in mind I tested pure mesh editing performance only. No sub-d modifiers, or other functionality. Blender's optimizations are also dependent on multi-threading. The more cores, the better. [all apps tested on the same machine, AMD3900, 64GB, GTX1080)

Darn, I posted this in the wrong thread 😀 Yes, this was supposed to be a response to one of your Houdini posts. As for the one thing I wished I had learned sooner: better drawing skills. I've improved greatly these past few years, but I should have started much much earlier!

I've registered for a Houdini course this upcoming Winter term (taught by a professional in the AAA games industry) - looking forward to learning Houdini and in particular up-to-date industry tips and tricks. I've played around with it, and it seems reasonably straight-forward. I agree that Houdini's reputation somehow precedes it as being terribly technical - and yes, it is a technical director's/artist's dream. But as far as I can tell from my play with it (and compared to my last stint with it a few years ago) things have become much more approachable. I was able to start modeling almost immediately. Still missing Blender's nice viewport, though. But perhaps I've missed some hidden viewport settings.

A special SSGI build of Eevee is available here: https://n0451.gumroad.com/l/PgyXc And real-time raytracing is also in the cards. Eevee is receiving an update/rewrite in the upcoming V3 release with native SSGI. And various other nice additions. Good times ahead! https://code.blender.org/2021/06/eevees-future/

@Chris Phillips@FLima They are working on an integrated asset manager. The first version is planned for the V3 release in October. Keep track of Blender's development: https://code.blender.org/2021/06/asset-browser-workshop-outcomes/ And I whole-heartedly agree that this is really going to simplify life for artists in Blender. C4D always got this part right.

Which then begs the question why the Blender developers are able to add major enhancements and new interesting functionality with every new release? And why plugin developers for various 3DCCs continue to innovate and come up with brilliant original features? Why indie developers still pop up with original 3D related apps? And why the industry keeps innovating as a whole, requiring new workflows and techniques in 3DCCs? Nope, 3D software is FAR from matured. Stating this is just not true (begging the question indeed). This argument is only used by software rental proponents, as far as I am aware. And as @Cairyn also mentions: the state of a number of C4D's core functionality could see massive improvements. Quite a few areas have been languishing for years, and consequently other companies and software have taken the lead.

I prefer filmic: ACES has glaring issues. I am not an expert, but after reading up on it (specifically hearing Troy S talk about Filmic, ACES, etc. in a live talk that I attended a few years ago), I avoid ACES. Troy S (who is and expert on colour management and colour spaces. etc) had this to say about ACES in a nutshell: Too much to go into now, but if you are interested in this (admittedly involved and huge) topic, and wish to become more informed about whether or not to use ACES in your workflow: read up on it via the sources below. The way to go forward is Spectral rendering, in my opinion. Octane already supports this. A special Blender build also exists with Cycles enabled for spectral rendering: https://blender.community/c/graphicall/Cnbbbc/?sorting=hot Does Redshift support spectral rendering? I should check. Sources: https://devtalk.blender.org/t/blender-support-for-aces-academy-color-encoding-system/13972/105 https://blenderartists.org/t/installed-aces-color-management-to-blender-now-im-confused/1236883/16 https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1kk9jx5qK4E2cbHq_0IOujDELmb3rC6-HErszMQDi5rA/edit#slide=id.gc6f73a04f_0_14 https://jo.dreggn.org/home/2021_spectral_imaging.pdf

The latest version is installed. One problem I am trying to figure out is the live app links. I attempted to get the exchange plugins to work, but so far no luck.

I did! 10 minutes before the end of the introductory deal. 🙂 Still playing around with it. It's pretty straightforward. PS I did have to increase the spacing between GUI text items: it seems the developers are distinctly lacking any reasonable appreciation of white space 😉

It's interesting that you mention viewport performance. Two of the major drawbacks of Blender are mesh edit mode performance and sub-d modifier performance. In fact, v2.8 introduced regressions in these cases! And earlier versions were pretty bad at dealing with heavy meshes. With v2.93 the devs finally realized that mesh editing had become too much of a bottleneck. I regularly test various DCCs how they cope with heavy meshes. Blender did not cope well at all. Only LightWave Modeler was worse. Cinema4D (before the core updates) did a little better than Blender 2.8, but only by a slim margin. V2.93 improved mesh editing to a similar level of performance of C4D 23/24. Perhaps a tad slower for medium-heavy meshes. That said, C4D chokes completely on heavier meshes of 2 million polys when I try to select all of them and transform. Compared, B 2.93 keeps chugging along. Blender is better at dealing with heavier data sets, as far as my tests indicate. But. BUT! The Blender devs have been hard at work this Summer doing a mesh performance improvement code sprint. v3 alpha is by far more performant now, and leaves Cinema4D 24 far behind. My tests indicate that v3 is as about as fast as Houdini in regards to pure raw mesh editing, much faster than Maya, and much MUCH faster than C4D. At this point only LightWave Modeler is slower than Cinema4d. 3ds Max is still king of the hill, though: it munches through heavy meshes without breaking a sweat. It's in its own league, and nothing comes close. The B devs have also been hard at work improving the sub-d performance, btw. As far as sculpting performance goes: Blender already outpaces C4D by a wide margin in my tests. And as you @DasFrodoalready mentioned: B deals easily with far more objects in a scene than C4D. In my tests that is also quite obvious. C4D is relatively quickly brought to its knees with hundreds of objects, while B happily devours thousands. I have to say that I was surprised to discover that 23/24 performed quite poorly in regards to heavy mesh editing, since the core update ought to have delivered more performance? I don't know. Perhaps the upcoming R25 will be the real performance booster update. All in all, Maxon MUST improve C4D's overall performance to keep up with the competition. In particular when the upcoming free option leaves C4D in the proverbial digital dust.

Yes, impressive work. When I was 14 I worked on C64 sprites on graph paper, using data statements and pokes to display them on the screen at an amazing 320x200 black and white resolution. 😄

Thanks for the heads-up. I noticed that it now includes actual modeling tools. I am interested in the painting tool more than the sculpting. I may get Textura.

I feel this also has something to do with the bite-sized social networking consumerist stream of information. Expectations are lower. Instant gratification rules. Also to blame are tools like https://www.reallusion.com/ Anyone with half a brain can produce acceptable looking 3d animations and renders. With AI driven asset generation it is only going to become easier and simpler. I mean, I use Character Creator myself. It saves me time, and the results are good. Definitely not feature film quality stuff, but more than sufficient for the odd architectural scene from a distance.

I wouldn't say 1 free add-on is that much of a trouble...? The developer also offers a free build that includes the functionality natively. I tried it: turn it on, and done. I am sure C4D users - in particular mograph users - would jubilantly welcome a similar render option with open arms. More than that, Eevee is also used in Blender to increase the viewport quality while working. And this, I feel, has made a dramatic positive impact in my workflow. To me this is actually more important than the option to render to Eevee itself. A few weeks ago I had to work with a project in C4D at my work, and it was a bit of a rude awakening. Well, perhaps this is a personal opinion. Anyway, the devs are busy rewriting Eevee which includes SSGI, and raytracing is planned as well some time next year. Not only that, Cycles is undergoing a rewrite for V3 (CyclesX). So in effect the early November release of v3 will include two (!) optimized rewritten render engines. While Cinema4D barely chugs along with a more than a decade old Physical, ProRender abandoned (which has developed into a quite good render engine these past two years and is also available for free to Maya, Max, Houdini, Blender, Unreal users), and Redshift or other external render engine more or less a requirement for C4D users (not even mentioning all the other modules which have been more or less abandoned or hardly seen development throughout the past decade). Anyway, I hope Maxon will integrate Redshift as standard in the next release. Something's gotta give here. Who knows, the C4D developers may have been hard at work on an Eevee equivalent. It seems like a no-brainer to me for motion graphics work. Here is a comparison of Eevee vs CyclesX in Blender 3 alpha:

@GazzaMataz In Blender it's the same. Copy, then open a new Blender instance, and paste. Everything is copied across, including animations, etc. Nothing is renamed. In Blender the concept of scenes is taken one step further: a file may consist of multiple scenes. A scene can fully duplicated or linked and thereby creates a new scene. Each scene can be viewed in its own window. True 🙂 That is why I mentioned "by popular vote". At least, it seems to be the case. Of course, any young one can just download Blender and start playing with it. The entry barriers for Cinema 4D are much higher. I've watched excellent 3d/VFX work done by kids all over the world with Blender these past few years. Maxon ought to provide Cinema 4D for free to kids - otherwise they will lose the next generation, I feel. They already are..? For example, a 14 year old made this all by himself in two months time: Eevee was a huge help: real-time feedback to adjust the final look helped him adjust things very quickly.

Perhaps rephrase that to "friendliest"? The "coolest" kid on the block, according to the popular vote, is Blender since v2.8. Eevee had a lot to do with that. At least, in my opinion.

I record a LOT of tutorials, and Camtasia was slow as a slug in molasses to work with when doing many cuts and recordings beyond ~20 minutes - even on my 3900x with 64GB. Last year I could not deal with it anymore, and switched to DaVinci Resolve. I record with OBS, convert the MKVs with either LosslessCut or Handbrake (production preset) depending on the source materials, and edit in DaVinci. DaVinci also features automatic voice audio improvements and good noise removal, while Camtasia did a terrible job in this regard and would affect the sound quality too much. What a difference that made: no more slow-downs while cutting, excellent sound quality, rendering out videos is MUCH faster because of DaVince's GPU encoding,... The only thing I miss are the text balloons, which I replaced with text boxes in DaVinci, but are not as quick to work with. So I created a library of text box presets, which works well. And all for free! 🙂 Camtasia is overpriced in my opinion, and taking advantage of teachers and instructors everywhere due to most of them not being quite tech-savvy.

Many add-ons merely improve quality of life in Blender rather than anything else. Everything Materializer does can already be done without the addon, but it adds a LOT of convenience and workflow speedup. As for the other tools: arguably the UV tools + UDIM, sculpting tools, viewport, built-in renderers (Cycles and Eevee), compositing are already much of an improvement compared to Cinema4D. (Obviously C4D still steals the show with MoGraph - but what else is there left?) And many free add-ons, including the standard collection that is part of Blender, only improve quality of life further. Then there are additional free render options such as LuxRender, AMD ProRender, Renderman, Appleseed, Yafaray, ... And a free version of Octane for single GPU users. One thing Maxon may have to deal with is the performance boost that Blender v3 is going to provide: in my tests v3 alpha's raw mesh editing is currently far ahead of Cinema4d. I have tested single-mesh models that choke Cinema4D 24 while Blender 3 alpha happily chugs along. I've noticed that B v3 alpha is more or less on par with Houdini. Only Max is a fair bit faster than the rest. B handles scenes with many objects already much better than Cinema4D, and version 3 is only going to further the distance now that the B devs are actively working on improving mesh and sub-d performance. And this is also already true for sculpting mode which performs much much better in B. In effect, Maxon has some work ahead of them to keep Cinema4D's performance on par with the other DCCs. What worries me is that Maxon already has rewritten the core to boost performance, so I am unsure how much more it could be improved. Or if they have the intention to - they may feel that the current performance is fine (which is not the case in my opinion). The base C4D package relies too much on external paid-for tools. The cost of upkeep is too high for what it provides the user with in its current state in my opinion. But perhaps R25 will be a super update 🙂

Check out this video. It's a real-world comparison of both CPU and GPU render engines.

Nothing to worry about here - except perhaps that Adobe is thinking "if you can't beat them, join them". Other companies have funded Blender development, and for them it is an easy method to raise some 'free' marketing buzz. Blender will always be open source and the licensing does not allow it to be 'purchased' by a company. Adobe might have been looking for a 3d DCC in the past, but the way I see it is that they are now more interested in providing painting/texturing tools, which fits their product line much better. Acquiring Substance Designer and Painter made/makes business sense for Adobe. The latest Photoshop release seems to be compatible with Substances as well, I have read (I haven't tried this yet). And I've just been testing the new Substances add-on for Blender - it is already pretty brilliant. Seamless and easy to load substances that are easily found anywhere on the web. Image maps are automatically generated at up to 4096px for saving as images (I wish 8192px were possible, though). All PBR material channels are automatically taken care off. Combine this with the Fluent Materializer add-on, and the sky is the limit with very easy mixable high quality materials! And all for free - amazing (well the Fluent Materializer add-on is $35). https://cgthoughts.gumroad.com/l/materializer PS I also noticed that there's a Mixamo Blender add-on to load up Mixamo rigs and animations directly in Blender.

Without a doubt in my mind: absolutely. This and previous actions on the part of Maxon seem to come straight out of Adobe's play book (which is probably why ex-Adobe management was hired to assist Maxon in this process): First, introduce the rental model but keep the perpetual license, and make certain both are initially presented as equal alternatives. This is to ensure to avoid a user uprising. Sooth any nay-sayer users, but never allow anyone in your organization to confirm that your end goal is rental only. Present it as "freedom of choice", or along similar lines. Next, with each new release clearly present the rental version as the ever more affordable and attractive alternative. Incrementally reduce exposure of the perpetual license on the website in favour of the rental option(s) and reduce access to it. Keep touting the advantages for the user of rental rather than perpetual. The goal here is to slowly and seamlessly prime and groom the larger user base to accept rental as the preferred option rather than perpetual licenses. Provide extra perks for users who rent your software. Reduce perks and updates for perpetual users. And at no time mention the end goal. Keep users in the dark. "Listen" to your users by providing additional rental options. Cater towards companies and small/medium sized businesses (which generally really like rental options due to fiscal benefits). It is important to continuously stress the attractiveness of rental licenses, while adding more and more to the unattractive qualities of the perpetual license. Convince as many existing perpetual users to make the switch to rental. And very important here is the use of language: instead of "rent" rather use "subscribe", or even better: allow for no distinction: "buy" or "purchase". (The younger generation of users is no longer quite so aware of the distinction between renting software and purchasing software anyway. This is great for software companies.) In the final stages before ending access to new perpetual licenses it is necessary to complicate the process of updating existing perpetual licensed versions as much as is possible. At the same time, it is expected that a segment of older loyal perpetual users will never accept rental licenses. This won't matter, since the less expensive rental model probably already increased revenue by a large margin. It is at this time that the company will release statements about how for the sake of continued development, the benefit of improved features of the software, and the company itself that perpetual licenses be discontinued. "if it's good for you, it's good for the company, and vice versa". Along those lines. The company may opt to keep the peace, allow this user group access to a perpetual license for the time being, but no new perpetual licenses will be available. Drastically increase update pricing, and after a few releases stop perpetual updates entirely. Or be more cold-hearted, and disallow perpetual users to update their licenses. After all, by this time that group of users is probably reduced to a small minority. Happy company! And accepting users (for the most part).

https://www.nonecg.com/3D-products/nyc-set-8-1-block/

I downloaded the free city block, and opened the C4D file. All textures are absolutely linked to a specific folder on their E drive - meaning none of the textures work and must be relinked. But alright, Project Asset Inspector to the rescue. Some of the buildings have walls that overshoot in width. Oops. And finally, the scene consists of more than 5000 objects, which noticeably slows down C4D's viewport to a paltry 14fps on my system (3900X + GTX1080). Many objects are duplicates, and I would expect those to be referenced/instanced. As a potential C4D customer I would not be impressed. The collada version loads up without issues in the geometry and with only 21 objects runs butter smooth. But all textures are based on the FBX version and have different prefixes, so it is not possible to quickly fix the textures. Have you fixed this file already? Seems to me this is not helping them to advertise their models to C4D users.

BlendSwap has over 23.000 free models. Many are CC0 licensed. Lots of architecture related ones as well. https://www.blendswap.com/categories You do require a copy of Blender to convert the objects for use in other apps.