Mash

Which edition of c4d are you trying to run? the full app, TR server or are you intending to run the CLI?

Just a thought on prices for people to consider; I don't know what the future plans are, but currently you can upgrade from R20 to R23 for a single regular upgrade price. Back in the day many people would skip 1-2 versions of photoshop and just upgrade every 2-3 years for the same price. *IF* MAXON's current pricing sticks around then this could be a viable option for many people, just skip every other upgrade, effectively bringing the upgrade price to less than the MSA; so long as you don't mind skipping the odd version.

A good picture from Jonmoore. I would call the current implementation V0.5, it really is just a "hey look how fast and powerful stuff is about to get" release. The object manager for 95% of users with a happy friendly rainbow interface is being worked on and I suspect it will be with us for the next release but perhaps still not 100% ready for prime time usage as a LOT of other parts of C4D need to be tied in and updated to make it a full replacement. The openGL display of nodes is currently barebones, just the absolute basics so you can see what you're doing; the proper feedback and interaction widgets will come soon enough. Node colours are currently hardcoded, they'll need to go through the full prefs integration and localisation process if they are to be exposed. Editing values directly in the node has already been requested a few times, not sure if they will be taking that route though, we'll see.

Basically, yes. The Neutron node system is the basis for all new features going forwards. In its current state though it isn't something most people will want to use directly; it is super powerful but like any node system, not the kind of interface everyone would enjoy using. The next step to be taken is to create a new object manager which acts as a much more friendly, day to day interface for the nodes which should look much more familiar. When everything is in place, you will be able to choose to continue your c4d life with a new object manager, benefiting from the huge speed increase and all the new user-created assets that will hopefully come from this. Or, as and when you desire, you will be able to open objects up and dive into the node system when you need more power. The speed increase will vary from scene to scene, but the biggest gains will be in projects with large numbers of things, ie. objects, tags, keyframes, clones etc. These projects have always been held back by c4d's object manager implementation. If a project is held back by physics sims, then don't expect any speed improvements at all, that would need a new physics engine to help there. However some test projects are showing 10x speed increases in viewport performance, others are showing 1000x improvements. In fact depending on viewport settings and how well the new viewport turns out, some projects are showing north of 10,000x speed bumps in terms of handling large numbers of objects. How well this all translates into real world performance will need to be seen, but what this all represents is the upcoming removal of c4d's biggest bottleneck. You'll be able to have a go yourself in the next release, but expect another release or two after that before it is well enough supported by render engines, plugins and internal c4d features before you'd want to start using it in live commercial jobs.

I'll be interested to see what people make of the morning session

Not sure I've removed anything recently. I do occasionally remove a product when it becomes too old for current versions of C4D, but that's usually a good 5 years or so in most cases. What was the general content of the video? my youtube videos tend to deal with more specific topics like that. Maybe it was this one?

The code will only work with my own 3D fluff videos for now, im afraid I can't extend the offer to other creators' videos. Might be worth getting in contact with Luxx directly and asking if they have any offers on.

20 years ago I started out with Cinema 4D, a few years later I would found 3D Fluff with Janine Pauke so that we could start producing training videos, that makes it some 16 or so years of teaching Cinema 4D either in person or through our many free and paid tutorials. Well, the time has come for a bit of a change. 3D Fluff won't be going anywhere but new videos will be on hold for the foreseeable future as I concentrate on my new motion graphics artist role at BoxFX. I would like to say that I would be making some new content in my spare time but I suspect that will be taken up with planning a wedding for next year! So for a bit of a blow out sale, I have decided to make all of the 3D Fluff video content 80% off for the next few weeks. Just enter the code "congrats" when prompted for a voucher code. https://www.3dfluff.com/video/ I will probably be back at some point in the future and will still reply to emails when I have time, but for now, I hope you have all enjoyed our videos and I thank you all for your time and support over the years.

Does anyone know a C4D trainer near London by any chance? Or someone decently competent with C4D that wants to get into freelance training work? Drop me a line, mash@3dfluff.com

I think you're missing the product link

Regarding the node system and radeon pro render. I think MAXON made the right choice here. AR and physical account for >50% of the engines used by c4d users, pro render doesn't even hit half a percent, making it work with the least used render engine c4d has first would have been a huge mistake (and before you say it, no, a node editor for pro render is pretty low on the list of reasons why you might not use it, pro render is still heavily being developed, it will take some more time before it is good enough to be considered the defacto c4d render engine.) The people working on c4d's pro render integration were already working flat out to get the motion blur, sss and out of core memory system done for R20, there simply wasn't any scope for them to switch the entire material system in a single release on top of the other changes. Finally, the best route is to make one single unified SDK for all third party engines to use so they can make use of c4d's node interface. That part won't be ready for some time, but when it is, pro render will likely use it just as all the other third party render engines would. Nodes for pro render will come in time, but first they have bigger fish to fry.

I've tried every app there is, mac and pc. With the other apps, keep in mind they all tend to record in 4:2:2 lossy formats such as .mp4. In short, all the strong colours such as the RGB axis will turn all pixelated, and everything will get slightly softer from the general compression. Camtasia record in full lossless 4:4:4 and will even export a decent sized 4:4:4 mp4 video, so generally it keeps the highest quality throughout. The bundled editor is very basic, but it gets the job done so long as youre happy with simple editing and basic effects. imho its the best windows option. For mac, I would point people towards Screenflow: https://www.telestream.net/screenflow/store.asp The recording is very smooth and the editor works great. The mp4 output isn't as good as Camtasia (larger files, slightly lower quality) but if youre just uploading to youtube or vimeo then theres not much difference. As for this $20 deal, go for it. The last 2-3 Camtasia updates have given virtually nothing of any value, just stick with the older version.

You need to consider release and development schedules. At this point, R20 is finished outside of bugfixing, development on R21 has already started. The next few months are for the manuals to be written, tutorials recorded and webpages crafted before release at the end of the year. So sure, they're leaving a few months before release, but in reality their work is done, at this point the rest of the work to do is a formality. Also keep in mind, although there is a handover deadline for when the new guy takes over, there has been and will continue to be a handover phase where the old guard are helping the new guy get settled. As for why all three at once, well that's easy, there's one contract. Probably it's best to think of all three as a single act. If Penn and Teller are hired to do a job, should Penn or Teller leave, the contract is void and the venue probably doesn't want to have the show done by one half of a double act. This is something the 3 bosses have discussed and chosen to do.

This card has nothing to do with bitcoin mining, its grossly poor value for money. Its just a super fast gpu for whoever needs the fastest card available. In a nutshell, you'd have to either be mad, or have super specific requirements to buy this card.

New video for everyone, how to use Cinema's pretty decent hair system :)

Here you go, give this a go. Using one area light for the illumination but splitting off the shadows.

If there's one video I can make which will save you more time working than it takes to watch, it's a video about takes. So here's a video about takes.

New video up for everyone, how to do sculpting in C4D.

C4D frozen? crashed? lost all your work? Maybe not!

True but it gets tricky with spotlights. If you plan to model the housing unit and geometry of the light fitting then this is a good choice, but in many cases the lights in large arenas never truly get modelling, there are just a number of lights up in the ceiling casting generic light downwards. Sometimes I will swap this out with one giant area light, but then you lose all sense of having it be a series of spots casting detailed crisp shadows, all the shadowing turns into a giant blur when you end up having to use area shadows. One option I have toyed with is using one giant area light up above, then using a parallel light with hard shadows but as a shadow caster light. I'll give this a play and see if I can get any decent results.

I had quite a few people telling me they used one of my old videos where I showed some of the best settings to change in C4D, so I figured I would do an update for R19. In this one I cover what preferences you can change to prevent c4d from locking up your machine whilst rendering, project settings which make working on smaller scenes easier (yay, no more 2 metre wide cubes!) and how to clean some of the fluff out of the tool bars.

Naturally there will be exceptions, but a few observations: They have picked the slowest GI method as their base standard. Double QMC is pretty much the slowest of all GI methods. This isn't something I would suggest for most people I don't see at any point if they show the render settings options page. If this is a single reflection depth, then they are essentially comparing QMC+QMC against just single QMC. Maybe. This scene has no light sources, the render times would change quite a bit if it weren't simply a hdri sky for all of the illumination. Its an outdoor scene. Reflectance materials work ok so long as the light rays can bounce off the model and escape. If you have an indoor scene with light bouncing back and forth, diffuse reflectance can get quite nasty.

I had someone recently ask me a few questions about lighting up mograph clone materials, so I figured I may as well make a video. Hope this helps some people.