Mike A

I understand it's a 'tech demo' but could you kindly expand on this - what do you mean exactly by 'no way to control objects in the viewport'? - and I had similar thoughts on the skills required to drive the system. I hope all the artists are up for a crash course on vector manipulation and matrix mathematics... 🙄

Interesting discussion. I've been a pro freelancer for a long time. One of the main things that is rarely considered enough in these threads is the value of your time. Why am I still using C4D? Do I think it's the greatest? No, I don't - but it provides adequate tools to do what I need. Are there better tools out there for me? Quite possibly: Maya, Max, Houdini, Modo, Blender... What about renderers? I use Redshift. Maybe Octane would be better, or Arnold, or Corona or... The issue is time. There is an opportunity cost for that. I can earn, or I can explore. Every hour I spend learning a new software is an hour of income I loose. That is where the big cost is to me. I'd love to be able to spend time exploring alternatives, but it gets expensive in time, and therefore cost, very quickly. Learning a new package or developing skills in the current one is a tricky balance to strike.

I strongly suspect they are doing this so big companies - games companies, tv production studios, etc etc - dont just hire 'freelancers' with indie licences, to avoid the cost of buying full commercial licences. I'm pretty sure those big companies would be the prime targets of the Autodesk legal depatment for any infringements. I think you'd be pretty unlucky as a small time freelancer with a range of small clients to get the call.

OK - I stand corrected! That is sneaky.

I think you're misunderstanding the terms. The $100K limitation is not per project - but your gross takings as a freelancer / indie person, per year.

OK that's good to know - thanks for the heads up. I'll contact them and see what happens. Nevertheless, I won't be relying on them again. I could well be back in the same situation in January. Cairyn's python solution works for me.

Cairyn, 'Thank you' sounds quite inadequate. I'd actually been trying to code some python tokens myself this morning, but was messing up somewhere. Your generosity stands in clear contrast to MAXON's current 'screw 'em for anything you can' approach.

Over recent years with the MSA I've had a Cineversity account. However, I am, and hope to remain, a perpetual licence customer. One of the things I've relied on for good organisation within my studio is Cineversity 'CV tokens' for automatic file naming. Having date and time automatically embedded into file names is an important component in my job management - and a basic requirement for a professional level software IMO. Yesterday, 31 August, my final MSA / Cineversity membership expired. I now find I am unable to use CV tokens - "A Cineversity subscription is required to use CV tokens" I have, this morning written to a MAXON contact to complain about this - in the hope that they might release CV tokens free to all. This 'Subscribe or else' approach leaves a very bitter taste in my mouth - particularly when it holds back basic functionality like this.

There is a built in feature - not sure if it's quite the same, but maybe of use, see my quick demo below: With the move tool selected, Ctrl (Cmd) right click on required axis and snap that back to the axis origin, then left click drag to the required vertex or other element you want to snap to.

Listening to the presentation yesterday, comments from MAXON staffers and Beta testers here. Are you suggesting otherwise? : ) If so, I hope you're right and I'm wrong : )

"...The only frustration is that it still looks like it will be another 12-24 months before this moves from 'technology demo'" OK - let me revise that: 24 - 36 months 😥

Neutron certainly looks very promising - assuming the performance translates across all forms of objects, which I'm going to assume, it would be crazy otherwise. The only frustration is that it still looks like it will be another 12-24 months before this moves from 'technology demo' - fun to play with, but not much use - to production ready. I hope it's sooner, but reading between the lines that's my feeling. Looking at Rick's demo, I think the only node in the geometry listing was 'sphere' - so I expect we're going to see a lot of dancing balls in a few months time. Ho Hum. For me the immediate highlights are the near term availability of Redshift OSL and Redshift RT. Also excellent to see support for USD.

Workplanes are a really powerful and important feature for me too. I'm surprised I don't see them in use more often. I did wonder if they were available in Blender...

I love the caption: Simulation time: three weeks / my entire life.... : )

What I would like o know from the Blender users: if you totally ignore costs - where does Blender beat C4D - and vice versa? What would be your top 5 things where Blender beats Cinema, and what would be your top 5 things where Cinema beats Blender?

It's interesting to hear your opinion on this Janine : ) Re Blender: The one thing that has deterred me from learning it is the 'undo situation'. From what I've read undo can be a real issue if you're dealing with big files - lots of polys / objects - which is typically my situation. I'm not sure if this is a 'fundamental / architecture' type issue that will not be solved - at least in the mid term, or not. Any thoughts on that?

Very cool and fun stuff!

ROFL ! - check out my icons : )

If the scene fits in card memory... 6, 8, or 11 GB won't matter. 11GB is better - you can handle bigger scenes without needing Redshift to use out of core memory - which will slow things down - but unless you're dealing with huge geometry and multiple massive texture maps an 8GB card will do fine. I recently rendered 8 million instances (circa 25 billion polys) on my 3x 1070 Ti's (8GB) without a problem ; )

Glad it helped : ) The render looks good. Now that the mining boom has cooled off I bet there are some good Ebay deals on second hand 1070 Ti's and the like : )

To fix your Aliasing issue on the superbright shutters I think you need to look up help on the 'Max Subsample Intensity' in the Sample Filtering settings of the Redshift render settings. I don't know, but 17 minutes sounds like a long time for this render to me, even with a 970. What is your render time for the Redshift Benchmark image: https://www.redshift3d.com/forums/viewthread/12843/ Hope this helps.

Fantastic! You've got some great stuff there, and I'm personally really looking forwards to the material nodes playlist. I'll also be recommending the intro stuff to a colleague of mine who is just starting to use C4D.

Thank you! I'm very much looking forward to viewing these!