3DKiwi

Hi John. Highly unlikely we'll see any progress on anything to do with character tools as the developer who worked on them, David O'Reilly left and now of course is responsible for the excellent X-Particles and Cycles for C4D. I can't see character animation being high on MAXON's priority list.

My guess is many people at MAXON don't actually use their own software.

Funding isn't the issue although I wouldn't say no to more cash :) I work school terms and only school vacations off. Siggraph occurs during school terms so I couldn't come even if I had free travel.

I'd love to come to the USA for a holiday and to do some cycling. One day but probably after I retire in 10 years time.

Dave I'd rather live in rattling NZ than crazy USA that just elected ...

Hi Dave. Thanks for your thoughts. My house rolled a lot. It was like it was floating on water and a boat went past and you got the wake and it was rolling around a lot. Went on for 2 minutes as it was 2 earthquakes one after the other. At the time I said to my wife, "if that wasn't close to us then somewhere just hit by the big one". We then went online and looked at the NZ Geonet site to see where the earthquake was and saw that it was in the south island. We're in the bottom part of the North Island so knew it would have been severe for those closer. There was an aftershock quake that we felt last evening watching TV. My wife said she felt one in the afternoon when I was outside mowing the lawn. Yeah road damage is severe with multiple rock falls . Here's a photo from this morning's newspaper. See the train track has been pushed out into the sea.

One consolation is the US election is no longer making much news here!!

Hi everyone. Thanks for your kind words about myself and NZ. I'm about 250 miles away from the epicentre of the earthquake and was woken a couple of minutes past midnight. Rather than violent shaking it was a prolonged rolling motion back and forth and a bit up and down. Lasted about 2 minutes. I gather it was in fact 2 earthquakes. Damn scary Yeah 2 dead which is tragic. I gather one was a heart attack. The area where the quake hit is rural so major damage is confined. There are numerous landslides blocking roads. Wellington (the capital) suffered some minor damage and the CBD was closed today. My daughter who lives and works in Wellington went to work, did some tidying up and then was sent home. Below are couple of photos I spotted online. Cheers Nigel

Question about the gallery. Isn't it meant to be for final images only? I note we're now getting wireframes posted regularly. I always had it as final images only to keep it cleaner and not full of half finished wire frame images. I used to delete the images and send a polite message to the member who had posted them, reminding them that the gallery was for final renders only.

I recall we had a strip of new gallery images across the top when I was running things and on the forum index page. Back then there was no option for members to hide it. The only was for the the forum admin to make it visible to specific member groups. It's pretty easy to add in. Cafe index pages are customizeable by the admin and they can add or remove whatever content that they want.

I agree.

They all like C4D's built in modules. If you're running the Prime edition you won't have them. Download the R18 Studio demo and then try opening the file.

Oh wow, stunning work. Well done.

Actually I would call it a basic feature. In Modo the tool for doing this is called "Mesh Paint". You basically just paint a source object on to the surface of another object. There are various alignment modes so that the object can be aligned e.g. painting screw heads or random rotation for randomly placing and rotating things like rocks. There's various ways also of applying e.g. click and drag. The more you drag the bigger the painted on object. ZBrush has something very similar.

If I was still using C4D I would give up on the built in material system and go with the Cycles renderer and Cycles material system. It looks to be way better thought out than the half finished material system that C4D currently has. By half finished I'm referring to no nodes and an overly complex specular and reflection layer system plus C4D's renderer makes no use of the graphics card.

You should be able to get quality results from this. Maybe be do some searching of AE forums on video output settings?

It only works with imported videos. No image sequences. What software are you using to generate your movie files from the stills?

I export my videos from Camtasia Studio.

All you're going to get within the R18 cycle regarding Bodypaint is an improved viewport display i.e. Bodypaint will use OpenGL rather than the software display mode that it currently uses. Paint tool and UV tool enhancements will be R19 at the earliest.

mp4 / h.264 Sounds like your settings aren't right.

In my biased opinion all MAXON were doing with the Blog was buying themselves some time until R18 came out and taking a bit of heat off people complaining about their lack of communication. Also softening everyone up not to expect R18 to be the big update with new core and new Bodypaint. I suspect we'll hardly hear from them now and only occasionally. I would have expected a blog post the day after R18 was released with them blowing their own trumpet.

You need to experiment a bit creating displacement maps. Sometimes a slight blurring is required to prevent jagged edges. Gradients work fine and make things slope.

With the tyre maybe the cloner will work if you model it another scene on it's own (may you did this?). Make sure to enable the "render instance" option as this will greatly reduce the load on your computer. When you're happy with it, make a copy and then make the copy editable so that the cloner is no longer being used. Copy this tyre into main scene. Alternatively and this has worked well for me is to use Sub Polygon displacement for the tyre using a displacement map. Attached is what I mean where the grooves in the tyre are generated from a displacement map applied to a smooth tyre. However if the tyres are chunky like a motocross tyre then physically modelling is best. I created the displacement map in a vector drawing program.

The engine looks terrific. Well done.

Yeah I miss my reviews as well :)