3DKiwi

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 :)

Excellent work. Well done.

Just watched the preview video. Very impressive. The nodal material system makes C4D's material system look very out of date.

Hi Hrvoje Unfortunately no joke. When I saw the announcement at CG Talk I quickly came here and checked to see if there was a similar announcement. As there wasn't I thought that it was important that there was one and it was appropriate that I made the announcement since Cactus Dan had been a long time supporter and I think the first one to come on board when I started doing the banner ads to pay for the cafe hosting. I hope that there is some way that Dan's plugins can live on at least in the short term anyway. Cheers Nigel

I refer Cafe members to this announcement at CG Talk: http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=47&t=1412018 Very sad news indeed. Cactus Dan has been a long time supporter of the Cafe with his banner ads advertising his excellent Cinema 4D plugins. I always found Dan to be excellent to deal with and a man of high integrity. I'm sure all of us are thankful for the contribution he made to the Cafe and the Cinema 4D community. Rest is peace Dan Libisch aka Cactus Dan. 3DKiwi

Those ATI HD 5770 cards are pretty old. I had one a few years ago. Gave up on it as I would regularly get the windows blue screen of death. C4D didn't like it as well. If you are running a ATI 5770 on Windows then I suggest running in Aero mode but disabling GUI transparency. Windows will be then a bit happier using it.

1. Great tip. This is essentially the same as using the Stitch and Sew tool in point mode, what I would call "drag welding".