Decade

It looks great, although I'm not familiar with the source material.

Nice resource, thanks.

That's very generous of you, thank you. As a permanent licence holder, I'll be on R25 until the September release comes out, so I can use this to maybe get a grounding in scene nodes before then.

Same, still get the red banner

I have yet to try Arnold. In my experience, I've seen some terrible instability from Octane & Redshift. But it seems very scene & computer dependent. Sometimes they run great & some files they just seem to hate ! But I still like Octane the best - the Studio version is pretty cheap, the out-of-the-box tonemapping or whatever it is looks great, I love all the post-processing in the camera tag, especially the different film-stocks & how I can just press the up & down arrows to cycle through them. It has it's quirks but I'm very comfortable with how to use it nowadays. I mostly use it for stills & short concept animations. I think if you have to scale up to a larger studio, network rendering, bigger teams etc then maybe there are better choices. But for concept art & look dev it works pretty great overall. In all honesty, I've never experienced a GPU-renderer that is rock-solid stable to anywhere near the extend of the classic Standard/ Physical renders. But they're so much faster & more pleasant to work with that I just suck it up & save very 5 mins.

No problem. Wait until you try & import Alembic Geometry Caches from Cinema to Unreal. You have to un-parent the geometry from the hierarchy in Cinema & import to Unreal using the 3DS Max preset. This is the only way it comes in at the right world coordinates & orientation. I feel by this point I know almost every bastard foible of Unreal's fussy pipeline. One saving grace is we do have at least 3 routes in & out - FBX, Alembic & Datasmith are all very valid & have advantages for different situations. A rule I found for both skeletal animation via fbx & geometry cache animation via alembic is that unsupported object types in the hierarchy, such as nulls & splines are not only ignored but mess up the global positioning & rotation. For characters & vehicles, we developed a system of having 2 seperate hierarchies - an 'Animation Rig' that stays in Cinema & consists of whatever objects, constraints, IK etc & a 'bind rig' which is just joints & meshes, constrained back to the 'animation rig' via psr constraints. To be fair, I think this is more or less the pipeline of forever in games etc. But coming from a film & TV background with a somewhat lesser supported application, we ended up re-inventing the wheel a bit at times. We bake the animation as PSR keys to the 'bind rig' prior to export (we have python scripts to speed this up) & export only the 'bind rig' to Unreal. There are other quirks. I believe (but not 100% sure) that the only thing that doesn't work via the FBX re-export trick from Unreal -> Cinema is cameras. If I remember rightly, you can enter a 90 deg offset in one of the camera's frozen coord axis in Cinema to fix FBX cameras coming in via default settings.

Having done this a lot, I know the solution. Import to Cinema with default settings. Then export the FBX from Cinema again, with 'Z Up' Then re-import this new fbx with default settings & it will be correct. Don't ask me why this is different to just importing with z-up but it is. It works every time.

When a new release comes out, I often discover new features from previous versions that I've misssed while I'm exploring. To be honest, in the case of Fields, it took me 4-5 releases to gradually become more comfortable with them, understand their 'syntax' & integrate them into my work. I'm not a motion-graphics artist, though I do a little bit occasionally, so a lot of the mograph tools I use primarily as procedural modelling tools. This looks like a pretty strong release. I'm still on a permanent licence, so I'll get a chance to use all this stuff I guess around September, along with the R27 stuff. Assuming Maxon don't withdraw the permanent licence.

There have been tons of updates to the Dope Sheet & many other aspects of animation & character animation over the last 5 releases. It's a pretty good example of the continued development that some people claim Maxon doesn't do (and to be fair, they sometimes don't do)

This is slightly off-topic, but I'm very curious about scene nodes for them to be useful for what I do: - Can you now render with 3rd Party Engines ? (ie Octane etc) - Is this only when feeding them back into the object manager & losing the performance boost ? - What about the other way round ? Feeding bespoke objects into the scene nodes ? Do we still lose the performance boost ? Because I'm not a Motion Graphics artist, we don't deal in fancy cubes etc, we need to feed in hand-crafted buildings & other assets for mass-distribution via scene nodes. It's unlikely we ever have a scenario where we can generate the models fully within scene nodes - I know no-one knows this, but I'll look at scene-nodes more seriously when the whole character rigging/ animation toolset is supported. This is one of the areas that most needs the performance hike & conceptually works quite well for a node-based workflow.

The Asyncronous Save/ Load might be low-key most useful feature. We often work with big scenes, lot's of messy scan stuff & CAd imports, all working off cloud storage. I got 3 of our artists to start using S26 today & it's going to be a big time-saver. I'm sure we'll get into the more exctiing tools over the next few weeks.

Oh yes, I agree. I only use Standard/ Physical for 'utility' rendering nowadays - Plans & Elevations, simple white-card, Projection work etc They're also pretty good for some types of NPR. As soon as you want some physically plausable surfacing, they slow down so much as to be hair-pulling.

We never really had much instability in those releases. As I say, we weren't pushing the envelope in terms of deformations, complex interactions with simulation etc. We were rendering the previs with the viewport, which has mostly been improving. The biggest instability in my experience has been 3rd party render engines. I use Octane for concept work & I'd say it's the cause of 9/10 crashes. Still love it for stills work though. The little I've dabbled with Cycles it seemed equally unstable & I hear Redshift is a bit shakey too. Maybe that's just GPU rendering, I don't know. As dated as they are, Standard/ Physical are more stable than anything else I've used. I guess it always depends which bits of the program you're touching & what work you're doing.

No one's mentioned it (I think) , but the cumulative improvments in R20-R25 for character animation have been really good & useful. The pose library, the character definition re-targetting system, things like auto-keys only being made on channels where a key is already set, timeline improvments. Where I work, we use Cinema 4D for previs animation (among many other things). Not the most elaborate stuff but lots of re-use of rigs, libraries of animations, always working in small teams. The accumulated quality of life improvements across these last releases has really allowed us to be more efficient. I know it's not an area that many Cinema users work in, but there has been substantial improvment.

I need more clarification on this - the 'Get Selection' node is present in R24, it's present in the manual of R25, but it's missing in the actuial program of R25. Was it replaced at the last minute & the documentation hasn't caught up, or is this a bug we need to report ? This particular example aside, they are for reading in a 'Geometry' input from a 'Store Selection' node & outputting 'Indices' to feed into a 'selection' port - is something else doing this job now, or is it just missing ?

On a slightly related note, we use Cinema 4D at work, with multiple licences on one account. It would be great if we could enter a name for each computer ie 'Graeme Work' or 'Alex Laptop'. As it is, we have to maintain a list of all the auto-generated numbers & who they're assigned to

"Is it correct to think that if you pay for yearly Fuse maintenance it costs $262/year (US) and if you use the subscription it is $508/year - but you get the same stuff? Why would a person choose subscription and pay almost double for the same thing? " Because you have to own a permanent licence to get the maintenance price. Many of us jumped on earlier & cheaper, but a brand new Fusion 'permanent' (only XP is permanent really) costs £816 including VAT here - so that's the cost of entry to the cheaper yearly maintenance price. Although I imagine that as usual, Black Friday will be the time to pick up a new licence / maintenance if you're after them.

Yeah, with a more-or-less deprecated render engine, it's increasingly going to be difficult for them to command the yearly fee they want. If I were being generous, I'd hope they'd roll in Redshift once Radeon is supported on windows too. Or if they want to sell the base C4D as just a DCC for serving Unreal/ 3RD party engines, they need to drop the price a bit, I think.

I think the actual losers in this would be Cycles Perpetual owners who don't have/ aren't interested in any of the rest - assuming Insydium no longer want to sell them maintenance. Actually, the question of Cycles permanent licenses is the big questionmark here in general.

What are the exact goals you want to achieve with Cinema 4D ? I have a colleague who is pretty proficient with Rhino & comes from a CAD background - he also uses Cinema for rigging the stuff he makes in Rhino & for 3D printing/ STLs, more organic stuff,as well as lensing/ camerawork. What are your goals with C4d ? It's a bit like Photoshop in that there are at least 6 unrelated industries that use it heavily.

Yeah, for me this is a bit of a bonus, I had X-Particles & Cycles but now I get all the rest & it looks like maintenance cost will be similar or even cheaper. It's also smart of them - I don't do enough Mograph/ FX work to justify X-Particles really & had been thinking of dropping it & just keeping cycles. The fact that I get a few other plugins (& TerraformFX is one I can put to use straight away), means I might reconsider that decision.

It's offered on the My Accounts page, which won't load as their server is getting hammered, but I saw it earlier. Few quotes I grabbed from their site & FAQ " If you have an active Subscription or a license in its Maintenance Period – Convert to Fused now. If your license is in its Reactivation or Last Chance Period, you can buy a new Fused Maintenance Agreement." " Converting your existing X-Particles license to INSYDIUM Fused will give you access to the full Collection at no extra cost. Please note that only Subscription licenses and perpetual licenses within their Maintenance Period are eligible for conversion."

From what I saw before all the Americans woke up & crashed their server, it's free to convert from an X-particles licence under maintenance period to Fused - you then get Cycles & all the other software & stuff included, regardless of which you owned before. Maintenance looked to be £180 + vat/ year for the whole lot.

Of course, I don't know your circumstances, but I recently finally let go of Octane 4 & got their cheapest subscription, which is more than enough for my needs & suports R23, as well as having some nice updates itself. As stated, you can download the older Cinema 4D versions, in fact this isn't limited to subscription customers, my R23 is a permanent license & I always have the last 2 versions installed (R23, R21 & R20, in my case). You also currently get free beta licences of Embergen & World Creator with the Octane subscription, if these packages interest you, although I suspect they will want to start charging extra for them once they go final release.

I used it maybe 6 years ago, for some previs. I remember it was pretty good. It's very much a particular way of working - it will never give you the ability to stylise like keyframe animation, but then it brings certain other qualities that can be hard to do in more traditional animation. I don't remember it being terribly difficult to get to grips with, overall. It does sound like it might be overkill for your needs. I think it could really come into it;'s own with a field of simulated cars, interacting in emergant ways, though I've never tried that.