PerAnders

Hi there, thanks for the interesting questions. I’ll do my best to answer : The whole of the original MoGraph Module as it was known back then was designed, architected and coded by just us two, that first release I think including testing to release was maybe 9 months. Of course that was only the start, I was with Maxon for 15 years and as time went on more people become involved in the MoGraph project, it took a lot of work to make that happen. As for till done, well MoGraph is never done. I did my best to ensure Cinema was the best tool for motion graphics artists in all areas so that workflow goes through everywhere, Fields for instance I added later and was designed to unify a set of disparate workflows. The other projects I worked on were all sorts. I worked with David on the Character Animation tools, VAMP, updated morph system and stuff like that, the MAX UV tools were mine back in the day, the “Powerslider” (mini timeline) was one of mine, doodle, lighting tool, viewport interaction model and camera navigation, spline tools, lots of the UI and general UX including core concepts about interactivity, mouse behaviors etc. (though Tilo is the real genius behind most of the modern UI code in Cinema), there’s a bunch more I don’t even remember and even elements that were just lifted from my older plugins by others. While I wasn’t always working directly on MoGraph I got to touch a lot of the application and form a lot of the workflows that I hope make it a good choice for artists. Ok so the node based compositor was known as Spider, it was functional, realtime, fit into the Cinema 4D Post Effect system but lacked many of the nodes required to be what I’d call complete. It was akin to maybe the compositor you nowadays see in Blender. Yes scene-nodes were a long time coming and still a long way off where I believe they should have been.. I’m in my 40’s, that little painting application was programmed in BBC Basic which was a combination of self taught and learning from listings that used to appear in Magazines and you had to meticulously type them out, I must have been 7 or 8. I remember earlier on in London messing around with TurtleGraphics LOGO to do things on the classroom computer which was fun, I used that to make some early for me motion graphics, color line fills. I have a fine arts degree, I really had almost no education in IT. While there were classes I remember that the selection system for which classes you could take meant that it became an either or and I picked the options I preferred doing. I did take a one or two semester IT course in 6th form but they weren’t interested in teaching auxiliary courses to a high standard so I didn’t get much out of it, in the end I used it to build an FBM screen saver and a UI system in MS Basic (slow as heck). I really only do programming out of necessity. There’s something I need then, I do it. Waiting around for others to do it for you is a recipe for disappointment. Oh I don’t have favorites when it comes to programming languages. They all have their positives and negatives. C++ might be the one I continuously go back to, but only because that’s what so many people want or need. In the end the real difference between your experience with different languages isn’t the language itself so much as the API’s you’ll be dealing with. Some are well written and documented, others are a disaster of boilerplate and lackadaisical documentation, usually a sign that the author really wanted to use a different programming language entirely. In the Oscars photo I am front row, second from right.

Ah yes NOTA, I had forgotten about that one. Renato was one of my mentors and early partner in crime when I first decided I needed to fill the gaps in Cinema 4D a couple of years earlier, helping me learn the very under-documented C.O.F.F.E.E. Scripting language (fortunately Maxon moved away from hot beverage based acronyms and puns, though not before Xpresso and my personal favorite groan Cappuccino), wonderful and kind developer, lots of good times on that early beta team.

Hi, I agree, DITools and Jenna both came before MoGraph as did XFrog and a few other procedural modeling tools, but were not inspirations for it. Though Maxon having recently fallen out with David Farmer specifically requested I copy Jenna which I flat out refused to do as highly unethical and Paul agreed, and because as I mentioned I had my own needs as a Motion Graphics designer. We were of course aware of the landscape, of Cinema 4D just as we were aware of Softimage, Imagine, Maya and Houdini, the various particle systems out there and so on, all remarkable tools in their own right and all with valuable lessons to learn from. They are all antecedents. As I have always maintained there was nothing that MoGraph did that you could not do other ways, even in the base vanilla package. But it’s about the ways that MoGraph did it that sets it apart and is why Cinema 4D maintains its lead in the field even though you can duplicate objects, animate them with signed distance fields in every modern DCC and could even back then. The innovation is in the architecture and workflow, the concept, not in the ability to write clone = obj.getClone().

Hi, thank-you for the wonderfully kind words. You know ego, I talk about what I know best… and then I don’t stop talking! : D That’s a great question. So to answer, at the beginning absolutely you’re right, Paul was my partner developer and we shared the development burden equally and did a great deal of brainstorming together, I of course additionally architected the vision and within Maxon I because I had negotiated us in as a package deal, he was my ward. To my great and ever lasting shame and in no small part due to my own naivety and inexperience in a role that I did not realize at the time was lead I was not able to protect him fully within the system and he and Maxon parted early on, as seems to be an ongoing motif with Maxon - acrimoniously and in my estimation entirely unfairly. From then on I built up, maintained and updated MoGraph as well as of course implementing general workflow through many areas of Cinema to strengthen that Motion Graphics experience. However don’t believe for a moment that’s a sole lonely act, I would have failed completely if I hadn’t been able to build up a team, vision and direction and it had ended up just being me on my own every once in a while throwing out random tools that no-one used! While I was primarily responsible for MoGraph, Maxon is a company of over time an increasing number of developers. In my speech I mentioned those key, who had been instrumental in being a part of the MoGraph team helping bring my hallucinatory visions to life adding feature (such as Dynamics which Ole provided) and providing support in other ways, technical and design. At the same time It was also always something I had to fight for, far too hard against a great deal of resistance, I would have failed if I had not had the support of a few key players especially in the US and among our distributors who saw first hand the value return. Now as for the award itself. Well when the Academy Award came along the Academy itself interviewed many people, both in an outside of Maxon and made their own decision based on the testimonies given and their own incredible industry experience, and let me tell you just meeting those guys alone was an honor, serious industry heavyweights and incredibly fascinating minds! They decided exactly who the award was to based on their own evaluation, which fortunately for me, saw true.