FLima

This is so cool man 🙂 Looking forward to test this! Congrats with all this Everfresh As soon as I saw the racoon (I love raccoons! ❤️ ) i was like "AHhh, i recognize that cutie!!"

Oh, this is amazing! thank you so much 🙂

This is good to know! Thanks for the headsup! Im excited to play with the toon character rig too!! I think that will be implemented into my workflow. (even though it feels a bit like cheating 😞 ) PS: Do you have any tutorials on face rigs? All my facial rigs comes out as nightmare fuel! I've been trying to find a good facial rig tutorial for so long hehe.

I am quite happy with the anouncements overall 🙂 I dont use the premade character rigs, so not sure if I will be able to implement the facial rig to my custom rigged characters? I hope so! For me, one of the big changes is the character solver. For sure, that will make it extremely awesome to transfer animation from one character to another! And the delta mosh! (in fact, I wish I had this delta mosh right now for a project Im working on he he) And funny enough, some of the small improvements, are the ones that I got extremely excited.. like.. auto previewing the F-curve when selecting a specific parameter It seems minimal, but doing some fine tuning on characters, and having to manually find "where is this curve?" a lot of times.. I got used to it, but it was frustrating in general. This and auto-keying changes is also super welcome! I think, the only thing I was hoping to see was viewport improvements, more specifically, changes to the Interactive Render Region, the one we have right now is unfortunately not good enough, or not responsive enough. Specially when working with toon shaders, etc.. it starts refreshing quite fast, but after some 4-5 materials, everything just lags.. and takes a while to update. I mean, the magic bullet and the space screen reflections are nice aditions, dont get me wrong... but I would believe, most people who uses Magic Bullet Looks, would normally use during the compositing stage of a project, before or after some other effects are added on top of the 3D footage... so there is a lot more control without wasting 3D render time, and with more control. Also, it would be cool for us to have some sort of roadmap... specially now that C4D is subscription based, It would be nice to see whats in the horizon for us. Overwall, it was a good presentation, looking forward to the update 🙂

This... and the older you get, the more complex it is to find this balance... Real world obligations, bills to pay, it becomes more difficult to just switch from software to software, even though 3D, once you learn it, it is easier to adapt.. But it takes time, specially when you've been working with a specific software for more than a decade - which is my situation with C4D.

I absolute love your input on this Dan. Have you played a lot with character animation inside Maya? Or any other software? I'm very curious about that. 🙂 My problem with C4D at the moment, well, aside from the subcription price, it is the lack of nice real time visualization on NPR work. I love doing things with sketch and toon, but at some point, the instant viewport render region just gets extremely slow to preview anything... But yeah, I gotta admit, C4D feels like home. I dont need to search extensively through several different forums when I see something that Im not 100% sure how to achieve. The object manager and the way you can organize your scenes, just welcomes you.

There are no problems on paying for software when your income comes from it. But this is mostly true to a one-time payment kind of software. Like it was with Zbrush for instance, I paid around 700 USD once, and every update they had ever since (and long before I had purchased) was completely for free. I own the software and Pixologic continues to support and give full attention to its users. It was a bit of a chunk of money to pay at once, specially coming from a Brazilian pocket.. but knowing this was an investment, it puts me at ease, knowing that I can continue to produce work with it during low seasons. This is different for subscription, where you are held hostage to a continuous payment, hoping that your life situation and job market doesnt change. This year, I had to use my credit card to pay for C4D's subscription for instance, due to several delay payments and no projects at all at the beginning of this year. And it was a bit desperate, knowing that the price is so high, for something that I know I dont really own. So yeah, paying a lot for a rental price, as a indie freelancer, I think it is okay to "cry", as you put it.

@CerberaI am now curious... have you tried Blender? And no, im not from the "Blender" cult hehe, I've been trying it for a while.. but still.. havent really felt "at home" in there. but the ideals behind it, the immense support and heaps of tutorials, always makes me think about it.

That would be the ideal situation, yes. I think, if we werent facing a pandemic, most likely they would fly you over, to work locally on a specific thing. But yeah, you eased my conscious a little bit hehe.

hey... I think you raised a super strong point here. No companies will be "happy" to share with you the complete information on how much they made on a specific project, specially with all the fees negotiations and etc in place. Unless maybe you are part of a team of a big budget production (pixar movie, etc...) and you worked using your indie license. Then a public project like that, sure, i could see a problem.

Yeah, I think you summarized much better what i tried to say hehe.

I would love to know that as well.

Nope, this is only for US. Autodesk changed their terms for each country (sneaky bastards 😛 ) So for instance, in Brazil, we cant make more than 50k per year (in US is 100k) but we still have to pay the same rental price. Also, we have this budget limitation by project, of 100k. There is a sneaky similar limitation like that for Japan users for instance, there was a big discussion around that.

Im not gonna lie, as someone who just paid for another year subscription of C4D, I felt a sour taste in my mouth... But i need for my work, and after trying Blender for months now... I can safely say that my production speed, and the things I can output from a software easily, it will never be like that inside Blender. it has so many awesome features for sure, and I will never be able to compete with someone who started their 3D career with Blender... and for me personally, beneath the surface in Blender, you will find that there are a lot of things that... Im not sure why it is the way it is. Their animation timeline for me is the biggest gripe. How to control individual keyframes, handles, loop things... and some basics things, like, selecting multiple objects and being able to change a parameter in all of them at the same time. (in Blender you have to either hold at or something like that, or shift w.. to access a secondary menu to change all at the same time). I think it all depends to how productive you already are with C4D. Given that you already have Xparticles and also a nice external renderer. You already have a professional setup, ready to go for at least a year, which would give you time for a smooth transition if you feel that is the best path, and decide slowly and more risk free. New GPU's will come out every now and then, and the one you felt you would need right now, will become obsolete very soon. Then when time comes, and if you feel that you are on similar speed in production terms within Blender, you could make the switch smoothly.

Oh no... please... stop.. I'm almost convinced to sign up for Maya as well haha! The subscription price for me would be 1/4 of what i just paid C4D 😞 But the biggest hiccup for me, is the project budget limit. Since a lot of projects that I work with.. my income, are projects that easily can go over 100k (not the amount that i get paid of course, but it is usually a part of an ad that I work with, etc.., and it has directors, art directors, other 3D artists.. etc..) So my use for Maya would be quite limited. My biggest dream is to test the rigging in Maya...

But doesnt the budget limitation by project affects you? or in UK they have a different limitation? For me, it makes it unthinkable, to use Maya Indie for anything other than small budget gigs or personal projects only.

I dont think I can jump ship to be honest. I tried to adapt a lot of my work with 2 trials of maya, but it feels quite complex to achieve some simple results. I believe character animation is far superior than the one we have in C4D, but yeah, mograph, for visuals and sequencing animations is unbeatable. Also, I like to organize things a lot better in C4D, within nulls, groups, layers. I didnt like the way things are in Maya at the start. Also, keep in mind about the weird and not so obvious limitations. Depending on the country where you are. There is a limit of money you can earn per year, to be able to use it... But not only that, outside of the US, they have also placed limits on how much the total project you are involved can earn (which is extremely shady..) So, not being able to work in a project above 100k, makes it only available to use on small projects/personal, nothing on advertisement and serious CGI work. I think Autodesk is still being "Autodesk" with this, that is why i dont think it is such a good deal.

jeezz.. where is your sense of humor?

I feel this is a really good study and persepctive about workflows within C4D and Blender, etc. I've never faced these kinds of challenged you listed regarding UV, etc, but frankly, I dont think I had used the software the way you needed. One of my biggest roadblock with Blender for instance, was animation. Being unable to achieve great results and fine tuning, edit multiple keyframe's values, or even same objects parameters at the same time, it was quite frustrating... For a lot of other things, Blender has the upper hand, specially when it comes to character animation/ auto-weight, etc.. But yeah, this in-depth study about your personal and professional experience with the software is helptful to us all. Thanks!

Wow, the new page looks awesome!! ❤️

Here are the top 5 things I really hope the newer version of C4D implements 🙂 - An improved character animation module, better auto weights, etc... (I heard they will talk something about it on IBC! Fingers Crossed) - Realtime viewport preview when working with some of the sketch and toon modules, right now, these non-photorealistic projects relies on Interactive render region, which is quite slow and unrensponsive... - A better sketch and toon, something that allows us to control the overall scene shadows/gradients, etc, like you can already do inside the cel shader, but in a global/scene level. - A proper symmetry mode... something that allows you to make adjustments to a model, even if it is not under a symmetry object no longer (ie: a character already rigged, etc) - Something like... bendy bones from Blender? I know we have spline IK, but it would be awesome to have something that could be easily integrated into a facial rig for instance.. And of course, an indie license! That would be the icing on the cake!

For me personally, after the update in S22, I stopped using 3D Coat, which was my go to software for unwrapping UV's. It is so much easier to unwrap things in C4D, leaving 3D coat for only retopo whenever I need it.

I really wish they do consider that in the future, an indie version of C4D. Specially now with Maya Indie arriving worldwide to compete with Blender, MAXON needs to start thinking more of its indie users.

Thank you so much for fixing the copy/paste behaviour on the animation timeline!! It was driving me nuuuuts!! 🙂 I think I saw it on the release notes, timeline copy command... but now that I tested, yeap, that was the fix ❤️

Not sure if someone is into games here, but I've been working on a fan art for Last of Us, Joel. Specially now that the second part will be released in a few weeks! I'm struggling a bit with the rigging, specially wrist area, etc.. but getting there. Did box modelling, and painted in substance painter. Im thinking of doing some details and fixing somethings in Zbrush, not sure yet. Rendering in Redshift.