Dardo

Yes, real time is definitely the future. I'm also paying close attention to Redshift RT and Brigade. The other technology Unreal uses that is mind blowing is virtualized geometry (nanite), which allows you to add an almost infinite amount of geometry to your scene without slowing down the viewport. The latest version of Unreal (5.1 at this time) enables Nanite for trees and foliage, so get ready to see incredibly photorealistic natural environments made with scanned trees and plants.

9 hours ago, zeden said: The forest is an asset from the store right? The only thing that bothers me a little bit is this default blurrines to it that I also encountered in Unreal rendering. Or is it DOF and MB? Thanks Zeden. Yes, the forest and the animals are from the Unreal Marketplace and come pre-rigged, and the archer is a Mixamo character. I understand what you mean about the "default blurriness". To improve sharpness I rendered at 4K and then downscaled to 2K, but I should probably add a sharpen filter as well. 6 hours ago, 3D-Pangel said: Unfortunately, after watching a few tutorials, the UI appeared daunting to me. I actually could wrap my head around Houdini's UI better than I could Unreal engines. Maybe it was the tutorial. So for those who have stepped more into Unreal than I did (admittedly a passing interest on my part with no real time investment), what were your experiences with the learning curve? How would it compare to Houdini? To Blender? To C4D? Dave, coming from C4D, Unreal was a bit daunting for me too. The layout of the UI is actually not that different from C4D's. There is a content browser (but it only displays elements that have already been imported to your project), an outliner (similar to C4D's Object Manager) and a details panel (similar to C4D's Attribute Manger). The problem is Unreal was designed to create video games, so the settings that interest me are buried under a tone of settings that are only useful to create video games. So to me, a big part of the learning curve is figuring out what is useful for cinematics and what's not. I still have so much to learn.... 6 hours ago, Igor said: really great stuff. A lot of work for sure. So congrats on the project. I also started learning UE5 once again after several tries. But now it has much more sense as I am mastering Houdini. Feel free to talk a bit more about the process and some hardships you might have had during the whole process. I would love to hear them. Thanks, Igor. So to make something like this in C4D, I would have storyboarded every shot, and then I would have created a separate scene for each area of the forest where the action takes place. In Unreal, the whole forest was already there, so my first step was to go location scouting. I just went around the virtual forest placing cameras wherever I found an interesting area. Then I downloaded the MIxamo character and placed it in front of those previously selected cameras. And that's where the fun begins! You create a Level Sequence (a timeline that allows you to add keyframes), assign the mocap to your character, and start playing with the camera position and settings. The character just keeps doing his moves again and again in a loop without complaining (occasionally he would shoot me a dirty look, but I just ignored it) while I play with the focus, aperture, the focal length, the speed of the camera move, etc... Once I'm happy with the shot, I enter "God mode" and I add wind, move the sun around and place 18K HMIs with one finger... so satisfying! But what's even more amazing to me is that I can then create a Master Level Sequence, and I can edit all these shots together like you would in Premiere of FCP, but with one BIG DIFFERENCE. You are not editing rendered clips. You are editing real time animation, so if I decide to change the color of my archer's bow, I just have to open the bow's material, change the color, hit save, and now the change will automatically propagate throughout my edited sequence and the color of the bow will change in all my shots. Mind blowing... Working like this is super-efficient, because you can refine the timing of your shots and you can immediately tell if two shots don't cut well together, etc... Finally, at render time you can increase the quality of all your render settings (sampling, anti-aliasing, motion blur, etc...) through the use of "console variables." The render is no longer real time, but still very fast. The whole edited sequence took less than 3 hours to render, but remember I was rendering at 4k to be able to downscale to 2K. To me the biggest challenge is still grasping the logic of the program. For example, there is really just once scene (map) where all the actions take place, so if the archer is performing two different actions in the same area of the woods, you have to hide one of the actions or else you will see two archers performing two different actions at the same time. At first I solved this problem by hiding the character in all the shots except the one where we were supposed to see him, but then I discovered you could "convert the character to spawnable" and that way it will only show in the Level Sequence where he is supposed to be. Finally, Unreal is not super-stable like C4D is, and the auto-save feature isn't great, so when there is a crash it's really hard to recover the lost work. Internal links are broken, references are lost, and you basically have to redo a lot of work. Oh well... still totally worth it for this type of stories.

After playing for a few months with Unreal, things are finally starting to click in. This whole scene was animated and edited in-engine, using Sequencer and a Mixamo character. Aside from doing animation I work as a commercial DP, so what I enjoyed most was the real time workflow. It feels a bit like shooting live action on location, since you have the freedom to move the camera around the virtual environment in search of the right composition. Time to play with those metahumans...

Congratulations to the Maxon Team! S26 looks very impressive. Love the new modeling tools, specially the Zremesher, the new bridge, and the new close polygon hole. Also very impressed with the new dynamics system and Redshift integration. Bright future ahead for Maxon. And I have to admit the Maxon One subscription is starting to look much more appealing.

So imagine your scene is a city street at night. You have lights pointing at the façades of the buildings, streetlamps lining the street, and a police car with its headlights on, slowly driving by the street, checking out the pedestrians. If it's a small scene for a cinematic, I would set the Mobility parameter of all the lights to "Movable" and forget about it. Now you can move the lights anywhere you want while you're building the scene, there is no pre-baking of the light so UE won't ask you to "build" your scene all the time, and everything will work in real time in the viewport. But if you are designing a game, or this is a huge city and you want to be efficient, here is how you could go about optimizing the performance of your lights. - I would set the Mobility of the lights pointing to the facades of the buildings to "Static" because I know those lights are not going to move, and no moving objects are going to pass under those lights. - I would set the Mobility of the streetlamps to "Stationary" because I know those lights are not moving, but I want the pedestrians who walk under those lights to cast shadows onto the ground. - Finally, I would se the Mobility of the car's headlights to "Movable" since the car is moving and I want any moving object that passes in front of the headlights to cast shadows.

In UE5, in the Details window, make sure to set all of your light's Mobility setting to "Movable" and you will no longer need to bake your lighting every time you move the lights. Here is what that setting means for a light: - Static: gives you the best performance, but light needs to be baked into lightmaps every time you move the light, and moving objects under this light will not cast a shadow. - Stationary: Light needs to be baked every time you move the light, but moving objects under this light will cast a shadow. - Movable: this is the most GPU intensive option for a light. You can move the light, there is no baking into lightmaps, and moving objects will cast a shadow.

Depending on your budget, I would go with an RTX 2080Ti, RTX 3080, RTX 3080Ti or RTX 3090. I have two RTX 3080s in my computer with 10GB of VRAM each for rendering with Octane, but Unreal Engine only uses one GPU for raytracing and for the real-time viewport, so no need to get two. Whatever NVIDIA card you get, make sure it is an RTX, since Lumen is not a replacement for raytracing. Lumen works without an RTX card, but If you have one, Lumen and raytracing can work together for better render quality. Also, the new RTX 3080 now comes with 12GB of VRAM, which is great.

Here are some cinematic renders I did with UE5 using sequencer. Disclaimer: I didn't create the forest. I just added a few rocks, trees, the monoliths and changed the lights and project settings to use Lumen with raytracing. It all plays in the viewport in real time. UE5_Test_Forest.mp4

I've been playing with UE5 for a few months now, but only in the last three weeks things have started to click really fast. I'm absolutely amazed at the realtime capabilities and photorealism of the engine. You can create an entire procedural forest with thousands of plant instances reacting to the wind and tons of high poly 3D scans and see it all in real time with global illumination. I haven't been this excited about a 3D program since I started learning 3D fifteen years ago. It's... unreal.

Make sure to check out the free tutorials available through Epic's website: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/learn Sign in with your Epic account and click on the Learn tab. They have full courses for beginners that go over the UI, project file structure, how to import assets, how materials work, etc... I'm not interested in designing games, only in the real time cinematic capabilities of the engine, and it has blown my mind so far. Once you understand the basics, make sure to check out this tutorial by Pwnisher to get even more cinematic results at render time.

Really excited about the Unreal Engine 5 section. Thanks Igor!

I would be extremely interested in an Unreal section. I have been playing with Unreal for the last couple of months and I'm very excited about its real-time render capabilities, but there is definitely a learning curve for C4D users. Changing the keyboard shortcuts and the middle mouse button function to emulate C4D's behavior was very helpful and I'm sure we can all share tips to help each other learn this beast of a program 🙂

@Daniel SeebacherThank you for the excellent post. Very well synthesized!

Thank you Icecaveman for your feedback! You are right. I've been to a few launches at the Vanderberg Air Force base and I wasn't anywhere near the launch pad. In fact I couldn't even see the launch pad, located behind a hill 🙂 Also, I understand what you mean about having more parallax shots, but I wanted to capture the feeling of the reference videos, where most cameras are static, since they are in a housing to protect them from the heat. I finally decided to go with dynamic camera moves for the spectators and static shots for the rocket. Finally, I'm going to redo the last shot and I will illuminate the rocket a bit more per your suggestion. Thank you!

Thank you Dave for your detailed feedback and kind words. I agree with all your comments and I'm glad you pointed out that I missed the sparks to burn off waste gases. I saw them in a couple of reference videos, but didn't understand what they were for. Now I do 🙂 The character animation is motion capture from AXYZ AnimaPro. Their 4D characters come with facial expressions and are super realistic in wide shots, but as you get close to them you start to see some problems. Thanks again for your comments! Eduardo

Hello everyone, In this 3D animation of a Falcon 9 launch, I tried to capture the excitement of the space enthusiasts who gather around the launch sites to witness that thrilling moment when a rocket blasts off from Earth. The biggest challenge for me was all the fluid sims. Hope they turned out decent 🙂 Weapons of choice: Cinema4D, Octane, After Effects, TurbulenceFD, X-Particles, AnimaPro. Youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzfkPXjqrnM&ab_channel=ThePixelWhisperer

Tutorials are definitely an art form. They have to be well structured and engaging. The instructor must come across as articulate, enthusiastic, knowledgeable, and non pretentious (a rare combination) and the pacing has to be just right... too fast and you get tired of pausing and rewinding. Too slow and you fall asleep... I think all the above mentioned instructors are great, and totally agree with Cerbera about 3D Fluff's subtle humor and amazing teaching skills, not to mention Janine's hypnotizing accent! 3D Kiwi's tutorials were also great and allowed me to finally understand Bodypaint. I've also learned a lot with Digital Tutors, GSG, Rocket Lasso and Cineversity. And of course, I must mention Ben Watts for his amazing TurbulenceFD tutorials.

Congratulations to the Maxon team for another release of c4d! It was so much fun reading through the thread. So many articulate opinions and interesting posts. I specially enjoyed the ones with dramatic endings like "R.I.P. Maxon" or "Bye bye Maxon, hello Blender." So much passion :) Anyways, after playing with R25 for a couple of days, here are my two cents: - New UI: I was pretty happy with the old UI, so I wasn't expecting this one. Looks nice and I'm sure I'll get used to it in the future. I like the hot corners, tabs, new sliders, presets and new customization options. I can see myself tinkering with custom layouts for hours. Well done! - Track modifier tag: powerful and easy to use. - Capsules: Oh yeahhh! I am no programmer, but I consider myself a semi-technical 3D artist (as in not afraid to play with Xpresso, particles, fluid sims, etc...) When I started playing with scene nodes last year, I got confused and bored, but capsules make sense to me and open a whole parametric world of possibilities! So it is not a feature rich release, and I'm going to miss the content browser, but I can tell the Maxon team is working hard and I'm excited about the future of c4d. Congrats again and hope to see you all at NAB 2022 to toast to the new, complete, and kickass new core?

Excellent tutorial, thank you!

Here you go! https://www.MAXON.net/en-us/news/MAXON-news/article/future-system-requirements-for-cinema-4d/

You may be right, and I may end up getting a Windows machine once things settle down, but I am also curious to see what RS, AMD and Apple can achieve in close collaboration. Over the years, I've become very efficient with the Mac: all software runs smoothly, I very rarely get crashes, and I am able to troubleshoot any technical issues very quickly, so I am willing to pay an extra for that, but if the rendering speed difference between the two platforms ends up being huge, I may be forced to switch.

ha, ha, ha. Yes, we live in the upside down now!

Thanks for letting me know! I wasn't aware of it.

So after reading the minimum system requirements for R22, I was ready to take the plunge and buy a new Mac Pro with a Radeon Pro Vega II Duo for a total of $14,000 to start playing with RedShift. I was just waiting for RedShift to support AMD GPUs before making my purchase. Since I have 4 classic MacPros 5.1 with 12 cores each that I use as a small render farm via Team Render, my plan was to install both R22 and R21 (the last version that can use Westmere processors) in the new MacPro. I would use R21 for CPU intensive render jobs via team render, and R22 for GPU rendering. And then came COVID-19… In the past 2 weeks most of my clients have canceled their projects, the entertainment company my wife works for is struggling to stay afloat, and as an independent contractor I can’t file for unemployment in the US. Fortunately I have some savings, but since no one knows how long this situation is going to last or how deep the ensuing recession might be, all my hardware and software spending decisions have been placed on hold. I imagine a lot of you find yourselves in a similar quandary and I’d be interested to hear what you plan to do when R22 comes out. Stay safe!

I’ve been a long time lurker and want to devote my first post to praise MAXON for the amazing job they’re doing with C4D. I’ve been using C4D professionally for many years now and it is simply a pleasure to fire it up every morning. I really like it because: 1) I make a good portion of my income with it as a generalist 🙂 2) It is intuitive, powerful, versatile, elegant, stable and multi-platform (I use it on a mac) 3) Works really well with After Effects. 3) There are a tone of excellent plugins and render engines that complement its feature set: Arnold, Redshift, TurbulenceFD, X-particles, Realflow, etc… 4) Great community of users, lots of tutorials (love Cineversity) and good technical support when I need it. 5) I see C4D constantly evolving in the right direction. I know many cafe users have strong opinions about where the software should be heading, but I like what I’m seeing so far. It is true that for a number of years, while the new core was being developed, some important tools aged, but even so, the updates we got during those years contained very useful new tools that I use often, like the sculpting tools, the 3D tracker, team render, takes, tokens, Voronoi fracture, PBR workflow, Substance and Houdini engines, and oh yes… the cogwheel splines 🙂 And in these last couple of releases, I’ve really enjoyed the speed gains, UI redesign, volume modeling, node-based materials, fields, etc… I'm also glad there are more options now to pay for the software, but I really hope MAXON keeps selling perpetual licenses for a long time. So congratulations to the MAXON team and Dave McGavran for the excellent work they’re doing. I’m really excited about the future of C4D.