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CORE 4D Interviews - Per Anders Edwards (The father of MoGraph)
Corebot posted a topic in Interviews
Per-Anders Edwards is Oscar awarded developer, designer and artist. Widely known as one of the duo of brains behind MoGraph and highly innovative individual . Born in Sweden, currently resides in California. He worked in many design agencies, Maxon and currently works at Mercedes Benz Research & Development North America. Apart form designing and programming, he enjoys playing the guitar, painting and has interest in tech policy. He also loves annoying Sam Altman. We are very happy to present Per and are very thankful he opted to give us this exclusive interview! Describe yourself in a single word : ) Serendipitous How did you get into C4D development and 3D in general? I got into 3D early on in childhood, not that I was some precocious kid; it’s just that I grew up in the 80s and 90s playing Elite on my Acorn Electron and Outrun at the arcades. CG was fresh, a big deal flashy thing wherever it appeared not just for me - it was a part of pop culture, in the Cinemas, magazines, even on the news on TV. This was an era of relative to today at least tremendous tech optimism. Tron & The Last Starfighter were milestones of course I remember well and of course Red and Tin Toy, the amazing work Pixar brought out setting the bar again and again and of course then Terminator 2, Jurassic Park in the 90s. 3D CG was even showcased in science museums heavily, I remember seeing an early VR headset at a museum of nuclear science in the north of England in the early 90s. It was hard not to be into 3D CG when you’re surrounded by a million voices telling you how cool it is, when you’re immersed at a formative time. Fortunately for me my dad was every bit into technology as I was and he brought one of the first 8bit home computers er… well… home. He and my brother wrote an accounting program with it but once I got a hold of a computer I wrote a painting application and versions of space invaders, then little 3D toys based on my own logic. It wasn’t till the early 90’s when I got a Commodore Amiga I got my first taste of a DCC thanks to the magazine Amiga Format having Real 3D (later to be Realsoft 3D) on a cover disk. I managed to create a few animations, but raytracing was sloooow. Things picked up a little when I moved to my dad’s Mac and first got to play with Bryce, Ken Musgrave and Kai Krause’s idiosyncratic take on 3D and UI. Also not fast, but faster and fascinating. Over time the interest petered out though with the life and needs of a growing lad. It wasn’t till I was working at a post production house in North London and we were using 3D Studio Max for little CG stings so I had to make a few videos for clients that needed 3D elements that my interest was rekindled. When enough of the clients begged that I become a freelancer because they wanted to work directly with me (and save a penny I’m sure) I decided to pick up Lightwave as the tool for when 3D was needed. A choice made based on the readily available community, there were plenty of other freelancers who I’d bump into constantly who used it in London. When I moved to America in the early 2000’s I decided to shift to just 3D work, and to see what else was on offer as a fish in new water. After testing just how quickly I could work in all of them I found I was fastest in Cinema 4D, it even aligned with my needs using the After Effects when I looked at how they were updating their timeline, to me it was the most artist friendly 3D tool at that time. That’s not to say it was perfect. The software development then came as a necessity, there were missing tools I was used to having and when you’re a freelancer time is money. You have to be able to work fast, so I started to fill the gaps. Which area interests you most? Stepping away from C4D for a moment. For me in my own personal projects right now I’m enjoying the world of VR and AR. While it’s not exactly early days they’re still in that charmingly awkward phase of UX development where nothing is really set in stone and everyone’s as incompetent as each other at it, and this makes for many opportunities. What other apps are you using and what for? I use a bit of everything. You have to be adaptable to be a freelancer and you should always be enthusiastic about the field you freelance in. These days I find myself encountering and using Blender more and more. When it comes to development work then of course my main weapons of choice are IDE’s and text editors, VSCode, the Jetbrains tools and the occasional forced under duress use of Nano etc. Unfortunately more and more I find myself being sucked into the world of Jira, Excel and PowerPoint. Which learning resources you used and would recommend? Oof, opening a big ol’ can of response here. I have many thoughts on learning. Different tactics work depending on your initial passion for the subject. Sometimes you have to learn something you don’t really want to, sometimes it’s just an internal need that can’t be satiated enough. Use every one! This is your passion or at least interest. It’s like you’re climbing a cliff, you need every handhold available to you as you scrabble your way up. As a technique I found that answering other peoples questions without assumption was very successful and would recommend the same to anyone. It’s great because you’re forced out of your comfort zone and ways of thinking, to research and do things you haven’t done before, and your answers are documenting your progress for you in an analytical way. If you try this then take on the QA mindset and never assume when you’re learning - always make sure you test and do the thing yourself before you respond, you don’t want to be the blind leading the blind. When it comes to growth mindset and learning I’m a believer in the value of routines rather than goals. It’s not really about introducing structure, instead its because they really help overcome fear of failure. Failure is a huge positive potential that’s mostly squandered. Especially in the arts failing means you have improved your discernment to the point that you can recognize that failure for what it is! That’s a good thing. You keep working at it till you figure out how you can fix or avoid the mistake. The more success you have the harder it is to fail. But you place that expectation you think others have of you on yourself and I really found this a lot the more I worked at Maxon, the mindset there and the lack of free time and building my own voice and and and… well and it exacerbated my own introversion and risk aversion which in turn reduced my ability to learn and progress and I would say while I was successful I capped my own potential. That reduced my value to the company. Once I left I found it incredibly liberating to bring in routines where there was no pressure for success. To focus on the exact opposite of what they always tell you to - quantity rather than quality! The quality comes anyway of it’s own accord anyway, you can’t help but learn and improve faster if you’re failing faster too. You build that critical discernment. Just remember the mantra of “No pressure!” (beyond the commitment of starting, of it being routine of course). You don’t need to produce a lot, it doesn’t have to be good or successful in any way, it can even deviate completely from the plan, you need only do and take the first step each day. Success, learning, a loss of perfectionism and entering a growth mindset are byproducts. We all subconsciously build ego around success, then try to repeat it and avoid failure. This fear of failure is perfectionism and that stops growth, you no longer want to take risk, or try anything outside of your comfort zone and eventually it’ll stop you completely, it’s a prison that shrinks your horizons and world. It’s incredibly important for your own spirit to recognize and avoid that outcome, break perfectionism for your own happiness. An example of routine that fits the bill is the morning pages from Julia Cameron’s “The Artists Way”. A great book well worth reading if you haven’t already. It’s a fantastic starting point, from there you can find your own routines, your own daily “me” time, whether it’s exercise, or even if it’s a process you introduce to your work itself. Do you think talent is overrated and can be offset with a lot of hard work? I’m on the side of nurture on this. I don’t believe in the idea of innate talent, I do believe in certain innate aptitudes that can help, for instance having larger but skinny hands makes playing the guitar easier, but also that you have to put in the work. Those who seem “talented” simply put in all the work that you don’t see, even if it’s their first time trying something, they put in the foundational work required to quickly pick up this new thing. That could be physical fitness, mental flexibility, mechanical understanding. It can even be the work others put in, like giving them a solid support structure, financial security so they can take risk. It’s all like putting together a recipe, you can make a pizza base if you have cauliflower, chick peas etc, but it’s much easier if you have wheat flour, salt, water. Bear that in mind the next time you see someone for whom it seems easy. How did you imagine and conceptualize MoGraph? When I was hired by Maxon at Siggraph I agreed on the provision that they would also hire my at the time coding partner Paul Everett. Paul had mentored me on the C4D API and C++ then joined forces with me writing plugins. I wanted to develop plugins that could do certain things that you could not with the only scripting language available in Cinema at that time C.O.F.F.E.E. Together we’d released two top tier plugins “Mesh Surgery” a modeling toolset that innovated workflow simply by being completely interactive and realtime (a novel idea at the time and for the processing), and “Storm Tracer” a fast volumetric particle rendering system. Paul had a storied history developing his own plugins before he met me, and shortly before I joined Maxon I’d written an extensible node based compositor in Cinema called Spider (which was never released). It was this background that lead Maxon to approach me. The first project we did was MoGraph. I wont go into the full background of the project, however suffice to say the original desire from the company wasn’t exactly what they ended up with. In fact they weren’t even after a motion graphics toolset, more of a procedural modeling tool do fill a recently opened gap with some ideas talked about doing text transitions. Thing is, I’m a 3D graphics freelancer. I know what I wanted. Knew what was great and what sucked about using Cinema 4D, and critically I knew what took time and what I needed to be much easier to achieve. So I had my own set of goals and fortunately for me Paul was right on board. in the end Maxon was happy to trust us to do what was right and that we knew would be better than the original brief. Paul is tremendously intuitive at coming up with novel ideas himself, I’m very focussed on workflows. To me you as a user shouldn’t be forced to make decisions that a good design should do for you, there’s no excuse as a developer other than budget, after all we can do anything. Also I just want an easy life as a user - laziness is a great driver of innovation! So I came up with the Effectors system (I still regret the naming, but often what you do in development ends up sticking) and Cloner as a solution to some of the workflow issues I faced when dealing with particles. I wanted to have ”particles without particles” a directable solution, so this was embedded throughout. Paul meanwhile took this idea to the Matrix object where you could feed in an actual particle emitter and apply deformers to the particle axis and the MoGraph text object where you could explode and direct elements of text at all hierarchy levels. I’d make a spline deformer, Paul would make a displace deformer and so on. We built a whole load of procedural modeling and animating objects, deformers, tags and shaders around Cinema’s brilliant but slow Object System. We were very symbiotic and spend time together on each piece of code, I added the Thinking Particles integration to the Matrix etc. At the end of the day these ideas solved problems I faced as a 3D artist, with workflows that were at the time as intuitive solutions as I was able to create with the knowledge I had then. Once people saw what it was coalescing into we agreed that Motion Graphics was the ticket, and the name MoGraph I just threw in there because I was tired of constantly typing MotionGraphicsModule. It was obviously a highly successful collaboration between ourselves and Maxon. MoGraph was only the start of course, that first developer meeting we had in person I set out a map for the future they’re still following, organization, design department, new core, nodes etc. having worked extensively with Cinema’s object system I had… opinions. I had a headline feature in every release from 9.6 onwards. In fact my tools and guidance helped the company grow 2000% over the time I was with them, and even though I left some time ago I still occasionally recognize one of my or Paul’s old shelved tricks being unearthed as new feature content. Your best advice for newcomers, tip or trick to pick up? People skills, be genuine - will open doors that a 5 star portfolio alone will not. The trick there isn’t in being friendly and likable when everything is going well, anyone can do that. It’s in being able to deliver bad news but make your client still love you for it. Where do you see yourself in 5 years? Drinking fresh mango juice. Thoughts on AI? Tremendous tool but also highly dangerous. From a UX perspective it’s implicit design which always makes Undo the whole workflow, something I’m not keen on. Experience has taught me that a professional knows what they want, to achieve that the tool should enhance their control, not take it away. In general it’s a magnifier of human behavior. In particular when it can be used for profit of one kind or another - it’s a magnifier of greed. As such there are very real risks and ethical concerns around how we use AI. Our policy makers are far behind the ball on this one, and unfortunately people like Sam Altman put on a circus and leverage the general ignorance on the topic to gain advantages that would see the rest of us deeply disadvantaged. The bogeyman of sentient and agentic AI (or AGI) is nothing more than that. It’s a tool to legislate away competition and build a moat for these people. Deep learning, machine learning is currently architecturally incapable of reasoning. It’s akin to a lossy encryption algorithm with a fuzzy logic key. It is tremendous at recall though and this is enough to fool many when they underestimate the size of its training corpus or do not understand the tokenization and importance weighting process. The real risks are human and economic, the potential for dystopia at our own hands. Even the E/ACC crowd identified this. I’ve always fought for artists. It’s for this reason that I put myself firmly on what I am sadly fairly certain will end up being the wrong side of history and back them in their fight against generative AI abuses, corporations scraping their work. You might say being right but on the wrong side isn’t much of a strategy for success, but it’s about compunction and I’ve only ever gained by supporting people. Top 3 wishes for C4D If it isn’t clear by now I make my own solutions 😄 In a more diffuse way I would hope that it continues to do well and enables new generations of artists to achieve. The best good you can do in the world to make it better is to enable others opportunity. If you could send a message for Maxon, what would you say? Hey! I charge consultancy fees for that you know? 😉 They know where to find me if they need the introspection and understanding of what’s really going on within their structure and what they can do to resolve the problems they face. Message for Core4D? Keep being awesome! This forum is tremendous help and eco system driver for C4D. Tell us something we could not possibly know about you but you find important Client first! It’s pathological with me. When Warner Brothers approached me to head and build their virtual sets department and when AWS wanted me to join their top sales team in a very high level role I dissuaded both from hiring me because I simply felt my complete lack of experience in those fields would be a huge detriment to their goals. Oh I’m sure the seven figure salaries would have assuaged my conscience a little but that little voice in the back of my head is always gonna be screaming “you’ll never get repeat business that way”. Since then no surprises I actually have more experience and contacts in both worlds, you never know what the future might bring! Life always has a way of working out. If people want to contact you? They can and they should! https://www.linkedin.com/in/per-anders-edwards/ -
Thank you very much for the suggestions, very much appreciated. Our next inerview will be super rare. The father of Mograph, Oscar winning brilliant designer and programmer Per Anders Edwards will give us an exclusive - stay tuned!
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We started with our own members 🙂
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The first one is available! https://www.core4d.com/ipb/forums/topic/118456-kingcoma/#comment-759829
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Martijn Korstanje aka Kingcoma is a well known 3D artist from Netherlands and our fellow member.Currently lives in Belgium and is active in industry for 20+ years. He worked at graphics and 3D companies in the past but for last 15 years he has his own company. Apart from addictive 3D passion he enjoys nature, traveling, photography, Lego, how stuff works and loves driving his car. We are very happy to present him and his fabulous work! Describe yourself in a single word: Downtoearth : ) How did you get into C4D and 3D in general? A couple of centuries ago, some new computers arrived at the school I was attending. Instantly loved working on it (I think we used to work with Photoshop 5) and a couple of years later I bought my first Mac. Spent almost every day practicing and discovering new things, for hours and hours. I was a pretty quick learner, so once I got the hang of Illustrator and Photoshop, I came across Swift3D, and started experimenting with that (very basic 3d). Because there were lots of limitations and I really wanted to make my drawings and characters come to life, I searched for other, a bit more advanced software. 3ds max was only available on windows, so that was out of the question, and Maya had a HUGE learning curve. And then I bumped into cinema4d. Love at first sight! I can’t count the evenings / nights / days I spent learning it and trying out new things, but it’s a massive amount of time. Which area interest you the most? Modelling techniques. I’ve always been a fan of nice and clean topology, and I really enjoy figuring out the best and nicest way to model something, whether hard surfaces or organic / characters. Other then that, I love doing animations. How things move, how slow or fast things move, how a character moves when he’s just standing there. What does the left hand do when the right hand’s busy doing something? Whenever I have character animation jobs, I always find myself standing up and acting a bit first, to see what a ‘natural’ movement is and what not. Really silly, but super helpful. What other apps are you using and what for? Mainly Illustrator, Photoshop and aftereffects. Illustrator for vector paths, creating logo’s or creating packaging or visuals that need to be put on 3d models. Photoshop for textures, compositing and retouch. Aftereffects for animations, putting together all different parts (rendersequence, sounds, music, texts, logos, etc) Which learning resources you used and would recommend? In the very beginning, there weren’t that much tutorials online, so you had to figure it out yourself or look for help on different forum (such as core4d, previously c4dcafe). Most tutorials were screenshots and written text. Later, more and more video tutorials came along, which are very easy to follow and you can actually see what’s going on and what you’re missing or doing wrong. Whenever I need to learn or check something nowadays, I usually check Core4D, Cineversity, tutorials from GreyScaleGorilla, or when I can’t find it on there, general google searches. Do you think talent is overrated and can be offset with a lot of hard work? I don’t think talent is overrated. I think when you have talent, it comes a bit more natural and some things are a bit more ‘easy’. The thing with 3d is, it’s not just one thing. It’s a boatload of things. You can be talented in modelling, but really suck at texturing. Or you’re an average rigger, but you master simulations. Your drawing skills aren’t all that, but when that Xpresso or Python script editor open up, you’re on fire. Overall, I think everyone has something they're good at (or better at), and I think in 3d-land, you always have to work hard, talented or less talented. Your character work is stellar, what made you focus on them? Thanks! As a kid, I wanted to be a comicbook-artist, always drawing creatures and characters. Later it shifted to Illustrator, and after that, I really wanted to translate my thoughts and creativity of those characters in 3d, so I could animate them, look at them from all sides (which you can’t with 2d obviously) and put the expressions and humor in them I so clearly see in my head. I also admire Pixar / Dreamworks characters and animation, the details in them, the movements, the humor. When I watch animations, I don’t just watch them, I anaylise them (sometimes frame by frame) to try and learn new things or ways to improve myself. Your best advice for newcomers, tips or tricks to pick up? Have fun, don’t take it too seriously and practice, practice, practice. Give it your own twist, don’t just copy something blindly, and don’t stop learning new ways or techniques! Where do you see yourself in 5 years? I really hope I can continue doing what I’m doing now, making fun and friendly characters to brighten someones day or to put a smile on someones face. Thoughts on AI? It’s a bit frightening, hence the answer above.. I hope I can continue doing my job til I retire. I probably keep doing 3d even when I’m retired though. But yeah, as many other artists, I’m worried about this. AI as a tool to help the artist is great, but AI taking over would be lame. Lately there are more and more examples of AI that I receive in briefings, but they’re only used to show ‘something like this’ or an overall moodboard / look&feel. Fortunately, clients can be very tricky and very unclear as to what they want exactly or it’s the oposite: super-extremely specific and detailed. It’s part of my job to assist them in the whole process of creating the perfect character or visual for them, and advise them where I can. Top 3 wishes for C4d I don’t have any wishes actually, I’m very happy with all the tools available right now and I don’t have any problems making the things I want / have to make. If you could send a message for Maxon, what would you say? A big thanks. It’s a marvelous piece of software which I love to work with and not a week goes by where I find something new which I haven’t seen before (or found out about) after all these years. I think it’s amazing people can create software like this, have all the options you can possibly imagine, making it possible for people like me to create art and have the ability to do what I love to do most. Message for Core4D? Also a HUGE thanks. For all the talks, insights, tips, tricks, questions, answers, tutorials, models, contests. I wouldn’t be the artist I am today without the people, help and knowledge found on Core4D. If people want to contact you? They can, of course! I’m just an email, phonecall or whatsapp away https://www.kingcoma.com phone +32 479 43 61 82 email: info@kingcoma.com Thank you very much for your time and all the best in future endeavours!
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Dear members We are introducing new section where we will interview industry professionals, artists, programmers and various interesting individuals across the board. Understanding what motivates and drives someone, gaining insight into minds, methods and approaches that are used, tips, tricks and plethora of valuable information in particular field of interest will make this series very interesting. Already we have couple of interviews in pipeline and some are with very elusive individuals which usually never go public but they agreed to do it for CORE4D : ) We will not shy away from asking any question, even if the subject is provocative or controversial. Stay tuned, first interview will be available shortly!
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Hellou everyone Due to donation of one community member who wishes to stay anonymus we are able to make primitive packs free for registered members. Member used them in daily work and wanted whole community to benefit from them. We sincirely thank the member in question, this will help running and maintaining the community. Grab them here! and We also like to thank multiple members who are reporting spam and crap posts on daily basis. Unfortunately, this is a result of heavy increase in malicious activity against our community and things sometimes get through. We are working constantly in background to keep things in check. have fun browsing! P.S. Anyone willing to make a similar contribution (known or anonymus) can contact either @Igoror @Corebot, we are open for any ideas
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Maybe it's time to open the forum again and bring back the ads?
Corebot replied to No One's topic in Discussions
Forum is not hacked 🙂 There is significant effort behind the scenes to stop spammers and various attacks. this happens on daily basis and requires resources. it also shows you why it is impossible to run the forum for free and major part of the membership fee goes into data protection. We have full protection on our dedicated server, active spam defense via forum software and backend has real humans taking care of things. this does not mean sometimes some post wont get through but this is known issue with forum software which following patch should resolve. our up time and consistency is on really high level - have fun everyone -
Fee is the same for users that registered before April.1.2023, there is no change, meaning 5 eur| 6 months. For new users it is 5 eur | 3 months. We have to finance dedicated server with high bandwidth and support plus forum software, addons, spam defense and backend. we are actively searching for new sponsorship to remove this and open up the community
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Looks promising. They are trying to make system programming easier, essentially C level access with python ease of use - difficult task
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sorry everyone this seems to be abug in forum software, we are looking around this. If you are registered member you can simply disregard this message
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Maybe it's time to open the forum again and bring back the ads?
Corebot replied to No One's topic in Discussions
They won't be deleted but their rights will be reduced. There is huge amount off limited members and we need to prune that in database to make the site faster. there is more than 50000 limited members -
CORE 4D PRIMITIVES 2.0 - PARAMETRIC SURFACES FOR C4D - FREE PLUGIN!
Corebot replied to Corebot's topic in CORE 4D Plugins
Hi Christoph 1 Open Asset browser 2 From Create menu select 'Import Assets' 3 Locate the zip file and import - New category called 'CORE4D' will be made in asset browser with all the primitives within -
Want to learn some nodes? Dive into this unique training which covers all the novelties in the nodes system for R25. Nodes? Capsules? Assets? Parser? Tessellation? If these terms are confusing and sound odd, then this volume will get you up to speed. Understand the concepts and techniques needed to use node sytem efficiently and to your advantage. Lesson outline 1. Intro_and_requirements 2. Capsules 03_Geometry_Caching 04_Database_parser 05_New_Nodes_And_Assets 06_Spline_Primitives 07_Spline_Assembler 08_Spline_Length 09_Spline_Property_Interpolate 10_Spline_Type 11_Evaluate_Spline 12_Tessellation 13_Spline_Primitive_Group 14_Line_To_Mesh 15_Formula_Spline 16_Data_Visualizer 17_Delete_Segment 18_Multitrace 19_Curl_Spline 20_Typewritter Duration 135 mins https://www.core4d.com/ipb/store/product/45-introduction-to-r25-nodes/ Note: Link will work only for registered members
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Hi all We are proudly presenting our second plugin based on wonderful new nodes technology for creation of parametric surfaces CORE 4D primitives 2.0 https://www.core4d.com/ipb/store/product/44-core-primitives-20/ Some things are impossible to model correctly. Expand your primitives with these premium parametric surfaces based on pure mathematics. Fully adjustable, fast, seamlessly integrated as capsule or node they are fully compatible with Cinema 4D in every respect Package contains following 12 primitives: * Menger sponge * Mosley snowflake * Fermat spiral * Archimedean spiral * Hyperbolic spiral * Tan spiral * Koch curve * Dini surface * Braided torus * Umbrella surface * Sierpinski triangle * Taubin heart Requirements: Cinema version 2023+ is required Here they are in action
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You can edit the node network and use another object. for scaling that would include calculating the size of the object based on polygon area which can be made with scene nodes
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Voxelizer is plugin for generation of voxelized surfaces. It support Primitives, Polygon objects and splines including randomization, colorization and filling modes. Adjustable, seamlessly integrated as capsule or node it is fully compatible with Cinema 4D. Parameters * Voxel size * Fill * Modes: Volume, Surface, Spline * Fill mode: Block, In, Out, Left to Right, Right to Left * Radius, sampling radius, Thickness * Randomization, amount, seed * Colorization Price: Free https://www.core4d.com/ipb/store/product/43-core-voxelizer/ Requirements: Cinema version 2023+ is required