keppn

The great @everfreshonce gave me this advice for working with xrefs, and it has never failed me: " use xrefs. no files get ultimatively broken by them, if so it’s easily fixable. but you can avoid that trouble all together, if you obey the follwing rules: never ever tick the hierarchy tickbox in the xrefs options, and don’t mess with the hierarchy in your xrefs. only make hierarchy canges in the master file that gets referenced. untick the “relative file path” tickbox in the xrefs options in the file tab right from the get go. there’s a bug with relative file paths in xrefs, resulting in everything gets greyed out (easily fixable though by cutting the xref out and pasting it in again), but still, other weird things also can happen with relative paths, so better just use absolute paths… since you are not working in a team it doesn’t matter anyways. be aware that material changes don’t get stored, so make your material adjustments alsoin the original file. that’s it, if you follow these rules xrefs are perfectly stable and reliable. i have used them in every production since 8 years, never had a single show stopper. and it saves you a LOT of trouble in bigger productions. " Thanks again, everfresh! And good luck, Davetwo! :)

I already expressed my great enthusiasm for the next release (based on Mat's insight here). Nonetheless, I hope for some specifics 😄 Best Redshift Integration of all DCCs It's the same roof, so C4D should have a premium RS integretion. Materials in the viewport. New node system with all functionality. Material previews rendering with IPR. OCIO-aware Picture Manager. A one-click "Render beauty + AOVs and export everything to After Effects and rebuild there automatically". Add RS Materials to the Content-Library-Assets. Make RS the standard renderer. Remove the UI deadspace in the IPR. Interactive help like in C4D. Redshift RT is still very early und very unstable, but it should become C4D's viewport, some day. Stability This is aimed at C4D, Redshift and mainly nVidia. A "wrong" nVdidia-Driver-Version can cause troubles without end. How to know the best driver for your config? Forum exchange, try and error. Luckily, there are some really stable driver+software-combinations everytime I had to jump these hoops, but the journey is *SO* painful. Bugs This was the only new feature of R25 😄 Come on now, really Maxon, up your QA-game! Also, there should be *much* longer bugfixing-support for owners of a perpetual license. Release cycle Honestly, I'd rather have only 1 big update per year. Less hassle updating stuff, finding working drivers etc. Maybe more time for QA on your side? So far, I can't see any benefit of the biannual release cycle, only that it apparantly forced you to do the fubar R25-release, needlessly so. Performance This is a broad field. I don't want to dive into details here, I want to express a broad wish. Currently, we are confined to rather small/medium scenes. 2 Characters, a landscape tile, some decoration and boom, you're already operating at the edge of C4D's performance envelope. Very quickly, work becomes about managing ressources, not making artistic decisions. And trying to hide the seams of the performance envelope all the time 😕 I wish we had some kind of streaming engine for geo. A unified simulation system. A unified cache system. A clear feedback system, that shows me what is computationally expensive and what isn't. I don't know, if the "core rewrite" adresses any of that, I just want to feel some realtime-magic in C4D. zBrush It has by far the best scultping "feel" of any app I tried. It's a mindblowingly good app, as demonstrated again and again by zBrush-artists. But, for the love of all UX/UI saints, zBrush sorely needs a complete UX/UI overhaul. That's one of Maxons strengths. zBrush-Artists defend the current UI, but Im quite sure that is a form of Stockholm syndrome. Maybe offer an "Easy Mode" alternative, here. A very strong "GoZ"-implementation is also obligatory here. My last point is not software related, but regarding communication. Once, an attempt has been made by Maxon towards more transparency. Anyone remember the three-and-a-half blog posts? 😄 Ok, now do that again, but thoroughly. Just do it like the Redshift team. Have a nice, active forum with Premium sections for paying customers. Talk with us about problems. Listen to our wishes, in a way that we know we are heard. Share at least a broad roadmap for the next releases. This is by far the biggest problem with Maxon and C4D. You guys are almost completely opaque, and that's a severely outdated mindset for a company that relies on the thriving and the goodwill of a community of communicators. And communicators we are, visual, textual, social. Talk to us, please! 🙂

Thank you, @HappyPolygon, really useful! 🙂

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I'm SUPER excited about S26, and only because of this one post: https://www.core4d.com/ipb/forums/topic/116497-what-is-an-r20-user-missing/?do=findComment&comment=745276

That video was just science fiction 🤯

The elephant in the room regarding landscapes in DCCs are the small tiles. It still a lot of work to convincingly fake a vast landscape with a cameraview to the horizon. My very first feature wish would be some sort of streaming engine as seen in games. My PS3 was capable of bigger landscapes than my 2022 PC with C4D 😕

I had a similar problem in S24, sometimes the coordinates wouldn't respond or just glitched in a funky way. For me, the following steps helped: - Copy objects to a new scene - Reset preferences - Rebuild UI layout and other settings from scratch - voilà, problem solved and never appeared again I hope it helps in your case, too!

Yeah, presumably the Aces-Tonemapping is applied in the end. Just to add onto Mike's post: I find working with Aces gives much better output most of the time. This color space allows to work with *much* brighter lights. The added energy gives more pleasing results, and thanks to the tonemapping, you rarely have to care about blown highlights. Color response also feels very natural. Everything is a bit more fiddly, but I think it's worth to grab a good Youtube-Tutorial and spend some time on the topic. It's very rewarding in the end.

With Fused, they have started a confusing mix of perpetual and subscription licenses. They should communicate extra clear and unambiguous down the road what's included and what not. The way it is now, it's more like ConFused 😄

I don't need a NURBS modeler right now, but it's always a delight to see the natural, hassle-free way of modeling that NURBS provide. Also, I reaaally enjoy the breed of new apps with a super-clean UI and well-thought-out workflow (like Embergen, for example). Judging from the videos, this is also a prime example of good UI/UX. For some people, this is not so important, but for me it really makes or breaks a software. Well done!

Nice to see progress. The preview-video has a strange effect on me, though. On the one hand, I'm excited about a lot more usable fluids, with more artistic decision per session. On the other hand, ocean-scale stuff still seems firmly out of X-Particles' reach. Yeah, talk about unrealistic expectations, but I like to hope for wonders... So, in sum, I'm kind of... middle-whelmed?

R26... is going to be great? I guess you can't say anything specific at this point, but maybe a hint of the broad direction where things are heading?

The dynamic placement tools introduced in S24 are reaaally useful to me. It saves a lot of time AND it's super fun to use. I wish 3D DCCs would adopt more tools that have this natural "real world"-feeling to them.

You just have to put in your love.

The "Volume Mesher" has this really elegant and simple solution of a "Cache-Layer". For me, this is much more tidy than to manually organize parametric and baked versions. I wish Maxon would implement this for every performance-eating object. Or, even better, on a layer-basis. Or, even betterer, just a big, shiny button "Just cache everything in here!"

Oh... well that's... totally not my cup of tea 🙂 While the animation is okayish, the look is just soulless.

Interesting list. I have no clue about the archviz-scene, yet I assumed Arnold would be a top engine here. Arnold's results just *look* so archvizzy 😅

Yeah, I'm guilty of wandering off, too, even far into the valley of photography or the jungle of traditional arts. Sometimes I wonder what would have been, should I have chosen a more narrow field of expertise. But then again, being more of a generalist sometimes unlocks synergistic bonus skill points 🙂 For example, it was really nice when renderers introduced classic photographic terms like aperture etc., because I hit that floor running 🙂 Aa-aand: Sometimes I just need a change and a fresh perspective, and jumping between disciplines gives me just that.

Chris is just an endless fountain of surprising techniques. The way he casually drops the hint, that you can funnel OM object color as userdata into a shader... why do I never think of such things! Just an amazing guy. I wonder how much time he spends in C4D per day 😄

What an accomplishment! Well done 🥳

Speaking of JangaFX's roadmap and Plans for Liquigen: There's no timeline for Liquigen There are no feature goals yet, they seem to be in the early phase of R&D They will focus on small-scale stuff first (splashes, etc.) So, maybe they posted the teaser a bit early 🙂

Not sure if OBJ works, but you can import Alembics and FBX, even animated ones. Objects can be set to emitters or colliders. Right now, there's a restriction to ONE object though, which is of course very limiting. But: I managed to export a simulated debris field with a floor as a single animated mesh in FBX-Format to Embergen; The Emission Node then allows to select which of the "sub-meshes" should emit and which not, and I could also set the floor as a collider via the collisions node. In same cases, that's enough of a workaround. It is somewhat of a hurdle though. Nick from JangaFX said, that multiple imported objects are targeted for the 2022 roadmap.

To science! 😄

Well, to be honest, I didn't have a point at all when starting the thread. Just an interesting tech preview 🙂 But it evolved quite naturally to the discussion of workflows and simulation solutions, so, why not continue? 🙂 It's always interesting to read different approaches and perspectives. Dave, for you the interoperability of simulation systems is a high priority, and also continous control without caching or baking steps. Totally valid point, I mean, you know best what kind of work you want to do and how you want to achieve it 🙂 For me, I welcome every development that allows for a more playful exploration of possibilities. Coming from traditional arts, I value immediate feedback and friendly UIs that hide the deep tech from me. It's still seldom, but realtime stuff sometimes even bestows upon me the "happy accident". So, it's nice that there are different solutions with different approaches available for different kind of artists. I didn't mean to bash X-Particles, it's still a great tool and I use it quite often for Particle work. What I honestly don't know at all: Can a plugin escape the performance frame set by the DCC? So, could GPU support really make a difference for X-Particles, if it needs to constantly talk to "old" parts of Cinema 4D? I surely do hope so! On the other hand, a fresh start with a very modern standalone app seems to grant a massive head start in terms of raw performance. (With the obvious disadvantages like caching, etc.) In the end, everyone needs to evaluate for himself and make his own decisions... and I enjoy talking about that kind of stuff a lot 🙂