keppn

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I found this helpful to understand Insydium's maintenance conditions:

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I have not much experience with Xpresso, so I can only add a very general idea to a different approach: Could you use an animated noise to offset the particle position? That could provide the flowing change between attraction and repulsion and it would be art-directable via the noise-settings. It should work somewhat similar to X-Particles Advection to a Explosia-sim.

Haha, yeah, MusicMaker is always plain fun 😄

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Chris Schmidt's tutorials are a delight to watch. Most of the times, I'll never actually use the techniques shown; but he has broadened my awareness to unusual solutions sooo much. Also, it's just plain fun to watch, because he's fast and witty and quite thorough in his explanations.

I couldn't go back to a version without the dynamic placement and scattering tools. For the stuff I do, those feature were like a Quad-Christmas 🥰

I'm totally with you, Flima. As long as you stay in Cinema4D, maybe add in a 3rd party renderer, it's all fine and dandy. As soon as you try to establish a workflow with plugins and other specialty apps, it's becoming really complex to manage all the bugs and versions. Add in the various licensing models and it's quickly becoming a project of it's own to handle all the software interoperability. Some examples? X-Particles had a bug that cached Motion-Blur in the OpenVDB-Mesher in a wrong way. Redshift then rendered motionblur incorrectly. The (confirmed) bug took Insydium almost two years to fix, so long that I had to renew maintenance only for this bug. Marvellous Designer has a (confirmed) bug with exported garments, that caused C4D to crash instantly at rendertime. This was such an exhausting bug hunt, I only solved it with the help of the great Redshift devs in their forum. I wrote enough about Signal under the "new" Greyscalegorilla and their customer-hostile update tactics. For a long time, I had severe stability issues under S24 and Redshift. These were only solved by reverting to a *specific* older nvidia driver. I didn't even try to update to the latest and newest driver, R25 and the asset-manager-lock-in?! Whaaaat... On and on the list goes, but you get the gist... All in all, it's really tough to keep OS, drivers, DCC, plugins and interoperability to other apps on a level, where I can actually get some work done. Also, this is not just case of "feelings" - a friend of mine is a musician, and he has to deal with the exact same challenges, only in another sector. So it has to be a general trend in software development – and it's really concerning. For now, I have a somewhat "golden" set in W10, C4D S24, nvidia 462.59 with working plugins. I decided to "notgrade" all of that 😄

It seems, they bought "only" the tool-developing part of weta. The FX studio and the Weta workshop are not involved in the deal.

w... what!? If anything, I would have thought that Weta would buy Unity! It seems like I totally mis-estimated their respective proportions 😅 Could turn out as a real power-move... we'll see...

The only downside to the bypass is, that you risk being excluded from future updates at some point. Here's the most thorough article to the topic by Ars Technica. Everything is explained in detail, and some edge cases are solved in their comments. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/10/how-to-upgrade-to-windows-11-whether-your-pc-is-supported-or-not/ Very good read, if you plan to update.

Yeah, but it *should be the OS's job to keep track of window states. That's the only way for a consistent experience. Microsoft tends to focus on the wrong aspects. A 3D Paint app? Come on guys, first make sure you have a flawless file- and window-management. I mean, it's windows. Execute on that! Graaah!

I only installed it on a Surface Go for test purposes. In case you're wondering: The "sweeping visual rejuvenation" is again just a thin layer on aeons of cruft. Start-menu, Taskbar, Settings and Explorer are somewhat new, but as always it takes just 2 clicks to get to Win2000-style menus. Or earlier. That's so... *sigh... I think, they have just given up on providing a modern, consistent user interface. I honestly envy my colleagues using macOS, just for the visual clarity and consistency of their OS. Even my Synology NAS's OS is cleaner than Microsofts flagship. Meeeh. Performance is surprisingly somewhat better than W10 on the small, underpowered tablet. I don't think you'll feel that on a maxed-out workstation, though. If you're thinking of updating for the styles, just don't do it. It's not worth the hassle at the moment.

From the description, it's hard to say where "Reactions" fits in with the competition? I hope, someone can share his or her experience!

I think that analysis is spot-on. I also think Maxon should open up communication with their users in a big way. Just talk to us. How is the revamp going, set some realistic expectations, collect wishes and feedback of your userbase. I guess, most, if not all flaming from the users comes from inbalanced hopes & expectations -- and Maxon continues to make a marketing-face chiseled in stone. "Everything going on as usual! Nothing to worry! Here's a big, great update!" Being so tight-lipped about the big rewrite just opens up so much space for speculation and worries. Yeah, sorry, that's not how to communicate with users, who all just wish the best for their software and are kept in a semi-informed marketing-bubble :<

Some thoughts about the new UI: -- The layout changes aren't that drastic as many people seem to make them. The palettes moved a bit, but in a logical way, that reduces mouse travel. -- The new icons fulfill a lot of ojective criteria for icons: they are discernible, consistent, readable in any scale and 'speak' very well. C4D has by far the best Icons of all apps I know, the new ones continue this. -- Color: Personally, I like the color theme, but it would be great if we had 3 nice presets for light, semi-dark-grey and dark background, plus 2 or 3 color-themes for the icons. Or a color-temperature-slider 😉 -- Reorganization: The menu-clean-up was reaaally needed and well done; now the rest of the UI feels on par. For me, that was a successful overhaul. -- Timing: UI/UX is made by a special team, so the Redesign likely did not take a lot of ressources away from developing the functional parts of the app. Which, sorry to say, makes the R25 update look even more thin 😕 It seems, the UI refresh was planned as a 'stopgap' to stretch time until something is ready in the developer's department... Nevertheless, it was well done, that's my point 🙂

The Asset Manager looked nice at first - but the fact it renames everything to conform to some internal structure means, it's essentially locking my stuff in. I couldn't get my stuff out the Asset manager in any reasonable way. And I learned the hard way never to trust my files any third party manager. Now that you removed the content manager (which I used a lot and left my stuff intact), I just can't follow you guys beyond S24. So for me R25 is just a complete no-show. Please, reconsider Asset Managers invasive lock-in 😞

Wow. That decision forces me to stay on S24. Maxon, please don't lock-in my files! 😕

soOoo... today's the day, hm? I can't help it, despite all and everything, I'm still excited for C4D-news 🙂 I hope, Redshift RT is going to be announced; and some real-life goodness coming from the new scene-node-architecture. Performaaance! Rawrrr! 😄