keppn

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! 😄

At this rate, we'll have only one or two megacorps left in September... o_O

Honestly, I begin to feel really uncomfortable with the whole industry-situation. I am the master of my tools, not their puppet. The way things are going ... everyone just seems keen to suck the life out of the art. I'm seriously looking back to pencil and paper 😕

Yep, that's the model I was referring to. "if it's been long enough" might not have been the clearest wording 🙂

I love Redshift; I like the dev-team's transparency and openness. They should have my money -- it's a good product with good support. But -- and this is crucial -- I want to pay on my terms, and I want to be able to access my stuff at all times. An ongoing subscription feels just extortionate. It's so easy to solve everything -- let me rent the software; if it's long enough, let me exit my subscription with a perpetual license (that no longer gets updates). It should be the same for C4D (and Adobe and all the likes). They way it is -- just robbers sitting on my files. The way it coud be: A fair model that respects my investments and honors me as a customer.

While not strictly for models, these might also be useful: https://flippednormals.com/ https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/game-dev https://discover.gumroad.com/?query=C4d https://quixel.com/megascans/

I just finished a Redshift-Ocean-shader, that might work well your plugins (and xpOcean): Redshift OceanShader - Materials - Core 4D Community

oookay, now the sneak peeks officially have arrived in "whoa"-country: INSYDIUM LTD | Coming Soon The xpBullet-Preview looks really nice! Of course, performance is key with a feature like this, so let's hope that the hype-finale will be "GPU everything!" All in all, the sum of the sneek peaks already amounts to quite an impressive update.

Thank you Srek, that sums it up really well. I think opening up development for feedback is really smart. Personally, I hope C4Ds revamp will bring me (in broad strokes): Performance The more artistic decisions per hour, the better. Ease of use With more performance under the hood, please consider presets that mimick real-world-behaviour for ... everything 🙂 A lot of times, I just want to pick a preset and be done. Apart from presets: You guys are UX masters, so just keep going. Complexity as needed Then again, the new UI and "realistic presets" should allow us to drill as deep as we like, whenever we need a really custom solution. A marketplace for pre-packaged Stuff It would be really cool if the new scene nodes would allow devs to easily build complex stuff that more artistically oriented people like me could buy from a central place. Preferably, a curated Store, or maybe even directly from the asset browser. Thanks 🙂

If you start at insydium.com, it says: x-Particles update coming soon! Click on that, and there are some sneakpeek-videos; mesh-tools currently being the first of those. So it really seems to be part of x-particles. Why it deviates from the nomenclature (xpmeshtool) - no clue. Also, the results in the video didn't really wow me. To be honest, I'm only waiting for the announcement of GPU-mode (promised for last year, I think?).

I'm holding my breath for an announcement of a massive, magical performance increase utilizing GPU... The feature previews are nice so far, but whatever I start in X-Particles, soon ends in a cache-fest 🙂