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Ars Technica has one of the most civilized and rewarding communities, and their exchange happens in the open comments section of articles. They have a simple, but effective mechanic in place: + Posts can be upvoted. Upon reaching a certain amount of upvotes, the posts get additional stickers to stand out more - Posts can be downvoted. Upon accumulating a certain amount of downvotes, the post is collapsed into a single line that reads "Downvoted heavily. Click to read anyway" This mechanic is effective to extinguish single flaming posts, without censoring stuff or completely blacklist users. Of course it can work only in a healthy community - but this, we have 🙂

I usually work with lots of layers to manage viewport performance - most of the time, the biggest part of the scene is turned off completely via layers. In this use-case, it's rather cumbersome to edit and manage materials, because I don't want to touch the layers at all - they should stay off, but I need to activate them, just to get to my materials. Material folders would be a very welcome addition for me!

Nothing is a 5 min-task in production quality, regardless of software.

Thanks for the examples! The ropes are quite impressive. The cloth not sooo much - very responsive and art-directable, but all simulation results I've seen so far (including this one) are more in the 'cartooney league'. I'd love to see something like this Marvelous example done in the new Cloth sim. (Sadly, I can't try it myself, since I get stuck in viewport freezes very soon)

Finally I was able to spend a little time with S26. Here's my unstructured collection of very early impressions. Everything compared to S24, since I slept over R25 🙂 Quicker Startup S26 is a lot quicker to start than S24. Could be plugin-related, nonetheless: cool. New theme It's okay-ish. I took only 2 hours to get used to it. I get the style they are going for, but I found the old Icons hat better legibility and better color separation. Renderview still wastes a whole bar of empty space when docked. Overall: = Z-Remesher This is so friggin' cool. The algorithm is fantastic, and it can be used in a procedural way, like Chris showed in his video. I see so many situations where this allows for faster & cleaner workflow Overall: ++ Modelling-Tools I'm no big modeller, but I swear, there's a new tool for every problem I once had and could only solve by pain 😄 I especially like: There's not a ton of cryptic options per tool, they work pretty much as expected. Very artist-friendly. Overall: ++ Task-Manager Very nice. I docked the full thing in my layout to always see what's going on. There's room for a lot more stuff though that could be displayed here. Sadly, it doesn't solve the problem where you could still lock up C4D accidentally by input mistake ( like, 1000 clones of something heavy). I hope, one day one of my cores will be reserved just to "Esc out" of a lock-situation. Overall: + (but with looots of headroom) Simulation I only played around with a basic cloth sim. The settings are much more managable and intuitive. Performance is ok, but as soon as you move to "Marvelous"-territory, resolution-wise, you basically get the same performance as Marvelous (like 1 fps for something really dense). Interaction with all the known tools like wind, etc. is very nice. I do have some major technical problems with the simulation, though: I get the dreaded 'viewport-freeze' quite often, Could be an nvidia-driver-Problem. Sidenote: In the light of the new, particle-based and GPU-assisted Unified simulation, it's no wonder Maxon doesn't buy Insydium. Of course they have a lot of catch-up to do, but the foundation of the new sim framework feels much more clean and solid. Overall: ? (More testing needed) Reshift integration RS Objects: This was so confusing at first 😄 But it's actually quite sensible: Change to RS in the render settings, and the RS stuff replaces the regular one. It took me a while to find the RS Volume object for example, but of course it's in the Volume menu now, where it belongs. Node materials: This is quite a change from the shadergraph, but I think I like the Nodes a lot more. No more fiddling connections! Node Previews! And the best of all: A proper viewport preview! The last one makes a much bigger difference than I anticipated. Very cool 🙂 Overall: ++ Redshift XPU That got me so excited. Sadly, with my test scenes, I get around the same rendertime as with GPU only. I'm not even sure it uses the CPU at all, as I can't start a CPU-only render with Optix Denoiser enabled. This was the biggest surprise in the release btw, after the announcement I thought: Ya, ok, this will take 3+ years. Overall: = (I hope they can turn it into a XPU performance-plus in the future) Redshift 3.5 I like the new Standard Material a lot! Way easier to quickly set up a good material, but with all the options still there. Lot of quality improvements in there! RT is still unusable on my machine, I wish they left that a year longer in development. Four decimals precision! (Actually a C4D-feature) This is literally a small change, but what a pain-point that was in Redshift! Yay 😄 The solid viewport representation is the biggest thing for me, personally. Everything feels much more coherent now! Overall: ++ Maxon One I don't have Maxon One (only C4D+RS), but I feel the value of the big package really improves. I loathe zBrushs UI/UX, but it's so powerful. One day, I'll just have to bite the bullet and learn that thing. Big plus included without price hike. Nice! VFX Real Lens Flares looks really good! There's a real lack for a Hi-End-Plugin like this one. Overall: + (getting tempted to upgrade 😄 ) Quirks Redshift Volume objects still have a much too big point size in the viewport The Asset Browser/Content-Library-Move still stings hard. At least performance got better. That's that. Looking forward to hear from your experiences!

Chris Schmidt's S26 presentation is amazing. I think he can talk quicker than I can think 😄 It's thorough, playful, fast and exciting, very well done! The update itself is so packed with useful additions, that it makes me really wonder about Maxon's communication strategy around the time of R25. Why, o why didn't they just openly communicate: "Sorry guys, took us a little longer, we were busy working around Covid. No R25 at this point, but S26 will be amazing. New modelling, rendering, simulation stuff! Thanks for your patience!" The new UI would also be a more complete experience at this point and would have evaded a lot of frustration from the user base. Ok, whatever, on to a bright new future now! Edit: Ah, I forgot to add a question: Has anyone seen a more complex example of the new cloth simulation? As in, comparable to a Marvelous sim?

Also great! Especcially when dealing with Redshift Volumes -- three digits often are not enough.

This is a great addition! I always found C4D lacking in user feedback, I hope this feature makes it more clear whats happening under the hood!

Man, this is shaping up to become a really good update! I'm looking forward to the full release notes and Chris Schmidt's uncomparable deep dive! 🙂

I think I'll just pass out from happiness. So glad I didn't buy another overpriced GPU!

Wait... Does that mean Redshift GPU + CPU simultaneously?! I've got some idling 63 cores lying around that I would love to get to work!

Aye, looks great indeed! I don't need the plugin right now – but maybe a day comes when I need some assets juggled really good? Then it will be good to know a professional juggler 😄

This is realtime from Embergen's viewport:

I'd recommend Embergen instead. It's not integrated as a plugin, so you have to do Extra-Steps for import/export and setting up a Redshift volume material. But - it's a real-time tool. And I can't overstate it: Having realtime-feedback is just fantastic when dealing with simulations. It allows you to make a ton of artistic decisions per session, and it's plain fun. With other tools, I found simulations to become either really painful (waiting... waiting...) or I did settle for a not-optimal-result because I lost patience. Embergen has a free trial (14 days) and some really good tutorials, so it's easy to evaluate.

When I saw David in person, I was just awestruck. Photos simply can't convey the sense of scale and perfect anatomy. It's a miracle.

You could also replace the lights with geometry with an emissive material?

Interesting take! I didn't think about the strategy "own the next big thing by being the major player providing the tools". That would make nvidia a powerful middleman indeed. At some time, I'm going to collect some first-hand experience. The tech is fascinating, and the strategy is worth following (even if only to have a well-formed, grounded opinion on the topic).

That was actually funny 😂

@IcecavemanI think you're mixing up Metaverse and Omniverse? One is Zuckerbergs feverdream, the other is a collaborative Workflow-Solution. Daniel explained the latter really well to me here. I had no clue 🙂 https://www.core4d.com/ipb/forums/topic/116719-overview-of-the-latest-nvidia-omniverse/?do=findComment&comment=746820

@Daniel SeebacherThanks a lot, that is a premium explanation post! 👍

I spent a little time with Taiao this morning. My very preliminary finding: Good: It's easy to use, quite self-explanatory Presets for trees and plants included Forces (like wind) apply to whole tree/plant Quick results Not so good: Lots of fiddling needed to get from quick result to good result No PBR-materials included Wind on a tree? -> Welcome to 1 fps-country. Forces can't be cached My personal summary: Wind & Forces where the main appeal to me. Otherwise I could just use canned assets with much higher quality and much less time to setup. Performance is typical of Insydium's tools, though. Ok in the beginning, but it quickly becomes really painful. I don't think I'm going to use it anytime soon...

This stuff is so meta 😅 Could anybody explain to me what is happening here, in broad terms? Are we seeing the beginning of a multiplayer "DCC of DCCs"? Also, seeing all the problems *within* single tools, I just can't imagine any overarching tech working without major, major headaches.

Could be Windows, but these days, every time my computer hiccups, I throw an evil eye towards nVidias GPU driver. QA should be the largest department in every software house, but they forced it upon us users as a hobby 😄

"m/f/d" = male / female / diverse It's required wording for employers in germany and states gender equality.

To add from my experiences with takes: It's very well suited to work with materials, that should propagate or change through different variations of a scene You can build super lean, super smart scene files, that cut your time by factor 10. I have set up a scene with 28 hi-res product scans in several environments, multiple camera angles, material variations and different screen rations. The team receiving this assets was completely flabbergasted how I could achieve this in the given timeframe. You can also build completely messed up scenes where you simple can't untangle the overrides anymore. As in: "Better start from scratch"-spaghetti-tangled. The difference is: You need to stay super organized in complex take-scene-files, and: Pay attention! If you make just a little misstep somewhere: Clean it up immediately, it has the seed of evil spaghetti in it 🙂 A life-saving feature: You can copy a take to a new document at every time. So there's always an exit-strategy out of takes-land. Chester's advice is also really good. Before tackling a huge job, start small first.