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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 🙂

Oh, and by the way, I think an important point is forgotten in the whole price discussion: Changing to Blender is not free. I considered it too, but: - I would have to relearn a lifetime of working in 3D -> Hundreds or Thousands of unpaid hours. - I would have to convert my whole library of assets - I would need to cut myself loose from all my previous work (scenefiles, setups), that make my work very efficient. In the end, for me the switch would be a massive time investment, and at this point in life, time is my rarest ressource. So I decided to stay in familiar C4D-country and just deal with the price. Of course I'd prefer a lower cost, Indie-version, whatever, too. I hope your voices are heard by MAXON. I just wanted to add those thoughts to the commonly heard phrase "Well, Blender is free!"

Hey guys, I haven't read the whole thread, I guess there's a lot of controversy 😉 Feature-wise, I think MAXON is on a good track again. (The UV-Update was a godsend for example). S24 at first seemed a little ho-hum to me, but after using it the last days, my opinion turned completely: - The Placement-Tool is fantastic and will save me a ton of time, every day, in every project. - The Dynamic Placement Tool is super well done. At first it seemed kind of gimmicky, but have a look at Chris Schmidt's presentation. It's insanely useful. - The Scatter Tool seemed to be duplicate functionality at first; but it's very easy to use and: super performant! - The Asset Browser seemed to be unnecessary at first too; but after Chris' video I spend half a day to organize my stuff and it's wonderful, especially together with the placement tools. ( You gotta give it to MAXON - those features complement each other really well ) - Signs of better Redshift-integration are promising. New RS settings are well done. - I haven't used any of the animation features, but tweening looks like a very worthy addition - Scene Manager: I really won't dive into a half-baked tech demo; i just don't have the nerves for it. BUT! The new Stack-paradigm looks absolutely fantastic! A parametric workflow with the object manager's simplicity married to a node-editor's flexibility. Congratulation guys, I think you have a real winner on hand with this development. For me, it's a very well-thought out bundle of updates, especially for a .5 update. PS: MAXON should really have Chris Schmidt do the official feature presentation, it was sooo much better than the official video.

I know, it's a fundamental thing, but: Whenever you start something new (dynamics, cloth, materials, voronoi fracture...), you should be able to start from presets that mimic real-world behaviour. It's sooo tiring to fiddle a way from a basic setup to something convincing. Of course, there must be be freedom to explore every setup imaginable -- but I think, it's much easier from a user's perspective to start from "real world" and work to something abstract than the other way around...

Well, to be honest, I mostly want the DCCs and traditional render engines to up their game, especially for large-scale scenes like mentioned above. I'd like my viewport to Auto-LoD and stream terrain data and... be smarter. Workflows are fine for small to medium scale scenes, but going big is just a painful experience. Also, I really don't want to pour hundreds of hours relearning everything I know in Unreal. I watched some tutorials and the editor just seems so ... clumsy 😄 Maybe Redshift RT or U-Render will be my saviours? Exciting things seem to come from a lot of places... PS: Ah, I didn't know about the Mandalorian ditching UE... thanks for the update, I'll try to find some background info on that...

I'm aware of the limitations of realtime engines, but lately I'm getting more and more envious. Some examples? Make a nice looking, non-looping infinite ocean in a DCC. Super hard. Game Engines? 60fps, looking good. Make a huge landscape with clouds and atmospheric effects. In a DCC it's just very hard. Game engines? They Lod and stream to infinity, in 60 fps Make complex volumes and atmospheric setups in a DCC... rendertimes stop to a crawl. Gameengines happily fake away in 60 fps. I know, i know, it's mostly smoke and mirrors in game engines, but the results have gotten so good, that oftentimes it's more than good enough. If i could work in that fidelity with even 1 fps, it would be heaven. Also, big productions like 'The Mandalorian' begin to utilize Unreal; for now it's "only" for staging backdrops, but of course that will evolve with more computing power. I'm quite convinced that traditional renderengines will retreat to niche application, and there will be a massive change to realtime engines in a lot of 3D segments. I hope that C4D will be ready for that in time!

I made them 🙂 Here you go!unmute layers.tifmute layers.tif

This video here contains all the basic settings for a lively fire with X-Particles: Basically, balance out fuel rate, fuel buoancy and curl; add Explosia-Wind to your liking. Insydium also has a great content repository, that provides very well made scenes as a starting point for various scenarios.

I never had a proper look at Nitro Solo. Whoa, that plugin really seems to scratch every itch I have. Just to make sure: Nitro Solo provides the same performance gains as fully deactivated layers?

Open the Script Manager, copy and paste Cairyns code and save. Make two scripts, one for "mute" and one for "unmute". The Script manager also provides options to generate buttons, load icons, etc. It's quite self-explanatory once you find the manager 🙂 (In the german versions it's in the menu "Erweiterungen", that should be "plugins" internationally?)

Thanks for the hint, but from the video, I don't think LayerMaster is a full replacement for CV-LayerComps? I think it misses: - One button mute/unmute of layers - Saving and switching between several layer compositions LayerMaster looks interesting, but it does'nt seem to help with those two core needs...

Man, the Blender devs really don't fool around anymore. Nice updates, good for you Blender-users! I'm glad not to be a product manager of a paid dcc 🙂 I hope, the ones at MAXON continue to find ways to keep C4D relevant. Tough job, good luck! 🙂

Makes me wonder even more, why this functionality wasn't and isn't included by MAXON in the first place... Super strange, as normally they nail these things on first try.

Man, that works just beauuutifully. Thank you so much! 😄 Cairyn, would you mind, if I posted a link to this thread in the Cineversity-Forum-Thread mentioned above? Maybe that would help another soul or two :D

Woooow, thank you so much, Cairyn! Big heaps of appreciation for you! :) I will try that out tonight...

I'm desperately waiting for a R23-version of CV-LayerComps as well. Rick Barrett said in this thread, it needs some overhaul and bugfixing, but it's been almost half a year now 😞 https://www.cineversity.com/forums/viewthread/4256/ Cairyn, would you mind if I take your very generous offer? I have some heavy scenes, that are only operable with extensive layer-muting/unmuting. In the standard layer-manager, you need 8 clicks to fully mute and lock a layer, and another 8 clicks for unmuting. If I had a one-click-button to mute and lock a layer in R23, I could finally make the switch from S22...

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