HappyPolygon

What do you think ?

Magix, Ashampoo and Affinity suite has interesting discounts. Ashampoo has some small video editing apps Magix has MusicMaker (irrelevant but I like it) and some video editing/compositing software. Affinity has the well known Designer, Photo and Publisher. These are cool and cheap apps for anyone who wants to composite renders from C4D or use 2D vector designs to import in C4D. (still looking for laptop so don't leave out hardware related deals 😉)

If you mean doing this : It's possible. BUT the fewer the polygons the better. Using it with two curved surfaces is too bugged . Use the hidden "I" selection inside the Bevel Deformer. For more complicated shapes I prefer using the Volume Builder inside a Remesh.

I am trying to make some particles move as if they are floating under tranquil water. So i want them to move in a way that is not random per particle but essentially the force will move them in a way that some will move close to each other and back to their original position forming dense and sparse areas. This kind of movement is usually seen on the surface of the water where many objects are floating and slightly move by the waves. But I want to see it in 3D rather in 2D. So I made the below Xpresso rig and plugged a FieldForce in the PForceObject. I also posistioned a Sphere at the center of the FieldForce in order to spawn my random particles. The particles themselves have no velocity, I want them to be moved only by the VectorField of the FieldForce. The problem is that the PVolumePosition and PSurfacePosition Nodes try to constantly pin the particles on/in their initial spawn positions and don't let the FiledForce move them. Some of the particles even glitch between two close position indicating that the node and FieldForce compete for the same particle. Any advice ? (R23) test.c4d

I think the openness of Blender is what drives today's CGI advancements. All universities with fields that involve CG have their hands on it. They tinker with it's code and implement all kinds of theories and experimental algorithms on top of it's core. The reason it gets improved fast is because the community that develops it is bigger than any company. Students, professors and scientists contribute to it constantly.

That's weird 🤔, I didn't know they did that. Maybe I overflowed them with suggestions last time. 😆 Could be for the same reason they put this on their support page... Let's hope that all this has only to do with the pandemic and will soon revert to a previous state. 🖖

Apart from Xparticles, ' Marvelous Designer, Substance Painter, Zbrush and Rizom UV are also being used by non C4D users like Maya, Blender, 3DsMAX, Houdini, Lightwave 3D, Daz Studio, iClone, Unity, UE etc. There is no "one DCC to rule them all". And all those names do not belong to plugins. They are stand-alone independent applications that some of them have developed bridges with C4D (and other DCCs) for faster exchange of data. Maya 1998, Blender 1994 , 3DsMAX 1996, Houdini 1996, Lightwave 3D 1990, Daz Studio 2005, UE 1998. Most of them are more than 20 years old. Users of those applications also complain about those products. They complain about the UI/UX of blender, for the crappy 3DsMAX workflow, for Lightwave 3D being dead, for Daz Studio having an exploiting online market, Houdini having a steep learning curve etc... And they should. Why shout out what they are planning ? So others can steal their ideas and try to develop them faster ? What a company is up to is no-ones else's business. This is an oxymoron. What are the bare minimum set of features if the creative idea has high standards ? The bare minimum set of features exist since version 1. Art, like Science, was always limited by the availability of tools. And being either 2021 or 1989 or 2051 does not justify any personal expectations. You can have the latest ArtRage version and still not be able to paint a Bob Ross painting. That man had the bare minimum set of features to create captivating landscapes in a 20' episode. You could have Gaia, WorldMachine, Vue, SpeedTree and Forester and still not achieve what you have in mind. There were a ton of things I thought were impossible with C4D but saw people overcome problems using their ingenuity. In 2021 we don't have artists with the same sense the world had in 1800's. Now the artist is also a technician. He has to have a deeper knowledge of the tools he uses in order to use them in their full potential. Hacking a tool to use it in an unusual way is also part of the artist's creative spirit. Correct.

Would you like to share what kind of improvements regarding Dynamics you'd like to see ?

All my assumptions are based on observations. My conclusions are (I think) safe based on actions Maxon already took on the timescale from 2008 till now. We, as users, will never know how long it took for Maxon's developers to study a topic, model it to fit inside the C4D environment and finally implement it. Dynamics and Particles were all introduced as modules in a certain release (I think R8, I missed the news on R7 so correct me if I'm wrong). Cloth dynamics (I think) came with R9. R9 was introduced with a bunch of modules which for me is a surprise. They must have been preparing all these features for years to be ready for our hands. So time of development is one factor. The other factor is "where is this ship heading to ?". So each module had its own development team, people that had accumulated a certain knowledge on a very specific topic. These teams kept optimizing the already existing foundations up to the time the Modules strategy stopped existing (I think R14 or R16) with the introduction of Production Specific Packs. I think that this change was a reflection of what was happening all over that time (economic turbulence, rise of other competitive DCCs, people getting in and out of the company etc). I think that was the time when Maxon decided they had reached a safe point of feature development where they could now focus on more technical things like keeping up with hardware advancements and rewriting their Core which kept them back from improving other things. The last couple of years aren't the best years to be around... The pandemic was a big crash, not only for Maxon, but some where hurt big and others not. I think the pandemic is well reflected on the S24 - R25. C4D had lost the speed on keeping up with things years before due to factors unknown to us (I think it was key-employees). It seems the current "captain" of the ship is trying to take a place in the top 3 using shortcuts and safe decisions. The acquisition of other assets starting with Redshift is a safe shortcut since ProRender and Material Nodes didn't seem to have the anticipated success. And instead of investing more time and money on trying to fit new features for different Rendering Frameworks (Standard, Physical, Pro, Nodes) they decided to buy a new one. (Let's admit it, Rendering had suffered a lot in C4D, from PyroClusters, to Vector Parallax to Physical Sky and lastly Material Nodes, some deprecated some not working and some not having an audience). If you take a good look at the 2 Minutes Papers channel you will see vastly different approaches on solving liquid simulations. Some use only surface solvers, others adaptive sphere packing, others sparse matrices, others adaptive resolutions... some are good for large areas like oceans, others for medium scales like interactions between objects on the size of boats to toys and other for tiny scales like water droplet collisions and bubble surface tension. It's very risky to just pick one model over the other and invest time and money to it while there are 10 more to be announced the next 2 years. I think that's what happened back in R9, they gathered whatever paper was available at that time (they weren't many) and chose what seemed best for most user cases with as little computational burden possible. I think what kept Particles development behind was an adequate mesher. I don't know if C4Ds particle system is a FLIP based one (and if FLIP is opensource) but as it is it's fine. What is lacking is a descent mesher and MetaBalls are not adequate. To be honest back in 2009-2012 Maxon didn't even care showcasing projects involving only C4D on their promotional videos. RealFlow, Houdini and 3rd party renderers were all over the promotion scenes. Now we see AE and Houdini all the time in Maxon-hosted 3D Motion shows. There is no more aggressiveness over the CGI pie. Everyone got their portion of it and are happy with it. Now it's the era of collaboration. Plugins for importing/exporting between apps (AE/Houdini/ZBrush/ArchCAD) are more important because at the end of the day what really matters is the result. If a user works on multiple DCCs it means he knows the advantages and disadvantages of each and uses each of them only for their advantages throwing his project from one to the other like a ping-pong ball and as for the cost... the cost is proportional to the needs of the client. If the client wants AAA results with fire, smoke, crowd simulations etc the artist has to bill appropriately to cover his expenses to buy a bunch of licences in order to achieve that result. (A small deviation here - starting as a freelancer now is hard due to costs but it wasn't the same a decade ago, less demanding marketing, cheaper software and other factors made a more friendly environment, you could start with little and climb your way up having to afford only the upgrade costs). So, my bet is on AI because it's something new that others competitors are on the same level as C4D. It's better to try to win a new race rather one you've already lost. Yes, it does need "fresh blood" among the crew but the field of A.I. in graphics is thriving in the academic ecosystem right now. In the early days of AI few academics involved around it, now there is an AI course in every undergraduate IT program. On the other hand all other simulation areas are hard post-graduate level programs (if not doctorate). Nowadays (I think) it's easier to find AI specialists to work for you than finding people specializing in the Navier-stokes Equations.

My thought process involves a step where I have to make the devils advocate in most of my desires. In this case I believe there will be no Simulation enhancements to any areas (Cloth, Dynamics, Particles) FYI : When I say "Simulation enhancements" I don't mean extra tools like a new force field or an extra tag like a "Tension Vertex Map" but an integral enhancement at the core of the processing algorithm. For the past 5 or so years any advance to these fields wasn't done by adding a little extra to existing theoretical models and algorithms but with completely new ones. And believe it or not A.I. now is involved everywhere. The good old days of analytical computation are over. So every time we expect for a better Simulator we actually expect for a ground-up re-write of a complete system still compatible with every other part of C4D. It's like chopping down the tree trunk and expect the branches to float in place. Cloth simulations - There is Marvelous Designer and CLO3D that are both top of their class because they are specialized in cloth simulations and nothing else. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mrdkyv0yXxY Dynamics - Most 3D apps have a dynamics simulator. Especially game engines. This field forks to the areas of Rigid body dynamics, Plastic Collisions, Soft body dynamics, and Celestial motion. Of these the first three are of CGI interest with second the third being the most interesting to the scientific community with advances on better, faster and more accurate simulations involving collision deformations, stretch & tear and fracture. I think Houdini is the top rival in this area. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxzGraohijU Particles - This area involves Grain, Liquids and Gas interactions. All of these topics involve heavy math and intensive computations. On top of that each matter state involves a different mathematical approach the simulation. From 2010 to 2017 we where trying to perfect each area individually. Then more broad methods where used to include all three matter states in one simulation paradigm for solving interactions like fluids with sand and wind with liquids. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54YvCE8_7lM&list=PLujxSBD-JXgnnd16wIjedAcvfQcLw0IJI For simulations like these in CGI top contenders are Houdini, RealFlow, FumeFX and Xparticles. There is no reason for MAXON to compete with any of the above applications by integrating new simulation systems in C4D when they are already available. The only way to do this is to pioneer in the field and as I see it the only way is to employ the A.I. benefits, but assembling the right development team with the expertise on all those fields is too hard. To justify my money on A.I. have a look at these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMCYRCCqR5Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7bEUB8aLvM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F-WnarzkX8 Particle dynamics development is a special issue for Maxon since Xparticles somehow promotes C4D... And since there is no consent on either part acquiring the other the status will remain as is indefinitely. I think that Maxon in an attempt to please the majority of users wanting more particle power acquired Trapcode Particular the only downside is that this is not a stand-alone application but a AE plugin. The same could be true for Forger as the built-in sculpting system wasn't a worthy opponent of ZBrush. I think that in an attempt to please as many users (with different needs) as possible Maxon spread thin and subsequent versions of C4D got a bit "clumsy". For the same reason (I think) there will be no enhancements or development to these topics inside C4D: Rendering (they have the Redshift team working on it) Volumetric materials (same reason) Shaders (same reason) 3D Fractals (Arnold and Octane have done this already and still a rendering thing and not compatible to the existing model of C4D) MaterialX (too soon for development) Compositing (they have Red Giant and Magic Bullet) In my opinion Maxon did well abandoning particle simulations and Post Effects in favor for Trapcode and other AE solutions since the common development pipeline for VFX involves mostly "faking" these in 2D/2.5D compositing environments. It indeed does hurt me because I'm neither a fan of AE or ever used it but I understand that there will never be an All-in-One application and if it does, it won't be C4D. The only feature now competing with Houdini and Blender is the procedural modeling with Nodes. Other areas of improvement include enhancements of already existing tools and UI/UX that goes hand-in-hand with all others but the bigger piece of the pie goes to the Nodes development. One more thing, that I believe, can make C4D stand-out like it did with the introduction of Fields is the enhancement of Vertex Weight Maps in all areas. I've already sent them a lot of suggestions on that matter we only have to wait if the team will evaluate them worthy of implementation.

I never had the pleasure trying rBool. By the small preview I expect it only works with spheres though. RayTracing a pure sphere was always easy because it has nothing to do with polygons. I guess boolean operations with parametric objects (purely mathematically defined and not as polygon groups) is also easy. Recently a new method for modeling in a similar way was introduced called Signed Distance Fields but we are far from using it in modern 3D applications.

Answering my own questions here ... https://player.vimeo.com/video/643604501 The Geodesic Weight MeshOp allows you to create a vertex map based on a mesh and a set of input points defined in an array. Through the use of locators and the Geodesic map, you can adjust the intensity of operations applied to a mesh based on the size, distance, and position of the locators. Curve Winding Aligner MeshOp Tools like Curve Fill streamline creation of geometry. However, if a curve is inside of another curve, the two curves need to have related directions to fill the shape properly. The Curve Winding Aligner automates this process, ensuring that artists get the result they want without having to troubleshoot a scene.

Unity is to acquire six-time Oscar-winning VFX firm Weta Digital for $1.625 billion, including its engineering team, proprietary software, and in-house asset library. The firm intends to “put these world-class, exclusive VFX tools into the hands of millions of creators and artists around the world”, - Like if the Average Joe has the means to use those tools.... Find out more here

Thank you for sharing this Easter egg with us MIGHT. Unfortunately it does not work in R23

I'd like to know what Advanced Viewport Progressive Playblast , Geodesic Distance Modifier and Curve Winding Aligner are... Couldn't find any videos demonstrating them.

It's one of the least visited corners not only for C4D but of all applications. Older versions of C4D had credits for all contributors on a scrolling text. I find it unfair that we don't have the opportunity to witness the true number of people that involve in this wonderful tool. Frankly I never noticed before that C4D has been around since 1989. I thought it was a 2000's application.

To be honest, I just gave up with all those initials in Nvidia's models years ago. I thought it was a model series not a feature. I thought RTX standed for Real Time eXperience...

Why ? Are they not good value for money or does the RTX not perform as expected ? I thought RTX was just for better gaming experience. NVIDIA featured RTX only for their real-time reflections and nothing else. RS and Octane as far as I know are raytracing renderers...

Most good laptops i've encountered out there with the suggested RTX 3060, 3070, 3080 have 15,4"/15,6" display. My current 2015 480€ GeForce GT 720M Lenovo Thinkpad has a 17.3" display. I get the impression that once a 15.6" laptop drops into my hands will seem very small. But any search for a laptop with a 17" display returns a very spicy 1200+ price for me even with RTX 2060. Does the 15.6" feel adequate for C4D ? It makes me wonder why so many gaming laptops have 15.6" displays but if that is the reason why prices sky rocket so fast it makes sense. What really bothers me is that vendors don't provide anymore good laptops with HDD. Those 256/512 SSDs seem to me mediocre compared to the 1T HDDs we used to have. Yes, the speed is notably faster but hey, there was always some waiting time in computers and with the same money you can afford an HDD with double the capacity. I guess gamers don't care about where their 3 x80GB games will fit and are more concerned about loading times. So I came to realize that what really makes a good laptop unaffordable for me is not the GPU itself but the SSD+17" disp +VAT. I guess I'll have to wait for Black Friday discounts ... I wonder if GPU prices are related to all the fuss about not producing enough microchips...

Is it safe to look for a new laptop under the Gaming category for use in CGI ? And does it really matter if it supports RTX ? The professional laptops for graphics design are too expensive for my pocket.

Always record on a smaller monitor resolution (if it's meant to be informative) so it's easier for viewers to distinguish elements of the UI.

Thank you, I will try ScreentoGif and see where I missed the OBS frame reate settings.

How do youtubers record their speedpaints/speedmodeling ? Allowing a recording app to record on hours would require a lot of memory and HDD space which would burden a system running C4D further. So I assume there is some kind of app that either snapshots the desktop in regular intervals like most timelapse apps in smartphones or there is an option to snapshot the desktop upon clicks and keypressses or there is an option to record with very low framerate. None of those methods where available on any app I've met (including OBS)...

I was going for "cheapest possible for minimum requirements on GPU" but anything between 700-900 € will do.

Any recommendations for affordable laptops able to render the C4D R25 viewport ? My Lenovo's NVIDIA GeForce GT 720M renders it blanc 😥