HappyPolygon

Intel has become the latest Corporate Patron of the Blender Development Fund, increasing its financial commitment to development of the open-source 3D software to at least €120,000/year. The news means that all of the major CPU and GPU manufacturers – AMD, Apple, Intel and Nvidia – are now members of the Blender Development Fund’s highest standard tier. Increasing financial support for Blender development year on year Intel first backed the Blender Development Fund in 2019, initially at the €12,000/year Corporate Silver level, increasing its financial commitment each year since then. Its new Corporate Patron status guarantees a contribution of at least €120,000/year, equivalent to the salaries of two full-time developers. At the time of writing, the fund provides over €1.8 million/year for development of Blender, far in excess of its original goal of covering the salaries of 20 core developers. The news also means that all of the major CPU and GPU manufacturers are highest-tier backers of Blender, Nvidia and AMD having become Corporate Patrons in 2019, with Apple following this year. http://www.cgchannel.com/2021/12/intel-becomes-latest-blender-corporate-patron/?fbclid=IwAR0NJfdkn2tgBBDw192Jktbx_lBjeJZ7-Ufo_aQncBUAdCMAWYRafnJbsLQ

VFX Breakdown from season 2

AMD has released the stable 1.0 build of the USD Hydra plugin for Blender The new plugin supersedes AMD’s ‘classic’ Radeon ProRender for Blender, although AMD says that the old plugin will continue to receive periodic bugfixes and updates to the latest Radeon ProRender SDK. Since the original beta release, the USD Hydra plugin has been updated to support Blender 3.0, which has itself now shipped, and now integrates with AMD’s new free online library of MaterialX materials. In addition, AMD has released an early public beta of Radeon ProRender for Maya – USD, the Maya counterpart to the USD Hydra plugin for Blender. The initial 0.1 release only supports viewport rendering. Licensing and system requirements AMD’s USD Hydra plugin for Blender is available free under an Apache 2.0 licence. The plugin is compatible with Blender 2.93+ running on Windows and Linux. Read more about the USD Hydra plugin for Blender on AMD’s GitHub repository Download AMD’s free USD Hydra plugin for Blender Over 290 PBR materials spanning a range of common real-world types AMD has launched the GPU Open MaterialX library, a new online library of free downloadable materials in the open-source MaterialX format. The firm describes the library as providing “ready-to-use PBR materials aimed at jumpstarting the creative process and rendering workflow for 3D graphic designers and game developers”. The library currently contains over 290 materials, including architectural staples like tiles, flooring, brick walls, plaster and concrete, plus metal, wood and fabrics. An open standard for rich material data supported in a growing range of renderers and DCC apps Originally developed by Lucasfilm and Industrial Light & Magic and open-sourced in 2017, MaterialX is intended to provide an open standard for exchanging rich material and look dev data between DCC apps. At the time of writing, the library contains 294 materials, grouped into common real-world categories including concrete, marble, metal, paint, plaster, rock and wood. There are also a range of ground, flooring and wall materials, including brick, tile and cobblestone. The materials are also available in themed collections, including urban exteriors, contemporary and historic interiors, and mountain and forest environments. Materials are provided in MaterialX .mtlx format, at a range of resolutions: the default resolution for AMD’s own materials is 8k and 16-bits-per-channel for texture maps. Users can also upload their own materials to the library, so the range of assets available should grow in time. System requirements and licence conditions The free materials in AMD’s GPU Open MaterialX library can be used in any application capable of loading .mtlx files. AMD’s own assets are provided under an Apache 2.0 licence. User-contributed materials must be made available via either a CC0 or MIT licence. You don’t need to register on the site to download files. Download free PBR materials from AMD’s GPUOpen MaterialX library

Unigine has uploaded this nice demoreel Download the free edition from here: https://unigine.com/

I don't recall C4D artists doing anything useful with Material nodes in general. Material nodes from third-party Renderers yes, but native no.

That's amazing Srek thank you for this.

Then I was tricked by naming conventions. I thought Displacements in C4D allowed movement along one axis only. I'm excited to try this on the Sub-polygon Displacement Channel and the Displacer Deformer. (Why did they remove the feature from the standard material editor then ?)

The Displacement is supposed to displace polygons only to +/-Y or other direction (but isn't used much for X and Z). I use Y to refer to the "Up" direction and Z for "Depth" but in C4D usually the Z is used to refer to the "away from" direction of a polygon... The ear picture is too small to see if there is an overhang of the lobe from the plane. And the asteroid picture is too small too to examine how you combine the xyz displacements. Anyway if a Displacement Material Node can do what the Vector Displacement node of Blender does, then that is great and I didn't know that. Is there a standard procedure to convert a mesh into an EXR map and use that in the Material node environment?

These kind of achievements was the reason that I suggested from Maxon to add the Vector Displacement Feature along with the Parallax Mapping years ago. Unfortunately the Vector Displacement lived a very short life in C4D (I think R14 to R15) due to incompatibilities with the Physical and ProRender. The Vector Displacement was introduced before the Node Material introduction. If those two ever met we would have the opportunity to reproduce some of the Blender examples. In a way i'm thankful for not having to deal with all that chaos a Vector Displacement node system would create. I get quite stressed when things get over complicated that even I can't remember why I did things the I way I did them some weeks before. I think the Vector Displacement system somehow still lives in C4D helping the Sculpting corner under the hood. I'd like to know by the Blender users in here if those Vector displacement examples we saw in those videos are quicker to render than their classic polygonal counterparts. And here's a more philosophical question: Is this pipeline worth the effort ? What are the advantages over the mainstream texturing and modeling procedures?

Did you use fields to restrict the luminance only to the center of the explosion ?

Thanks, I'll have a look at that.

There's one less node in the Blender node tree. What substitutes the Field Function in Blender ? I like the cube scene. At last, an original idea.

Very few nodes, interesting result

I had half the picture with this tool until recently. I don't use Redshift and didn't know how useful it could really be with it.

I totally understand that. It wasn't my intention to ruin the thread or change the topic. I just wanted to prevent any bias from new C4D users towards other applications with a node system. If you need that deleted PM me (or delete it yourself), no problem, it'll be like it never happened. I don't bother writing.

Is it possible to use a Selection node in the OM to select every Nth polygon ? I thought String Selections would support functions like rand() and mod() but was wrong.

As I've already mentioned here : Most of these can also be made natively in C4D without the use of a node system, for reasons I already analyzed. Having said that I will compare some Blender and Houdini scenes with C4D for C4D users that may not be too familiar with C4D or don't know how to reverse engineer a final image in terms of C4D tools. And I'm doing that only to debunk the "almighty Blender node system" for new C4D users. Of course some scenes are impossible with classic C4D tools and I'm going to note that, I'm not trying to glorify C4D, I just find that this thread might not do justice to the capabilities of some DCCs and get misunderstood by some readers leading them to overestimate the use of nodes. In my opinion anything related to Houdini is just going to be superior in terms of Nodes just because nodes is what Houdini is made of. It's like comparing a fish with a duck on how fast they can move only by their swimming capability. I hope Maxon doesn't interpret the node enthusiasm of users in the wrong way (as the preferred way of working and not considering practicality) and make everything node-dependent. OK here we go: 1) Cloner, Random Effector, Step Effector, Fields 2) Scattering Effect using Cloner, Fields using Vertex Maps, Push Apart Effector 3) XPresso for the springs (I guess this counts as nodes), Fields and Plain Effector for deforming the rail. XPresso could be omitted if a Pain Effector with a Field can scale the springs towards -Y when passing above them. 4) Cloner with animated instances and Delay/Time Effector, maybe some FFD Deformer to avoid physics simulation (requires a special setup), a Vertex Map can be used instead of the Delay Effector. I think this can also be done using Hairs instead of Cloner. 5) Looks like hair clamping available under the Hair Material. Can also be done using some attractive forces to guide hair to a single point. I don't think the final image cannot be done in C4D. But the tool being used to grow hair like this is not present in C4D (yet) 6) Field with Vetex Map and Grow effect. It's possible in C4D but a bit expensive to replicate due to the great number of polygons. It could be faked with a Sub-polygon Displacement texture but that should be done in an other app. Doing it as a static image is totally possible using Splines on Fields. But making the Splines have multiple Outlines spreading outwards parametrically is not possible yet (as far as I know). I have a hunch a Spline Outline tool is underway on the next release. 7) Hair, just because a non-experienced C4D user might think hairs can only be very thin non polygonal lines. 😎 oops, meant to type 8 ) This is exactly the reason why we needed nodes in C4D in the first place. Modeling this in C4D, totally doable, very easy. Making the "Wafer" effect is even easier with the current state of nodes in C4D. But making this whole setup with real-time drawing the boundaries of the structure and have the rest of the area grow foliage ... I have a strong feeling that this is not possible (yet). These kind of demonstrations make me wonder though... Why make such an elaborate node structure for one model ? Doesn't the client know the area of the construct yet ? Don't get me wrong, generative/evolutionary Architecture is a thing but C4D, Blender and Houdini are not CAD apps. A variety of similarly looking structures could be a time saver for game assets but I think that a tool like that is more suited to be natively used in the game engine itself. But making a movie with similarly looking buildings to populate a large area, yes, totally worth it. I just think this particular example does not sell the importance of nodes well, it's just the WOW factor. 9) I would say, hair with cloners, or splines and cloners BUT, I don't know how to make an instance spline or particular hair strand grow to a particular state using Fields or Effectors. MoSpline can grow splines the way depicted here but I don't think they work with Fields like this. Happy to discuss how some node scenes could be done in C4D with alternate methods because in this early stage of SceneNodes I find the comparison a bit trivial.

I think it's back online now. I had a similar thread about the online documentation.

I'm not 100% sure but I think this is exactly the kind of job a new programmer takes. That and code peer-review.(Of course I don't refer to some deep bug on some complex newly developed feature but a bug like the interface not responding or an object appearing inverted and such) @MighT could you share some insight ?

Some people may say that even that can make a lot of difference...

This is the 2019 annual economic report of Blender, https://download.blender.org/institute/2019_financial_report_v05.pdf As they say And these are the people working the magic behind it: https://www.blender.org/about/credits/ 151 programmers (for the 3.0). How many programmers does C4D have ? I don't think more than 20 (need citation). And there are still 14 open positions. By acquiring more assets from other companies Maxon gets experienced programmers something that is not easy at all. Add the pandemic to the equation and it's like searching for a needle in the hay. Even an junior programmer can save a senior a lot of time on fixing bugs so the senior can develop a new feature. Currently the main advantage of Blender is manpower.

7500 nodes and 7 8-hour-long sessions for a scene. Thanks but NO. Most videos about GeoNodes I've seen are totally feasible with already available tools from MoGraph. C4D has a totally different approach on Nodes than Blender. Nodes were introduced as a Procedural, Parametric and Generative editing tool to compensate for some non-parametric, non-procedural, non-generative commands of C4D. Nodes were never meant to be a modelling paradigm. You never model with nodes if you want one specific geometry (unless you don't have anything else to do with your life). C4Ds Object Manager already offers procedural and parametric capabilities it's in its nature. The problem is with some commands that are not Procedural, Parametric or Generative. Best examples the Extrude and Delete commands that when incarnated as a nodes offered so much parametric modeling potential. An other reason why SceneNodes had to be invented was the fact that the ObjectManager was getting too complicated with seemingly orphan Fields and other kind of objects that were simply reference-linked to effectors and generators (of course this is an issue that has to do with how the user decides to deal with his mess). SceneNodes offer better visual relations between said operations with less clutter in the OM. Better than OM, SceneNodes offer the capability to fork the same operation to more than one object regardless where it lies in the hierarchy. The main moto of C4D is still intuitiveness and high-level geometry manipulation with minimum effort. They just decided to take things from the bottom-up and build the system with really basic nodes. Judging from the evolution of SceneNodes from R23 to R25 I can hope for further simplification of the node ecosystem, more powerful/advanced nodes (there are many operations like DualMesh), advanced information exchange with the OM and some mirroring of node parameters to their command and generator counterparts (for example the Trefoil and Spiral distributions to the Cloner). The way I see it, it's already possible to build node-trees that copy many of the expensive plugins out there. The problem is that there has to be some familiarity of certain aspects of node information exchange and conversion. Hopefully in the near future the end user will not have to worry about what type of data flows between nodes, they will be intelligent enough to process only what makes sense on their operation context and ignore/pass everything else. I find this a worthy innovation to make C4D a bit more competitive.

I think apps like these can help a lot in Concept Design

Most of the bugs concerned Exchange and Scene Nodes. If you take those out the number of bugs doesn't differ much from other updates. Importing new formats was always buggy. SceneNodes are too complicated. It's virtually impossible not to have bugs. And since it's a relatively new feature and has undergone overall changes it's expected to be that buggy. It's a good thing they find those bugs because it means people use these tools a lot.

NVIDIA Canvas is a painting application that uses AI to generate landscape images from simple brush strokes. This enables artists to rapidly ideate, a daunting task at the beginning of a project when faced with a blank canvas. Canvas is for artists who need to conceptualize landscapes for their projects. For example, Concept artists can rapidly explore new ideas Archviz designers can quickly draft backdrops and environments for their buildings Creators can rapidly paint a landscape rather than searching hours for the perfect stock photo Moreover, Canvas is accessible so that any RTX user who wants to draw amazing landscapes, either for work or play, can do so with simple brush strokes and the power of AI. What are the requirements to run NVIDIA Canvas? NVIDIA GPUs: GeForce RTX, NVIDIA RTX, Quadro RTX, TITAN RTX NVIDIA Driver: 460.89 or later, NVIDIA Studio Drivers are recommended. Windows 10 2004 or later Input: Mouse and keyboard Optional: touch screen Optional: tablet and stylus (e.g., Wacom Cintiq or Intuos Pro) https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/studio/canvas/ And an Update