Jeff H1

another crazy ass way to do it is to use Atom Array. This wouldn't require a wireframe node. Copy the mesh and throw it under an atom array. Use an emissive yellow material for the atom array and a blue material for the original mesh.

honestly you could do the same thing with any renderer, using their wireframe shader (or node). This is what CERBERA is talking about with the clones. (I forgot to change them to render instance) Quick test with Redshift, although I could also do the same thing in Octane and Arnold. The beauty of using cloned spheres on vertex is you can tweaks the size of the spheres. As you can see the further you get from the camera the less you'll notice them. Boosting their size because they are actual geometry makes it easier to art direct the look.

We can solo nodes but not disable them in the Node Editor for Redshift? It's pretty important for look dev to be able to toggle nodes on and off (disable). Octane has it in its editor. I remember it in Maya (Arnold). I tried the Node Editor itself with scene nodes and there wasn't anything either. In fact, right clicking on nodes I put down did nothing and eventually it locked the nodes into place where I couldn't move them and seemingly froze up the editor for a few seconds.

I've seen some in done in Houdini, which gives you even more capabilities than blender. Here's one quick one I just found.

it is true. I've been using RS a lot more lately with the node editor and the UX is still cumbersome compared to Octane's updated editor. I mean simple things like clicking on an input node dot, dragging it out and it gives you a list of possible inputs (with image texture at the top). Alt-dragging a node on a pipe and it inserts in the node into the flow. Even something simple as hovering over a pipe and it tells you what the connection is, or gives you options insert a node or break it. It's like butter....

done in shader.. https://3dtools.info/tilepro/

Also, Maxon is still holding on to OLD way of having a single material open at once in the node editor. It's extremely useful having the node editor be an open editor whereby multiple materials can be opened in the same editor at once if need be. Useful for linking textures across various materials, copy/pasting parameters between materials and working on lookdev for multiple materials for the same object all at once. just some examples.

yeah I wasn't thinking it through properly. I screwed around with a triangle polygon and threw it in 3 different matrix objects with different effectors and linear fields. I spent about 10 min on it.

I thought about that too. Also using a painted vertex map on the underlying geo to use as a scatter source for a cloner/matrix?

https://c4dcenter.com/portfolio/snowgen/ (bit pricy but it's a plugin) https://nitro4d.com/product/magic-snow-2/ (not sure if this one works anymore) Here's probably a good way to do it. The key will be the material. He also has a tutorial on how to make the material in Octane:

so we should trash our new.c4d files and let it rebuild a new one to make sure the 2023.1 features work properly?

I don't think they're pretending at all. Maya has been subscription for a while. This is just a cheaper subscription. Regarding Houdini Indie, Nuke Indie and the others. They too are offering a low (extremely low) cost of entry for their software. Of course they want continued revenue for such a price point considering their normal version is priced pretty high. I also don't think anyone is telling you that you should switch up your main software, only augment it with other software or plugins, especially around Black Friday when there are deals to be had. I'll pick up Houdini Indie again once I have time to dig back in. It won't replace C4D for me but it has some nice tools which are great for visualization.

Yeah I think I referenced a few great scripts in another Maya thread awhile ago. One of my go-to's for the longest time was malcom341's mega pack. it has just a little bit of everything in it: https://malcolm341.gumroad.com/l/cZvxZ? one I've love to find time to play with is GraphN (and Ecotope in Maya)

I still like Maya more than C4D modeling and the UV tools are more refined. Snapping is a dream compared to C4D. Blender has a lot of good addons which makes it easy to do hard surfacing modeling tasks but some of the techniques from the Blender Youtubers teaches really bad geometry flow. They would rather you destroy a model with a ton of booleans then render it on grey in the bad EEVEE renderer. On rare occasions they'll show you how to go about spending hours afterwards fixing your model, but forget about UVing that beast. Also, Blender is very hotkey heavy which can be cumbersome at the beginning but can be helpful in working quickly through some repetitive tasks, or tasks that SHOULD have hotkeys, like adding divisons to a bevel via the mouse wheel. Some things just makes sense. Also, many of those Blender modeling addons are cheap or free compared to ones in C4D which can run up to $99 (HB Modeling Bundle) and aren't updated as frequently as the Blender addons. I know that may trigger some devs here but I'm only referring to cost, especially when we have to pay for C4D and a render engine yearly. I haven't messed with modeling in Houdini but I think Igor has. I was using Blender for a while but never cared for Cycles (EEVEE is a joke), or doing much of anything else in Blender. So many strange development decisions. I'm sticking mostly with C4D, for now.

more RS confusion... so doing the update to 2023.1 it killed some of the icons for RS which I had to manually add back to the UI. It also defaulted back to "Standard" as the Default Material, but it's the old c4d Standard material and not the new RS Standard Material: If I change the dropdown for Default Material to RS Shader Graph, it's the RS Standard Material and called "Mat" versus RS Shader Material or RS STandard in the material node editor itself? However if I chose the top level RS menu, drill down and select Standard, it creates a "RS Standard" and then calls it "RS Standard" and not "Mat"? Finally, if I pick from the Redshift top menu > Materials > Materials > Material (yes. triple), it creates a RS Material, using the newer Node Editor too but it used to use the old node editor? So are we still supposed to use the RS Standard, which is the new NEW standard material? If so shouldn't the Default Material dropdown in Preferences be labeled "RS Standard", with the name it creates in the Material Manager labeled as such "RS Standard" versus "Mat" or "RS Shader Graph" (which is implied in the Default Material in Preferences)? Maybe the dropdown in the Preferences for Default Material should be changed to reflect these: RS Standard Standard (C4D native - legacy) RS Material (Redshift native - legacy) Also, regardless of how you create a material, the name shows up the same in the Material Manager.

Wizix released an update to his ModIt script. He stated he is updating all of his scripts over time.

i've seen people using octane and vray.

You can still do the magic inside of Houdini and then export the mesh to C4D!! 🙂

yeah the C4D one was posted here. So was one or two for Blender. Just spreading the wealth. Also, the ones for Blender and Maya are free.

It's available on his Gumroad: https://codychildress.gumroad.com/l/stablediffusion

bruh!!! 😜 . . . . Maxon.. always providing you with a different perspective. *MIC DROP*

I'd recommend Arnold CPU over Redshift's CPU implementation, if you are sticking with CPU-only rendering. It's a lot faster and robust. If it's a money issue, then I completely understand.

make sure you've updated your 2023 version. The 2023.0.0 version had some spline bugs. It appears they may have fixed something else with yesterday's release too... 2023.1

It'll never compete with Houdini, but it certainly seems better than what the poor Blender users have been stuck with for some time, or old nFluids in Maya. It will be interesting to see more pieces of the new dynamics architecture eventually fall in to place, like fluids, particles and more destruction style things. It seems like Maxon clearly has a roadmap they are sticking to and it's not years away and they're not interested in diverting to fiddle around with other things like C4D "apps" and such nonsense. 😛 Congrats to the Maxon team for moving ahead.

https://www.maxon.net/en/cinema-4d it's also on their live stream going on right now.