srek

XSI was one of the best pieces of software, unfortunately it was bought and discontinued by AD a while ago. It would still compare favorable with current 3D DCCs, but you can't get it anymore.

I am not a rigger, but from what i remember this is often handled by an upvector constraint that orients the wrist according to a target. The target should be local to the forearm. In general global rotations or positions are something you should never use within a rig, they will mess things up the moment you move the character. I just checked, in the content you can find a male puppet asset where a handle similar to what you wanted to set up is used to control the wrist.

Thanks Kent. It is true, i am very bad at sugarcoating. If i can't tell it as i know it, i prefer to not say anything. As for the "need" to be here, there are other things than my job that make me want to be active in the community. There is a lot of satisfaction i derive from seeing people making fantastic stuff with a tool i help creating.

For whatever reason you disabled the main XGroup. Right Click into the background of your setup and uncheck disable. Apart from that, i don't think controlling the global rotation will do what you expect.

Upload it and we can check

Before Maxon i worked for over a decade as an IT tech, diagnosing and resolving customer problems. At Maxon i started as a tech support guy and later switched to leading QA, afterwards to UX Design. Trying to understand the problems of users and finding solutions that work for them is something i do since the 80s. Even my hobbies of making and upcycling are about solving problems for myself and other people. While i am in no way perfect in what i do you can safely assume that i do try to see issues from a users perspective, otherwise my job(s) would be impossible to do. While it can often look like i want to defend Maxon and Cinema 4D, which is not a wrong impression over all, you don't commit to a company and a product as long as i did without getting attached to it, my main aim is usually to explain why things are the way they are, so everyone involved can try to make the best of the situation. I am a very practically minded person and from my experience information is the main thing you need to solve issues, this goes both ways. Since i am not an executive i simply can't offer many of the solutions people expect to hear from me. I can try to point out workarounds and alternatives and i definitely try to include feedback i get from users in my UX Design work, but i can't change policies or modify development plans and i certainly can't announce any possible future changes that are being asked for.

Assets are not created by developers, features are. There is no or little ressource conflict between the two. Capsules can be anywhere in between depending on what specificaly they do.

Turnover isn't very large, we are growing, a lot!

Thanks for that offer. We would need more engineers to implement them first though 😉

You as a dev? Definitely, like Dave said, we are looking! In regard to including plugins, that is something we usually don’t do. In the very few cases where we did it in the past we prefer to take the devs with the product. Regardless how well written your code is, it doesn’t match internal structures and standards. To be able to maintain code in the long term this is needed. Taking in plugins is a short term solution, in the long term it is more expensive, not necessarily money wise but in terms of effort spend. Apply, find out 🙂

We are hiring like crazy. As a side job and remanat from my past at Maxon i am responsible for some part of the on boarding of new hires so i see what is happening. It is a bit crazy to be honest, still we are looking for more. Thanks to the rise of 3D in general it is super difficult to find people though. The market is dry, game development sucks up a lot of talent. We are paying very competetive salaries but that doesn't help much if there are just not enough people around. Even if we were to get as many people as we want, it takes time to get them to production level. Cinema 4D is a hell of a complex product and to be able to work on major elements of it requires quite a bit of preparation and learning. At the beginning you have to put new hires on smaller stuff to introduce them to the technology behind. I still remember the ridicule we got for the Cogwhell spline. Oh what fun was beeing had that we would add that but not adress major issue this or that. It was one of many starter tasks for a new hire who later on contributed quite important parts, but only after he got to that level of knowledge about how Cinema 4D works internally! So if you know any talented devs, feel free to point them our way, preferably to me, since we get nice incentives for bringing in new people 🙂

Just for the record, Rick is one of the hardest working people i know. I get it that not nearly everything he does is immediately visible to the end user, but without him we all would have a lot less. He is working tireless for you and me since the late 90s. You don't do that for the money or the fame, you do that because you love it. Over the last 20 years i have seen so many people critizising without knowing what is actually being done. I understand the frustration if things that you see as priority are not adressed in the way you would like them to, but on the other hand few people outside of Maxon have any idea on how complex and difficult some seemingly straight forward things are. The comprehension that assets require different ressources than features is not given to everyone. Factual critique? Yes please. Ideas on Improvement? Yes please. Assumption that we ignore problems for the sake of hauling money? You can keep that one. Cheers Björn

One thing Macs are used heavily for is Video editing. Any review that does not include this topic in a major way would miss it's target audience. Apple knows it's customers and thus implements hardware acceleration for the most computing intensive part of it, compression. If, for what ever reason, Apple fails to deliver on this, it will be very quickly noticed and made public by disgruntled customers. I'll just wait for Dimi https://www.youtube.com/c/dimitriskatsafouros to get his hands on one and tell his verdict. On a related note, the fact that the M1 systems have unified memory is already a huge boost to video work, where classic systems need to transfer loads of data between RAM and VRAM to make use of the GPU computing cores, the M1 simply doesn't have to.

Maxon works closely with Apple on all new technology. Be it new hardware, changes like the 64 Bit move or Metal, new OS versions, you name it. You can see that right back to G4/G5 times. I wasn't around earlier so i have no idea what went on before. Maxon and Cinema 4D have been part of so many Apple presentations over time, i have lost track. Since we are often one of, if not the first, app to support some new tech there is no need to pull any marketing stunts, it's mostly our devs that are featured anyway, Like Philip now, or Cathleen before him. Apple supporting the transition of Blender from Intel to M1 makes a lot of sense for Apple, they do not want to be left out there just because ressources aren't available and the actual monetary and engineering effort for Apple is minimal. I would not start guessing if this is the start for some larger cooperation or just a stepping stone for things to get moving, at this time it is simply a leg up and i am quite happy to see Apple supporting Open Source Software. The self interest of Apple might be related to Blender often being used in academia for early test implementations of CGI algos, losing that due to the hardware change would be a a bit of a blow to the use of Apple systems in research. All in all a good investment either way.

Interesting to read, we have used Trashcans from the beginning for pretty stressfuls stuff likely rendering tests and compiling OS X builds. It might be due to them being in a controlled environment, but there were basically no cooling issues. We also used them as Developer systems in less controlled environments, again without any major issues. It seems then they are more sensitive to the environment than i expected. I'm quite happy to be rid of them anyway.

The main problem of the trashcan is it's reliance on non standard components, namely the GPU modules. With a workstation class system you expect to be able to expand the capabilities according to needs, with the trashcan you couldn't. The thermal design of that thing was indeed very good though.

No, the quality was usually no issue and in general above comparable PC systems. However Apple lost focus on Pro users with serious computing demands for a while. The Trashcan MacPro was just that, not a really professional workstation. Every machine in tha last decades was technically well designed, but did not neccesarily match the demand and the Trashcan was a shortsighted mistake. The new MacPro, and likely future M based MacPros, show that Apple still wants to cater to high end users, albeit with a price tag that makes my eyes water.

We have quite a few coders at Maxon that come with an artist background and they are treasured. You need both, the hardcore experts on computing structures, efficiency and algorithms and those that include an artists view. Prime example might be one of the developers that laid the foundations of MoGraph.

Execution within each capsule is as fast as scene nodes, outside it depends on the old object system and is thus limited.

Quick note on saas and change in ownership. I know first hand that this wasn’t part to the decision of the three founders to sell their shares to Nemetschek. Other, non public, factors went into this decision. It is correct though that saas is a general part of the strategy of Nemetschek.

What it does is it makes a copy of the geometry and stores it as a value withn a node. This is a compeltely independent copy so you can remove the original and still work with the geometry in the node system

Looks like a bug to me, i reported it. Thanks

Having data and making good use of it are two quite different things 😉

Just a remark, Python is unlikely to be faster than nodes, scene nodes are quite fast since they are a direct implementation of core functions, also they are automatically multi threaded where possible. So if you want to speed things up by using Python over nodes you likely shouldn't bother.

Not using a feature is a clear indicator for either it being to hard to use, or not sufficient for the task. Either way it is good information to have.