srek

Just a note on why i use the matrix directly and not a conversion to rotation angles. The conversion can introduce jumping since there are often multiple angles possible that would define the same matrix orientation. Using the matrix directly resolves this.

I adjusted the ranges so the angle differences become more pronounced. I also changed the animation values to emphasize what happens. Check especially between frame 49 and 68, where the rotation happens around the axis used to determine the angle resulting in no detected change. If you want to detect every change you need to set this up for all axis and combine the results. rot_diff_0003.c4d Here is another version that uses all three axis rot_diff_0004.c4d And for good measure, a version that uses all three to create RGB directly. Dark gray, no rotation, white, rotation around all axis. rot_diff_0005.c4d

Wired, it works for me. Due to the animation values on the cube the angle differences between frames are actually pretty small, you need to watch the numeric values to see real differences, the hues of red are nearly identical.

Dot product gives you the cos of an angle between two vectors. To get the angle you have to normalize the vectors and use acos on the result of the dot product. Standard matrices have normalized components if you haven't scaled anything, so normalize is not neccesary in the attached version of your scene rot_diff_0002.c4d

If i remember correctly Rick refers to something that really happened when a customer jumped on a plane for an important project presentation. It worked out somehow, but it nearly cost dearly. I talked about how single user feedback can change things, that was one of them. And yes, we are actually using analytics as much as we can, they are the most unbiased source of actual user interaction with our software. This is not a gimmik but an important tool for PM and UX. Switching them on helps us to hear you.

You are right, my feedback can be interpreted that way and that was not my intention, sorry. The fact alone that several of Maxon do contribute here should tell everyone that we really do care about the feedback given.

Is it so outlandish to think that the feedback here might really be only a small part of the whole and not a fully representative one? You put one frame around this, i see a different one. I do not question the feedback coming from here at all, what i question is the relative importance you seem to give to it. If you use quotes, please actually do quote. I did not say or imply that feedback from small numbers of users is irrelevant, on the contrary, there were many situations in the past where a single users feedback turned things into a very different direction than initially planned. Also i did not say that we only get very positive feedback from other sources like studios, it is very different feedback though, positive as well as negative. I also did not say that everyone likes it after a while, i wrote, and you can read my initial unedited statement again, that opinions always adjust after actually trying. To quote mself "That initial reaction always changes to something different, either a more realistic impression of the same basic feeling, or a reversal." You expect me and others to listen to you, so please do me the curtesy to also try to read and understand what i write.

That might have been your perception, but UI and UX paradigms of Cinema 4D did not maintain integrity over the many years of additions and changes. This is less obvious for long term users since they only see a small change at a time and adjust to the quirks that develop.

I was following this live, but honestly, these knee jerk reactions tend to be over the top, in both directions. From my experience it takes a few weeks until people actualy had a chance to get their hands on the new version and functions and actually gave it a good try. I have read it a couple of times on this forum as well "This is (fantastic/rubbish) ... maybe i can try it in a few days". That initial reaction always changes to something different, either a more realistic impression of the same basic feeling, or a reversal. I get it, the first contact is often emotional, but the important part is to actually double check. Given the limited ressources we have, we try to not do things that we do not see as ultimately useful and better. Of course we make mistakes, thats why we have betatesters to tell us so early on (sometimes we even listen 😉 ), and then we watch the reactions of our users, sometimes hands on like here on this forum. We get a lot of direct feedback from studios and it is interesting to see how divergent from public feedback that can be. Pretty often the topics that come up are quite different from what comes up here.

No, but it is a bit like asking a car rental person to only rent you a spare tire of one of the cars. Yes, they can probably do it, but the effort is much higher than for their standard business. You don’t implement a real business process for something that happens once every blue moon. License changes were never frequent, but since subscription came they are nearly non existent.

That person is also kept from doing something that might actually make the company money. Keep in mind that the buyer of used software licenses does not support the manufacturer in any way, at least not until they decide to upgrade the license, which they might or might not do.

from the top of my head no upfront cost very easy up and down scaling of seats by demand

Let me just point out that this discussion has the attention of at least three Maxon employees that are all involved in defining what will change and what not, including the CEO and one of the Product Managers. Hardly what happens if we weren’t interested.

Trolls are an own topic, i meant normal users that just have a negative experience with what Maxon delivers. While trolls try to out shout any reasonable discussion, most people have enough online experience to ignore them and focus on the real concerns.

You might like to check this with an accounting specialist as it does not match what i know about it.

I get the impression that there is a certain bias involved here. The number of users on this forum, is a small fraction of all Cinema 4D users, additonally users that see certain things as problematic are more likely to share their experience publically, leading to a heavy bias that might give an impression of the over all acceptance that does not match the actual degree. This is something that i learned early on in my over ten years as a moderator on CG Talk/CG Society and it is sometimes difficult for us to accept that the bubble we forums user work in is just one small part of the bigger whole. From Maxons POV, with a lot more detailed information on the acceptance of certain products, the situation shows itself likely very different to what we see on this forum. This means that even the most valid critique here must be compared and weighed against the benefits seen by others, as well as the actual cost/effort connected to it, the result of that might not be what users here expect. Another factor is time and effort. Many of the requests voiced here involve a much higher effort than most people would expect, this is especially true for offering product variations. As Rick pointed out, Cineversity access is directly connected to subscription, be it MSA or the new subscription, because it constantly offers new value, something that simply can not be offered without very high cost and effort for perpetual licenses. Tutorials can be argued to be documentation, so we can do that stuff on Youtube etc., but assets are a completely different animal, that is new value. This also prevents Maxon from adding any other new value to perpetual licenses. The situation has not changed with the new subscription, it was exactly the same with the MSA it replaced. Even with our strong hiring policy we have limits to the ressources we can invest in any issue, so we have to prioritize. Priorities are defined by an enormous amount of factors, of which public user requests are only one part. Long term strategy, technology driven must have changes (operating systems, hardware, ...), Ressource Matching, ... and many many more elements are in play here, most of which the users don't know and mostly don't care about. In the end we can only do so much in a day and what we do is heavily based on what our users want, but this forum represents only a small fraction of our users and from all i know not a very representative one. So if changes you want don't happen, or don't happen as soon as you expect them to, it is not because we did not listen, but because over all the priorities did not work out for these changes to become reality. My personal 2 cents on this from my pov of an over 20 years active Cinema 4D forums user (anyone from Postforum here?) and Maxon employee.

I think Thanassis build that as a test, i don't think it was ever finished for release and don't know if that is intended.

Yes, it is easy to create assets that can be used as capsules. Quite a few of the ones that come with 25 are actually assets and not hardcoded.

The core argument always cycles back to the MSA and Cineversity, those are the key difference between now and then. There still is a perpetual, there is still the option to keep it current at comparable prices to before. The key difference is that the only way to have Cineversity access is the new subscription since the old MSA was discontinued. The scope of this decision is imo blown vastly out of proportion in some of the postings here. I see a lot of steam being blown off, that is something i can relate to, but i won’t interact with it since there is nothing i can contribute. I’ll gladly try to bring things into focus that sometimes get distorted a bit, and i try to point out when there is often more than one valid point of view, but not much more. I have no fear to agree or disagree with opinions here, there is no reprisal i would have to fear from my employer. As long as i state my personal opinions and not try to talk as a company spokesman, which i certainly am not, all is good. The only thing expected by my employer is that i show professional behavior, which is not much of a stretch for me, and that company internal information stays internal, which, as an IT guy for many decades, is second nature to me.

I am not going into the who feels wronged by what thing, I'll just point out that there were quite decent offers for perpetual owners to switch over to subscription, which made the up front cost count and mean something.

Regarding cost. I am not sure what else you calculate into the cost of Cinema 4D, but if before you had the MSA to access Cineversity then you had a. the initial up front cost of buying the license, and b. the yearly MSA cost to maintain Cineversity access and a current version. At €700 the yearly cost for the subscription to Cinema 4D is roughly the same as the MSA was, except that now you get more frequent updates than before. For you the running cost should be about the same as before and you get more fixes.

Personally i agree, but i have no idea if this is a priority or not. Regardles of this being on the agenda or not, i can only say that we are running here, not walking. This includes everyone involved into the business side of things, licensing, etc.. Many people underestimate the effort it takes to put a product out, even if the product itself is more or less done. So it might just be that Indie just doesn't have priority yet over other more pressing issues. As i said, i don't know, not my area, not my task and even if it were, not mine to talk about publicaly. In general, if you (not you Kent, you know this stuff by heart 🙂 ) want to see things go faster and further -> https://www.maxon.net/en/about-maxon/careers

I find this a curious statement. Rental means that every month the user has the choice to continue using and paying for a software or not. Project done? Stop paying until the next project comes along. Need fewer seats after a big rush? Reduce. So for customers it is actualy easy to optimize costs. Cost optimization for the customer always means that Maxon has to offset this loss by attracting new customers, which is difficult in a competitive environment and requires you to deliver a value to the customer that others can't, or at least can't do as good. Maxon is thriving and commercial users over all love subscription, this means the package that is Cinema 4D does find a lot of traction with people that have a choice. Anyone who ever ran a business knows that the cost of a tool is only a small part of the equation. If an expensive tool gives you an advantage that is worth more than it costs (could be productivity, feature, Artist availability, .. anything) it is worth paying for. Actually even the cost for the most expensive 3D tools currently on the market is usually in a range that it is no major factor in the over all cost, especially not if it can be optimized and does not need a large up front thanks to rental. When it comes down to it the deciding factor isn't monetary cost, if anything rental leveled out the field even more, increasing competitive pressure! To me it seems the perception of the value of Cinema 4D among several users here and those out there making Cinema 4D a financial success is quite different and is closely related to the state of the software at each point in time and how it can contribute to the success of the customer deciding what to rent. Anyone feel free to disagree with me, but please take the business reailites into account when looking for alternative explanations for why so many new users opt for Cinema 4D.

It was never about topics, just toxic behavior. At times we had intense discussions on very dividing topics without personal insults, misogyny or open hate, that changed.

The challenges were pure gold, so much to learn and see. Especially the big themed challenges. I still have several of the resulting art books. Sadly the new owner never cared nearly as much about this as Leo did.