BigAl3D

I looked at Maya's 3 year deal with support and it works out to about $1,600/year. Cinema 4D with MSA works out to about $1,800/year. MAXON includes Cineversity premium with the MSA, not sure what Maya has. Not exactly a third of the price, however, it's not a good perception to be a little more expensive than the industry leader when not all of the tools are equal.

True to a point, but I'm also very interested in your car rigging. I need to get better at getting cars to looks natural.

Wow that's awesome! Nice job. How did you create this? Did you make your own rig? Use a plug in? Details please.

@SIgor When you say "sharing," what you really mean is 25 Euros right? This is a great idea, but not sure I would pay for content for a product that is still in Alpha. Seems odd to me. I too would be interested in outdoor scenes, specifically for automotive work.

Great. thanks for the link. Now just have to figure out two use the darn thing.

How do we download this awesome looking tool? I don't see it in the Toolbox and can't find a download link on the site.

One question about this new ProRender deal, would we be able to use the CPU AND GPU simultaneously? And if we can, would that cause problems with the differences between processors?

One other thing I'll mention, when rendering with Cycles on my MacPro, my computer is pretty useless. It really hogs all the resources. Working while I'm rendering won't work, unless there are some parameters to prevent this from happening.

Thanks for that post Doc. I took your specs and put them into the Bathroom scene. Using my dual FirePros, I got a time of 5:28. After tweaking and doing many renders, I came up with settings that seem to be a good mix of quality and speed (see attached). My other question is, if GPUs are so fast, why aren't the used as CPUs? Right?

@docphibs, since you have experience with Blender's Cycles anyway, any suggestions for a basic setup to get a clean render out of Cycles that won't take an hour to render?

Yeah, I'm with you on that. Since I'm new to Cycles, it's just not easy to do any quick testing. If I open a MAXON sample scene and hit render, they set it up to show what it can do. That was my point.

Been playing around with the Cycles4D demo on my 2013 MacPro. Since I have the big D700 cards with 6 GB each, I wanted to see if Cycles would do anything for me. Seems like these cards are supported. One positive. But like @docphibs said, this system is not for the casual user. I'm not a casual C4D user, but this renderer is pretty deep like the other bigger engines. I was hoping there was some presets like the Physical Renderer just to get started with. High, Medium and Low. I opened the Bathroom scene, switched it to use both GPUs and hit render to picture viewer. Not fast at all. I then read here to turn off the Progressive Refine which sped things up tremendously. Way faster, but low quality. See Render1.jpg attached. 2 min. 15 sec. I then moved the Samples up to 16. That's Render2.jpg attached. 8 min. 55 sec. Wow, that's a huge leap in render time for something that still isn't usable. I know there are a ton of settings and my Mac is not going to be the fastest, but I can't imagine it's this slow even with a tiny 600x600 output. Can anyone shed some light on some settings that would produce at least basic production-level images for video? I also read in one of the help pages that when rendering to the Picture Viewer, it will switch to the CPU instead of the GPU? Is this correct? If so, then what's the point if I can't use the GPU output? Like I said, I haven't dug too deep at all, so I'm not slamming the plug-in, but I'm trying to see what it can do. Oh I almost forgot, I think the watermark in the demo is excessive. It's hard to really see the details with so many logos interfering. Maybe fewer white logos and connect them with hairlines? Just a suggestion.

Not sure if Animidi does everthing Soundkeys can do, but it looks interesting and it's cheap. He can be a little hard to understand with his heavy Italian accent and he speaks very fast. https://nitro4d.com/product/animidi/ https://nitro4d.com/video/

@INSYDIUM I've registered twice for a link to download a demo of Cycles, but haven't seen anything. Spam folder or not. ???

@selimari Yeah it does look nice. I love the highlights on the hood of the red mustang. Can built-in C4D render engines get that effect?

So I just saw the ad at the top of the page that said the demo is now available. Great! I click and no demo. Just says "Coming Soon..." Why run an add and drive people to your site if it's not ready? Not good marketing. Let's hope it's up soon so enough people try it and post their results.

This could still be a Cinema 4D question, but it won't be easy. You can add 3D figures and animate them flying back or give them ragdoll properties and let them fly after being hit with an invisible force. Advantage doing in C4D is that you just render with an alpha. If you film it, you'd need green screen. You'll have to get creative either in C4D or AE. Good luck.

I fell like I just flipped through some old 80s LPs (vinyl records) at a thrift shop. Nice work.

This looks interesting. What render engine would you say Cycles most closely resembles? Just curious. Also, will I be able to take advantage of the FirePro cards in my Trashcan Mac Pro? You only say "CPU or GPU" but we all know the battle of the cards. Is this a new material system a la VRAY? Thanks.

Well, all you have there are splines which do not render unless you put them under an Extrude Object (and a few others too). Seems like since those are your guides, you should drop your objects as children of each side. I will assume that script will animate your project folding into the final shape? If so, then maybe my theory would work, but I've never used that plugin before.

@HSrdelic Great news. Maybe I can get some benefits from my Darth Pro trashcan Mac with dual AMD FirePro D700 6144 MB cards. One question, would it ever be possible to utilize the CPU AND the GPU for a single rendering job or would this be an issue with slightly different calculations between the two chips? Would we need to learn a new materials/lighting system if we want to render with the GPU vs. the CPU a la Vray?

That really sucked! Just kidding, that was a vacuum cleaner joke. Seriously, some really nice work in there. Nice job!

Yeah, the motion is very nice. I don't have X-Particles yes so what do I know. If you told me there was a speaker blasting music and vibrating the table it's perfect. Hope to see more of this sort of thing. X-Particles has come a long way.

I see your point. One thing I'm finding is, much luck using a DSLR, you learn how to set it up by seeing how Top Coat does it. I do like the layers with dings, dents, and wear and tear that they provide. I also like the little button at the top that says "Add Render Settings." Just saw this the other day. I was working on a 3D car, getting the chrome reflections just right. It was taking about 2 min. and :15 sec for each frame. I selected their "LK High" and hit render. Looked virtually identical to my render. Difference -- now it renders in :13 seconds! Now I'm learning how to tweak the render settings just from this plug-in. I'd now say, yes, it is worth every penny.

Wow, so sad to hear this. I remember he'd had surgery years ago and was away for months, so maybe not a surprise to him. I bought his CD Tools back in 2007 I think. He was very helpful with support and his videos were so detailed, I had to watch them four or five times. One time, I was at another studio an needed to edit the animations I did with his tools, but that shop didn't own them. I sent him an e-mail explaining my situation, and he e-mailed me a new installer for Windows so I could get the job done. THAT's customer service. Always liked his "Adios" sign off, which loosely translates from Spanish as "to God" or "travel with God" which is why people say it when you leave. Sad day indeed for the C4D community.