davetwo

SHIFT TO CONSTRAIN PLEASE! My Adobe muscle memory kicks in every time and it drives my nuts

Maya. Including Arnold cost me €290 (Minus tax) this year as an Indy licence. C4D - with effectively no production render engine - would cost me €736. More than double. Hard to justify the upgrade from R21. Even with 95% of my work still in cinema. The BIG problem with subs is that you basically lose the ability to open your own files and assets (that you've spent years creating) if you evey stop paying . I dont think that's OK.

There is a Noseman tutorial showing how to do this with geometry. Just google ‘noseman cell packing‘. the material can just be thin film shader and nice lighting I guess

Take it easy with the replies. This is a friendly and helpful forum - no puffed-out-chest nonsense please.

If you show us an example of the boole maybe we can advise a better way of building it. Also you dont mention which renderer you are using. Corona's or V-ray's geommetry slicer may do a better job. Or simply making a single panel properly then using multi instances to clone out the rest.

A big problem I have is that sometimes a render takes a LOT longer because of the materials (ie lots of rough transparencies, matals, SSS. A 30 minute render with simple materials can jump to 4 hours with complex ones. But I cant charge a client different rates for different materialisatios of the same product of course. A big thing to remember - is that you CAN use a farm and write the costs against your business as an expense. THE BTW/VAT is taken off straight away and the costs will be (partially) deducted against your taxable income.

I dont think its common to charge for render time as a seperate element. Very unusual in my experience. It should be factored into your hourly rate or job quote. (I also work freelance in the netherlands FYI). Daily R&D tests are just normal hourly rate... For bigger render jobs where my machine is busy preventing me from doing other work for periods of time, then I'd just add a slighty arbitrary amount of time onto my bill, depending on how inconvenient it is.

There has been quite extensive discussion about using the Studio on the Corona forum. The general consensus is that its very nice to work with and ofter faster and more responsive in typical tasks. (yes, including RS) Its' never going to render faster than a heavyweight threadripper though. Kinda depends if your main output is animation or stills as to how appropriate it is. Thread is here if you are interested: https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?topic=33540.msg200941#new

Step 1. In BP edit mode > File > New Texture. Create at the resolution of your choice) Step 2: Go to >Layer > Outline Polygons. This will make a guide with the UV edges neatly shown Step 3: File > Save texture as.... Pick the format (PSD or TiFF) and location of your choice. Step 4: Open the new texture in Ps. Paste your artwork in as a Smart Object and scale it to fit the UV guide. Save file. Step 5. Back in c4d make a new shader. Load your new texture and apply it to your object (I can't show you as I didn't save the file). Step 6: For all derivatives just duplicate the texture and update the smart object with the new art. Reload. Repeat.

Gimmie a minute - ill upload some screengrabs......

Since that last release, Corona has the Slicer material. After using it for a few months, I don't think I could go back to using a renderer without it ever again. The video below is a bit prosaic. But I find a lot of uother uses for it. (Capping liquid at varying angles. Bites out of food etc.

Yep. The new browser is a backwards step for users. Maybe saving the materials to a library file would be better if that's still possible?

HDRI Haven is an excellent example of transparency. Where they have regular updates on whet they're doing and how the budget is divided up. They also work via Paetron - where a very small montly cost of €1-2 can easily be forgotten about and is no barrier to entry. Basically what ADAMFILIP said

Its quite easy to just use a Bend deformer and adjust the angle perameter isn't it? Works OK in my quick test (attached) Untitled 1.c4d

It definitely IS possible to get good quad meshes from Rhino’s quadremesher: https://www.rhino3d.com/features/quadremesh/ have a look - pretty impressive. Probably best for single complicated elements than whole multi-element models

You will never get a proper quad mesh. But just dont worry about it. Most likely you dont need it. C4Ds internal converter usually makes a pretty good job of things. And edge rounding etc can/should be done on the shading level. Back in the day Everyone used MoI to get decent meshes - but these days I just used C4D as it's less work. If you want to splash out on Rhino, I think that now has a nurbs-to-quad capability which looks pretty good.

tried stick texture tag? Or failing that Set uvs from projection or assign from projection or whatever its called these days?

A general note on all this CPU/mac talk. A lot of C4D users work within design agencies and the like. It is a traditional user base, and C4Ds early adoption of MAC0SX was the path into 3d for many people. It's where I started myself in fact. These are not motion companies with pure 3D workflows and workstations. I'd be careful not to assume that's the norm for C4D users. With the advent of hotdesking and corona, many people work exclusively with (apple) laptops. And they spend a lot of time in other apps which work very well indeed on MBPs. They will not be swapping for a gaming PC laptop - that is 100% certain. I personally find the current pelthora of 3rd party render engines a bit of a problem for C4D. I'm always having to work with perople who are using a different engine. And converting files constantly is a real PITA. So to be able to use a workable engine that everyone can access in CPU mode can only be a good thing. (Although I'm sure everyone would have liked it better if they had the time to get the speed up-to-par first.)

Certain workflows of mine (self illuminated objects with no lighting - for graphics/masks etc.) render in the blink of an eye with standard. And with excellent anti-aliasing too. It's quicker and crisper than with the new school render engines.

C4Ds step import is pretty good these days. So it shouldn't be a problem. I assume you've tried the 'high' tesselation setting on import?

Thanks Stefano - nice technique

Oddly I also dipped my toe into Maya this week (need to align with a workflow). Actually it wasnt bad at all - I was expecting it to be much more complicated. Early days though. (And I wish I could change the navigation to emulate cinemas 123 keys, much better for my RSI).

Thanks all! I've been burned by takes in the past (user error) but I think I'll definitely use xrefs in this project. In terms of mindset it should be exactly the same as linking files in design apps like indesign - so that shouldn't be much of a leap conceptually. It'll be nice to work smarter for a change.

Hola. Normally I work on product visualisations - but I'm currently doing an arch vis style project. And it has me wondering if using xrefs are agood idea. I'm making multilpe files where I'm rearranging the furniture/cameras/lights and updating materials as I go along. This means that some scenes contain legacy duplicates of some objects. I thought using 'linked' xref files may solve this - and possibly keep files sizes down too? I dont hear xref workflows mentioned much - so I wondered if anyone had any recommendations for, or warnings against using xrefs? Cheers R PS. I realise using takes is also an option - but I'm very nervous about having all my setups in one file in case something goes wrong or i lose something.

That Poliigon tool is incredibly useful for making materials from Poliigon textures. I use it all the time. But the name is a bit misleading... its not really a converter but rather creator of materials based on their maps. It's really no good as a conversion tool between renderers unfortunately.