3D-Pangel

I love it when plugins from other platforms get ported over to C4D so I wish you guys great success. Question to those who use Syflex on other platforms: What does Syflex offer over C4D's native cloth simulator? It looks (based on a quick scan of the Syflex web-site) to be speed and ease of use. Possibly better handling of self-collisions as well. I did not see anything on cloth tearing. Cloth simulation with high stiffness values and tearing is a great way to simulate physical destruction of metal structures so does Syflex have that capability? Will a set of tutorials be released as well? Thanks and interested to see more! Dave

Who was the first? I have been on a number of business trips out of the country with more to come, so my time on the Forum has been limited and will continue to be limited for at least 6 more weeks. But to come back to news such as this is bad enough but now there was another passing that I missed? This is horrible. Dave

Wow! I just learned the sad news. What a gentleman he was. I met him once at Siggpraph 2006 and he was just the most unassuming and polite person you could ever hope to meet. Just a generally nice guy. I even had trouble converting a model from Sci-fi.net to C4D and he offered to help with one of his plugins. So my heart is saddened by the loss. Based on the post at CG Networks, I gather he was a private person but my thoughts go to his family. I have no idea if his passing creates a financial hardship for his wife or children (if any) but if anyone knows please let us know. While not a character animator, I would buy his plugins if that would help out his family. I will keep them all in my prayers. Dave

Very nicely done...especially the little touches like the bump map on the river and the waving bear. I would agree that painting tree's on selections would be a great feature for V2 (if one is planned). Another good feature would be the ability to provide local rather than global wind forces - that is, have the trees react to wind generated by the car as it drives by...while that would not add much to this animation given the scale of the car, it would be a pretty cool feature nonetheless. So as great as that plugin is, it still has plenty of room for new features in the next version. Unfortunately, with no announcements from 3D Quakers for over a year on anything....you have to wonder what is going on. Also, 3D Quaker was working on a car simulator...not sure where they are are with that but it looked pretty interesting and would really make this awesome animation even more believable! I also have one question about your animation: Did Kathie make it?!? ;-) Great work! Dave

Wow...this must be a sign of a successful release when we start complaining how the tools are "named" rather than how they operate! Okay...if we are going to take our criticisms to the absolute nit-picky level, then I would like to have a word with someone about the R18 splash screen! Really....is that that best that MAXON can do? A couple of lines on a white background? Also, anyone notice that there is still a "R18 - RC" next to the version number. Did someone just miss updating the version number when it was released or are we still getting release candidates? Whew! Glad I got those burning issues off my chest. I feel so much better now. ;-) Dave

At the time of announcement, I was not too excited about voronoi fracture. But after just playing with the point control I am simply blown away with how well MAXON thought out the implementation of this new tool. Wow! Endless possibilities. Really brilliant MAXON! Question: While it works with Thinking Particles, has anyone had a chance to get it to work with X-Particles? I would imagine that you would need to pass XP through TP to get that level of operation. I have yet to install all my plugins but just wondering if anyone else has already worked that out. Dave

So I heard back from e-on. They said essentially this: So, if I don't renew my maintenance contracts I will still get the next update. But once that maintenance contract expires, it cannot be renewed unless I get a new license. So it pretty much leaves me in the same situation where I am trusting that the Bentley/e-on merger is still investing in the development of e-on's products as they stand today. Other than "we are still alive and well", there is no hard evidence that this is the case. I hate this situation. For you old timers out there: You know what this reminds me of? The old trueSpace ProTeam deals prior to tS7 (back in 2005). I never bought into ProTeam, but it was the same situation. tS7 was long overdue and Caligari is still pushing maintenance programs via ProTeam. I jumped to C4D at that time but for those that bought ProTeam maintenance license, there were screams of class action suits, etc because it took years for tS7 to get released and people were getting nothing for their ProTeam license. Now, I would imagine that e-on is a bit better run and larger company than Caligari (which is not hard to say - Caligari was that bad), but still I am getting the same vibe. You know, it is like this that just makes you appreciate MAXON. I mean, for all that we may have complained about R17, they at least still release something every year, have a long term development plan and given the money they are making for Nemetscheck, you "may" not have to worry about mergers, or sales to other owners (I say "may" as you never really know in the business world what the future holds). From this perspective, there is trust in MAXON that we all take for granted....and we really shouldn't. At the very least, I may just renew Vue xStream and let the other two lapse (CS and PF). Still not sure. Dave

I did send them an email....but we all know how that goes. Here is what I sent: If they say that they can do nothing for me...or that they don't respond...well...all I can say is that I am darn glad to have purchased Forester and some of the C4D Depot products (which is have a 50% off summer sale right now). Dave

So I have a few of e-on's products (Vue xStream, Carbon Scatter and The Plant Factory) and all of my 2016 maintenance contracts are coming up for renewal. So after the merger with Bentley Systems in September, 2015, e-on as a company really hasn't done much. Just look at their list of press releases. A big old fat white space next to 2016.So given that the money I shelled out last year at this time netted me nothing in return in terms of updates, and e-on is really not communicating anything officially, I have to wonder if e-on is a dead company. Did I miss something? What is the word on the street concerning the future of this company? Oh...and please remember this: Regardless of what you may think of what MAXON puts into each release, they at least release something every year!!!! Just thought I would offer that perspective. Thanks,Dave

Downloading now....should only take about 20 minutes...pretty zippy. Thank you MAXON! Great timing...right before a 3 day weekend!!! The only thing that could step on this joy is if the Cineversity servers had a crash. Dave

My understanding is that TFD only uses CUDA based processors for GPU simulation. While not specifically stated as such, this page from the TFD help manual leads you to that conclusion: https://help.jawset.com/en/c4d/gpu_simulation Note that under "supported GPU's", there is only a reference to GPU's with an nVidia compute capability of 2.0 or greater. Not sure AMD cards have an nVidia compute capability level!! ;-) Dave

Thank you. Starting to look at 3D Coat as well. They have some pretty slick import/export app (call applinks) that were developed by 3rd parties for C4D R15. Not sure what broke the development, but I can imagine it was R16's reflectance shader that kept them from being updated past R15. But that applink does what you would want an applink to do...one click to import and export in and out of C4D. You can see it in action here Seems pretty straight forward to use with better pricing for the amateur than Substance Painter (I think it is about $100 less)....plus you get sculpting. I will be playing with the demo this weekend as well as their C4D applink. Dave

Well Hrvoje....we were positive for a whole two pages at least! Can any tell me the pipeline into and out of Substance Painter from C4D and how well that works for them? I have had my eye on Substance Painter as its Indie pricing is very appealing, but not sure how well the programs integrate together. They created a great bridge for Substance Designer but I really have not heard too much about C4D/Substance Painter integration. Dave

Wow....I thought I felt the earth shift to a new orbit this morning! Huge standing ovation to the MAXON team for actually sharing both some information about new features and a pseudo timeline ("you will get your hands on it within the R18 release cycle"....which means between R18 and R19). Let us not downplay the significance of this!!! And if you want it to continue then please positively acknowledge it!!!!! I personally have already picked up a case of Hefeweizen for delivery to Rick Barrett's house. Unfortunately, it never made it to the post office... ....but it was the thought that counts! Just awesome MAXON.....just awesome! Dave

Not sure if this has been posted before (I did do a search but could not find anything), but I found a rather interesting trick with the camera crane. I was looking into setting up some animation controls to assist with animating the motions of an airplane in a dog fight: That is, banking and pivoting while following a path. As I was setting up my scene, I also incorporated the camera crane to follow the action and noticed that really the camera crane is no more than an Xpresso tag applied to a camera. So what would happen if you just dragged that camera crane tag to another object? Viola....you now have a set of ready made controls to assist in the animation of that object. Also, the camera crane tag allows you to pivot off axis as well and to animate changes to that pivot of axis as well. So if you want the plane to go from pivoting along the center of the planes body to pivoting around the end of a wing (say after it has been shot), you can easily do that with the camera crane tag. Also works for spot lights as well!!! Pretty useful little tag. That is all. I hope that piece of information has some use to you. Thanks, Dave

Never mind....I read the entire thread and saw the offer on the first page. I have been travelling over the last 3 weeks and not too attentive to the Cafe so I am very lucky I tuned into this topic before the 20% off special expires tomorrow. Thank you!!! Dave

Discount for HB2? Is that something for the rest of us hobbyists as well? Dave

​You are absolutely correct that it is pure speculation. I don't know the market share breakdown for C4D. But when you think about MAXON's behavior towards the public and its use of social media in general, nothing else makes sense. Honestly, to think that the individual user or small production house represents a majority of MAXON's business and then be that inept with product development or customer care just boggles my mind. If what you are saying is true, then whoever handles or directs public relations and/or customer care for MAXON is doing a pathetic job. Actually, it is less than pathetic and it would take hard work to reach even a "pathetic" level of performance. Now that is something to aspire to: "We hope to become pathetic in how we respond to our individual customer needs!" Yeah...put that on the company letterhead! Dave

​Let's try to be a bit more balanced here. I think MAXON knows who they need to satisfy and that is probably the major graphic houses where C4D satisfies a piece of their production pipeline. In fact, I think MAXON's entire business strategy is focused on getting into those production pipelines and that is why they are busy working on integration with Side Effects, Next Limit, Allegorithmic, etc. software than improving core tools for the single user. Why upgrade Bodypaint when Mari is the tool of choice in a production pipeline? Remember that production houses purchase many seats of C4D, and one seat of C4D costs the same whether the employees are using the whole package or just MoGraph. Also, think of where MoGraph would sit in a production pipeline and that may explain why features at the front of the pipeline (like texturing) or back of the pipeline (like network rendering) got less love over time. This is the only explanation I can think for the direction that MAXON has taken in the past few years. Unfortunately, the individual user or small studio suffers with those decisions as we represent a very small part of the overall user-base. I would like to believe that they do listen to us (I trust Hrvoje when he tells us this), but we are low on the priority list because we just don't represent that much in sales. Everyone on this forum is probably an individual user and that is why we are so frustrated. MAXON does hear us. MAXON does care. But the amount of money we represent to MAXON does not keep the lights on or pay employee's salaries, so our needs and wants are last on the list. It's that simple. No one likes to be told that they are a low priority and that is why it is better for MAXON to have such a tight NDA and remain so silent. Relative to buggy features, again business decisions are made on where to direct resources to address each one of them. They know about them, but are only working on those that have the greatest impact to their biggest customers. Companies make these decisions all the time. Look at all the recent noise on how GM made decisions relative to their recalls if you don't believe me. Autodesk and The Foundary probably have a more equal distribution of sales from the individual users relative to large production houses and that is why their behaviors are different. I would rather believe that this is what going on rather than the worst case alternative that everyone seems to be jumping to: That MAXON is out to milk their user base of every last dime with very little regard to providing a quality product. Like Hrvoje implied, that is a losing strategy over time and does not make sense. Companies really don't operate that way unless they perceive that the resources necessary to compete over the long term are so significant and result in such little additional market growth that they will end up losing money. At that point, they are working to maximize profit for the business owners before exiting the market all together. I don't believe that is the case otherwise we would not be getting updates....they would just sell us MSA's but provide nothing back. Sorry...but our place is at the back of the bus. It is what it is and that won't change anytime soon. If you want more love from the company you buy your software from then everyone best follow Nigel's lead and use a package where the individual user represents a bigger part of their business. Dave

​In honor of Nigel, we should extract a couple of his most famous sayings from his tutorials and edit them together into a some mix audio tape or make them ring tones! "Now how cool is that?" "In the Zed direction" "Make editable"... Dave

With the exception of our mutual praise and respect for Nigel, this thread is devolving into yet another C4D bashing. I may also point out that bashing C4D is becoming more commonplace for all the reasons mentioned. I feel for Hrvoje's position but do want to caution that regardless of the truth, it is hard to argue that MAXON listen's to its customers after many consecutive years of waiting for a significant update to Bodypaint and not getting one. Now, this isn't like three guys from Scranton, NJ have been waiting for an update to how CTRL-SHIFT works as a hot key since R15 and been left wanting. No, this is an entire user community screaming that a major portion of the software (once sold as a stand-alone product) has gone virtually untouched for half a decade! You just can't defend that! Don't even try because to do so only works against your outstanding reputation and standing within the C4D community. MAXON desperately needs more people like you (experienced users who know how to code) and I don't want you to get discouraged fighting a battle you cannot win when you are shackled by an NDA. Now I understand MAXON's NDA policy. But had every portion of the software been improved consistently over the years, I don't think it would be a big deal. But to ignore such major portions of the C4D for so long and then go silent about it helps no one. It does not help MAXON, its employee's and especially its users. Things have to change. Rather than try to change our opinions, please work within MAXON and try to change their policies. Trust me, it will be an easier battle to fight. Until then: Is this how we want to remember Nigel's C4D Cafe? Do we really want to turn a place that grew in popularity because it unselfishly reached out to all users with welcoming arms and gave them the support they need to grow their skills into nothing more than a sounding board for our frustrations with MAXON? Nigel's enthusiasm and training is what brought me to C4D. The phrase "How cool is that!" is probably permanently ingrained in our collective conscience. I hope that spirit continues. Dave

Will the Cafe continue? I think because Hrvoje commented that it will implies that he will be the one doing it, but it takes more than someone behind the scenes managing the forum software to make the Cafe what it is today. It takes someone with a deep personal commitment to help the Cafe members and the knowledge, time and talent to do so. I think Hrvoje has all but one of those criteria: the time to do so! My sense is that he is pretty busy pushing C4D development to meet our growing demands and that is a full time job for anyone. Nigel was unique in that respect and people like him are few and far between. MAXON does not realize that the C4D community lost a precious resource and unless someone like Nigel steps in (which would be miracle because Nigel was a class act and there are not many like him) there will be gradual shift in the community as a good number of users move away from the program and MAXON will be at a complete loss to understand what is causing it or how to stop it. Dave

I agree with Nigel's decision to move on for the reasons he's given. It is hard to continue supporting a forum for a product that you no longer believe in. I will miss his involvement with C4D but hope that we continue to stay in contact with each other over the years. Nothing prevents that from happening other than letting the old adage of "out of sight, out of mind" take hold. Like Nigel, with each modo release you just see more and more tools being added and then look at C4D and see a development pace that pales by comparison. Couple of things that I need to consider if I were to see MAXON further mismanage C4D's development: Cost of software and plugins, but also time to learn a new platform, time to convert assets to a new platform, cost for new modo tutorials, etc. Plus lost opportunity cost of everything C4D related that I have purchased in the past. Now, this does not mean that I can't still create something in C4D and port it over to modo, but over time there will be a point where R16 will no longer run on a future version of Windows...and at that point, it is game over. modo stability. Okay....love all the new features, but have they made modo more stable in the process? Part of the "stodginess" in the MAXON development cycle probably has to do with one thing: Stability. So it is a double edged sword because you take stability for granted only until you switch to a less stable program. The future of The Foundary: Not sure where The Foundary is going to land in terms of new owner. I would really want to see how that plays out before making a switch. modo interface. Sorry, but I just can't get my head wrapped around their object and material management. I purchased modo 401 (still have it), but regretted it because of the complete lack of tool specific training, training that was given via verbal hot-key descriptions only (very hard to follow unless the instructor talks slow---which they don't). Having the right tool is more important than having a new tool: Computer programs are tools. Evaluate whether or not you need the tool before you purchase it. My interests are more effects related and as such XP3 and TFD suit my needs just fine. Never underestimate the value of intuitive software. We all love shiny new toys and modo marketing is really great at selling the next version of their software. But as you watch the video's, keep asking yourself how long will it take you to grow your skills as proficiently as the people demoing that feature. Will there be enough training available to get you up that learning curve? I have to say, while the tools look cool, they don't look that intuitive to use. Now, don't read too much into what R17 will or will not have based on Nigel's decision. Remember that all the R14 beta testers were completely surprised by sculpting as it was added pretty late in the beta testing cycle. Alas though, I fear that MAXON's approach is to partner with other companies (Allegorithmic, Side Effects, etc.) as a means to add new features rather than develop them internally. This does nothing for the user as we are already paying a premium for C4D but now have to purchase other programs should we desire those features. Not sure what the future of The Cafe really is...but I think more would be done for the C4D community if it was just folded up rather than sold. Why? Well, like every other user out there, I am ripping mad at MAXON management for how they are NOT protecting my investment. I am sure that C4D Cafe has helped promote a number of sales for MAXON and represents a really good sales channel for them. Think about it: if you were interested in C4D, what other site would you go to that provides as much training and guidance as this site does? Threatening to close this site completely may get MAXON's attention and actually force them to listen to the customer, understand their anger and actually do something about it. Unfortunately, we all know that won't happen. One thing that continues to be developed by MAXON over the years is their arrogance. Let me end with a huge thank you to Nigel! While we support your decision, we are sad to see you go! Dave