3D-Pangel

The only reason I can think of when two material managers might be nice is if you should start assigning materials to different layers and then realize that you want to use ONLY one of the assigned materials to that layer on object that has its materials on a different layer. For large projects that has sometimes created a few extra steps to correct provided you were not careful is assigning your layers to begin with. Now if anyone has a pre-existing workaround to that than please share. I have only come across this problem once so I never deep dived into it. Thanks, Dave

I was referring the MCU Phases of their release schedules. MCU Phases 1 to 3 carried us from the first Iron Man to the Infinity War films. Phase 4 is everything that came after Infinity War until now. So as Phase 4 was a bit of a miss, Phase 5 is being re-thought. Honestly, what made Phase 1 to 3 great was that they were all telling one complete story from introducing each super hero, to forming the Avengers to then fighting Thanos with a common "mcguffin" or plot device of the infinity stones. People would wait until the end-credits to get hints of what was coming next because all the movies were part of the same overall story. There was a certain continuity to them all. What drove Marvel movies to blockbuster status was when people realized all these movies were related.....so you can't miss any of them. You have to watch them all. Honestly, Phase 4 has none of that. I have no idea how all these movies relate to each other and/or what is driving the overall narrative the way the infinity stones drove the overall narrative of Phases 1 to 3. The scenes at the end of the Phase 4 movies just leave me more confused rather than tie things together. Peace out Marvel. I will catch you on video. Also, when you add to that what Disney did to Star Wars, you have to begin to wonder. Yeah, I liked Andor, but honestly, that still does not wash the bad taste of the sequel trilogies out of my mouth. Obi-Wan was a bit of mess. Willow is a bigger mess (I could not even get past the first episode). And let's not even talk about She-Hulk. So peace out Disney+ (I did not renew my subscription -- no point to it now that they want you to pay and still watch ads for their crappy programming). Dave

Marvel is only studio where they budget re-shoots at a very high level even before they start shooting. Their reasoning is that their stories are a bit "high concept" and given the volume of movies they produce each year, they are pushing the pre-production teams to their limits. In short, they spend less time on pre-production planning than they should for the size and scope of movie that they are producing and prefer to just "fix it in post" should the edit not come together the way they expected. This plan works when each movie is a blockbuster as they were in Phases 1 to 3. So, if each movie is generating hundreds of millions in profit, then would you want to only produce one a year and take the time to plan it right or pay $20 to $30 million more in post-production to fix the edit so that you can get two blockbusters out the door each year. Unfortunately, Phase 4 was (IMHO) a dumpster fire for Disney Marvel. "Eternals" was too long and confusing. "Multiverse of Madness" was just a confusing mess built on a weak premise that even Sam Raimi couldn't fix (really...she gets scared by a bee and can now cross multi-verses? Are bees that scary? Is that the best they can do?). And "Love and Thunder" prompted a "What were they thinking?" type of response because it violated every concept of the "hero's journey" essential to good character development. It also made Thor look more like the village idiot than they have done in previous movies (which I think prompted Chris Harmsworth's pledge never to work with Taika Waititi again). "Spider Man No Way Home" was the only movie that actually lived up to and exceeded my expectations for good story and character development that we saw in Phases 1 to 3. Unfortunately, the deal between Sony and Disney over the Spiderman rights ended with that movie. Who knows what happens next. So that VFX reel proves to me that they are not even trying to do good pre-production anymore. We really don't know what the VFX will look like through the windows so let's not even try to match the lighting on set.... we'll build the whole room in 3D and fix it later (imagine if they had done some pre-planning and shot that set in a Stagecraft Volume). Where does the actor stand? Ahh...put him here, and if we don't like it, we will fix it later. Did we make a prop book? Whoops --- didn't have time. Here, hold this piece of cardboard -- we will fix it later. It may not have been as sloppy as that, but you get the idea. That "we will fix it later because we have the money" mentality keeps a lot of VFX houses employed by Marvel. Marvel's movie revenue for Phase 4 is not where Disney wanted it to be and did prompt this rumor on Phase 5. So that thinking may change. Dave

Yes....same here. I would have responded earlier but we had a pretty severe snowstorm on Monday that brought down trees and knocked out power. Our power just came back on last night....just in time for another storm this evening. So thank you Corebot!!! Dave

Janan, I think this page explains it pretty well relative to bronze support. A couple of things to note from that page (screen shot below): Note that my contribution level (Silver Monthly) is highlighted in Blue. So that is how you get feedback of what program you are in. My understanding is that if you sign up for monthly then you are opting to go into automatic payments each month. In that program, I do get two emails each month: One telling me that a deduction is about to happen and then another telling me that there was a deduction, and it provides and invoice. The first looks like this: and the second like this: I would imagine that whether or not you are paying monthly or annually, you should be getting an email from "Core4D Community". It is all pretty well managed. Also note that regardless of whether it is monthly or annually, all programs come without ads. The yearly plans are the better deals for those who are on the fence about joining. I hope this helps, Dave P.S. I know that there have been some who complain about paying for Core4D and complain about the ads. I honored those complaints until I realized just how cheap Core4D sponsorship could be (I gave monthly before the start of the subscription program, so I never looked at this page). For 12 euros a year, all the ads go away (that comes to 1 euro a month.....you can't even get a candy bar for that price)! But as I don't know about everyone's financial situation, then there could very well be some for whom this is a hardship. In that case, my heart goes out to those who can't afford 12 euros a year or 2 euros a month and with all sincerity, I wish you a better future.

Yes....I saw that. Very interesting. But again, what is real or CG is still open to debate even in their minds as they do go back and forth. They even propose that it could be a combination of CG and live action. But notice also that however they do land in the argument, they will say that they could be wrong. Again, the big details being called out are around the micro behavior of water. Can you get CG water to seep into and pool up between the weave of the cloth or on the stitch of the leather? There was mention of a technical paper on new water simulation capability that came out of the Weta team a few years ago. So, is micro water physics the next great breakthrough in liquid simulation? I hope so. I have great faith in Weta to make anything happen. Dave

Very interesting in what needed to be overcome to do motion capture underwater. Those nasty bubbles that confuse the tracking cameras as they cannot distinguish between a bubble and a tracking dot on the actor's suit. But I don't think it was that bubbles were being read as balls more so than the bubble acting like lenses and distorting whatever was behind it. With that said, were RFID emitters ever considered? Apart from motion capture challenges, there were also some advances on simulating micro water behavior - that is how water seeps in between small features such as the weave in cloth as shown below in this image from the movie: But there is still some debate whether or not this scene is 100% CG or a combination between CG and live action. We will probably not know for sure until the movie has finished its theatrical run and the VFX artists are allowed to spill the beans. As for me, I saw the movie in IMAX 3D and it was just visually amazing. Definitely worth the $20 ticket price -- ouch! But only for a James Cameron movie would I pay that much. Story wise, you have to go into it realizing that it is setting up for the next 3 movies so there are some things left unanswered and not the self-contained and complete story that you got out of the first movie...but still good storytelling but not quite perfect. Dave

Thank you Corebot....I knew you would be on top of this and I appreciate the challenge that it represents. Dave P.S. So who is Corebot after all? Hmmm.....

Okay....as MS Edge is based on a Chrome architecture, then essentially they are the same. So I thought I would try Firefox. Well, after logging in I no longer get white space but I do get a ton of ads: Plus they are constantly changing and sometimes video ads pop up either to the left or right of the forum text fields and below the banner (thus explaining why main section showing the forum messages is so narrow). Oh my! That is distracting. What was that line from "Ready Player One"? So again, it appears that Firefox is NOT the browser to use as a Silver Contributor. Just seeing what non-paying users put up with makes me happy with just seeing the white space...even though that is NOT ideal. Dave

There is also this weird page formatting too going on: Look at all that dead space below the banner and how narrow the actual forum entries are appearing. I thought maybe there was some browser setting I needed to change or something in my Core4D user profile, but I could not find any. Plus it only appears on this web-site and when I use other browsers and flush the cache, the problem does not go away. Dave

Glad I am not the only one (well...sorry that it is affecting others on the forum....but you no what I mean) If it is ad related, then am I still supposed to get ads as a silver contributor? This may explain why I am getting the ad window without the ad -- just a white box. Dave

So I am seeing this strange white square at the bottom of every page of the forum....and only on this forum but on other browsers as well (so both Edge and Chrome) It is like Core4D is pulling up a message on accepting cookies but that message is not loading....nor is there any embedded location where "close" or "accept all cookies" would normally be located. Cleared cached, cleared cookies, tried other browsers ...problem is still there. Anyone else seeing this? Dave

It looks like a sub-step issue. The simulation only calculates the collision by comparing where it is now to where it would be in the next frame should the collider object NOT be there. If that point is past the collider object's boundaries, then the simulation determines the collision behavior from its current position -- which may not be close to where the collider object is now if the simulation is moving fast enough. Thus the large gap. There are some settings to play with. Decrease the object thickness on the collider tag and increase the sub-step count on the pyro object. Increasing the sub-step count simply takes that distance between current position and the next position on the next frame and sub-divides it by that count. This will get the collision behavior closer to collider object and eliminate those gaps. Now....I am doing this from memory as I do not have C4D open at this time --- so hopefully those two settings are both called and located as I am remembering them. Dave

No animals were harmed in the making of this short and all actions were monitored and approved by the SPCA. I loved it. The lighting and atmospheric early morning fog was spot on! Though the wolf's growl was a bit off (sounding more like a hungry stomach than an actual wolf), I loved the overall sound design especially the footsteps in the woods. Every footstep was perfectly keyed to the sound effects. That took some work. Honestly, for anyone who desires to do more with CG than stills or motion graphics, Unreal is growing to be the application that provides the broadest set of capabilities to "story tellers". Its toolset is geared toward providing "on-set" tools. By "on-set" I mean its tools are designed to create finished elements rather than provide the capabilities for developing those elements (e.g., do you want flowing "water" or a fluid system for creating flowing water - there is a difference). If modeling is not your thing, then there is Quixel for environments, Kitbash3D for structures., and a host of other sites for characters and character motions. I resonate with Dardo's comment of loving the virtual on-set environment that Unreal provided. And it does all that at close to photo real quality and pretty fast as well. Unfortunately, after watching a few tutorials, the UI appeared daunting to me. I actually could wrap my head around Houdini's UI better than I could Unreal engines. Maybe it was the tutorial. So for those who have stepped more into Unreal than I did (admittedly a passing interest on my part with no real time investment), what were your experiences with the learning curve? How would it compare to Houdini? To Blender? To C4D? Dave

I actually asked a similar question some time ago and the general consensus was that depending on what you were trying to do, 12Gb should be fine and 24Gb should be more than enough for "most" situations. Now, I put "most" in quotes because if you are looking to generate fluid simulations, then VRAM gets quickly consumed. From experience, 8Gb is just too small these days for most things. My last workstation used an 8Gb card (albeit a 7-year-old gpu) and it could not render certain models from Kitbash3D as they tend to use 4K or 8K textures. If your limit is 12Gb, then you may find certain fluid simulations may be out of reach but that does NOT mean all simulations are out of reach. Just be careful with the voxel size and frame the shot accordingly (eg. higher voxel sizes will be okay as long as you don't want a close-up shot of an overly detailed simulation). Also, relative to the CPU, focus on clock speed and not core count. With GPU rendering, the CPU is nothing more than the traffic cop setting the speed limit on moving data to and from the GPU. The GPU does all the work. With that said, I got the cheapest Threadripper available on the configurator which worked out because the cheaper CPU's have the fewer cores but the fastest clock speeds. My choice was the AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3945WX (12 core, 4GHz). Another consideration is not only DRAM speed but whether or not the CPU/motherboard can support multi-channel memory. Some tests at Puget Systems have not (by their own admission) thoroughly tested the benefits of multichannel memory in 3D because their 3D scene files were not that large. But for video editing, etc. they did find that 2, 4 and 8 channel memory configurations made drastic improvements in performance (eg. two channel is 20% faster than single channel, four channel is 20% faster than two channel, etc). You will do better to first determine how many memory channels your configuration can support (either 2, 4 or eight) and then dividing that number into how much memory you want and then configuring your PC with that as your max DIMM size. So if you want a total of 64Gb of memory in your system, and your configuration of CPU and motherboard can only support 2 channel memory, get two 32 Gb DIMMs. If your configuration can support 8 channel memory, then get eight 8Gb DIMMs. Think of multichannel memory like configurating a hard drive array in a RAID 1 (stripping for speed) configuration. I hope this helps. Dave

Igor, Happy to. The biggest issue is with creating the massive scale of the City Destroyer (or CD for short). That ship is supposed to be 15 miles wide so you can imagine how big the fluid simulation would need to be if I just decided to model everything to scale. So you have to cheat and the biggest cheat I could think of would be to have the ship pass "just above" the buildings when in reality it would be much higher in the movie. Therefore, you would need to insure that there is no light or reflections from the buildings onto the ship otherwise it would give away just how close they were and destroy that sense of scale I am looking for. So here is a side view of the scene set-up. The building are only 600 cm's tall. The ship is about 44740 cm wide and 6300 cm tall. So if you assume that the buildings are about 40 stories tall (around 400 feet) then at that scale the CD comes to around 6 miles wide. Not quite the 15 miles discussed in the movie but good enough to get me where I want to be. Also, not a lot of buildings were needed, and they are strategically placed to cut off a good portion of the wide-angle view with more being placed closer the camera and fewer behind with a pseudo main street down the middle to leave enough of a gap to see the fire effect. The next challenge was how to do a rolling fire cloud. Not sure why that took two iterations when in reality it is pretty straightforward. I thought I could just do it with a high rate of turbulence on the fluid simulation but that killed the scale again because to see that turbulence you would need to allow a long dissipation time. You don't want big whispy clouds because again that would kill the scale. The frame captures above that show the ship are from this first attempt. But here you have a static cloud that just kind of simmers rather than rolls. So, to get that rolling affect than it was a simple solution: just create a odd-shaped tube to be the emitter and have it roll along just ahead of the ship until the point you want the ship to emerge from the cloud: Remember that the odd shaped tube is just the emitter and it will be deleted after you have cached the simulation so it will never be seen in the render. When getting the integration of the fluid simulation with the ship I was a little concerned that the ship was made with nothing but booleans (sorry Jay 😉 ) but the connect object worked better than I expected. I just put a collider tag and set Bounce to 0 (that would kill scale) and Friction and Stick to very high values as I wanted the fluid to be dragged by the ship and stick to it because the ship should be the source of the fire and the ship only emerges from it because the ship is cooling --- but cooling unevenly so that is why parts of it are still emitting smoke. A few problems to still solve. The polygon count on the cloud is too high and needs to be reduced because while it is giving a great look, each VDB file per frame is over 1Gb. So I need to reduce the polygon count, shorten it up a bit (strategically place a few more buildings to make that possible) and remove velocity from the simulation cache. So much for really good motion blur but as the ship is supposed to be massive, it moves slow so you don't need motion blur for the ship but it would have been nice for the rolling cloud. That's about it. Hopefully I can get the cache size down to get this done. There were no VRAM errors but C4D just crapped out after 139 frames which I think may have something to do with the size of the VDB files. The ship is moving slow so it will take at least 1000 frames to pass over the buildings. Any faster would not match the pace shown in the movie. Dealing with large scale is a bitch in CG but that is what makes it memorable (IMHO) if you can pull it off! Now....what can you do in Houdini? Sorry. I had to ask and lay down that challenge!!!!!! Dave

Glad I could help. I did try to find the comparison page by going through the e-on website (any thoughts to a site search capability --- I could not find one). Without success I tried Google and that is where the URL (https://info.e-onsoftware.com/comparative-chart) popped up. It looked valid to me. Now the re-direct you provided on that URL only takes me to the Product Licensing, Pricing and FAQ page. That is actually where I first started my search for a product comparison chart but I could not find it. So what am I missing? Apologies for being dense as I am pretty sure it is right under my nose. Dave

Congratulations on a great release. I did check the compare page to see if the promise of export capability for the creator line of products would be announced with this release, but alas it still said that export was available to professional only. Has that changed or did I mis-interpret something? Is it still being discussed and is just delayed? Dave

That's not entirely correct. They used a light rig in a cloud tank: white paint injected into a big glass tank of water that has two different densities to create an inversion layer for the paint to float on forming the underside of the cloud. The light rig of alternating red/yellow/orange lights was all they could do to create the fire effect. It was onto that high-speed footage of the cloud tank that they then comped the ship. Some digital manipulation via compositing masks were required to get the clouds to peel back as the ship passed through the cloud but there were no CG clouds in that shot. The most digital work they had to do was clone sections of the cloud tank footage wherever the light rig was poking through. That is why the reveal shot is shot wide and from a distance as getting closer would probably show that the water tank paint clouds were grossly out of scale. Notice also that it was a quick shot. Honestly, I think it would have been more dramatic if the ship burst through in a tight shot right above the buildings and then rumbled so close overhead that you think it is going to hit the buildings. Only when it doesn't hit the buildings that you realize just how gigantic that ship really is. Well, that is the feeling I am going for anyway. Dave P.S. My reference on how they did that shot is from Cinefex Issue 67 (page 68). I remembered how they did but looked it up to make sure my facts were correct.

Otherwise known as Stagecraft. Not sure if 1899 was filmed on one of those stages. According to Wikipedia, here are the current locations: Note that ILM can "pop-up" new stages. Not sure what this means as I would imagine just getting all the material (screens, electronics and rigging to hold everything in place) is not a trivial task. Also, there is more than just Unreal driving those LED screens. ILM actually partnered with Epic to develop a proprietary set of tools for Stagecraft (it has its own brand, but I can't remember what it was called). I am also led to believe that future iterations helped solve the problem of getting the screens to blend better with the floor and (more importantly) the ceiling LED's. Now the camera can pan up with fewer restrictions. Interesting bit of history: It probably took some closer collaboration between ILM and Epic to get this done and every time two companies need to work that close together, there are always bumps and rough edges. Well, I would imagine that Epic's CTO, Kim Libreri, was instrumental in making that happen. Kim used to be a visual effects supervisor at ILM, leaving ILM and joining Epic in 2014. Small world coincidence? I would not be surprised if Kim's move to Epic was engineered just for things like Stagecraft. Afterall, George Lucas has wanted to do a more virtual world of production for something like this for over 20 years. The only way to get there is through game technology. Dave

Right film, wrong scene. It is the scene where the "city destroyers" first appear. If you recall, the ships slowly emerged from a big fire ball that was created from entering our atmosphere. In the movie, that emergence was shown in a long shot, and I wanted something a bit more dramatic: and to really punch up just how huge they were: So first this big fiery cloud rolls on top of you and when think that is pretty big, the ship emerges then just overtakes everything in the frame and blocking out all the light. And it just keeps rolling and rolling on by: Still a WIP though. More work to do. Dave

Wrong film....right director. Dave

Every end-of-year shutdown at work is when I finally find more time to work in C4D. This year's WIP is designed to both push me deep into pyro and to push my new workstation --- just to see how far it can go. Can you guess the movie that is inspiring me this time? A full animation is in the works but the VDB files for each frame are over 1Gb in size. To give you a sense of scale, the voxel size is 100 cm in order for me not to get any VRAM errors --- which is a good thing. Unfortunately, C4D could not keep up with the cache generation and crapped out after 139 frames. For the frames that were simulated, render time was still pretty zippy at 42 seconds. I just need to rethink a few things to get the simulation fully cached (like maybe turning off velocity and forego motion blur, up the voxel size, decrease the size of the emitter a bit, etc...etc...etc..). But it is a good problem as I am loving the results so far. If you can guess the movie, then can you guess the scene? If you can guess the scene, then you know what happens next and the reason why I am working with such large-scale simulations (but the test renders of that were pretty awesome---IMHO). Dave

The cut-off at the pink lines (number 1 noted above) also indicate that a field force is being used which may be clamping the fluids as well. I downloaded the file and HappyPolygon was right in that the tree setting was set to 1 and should be increased as well. Unfortunately, I could not get the fluids to appear when hitting play. To be honest, I did not fiddle with it that long. I thought maybe it had to do with some of the emitters being children of the hand object and that a composite tag with 0% visibility was set on that tag but moving the emitters outside of the hand had no impact. I did not deep dive into all the pyro emitters. You do not need to use a compositing tag to hide the emitters if you do not want them in the final render. Just cache the fluid simulation and then delete the emitters prior to rendering.

Exactly! With GPU rendering (and GPU simulation), then go for the fastest CPU you can get for the money and do NOT worry about core count. The beauty there is that the faster CPUs with the lower core counts tend to be at the lower end of the price range. The AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 3945WX was the cheapest CPU in the P620 configurator but also had the fastest clock speed. It can also support 8 channel memory which is plus for improved performance (spreading memory across paired channels is like running striped hard drives as in a RAID 0 drive configuration). Relative to multi-channel memory, there is an interesting article from Puget Systems (found here) whether multi-channel memory configurations provide significant benefit to performance in DCC application. Honestly, the 3D benchmark tests (like Cinebench) are not conclusive as the test render scenes are very light in size, so all the values tend be the same. Had they used huge scenes that required a lot of data being moved to and from memory, then maybe you would have seen a greater benefit to spreading your memory across 1 DIMM slot to 2, 4 or 8 DIMM slots. The 2D results looked interesting and show a big benefit from spreading memory across 2 DIMM slots rather than 1 but not that much additional benefit when spreading memory across 4 DIMM slots over 2 DIMM slots but then another big bump when moving to 8 DIMM slots. Based on this article, some other feedback I received and the fact that you do pay more for the same total amount of memory across more DIMMs, I just went with a 2-channel memory configuration. Dave