3D-Pangel

Once again, no R23 perpetual upgrade pricing at the web-site. Can anyone from MAXON please explain why perpetual upgrade pricing is such a deep, dark secret? Why do I have to call the local sales office? This has been asked but not answered by a number of people over the last year and MAXON has been quiet about it. Again, not sure why. I do have a couple of theories though: MAXON is embarrassed by the price - they know it is high relative to how loyal customers upgraded in the past via the MSA. Originally, the perpetual upgrade price WAS going to be $720 and the subscription price was going to be the old MSA price of $650 but they made a mistake when they released the subscription pricing at the $720 cost. So they picked $995 because it sounded nice. Perpetual pricing is determined by a MAXON sales professional spinning a giant "Wheel of Fortune" type roulette wheel with varying pricing values on it and a few traps like "Past Perpetual licenses flip to subscription", "License server goes down just for you...permanently" and the dreaded "The only upgrade path for you is completely new license at $3495" Test marketing shows that by having a highly trained MAXON sales professional with 6 years experience doing grief counseling walk you through the sticker shock, they will see 20% higher sales. They posted it once at the web-site in Germany and the offices got egged. They posted it once and their support desk was flooded with calls complaining that the web-site must be in error. MAXON sales professionals love hearing the anguish in our voices. They record every call and play the best back to everyone during happy hour on Friday. 😉 Dave

News? No. Rumor? Nope to that too. Whisper? Not a peep. A deep burning hope in the hearts of hobbyists everywhere? Always....but that and $1.80 will get you an N95 mask which is probably far more useful in today's world than hoping MAXON makes a move towards indie licensing. In short, hope is a bad strategy. A better strategy is for hobbyists everywhere to not upgrade and wait as long as you can. We want R23...but we don't need it. We don't make money on it....it doesn't feed our families. So if we all waited everywhere and in every market and corner of the globe, maybe....just maybe....our combined lack of revenue means something to MAXON. That is the only way to move the needle on Indie licensing. Dave

My guess is a crushing $995....the cost of missing your MSA deadline and having to do a one revision upgrade in the pre-subscription days. Notice that perpetual license upgrade costs are not part of their web-site and still require calls to your local MAXON sales office. Not sure why? Prices vary by region maybe. Ability to negotiate a lower price for long term customers? Probably not. Interestingly enough, I think it was quickly stated in today's presentation that perpetual license upgrade costs will require a call to MAXON which is the first time I think I have ever heard it referenced publicly (I could be wrong....) As for me, it almost feels like MAXON wants to suppress the fact they offer a perpetual upgrade at all....which does not bode well for the future of perpetual licenses. If not, why keep another sales option in the shadows? Dave

No YouTube videos of Scene nodes? C'mon!!!! Neutrino Man wants to come out an play!!! 😉 Dave

100% agree...and that extends to every manager in C4D. They all just make sense. The managers and C4D's stability keeps me using the program. I did try modo 401 and while the modeling tools were outstanding I just could not get my head wrapped around their object manager (every mesh in the scene was under one item called "mesh" in the object tree -- why?). Likewise, while Blender has made some improvements, it still does things that don't make sense (eg. parametric objects only stay parametric with first activation -- why?). And while Blender now has an OM, you can't drag and drop materials onto items in the OM. I used to take the entire tag architecture of C4D for granted because it just made so much sense. I mean, all these programs are written in C++ which is an object-oriented architecture so a tag architecture should seem like a logical way to go. But it is not. A good test for me with any new software is to see how far I can get using the demo without the benefit of any documentation or training. If you can use it straight out of the box, then you know you will have a pleasurable user experience. I got further with C4D than with any other program. That same experience with Blender was a little "clunky". So, if I may quote Cerbera), Blender just doesn't feel like home. But that does not mean it could never become home. To continue with that analogy, everyone hates to move but when things get too expensive living where you are then you have to move. I would hate to move to Blender, but that is up to MAXON in their pricing decisions on what the hobbyist user means to them. My ideal world? Blender focus on improving their object and texture managers (drag and drop capability, ctrl-copy, etc) and brings them up to C4D standards and Insydium (already in the Blender camp with Cycles) ports X-Particles to Blender. That would get me to move. Dave

I went to the Maya site in search of the indie license information. Interestingly enough, they hide that as well as MAXON hides cost information about their perpetual license upgrades. I did not find any information on the indie licensing. I had to do a wider Google search (check here) to find that it was $250/year. It is apparent that Autodesk is setting the price ceiling on subscription licensing fees and that MAXON's position will always be competitive to what Autodesk does (eg. something lower). Maya's licensing fees are absolutely horrendous and death to the hobbyist: no perpetual licenses and $1620/year. As a hobbyist, nothing would drive me to Blender faster than should MAXON follow Maya's subscription plan . But nothing would keep me perpetually dedicated to Cinema 4D faster than if MAXON followed Maya's indie plan. So obviously, something drove Autodesk to offer an indie license and I am pretty sure that it wasn't just because they wanted to be nice people and feel good about themselves. It was probably something we all expected: Their customer base of indie users was bigger than they expected and they lost a good chunk of that base when they implemented their high cost subscription plan. Where that base went (Houdini, Blender, C4D) is anyone's guess, but it represented enough revenue to Autodesk that they took it seriously and wanted it back and thus implemented their indie pricing plan in key markets only (obviously markets with a lot of indie users ---- proof enough that they weren't just being nice guys but trying to win back customers). I think MAXON is trying to dance somewhere in between with a subscription plan that is acceptable to everyone. Whether or not the hard core hobbyist buys into their middle ground approach will become evident over the next couple of months as the last of the MSA's expire and the hobbyist is faced with a choice: submit to the subscription plan for however long you want to keep using C4D or pay the higher cost of a perpetual license. So...if history is any judge....I say we stand our ground. No matter how exciting the next release looks, hold onto R21. Every company sets budgets predicated on a prediction of future revenue. Given MAXON's recent acquisition costs (Redshift and Red Giant), their cash reserves may not be what they once were...some of their cushion could be gone. So meeting their revenue targets could be something they deeply care about more about now than they did in the past. Therefore, if that revenue is unexpectedly less than what they predicted, they could change plans in favor of the hobbyist. That is what Audodesk did. So hold tight people and see what happens. "We are in the endgame now" Dave

Hah! I never saw this thread. I only saw the gallery images yesterday and was just blown away (I left a few glowing comments). Now I find out that there is this amazing animation that is behind those gallery images (I was wondering why there were names in the gallery images). So now you can add great camera work, editing, fluid sims, and general story telling to what I already praised in the gallery image. And then I visited your site at vekta.tv First...who would have imagined that King Kong would ever be attempted for Broadway but then you see the work you did for background projections. All that modeling! No kit bashing as far as I can tell from the breakdown video. Amazing. Well....very inspiring. You rarely see C4D being showcased with amazing work other than motion graphics and here you have a body of outstanding work that just uses everything C4D can give you. And based on the freelance work you have done, you are busy -- people know who you are. I am just scratching my head wondering why I don't recognize your name from MAXON presentations, 3D World Gallery images, CG Network articles, etc. Man....I need to get out more. Dave

I am wondering if you are using Redshift's area lights? In general area lights are designed to give a diffused light (as if the light is passing through a scrim) with soft shadows. Also with Redshift, the size of the light increases the amount of illumination so if you have a big area light then the scene will be washed out. One way around that is to be sure to select "normalize illumination" which will not increase illumination as the size of the area light increases. The other thing working against you is the ground fog. Honestly, it is hard to see the fog in the scene itself and only serves to further wash out the contact shadows. You could fake it as was done in the Eroica video. Back in 1996, pretty certain that volumetric rendering was not available and they faked the ground fog using a luminance map of smoke element added to a foreground plane. Hey....if it works, its not cheating to use a work around to your render engine. To figure out what works and what doesn't, I would suggest turning off the fill lights and the ground fog and switching the main key light from area to spot (if an area light is being used). If you use a spot slight, then you should also define its direction by adding a moon to the background image. Then turn on your fill lights one-by-one and see how they affect the scene. Is the contrast being maintained or does it wash out shadows? If all is good, turn back on the ground fog. I have yet to play with the environment controls in Redshift but I would image fog luminance is something you can control. If you can't see the fog without washing out the contact shadows then realize that ground fog does NOT need to be seen everywhere....rather it can be suggested in key areas where the background is naturally covered by shadow. That is, the moonlight is only penetrating the forest canopy in certain sections - and thereby only lighting the fog selectively in the foreground while the background is kept in shadow. Ground fog creates mood so simply "suggesting" its presence in the scene rather than showing it everywhere may be enough to convey the mood you are looking for. Dave

Interesting...IHMO a very good tool. While not as powerful as Takes, it is certainly a lot easier to use. "Takes for the Object Manager" perhaps? Dave

So how is the new title working for you now?

There are some serious flaws to how MAXON is managing their Python scripts via Cineversity only subscription. At first, it was a nice plus to being a MAXON license holder when you knew that as long as you held a valid license, these scripts would work. But now that they limit these scripts to subscription only customers is just plain wrong especially when their capability is NOT incorporated into a future release of the program. People have come to depend on these scripts! So what's next? Decisions to move features currently available in both perpetual and subscription licenses to ONLY be available in future subscription licenses? We know they won't do that because it would mean maintaining two code basis but that is how it feels. "Sorry...the square primitive is now only limited to subscription customers or if you have a Cineversity subscription!" Now that is a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the point. You just can't take features away from people if they have paid for a perpetual licenses and Cineversity scripts are features after all. The scripts were once a wonderful act of goodwill that endeared us to MAXON -- but now that has changed. Such a small thing too but it has a big impact on how customers view the company, their culture and "customer caring" (a big deal with some of the most successful companies --- there are whole books on the subject. MAXON should read a few). MAXON is really being shortsighted in this area. Loosing a script is not going to move anyone to get a subscription, but it will move people to complain and potentially publicly trash in other forums MAXON's reputation. Make all the scripts free and independent of a Cineversity subscription. Again, they are such a small thing and the goodwill created will be more valuable than the time it took to create them. Dave

Overall, I liked it....but I do agree with the comments made so far. What bothers me the most about it is the flatness of the lighting on the skeleton and the background. Nothing casts a shadow. Actually, I think you should make it as scary as possible in the beginning. Deep dark shadows, raking light from the moon. The skeleton mostly hidden in shadow except for his burning red eyes that glow in the night. Not sure you have Forestor, but adding some life to the background in form of swaying trees being blown by the wind, casting foreboding and moving shadows on everything with a soft shrieking wind sound would definitely help create a scarier opening. Look at this animation from 1996 to draw some inspiration on nighttime mood lighting: https://www.robertoziche.com/eroica/ So why the scarier opening? To help sell the laugh at the end. The joke at the end of the skeleton using the "To Let" is a pay-off and a nervous release to whatever thrills you can induce at the beginning. Keep the funny walk until the very end when you reveal the "To Let" gravestone. Don't tip your hand that this is a joke until you have to. If you want to keep it cartoony, then go for it but not in 3D. Just shade the entire thing with a toon shader as that would be more appropriate to the shading, pacing an animation so far as it looks like a cartoon right now. Dave

I know this has been asked and "almost" answered before, but it is probably worth a repeat here as we are close to the release date and therefore need a definitive response. As you pointed out, the next perpetual license release will have its number increased to 23. Therefore, is R23 considered a one version perpetual upgrade from R21 or a two version perpetual upgrade? This is important as historically (prior to subscriptions) a two version upgrade for those who let their MSA elapse was close to $1900 USD. So, given that we never had a chance to get an perpetual license for Version 22, are we now forced to pay that two version upgrade price for a perpetual R23? Again, this was asked in the past and the response from Mr. McGavran was a humorous "Hey....good idea" (or something like that) which did leave me with the impression that would not be the case. But probably good to get an actual answer now. Dave

My MSA expired on 8/27 and I am now in the higher cost world of perpetual upgrades or have MAXON hold all my future content hostage to their subscription program. Casting aside all their specials and deals on subscriptions, I started to troll the local dealers on perpetual upgrade costs. I came across this on a very informative Toolfarm page of pricing (found here) Maybe it is just a normal caveat from all of MAXON's retailers and not indicative of any change in policy from MAXON.....but, if you read the rest of the note, you will see the continued behavior from MAXON to NOT make perpetual upgrade pricing more public. Overall, not very encouraging for the hobbyist who makes no money from using C4D but just wants the option to use their last upgrade should they decide they can no longer afford to stay current with the program. Dave

IMHO....the Cafe is a rarity on the internet. Personally, I am NOT a big fan of social media in all its forms. The best compliment I ever received was that I have a low internet footprint. The Cafe is the only place which I visit regularly and I do so for a number of reasons: Helpful tips Polite and friendly members. Great access to some true masters of the program (and this compliment goes beyond the moderators who truly are "masters" but to the entire C4D eco system of tutorial and plugin developers as well as everyday users that populate the Cafe). Great tutorials and free plugins, etc. Tremendous and inspiring gallery. Latest news from MAXON It is always a positive place that stays on topic of C4D or graphics in general. The events of the outside world rarely creep into the Cafe (afaik) which makes it a nice escape to a better place. The moderators do a masterful job of keeping conversations open and free but also respectful. I mean, we have a Houdini and Blender thread going. In that discussion, you do actually learn a lot about C4D and how it compares (which I think is positive to the C4D community). The fact that it exists at all is unique because other sites would treat any discussion of a competitor's program as apostacy and have all those involved sacked. Access to MAXON leadership. Hopefully, they find this place as inviting as I do despite the robust dialogue that may be created over features and {...ahem...} pricing. Just remember that we all come from the same place: a love for C4D...and Redshift. Dave

Welcome to the Cafe! You will find this to be a friendly community of extremely knowledgeable and talented people with the same creative desires and goals as yourself. As an aside, I spent a good portion of my early career (almost 30 years ago) in The Netherlands and absolutely loved it. Just a great country, great food, great people, beautiful countryside. The summers were outstanding (the winters....not so much). So the Cafe is like the Netherlands....in the summer!!! 🙂 Now I am a hobbyist so I have never worked in the industry so I have no first hand knowledge of what life is like in the industry. What I do know is only through what I have read. With that said, if you have any desire to work in the film industry then I would strongly recommend you read "Inside VFX: An Insider's View into the Visual Effects and Film Business" by Pierre Grage. In short, not a pretty picture....it's a tough business. With that said, I have NOT heard as many horror stories about life in the games industry (IMHO: the work being done at Epic is driving the industry forward). If you have not already done so, make the same post at the C4D forum at the CG Society (found here) as that site is more frequented by CG professionals working at the larger studios than you would find here. Now, not to discourage you, but every industry has good and bad. So listen to what people say but don't take it that everything you hear will apply to you. It won't. Your path will be unique. But you know that otherwise you would not be asking for insight...and that is a very good first step!!! Good luck and welcome! Dave BTW: Not sure if you ever heard of Gimpville (a really outstanding VFX company in Oslo, Norway). I have kept in touch with the founder ever since he was 18 years old (yes...I met him in a forum). He took a chance and started out on his own at a young age. Now this guy had talent....you could just see it in his early work. We all hated him because he was so young with so much talent! 😀 So talent will always get you where you want to go!

If you are going to do more work in this area, you need to do it to the right type of music. May I introduce "Space Tones" from the Extreme Music production company: https://www.extrememusic.com/labels/space-tones Great orchestral compositions and all available for immediate streaming for free and without ads. Stay inspired. Dave

I would be interested if you have found planetary textures at any sites other than the one's I am familiar with....and those would be: Celestial Motherlode NASA Earth Maps (or Visible Earth) Earth from Space Dave

Threekit is currently looking for a 3D Technical Artist or a Senior Generalist 3D Artist. Note that remote work opportunities exist in the US and Canada. I have never heard of them but thought it might have value to someone so I am forwarding the email I received (shown below) to the Cafe. If they are emailing me directly, they must be desperate!!! Dave

You nailed it! That certainly get's the point across that the moons of mars really are not moons as we think of moons. More like captured asteroids as you say. So the bluish gradient captures our night sky as seen through our atmosphere, but how do you eliminate the flickering without having ridiculously high anti-aliasing values during rendering! Some stars just do not consistently render from frame to frame....even when the camera is not moving. I've tried everything (high AA settings, rendering out to twice the finished image size and then reducing in post) with only somewhat passable results (still not happy) --- even with static backgrounds. Admittedly, I have not done a space animation in quite some time (3 to 4 years), so maybe the denoising algorithms have improved significantly since then - but I would still like to hear how you did it. Dave

There is drag and drop capability if you click and drag. Unfortunately, the tricky part comes when you click and when you drag. For example, when dealing with the top stop light (visibility) -- say it is green but you want it to go to red as well as the 5 objects below it. Left-Click it so that it goes red and while still holding the left mouse button down start to drag the cursor down just a little bit in a slow and steady fashion until you see the pointer turn into a paint brush. At that point, while still holding down the left mouse button, as you paint down that column of stop lights for all the other objects, their visibility will turn to red. But if all else fails, there is also the layer manager as well to turn on an off layers from both visibility and rendering. Dave