3D-Pangel

Me thinks you are over-reacting there. While it is true you can draw an infinite number of lines through a single point, you really are taking a huge logical leap extrapolating a small python plugin to a major R19 release feature....unless of course you just wanted to make a cynical point to an otherwise very accommodating and patient MAXON representative. So I will take a logical leap: You have lost patience with MAXON, you will not wait for R19 and will be jumping to Maya and Houdini very soon. In fact, you can't wait to get to this promised land of graphical delights where the features are always new, cutting edge and rock solid. It is a magical place filled with contented users where the only limitations to your creativity are found in your own skills and not in the software. Autodesk and Side Effects freely discuss new features years ahead of their release dates and adopt every user suggestion or fix every user bug right away because they have legions of dedicated coders working globally 24 hours a day. Yes...it is a happy place where there are no complaints or frustrations. So why aren't you there yet? Ahhh...the curse of quality! It takes time. So what you are saying is no early Christmas this year! Well...can't blame me for trying. And as far as subscriptions go....NOOOOO!!!!! I will be happy with waiting. I would love to be on the beta team, but that privilege requires more time and dedication than I am willing to give it right now (this is a beloved hobby for me, but I do have a day job...plus a family....plus a wife...home....dog....kids...you get the idea). Maybe when I retire (ahh...that would be fun). Thanks again, Dave

JF, Fully understand the legal, financial and just plain "let's minimize the noise over undelivered promises" constraints that MAXON adopts relative to new features. But just wondering at what point during the development process do certain features become locked for a release? Is it always around Siggraph? I would hope not as Siggraph is usually just one month before a full release notice. There has to be some point far earlier where MAXON is fully committed to incorporating a new feature into the program. And by committed, I mean "we don't have a release unless we get this implemented as so many other enhancements depend upon it". I ask because we look at the competition and it seems that they are more willing to share some details well ahead of their next release. I would imagine, like MAXON, that they also don't want to over-promise and under-deliver so what they talk about has a 99.999% probability of being in the next release. As such, there is almost no risk of giving its user's a sneak peek much earlier in the release cycle because come hell or high water that feature will be in the program. There has to be features planned for R19 that also fall into a similar category? So while discussing some features will entail the risks you outlined, I can't imagine that all features carry that same risk. Again, I fully support and respect your policy. But the next time your sitting in a product development meeting, and the Program Manager is just tickled pink about meeting schedule for features X,Y and Z, then ask yourself and the team what the harm will be to share that same level of optimism with your customers for those features? Dave

Well...this will be a first for me...actually creating and updating a thread on a current WIP. Probably a first, because I never really know if I will be able to finish a project when I start it, but I feel pretty confident about this one. The project will be the space station from Star Trek III --- highly inspired by listening to the music from the movie. I am a huge fan of movie music and one my favorite composers is James Horner (Avatar, Field of Dreams, Apollo 13, Titanic, ST II and ST III, etc.). Sadly, he passed away in 2015 in a private plane accident. Just lately, I have been listening to his soundtracks. The station I hope to create is this one: At first glance, it did not seem to offer too much a challenge as it really is about 10 primitives (cones, spheres and cylinders) stacked on top of each other, but as I do research on the web, finding any and all images, it is actually not that simple. So it should offer some fun challenges. I also plan to model the interior docking area as well: ....and finally, here is where I am so far - Okay....is it just me or does this look like a giant mushroom? ;-) Dave

Never meant to imply that about Hrvoje and I would certainly agree with you. A true gentleman. But after just watching that Krav Maga video, I did find it incongruous to his nature as best as I could determine from his tutorials and Cafe posts. And that is when I thought "wow...that would make an excellent villain character: huge and physically menacing but with a soft and calm speaking voice -- who explains why he must break you while he is doing it in soothing tones." So I was thinking more about that character than Hrvoje. ..hmmm....maybe Hrvoje has a future in the next Bond movie. Hrvoje does remind me of Ron Fedkiw: Stanford University professor who developed PhysBAM for ILM who was a competitive weight lifter who dead lifted 800 lbs in the 198 pound weight class. Hey...like Hrvoje...another data point against the "all brawn and no brains" stereotype. Dave

Okay....I had to look up Krav Maga Yes...now I am scared. ....a really scary image would be Hrvoje slowly twisting you into a pretzel while he calmly says in those soft dulcet tones of his "I must break you now....do not take it personally but this is the simplest and most direct way for me to deal with you. It is veeery easy and there is no reason to be concerned....{crrrraaaack!}" BTW: Sigor...love your new avatar....cute! Striking resemblance too! Dave

Jean-Franocois, First off---welcome to the Cafe! Thank you for clearly and logically explaining where Maxon-Labs sits in the overall C4D world and for setting expectations for what to expect --- or not expect --- in the future. In short, you have level-set me pretty well at least. Relative to providing positive feedback to product management, what is the best way to do that? Will Maxon Labs consider a forum of some sort or should we use the "suggestions" link at Maxon.net? Or do we just yell at Hrvoje at the Cafe? I understand he's quite open to that! ;-) Dave

So how long has Maxon Labs been around? I was always pretty bullish on what Maxon offers beyond C4D such as the Cineversity tutorials and CV-Tools, but this just takes it up a notch. Bravo! So is this just a repository for what the developers create in their "spare" time? Apps that maybe support their own workflow but are not part of the development program? Just wondering because it would help to know how comments/suggestions would be taken. Would they yield any changes, promote further development, be compatible with future releases, etc. I get the sense they would not which is a shame because the Coons and Extruder tools would make really nice permanent additions to the Maxon toolset. But for now, extremely grateful to Maxon for sharing!!! Dave

Don't get me wrong. I have absolute confidence in the future of Maxon otherwise I would not have purchased my 2017-2018 MSA license back when they had the 30% discount (so I am good through 9/2018). I just get the growing sense that Maxon is siding with the industry perception of their own renderer and feared that maybe they were coming to the realization that they will never be able to keep up with the 3rd party developers. Question: is that interior rendering done with a beta version of the new renderer or with the current version. Confused by " what I saw on Maxon beta forums is very capable renderer that is already in Cinema" I would imagine it is the beta renderer you are referring to but just wanted to be sure. Yes...I would love to see the image as well. My hope for the future of AR: Texture channels....but underneath the hood a nodal system for going above and beyond. Volumetric shading Light emitting materials OpenVDB And my personal nit: More control on the shape of the volumetric spot light (does it have start at a point?). Dave

So I have to ask: But all these tutorials are on "Realistic rendering" and appear to be sponsored by Maxon but there is no webinar on using C4D's Advance Renderer. So what conclusions are we to draw from this? Realistic rendering is NOT possible in C4D using AR? Has the industry backed away from AR and, left with no choice, Maxon has consigned themselves to the fact and is promoting 3rd party rendering solutions over their own renderer? By promoting 3rd party rendering solutions rather than their own internal renderer, is Maxon backing away from AR? Overall, not a good sign unless there is something I am completely missing (in which case, please clue me in!!!). Dave

Wow. Very nice and better progress than I have made. Is the PC sluggishness only related to the real time preview. How fast did it render as I would imagine that you would need to really increase the samples to get a clean image without noise. Plus, when you push the scale to get smaller clouds but preserve the detail, that would also spike render times. But it does show very exciting possibilities. Dave

Overall....FreeD tech was under-whelming given the 5 years of development time over the last example we saw showing the baseball game. My expectation was that it would create an animation from within the virtual world it created but in reality it was only a static image and then again only from the POV of the quarterback. They didn't even jump around from quarterback to receiver to linesman....you get the point. Yes...still pretty cool but given the pace of 3D advances, maybe our expectations have been set unrealistically high. Relative to the Superbowl itself. All I can say is wow. 2 hours of disappointment as the Pats were behind by 25 points in the 3rd quarter (28 to 3). Then they slowly marched back to a 28 to 28 tie at the end of the game, won the coin toss in overtime and marched down the field to score the game winning touchdown. Sigor -- C'mon man....show some love for Brady because when you recover from such a deficit (the biggest in Superbowl history) you have to be mentally tough. Plus, his mother is fighting cancer, just came out of chemo so he had all that going on in his head as well but he still focused and fought back. That takes strength. He did win MVP but felt he didn't deserve it. He felt White deserved it so he gave him the $50,000 truck you win when you get the MVP award. Now that's class. How can you not respect that? Look, I respect tough competitors. Rodgers and Rothleisberger are my 2nd and 3rd favorite quarterbacks. Yes, we compete against them but you still have to respect them because they are just damn good. Dave

I wonder if what the Superbowl will use is this Free3D in this link as that was from 2013...almost 5 years ago. Note that the Free3D demo could only shift between any of the two taking cameras. It never got close to the players and at the end of the video they do show you an image of a player up close and the textures do not hold up. What tonight's Superbowl is talking about is developed by Intel and they are talking about putting the 3D camera anywhere...so obviously this is a whole generation of technology better than what was shown in 2013....and like Sigor, I was impressed by what was in that 2013 video. So really interested to see how far this technology has gone in 5 years! Dave BTW: Only 27% of people are rooting for the Patriots. As a person who has lived in New England all my life, we are used to it. I mean we've gone to the SuperBowl more than any other team in the NFL (9), we have had more consecutive wins than any other team in the NFL (21), and more consecutive winning seasons (10 or more wins in a season) than any other team (12) . We are just use to everyone hoping for us to lose and rooting against us.

Thank you. I would be interested to see what you come with. Right now I am trying to get that effect by using pyrocluster to shade a bunch of tiny spheres cloned randomly to the surface of a larger sphere using MoGraph.....and right now it looks like a bunch of uniform puffy spheres cloned to the surface of another sphere. There has to be a better way! Thanks for all your help. Dave

Okay...this is cool. Is there anyway to get the volumetric shading to not run hard to the outside of the volume? That is, could you use this technique to create volumetric clouds around a planet and be self-shadowing. This is what I am after: If you used the shader that you developed, it would not look right because clouds do not run hard against a perfect sphere at the top of the atmosphere. In fact, the exact opposite of what you created would be what is needed. Creating the perfect 3D model of the earth from space has been a pet-project of mine for quite some time. And so far, the one thing that I have not been able to create is volumetic clouds from space that look real. If Cycles volumetric rendering could do that, I would be buy it right away. Dave P.S. That would be an interesting Cafe challenge: make a hyper-realistic earth as seen from space.

As a VFX enthusiast, I was excited many years ago when they started mapping the first down lines during live action play in football games (okay...I am a true geek and I don't get out much). I appreciated all the 3D graphics software that was involved: camera tracking to get the line to stick on the field, contrast matting to put the line behind the players, etc. What they are going to debut at Superbowl LI (51) today puts all that to shame and takes it to an extreme level. At the Superbowl, they will be placing 38 fixed cameras around the stadium. Those cameras are going to be recording the action and mapping the players volumes, actions and position - very similar to how the VFX industry uses motion capture but rather than just recording the motions, it also records the 3D volume of each player and then texture maps the recorded image back onto that volume. And it does all that without the benefit of the players wearing reference marks (or those tight leotards with the triangle and square patterns). So what this will enable is a replay in 3D space where you can view that play from the quarterbacks perspective. Literally, put the camera in the quarterbacks helmet and rerun the exact same play...or put in the receivers helmet...or from the perspective of the referees....basically anyone on the field at that time. Not sure how much processing hardware is required but each 30 second clip records 1 Terabyte of data which is then rendered in only 2 minutes. The technology was developed by Intel (go figure) and you can read more about it here. Being from NH and a die-hard Patriots fan, I now have another reason to watch the game! Dave

Just wondering....but isn't paypal safer than credit cards...especially for purchases made outside your country? Dave

By the way, as the Cafe Supporter options are priced in Euro's, I thought I would mention that for our US members that the value of the Euro against the dollar is coming off a 10 year low. I was shocked at the conversion rate used by Paypal so I looked it up at www.xe.com So not only is it a good time for US members to donate to the Cafe, but it may also be a good time to buy plugins (Nitro4D, C4D Zone, etc), models (Evermotion), etc. that are only priced in Euro's. Dave

I have successfully tested the new Club Support products...and it all works very well!!! ;-) Thank you (and all the other moderators) for the training, support, and generally excellent management of this forum. Dave

Setting up the products for Club Support is the best option for me. I am not sure how sending me an invoice would work unless it contained some Paypal link to make payment. So when you get that set-up, please let me know. You've have probably guessed that I prefer to use Paypal and not too open to other forms of payment. Why? Well, I try to limit how many databases in this world hold onto my credit card information.....I know that is a struggle in futility, but at least I am giving it my best shot. Dave

So how does the support club work? I thought that was through Paypal donations as I have used that in the past. I have gone to the Cafe Store looking for "products" like Bronze, Silver or Gold Support but could not find any. Dave

You also need to include C4D Version number. Many times that is key to understanding a persons question/issue/help request. One other things for 2017.....what happened to the Donate button? Dave

Ahh...my assumption was that I could reverse engineering the materials in the starter pack but it sounds like that is not possible and better to work with the sample scenes. Relative to tutorials that go beyond learning the UI, any recommended sites? I had a quick read with this site which is good as it shows the effect that changing certain node values have on the render, but again defaults back to the cookbook format for the more complex shaders. Anyone have any other Blender Cycle tutorial recommendations? Dave

Well said. I do believe that ultimately we will all have to learn the logic of a nodal material system as I would expect that is in MAXON's development path. Hopefully, MAXON implements nodal materials similar to how they implemented Xpresso: something that "under the hood" to the existing interface and there if you need it to go deeper. So far, some of the Cycles 4D tutorials just kind of role out the nodes in a cookbook fashion: open these 7 nodes, link them this way and viola you have great art. What I am looking for is a deeper explanation behind the "why" of each node....maybe even a discussion of all the different ways to accomplish the same effect and then why some methods are better than others. If you are just going to slap nodes up there, I get quickly lost. But it is a mental shift as you alluded to. So the big question is how many mental shifts do you want to make if (like me) you believe that C4D will also one day implement a nodal material system? Also, should MAXON implement a nodal system, then that is one less annual maintenance fee I have to pay if I don't purchase Cycles4D.. I would be enticed to gamble on Cycles4D as I would love to play with materials being able to emit light. Also, I would like to know what is in the free Starter Pack you get should you order prior to 1/31/17. But so far, Insydium has yet to post any links to the content of that starter pack. I have written them twice about it and they keep promising to post that information...but so far nothing....which kind of works against providing the necessary motivation for purchasing before 1/31/17. Overall, nothing is moving me to rush out and make a purchase. Dave

People do NOT place enough value on Cineversity when they consider the overall benefits of an MSA. Gifts like these (along with the ease of getting them via the CV Toolbox) is pretty outstanding. While I have not done an exhaustive study, the combination of tutorials and tools with your service agreement is (IMHO) pretty unique in the industry. One of the reasons why I not only paid for my 2017 MSA agreement but jumped in an purchased an 2018 MSA agreement during their Black Friday sale (30% off). I am with you for the long haul! Please try to contain your excitement and/or utter disappointment! Dave

Okay...new member to the Cafe (0 posts) and his entry into the forum is with a well rigged, modeled, textured and animated spider-bot. Yeah...like that happens everyday. So before I comment on the work, I need to know if you are just new to the Cafe, new to C4D or new to 3D modeling and/or animation. In fact, on second thought, don't answer that. I don't want to hear the truth. I don't want to hear is that you are 17 who just picked up C4D Prime for Christmas. Why? Well, speaking for myself only, seeing so much talent in someone who is young is very discouraging to an old duffer like myself who has been banging away at this as a part-time hobby for the last 15 years. So let's just assume that you are a 25 year professional in cg and character animation, with the last 15 years working with C4D who just recently found out that the C4D Cafe was a pretty cool forum. Okay...relative to comments, I do have one. The design of the robot is pretty cool but it looks like the legs are supposed to fold back into the shell. Based on the design, I don't see how that is possible as the body cavity for the legs does not look like it would allow enough room for the leg joints. Maybe it does as I have not pushed it around enough to check, but I always love seeing cool designs that also look like they could really work. Seeing a little pocket for the leg pistons to fold up into when the legs retract would really help sell that this robot was designed by engineers rather than a character created by artists....and as such, read more "real". Small criticism to an otherwise really nice work!! Bravo! Dave