3D-Pangel

Interesting video in that it was made only in August but references the A6000 as part of the kit for a high-end workstation even though it has been out for some years now. For an overall creative workstation doing both videos, 2D and 3D work, then his recommendations make sense as there is an emphasis on both CPU core count and high-end GPU's. From my perspective, the emphasis should be on the CPU speed rather than core count for 3D work given the shift to GPU rendering and simulation. In addition to CPU speed (which is no more than a traffic cop in the whole system), the focus should be on the speed of the main SSD drive, CPU memory, CUDA cores and speed of the GPU and that there are 16 PCIe lanes to link everything together (or at least the GPU to the CPU). Core count does not mean anything to GPU rendering. So, I made different choices from the perspective of 3D content creation only. Plus, as a hobbyist vicariously re-living my teenage dreams of working at ILM (read my profile), I find myself more interested in VFX and physical simulations. So, with the move of C4D to fluids, I wanted to max out memory wherever possible to handle the larger data sets inherent in that type of work. Interestingly enough, the Boxx configuration was surprisingly similar to the workstation I purchased in September with the exception of the CPU and that I have more ECC RAM (128Gb vs 96Gb in the Boxx system). The SSD (2TB PCIe NVMe M.2) and GPU (RTX-A6000) are the same. The differences are that my CPU is the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 3945WX (12 cores at 4 GHz with a boost clock speed of 4.3GHz). I also opted for a 4TB SATA RAID 1 array for storage rather than more SSD's purely for cost reasons. Now my Cinebench scores were not as impressive as those for the dual processor configuration from Boxx, but you are comparing 24 threads to 96 threads in a pure CPU test. Still though, my score was 18593 for CPU rendering...which is respectable (probably could have picked up a few more points if I shut down the virus software during the test as recommended by Maxon). My machine was whisper-quite during the benchmark test and here the CPU is air cooled rather than water cooled. I wish Cinebench would return to providing GPU scores as there is more to that score than just the GPU and you really want to know how your whole GPU rendering system is performing. Now, did I pay the $10,500 price tag that Boxx was charging? No! I paid significantly less and would have saved more money had I waited until Black Friday, but in September there was a 6-month lead time and my existing 7+ year old workstation (while still running quite well) could no longer handle Redshift due to the age of the GPU and CPU. The machine was a P620 from Lenovo. This brand of machine was designed by the IBM team at Lenovo and the hardware design choices that were made resonate positively with me. You can see that IBM influence on doing it the right way rather than the cheap way in their design choices. A good review on that system is found here. They also offer a 5-year warranty with in-home service for very little money. It is rare that any electronics manufacturer would offer any warranty over 3 years - let alone for less than 2% of the purchase price. This all means something to me as I have been in high-end electronics manufacturing for 38 years and have been on manufacturing shop floors and clean rooms across the globe. I know what can go wrong. Dave P.S. Right now, my EOY project (the only time of year where I can truly focus on 3D over a long period of time) is the City Destroyer from Independence Day emerging from the clouds with all the fluid reactions of the clouds reacting to the ship. Having a blast and happy that I order the P620 in September and that Lenovo beat their 6-month delivery time.

So....given the current deal of $149/year subscription price for Vue/Plant Factory creator (saving $50 USD), probably the best move is to sign up before it expires on January 3rd? Or will that special be extended as well? Dave Funny how after just watching Avatar 2 you begin to think about modeling terrains and ecosystems again.

Apart from masking the particles to be behind the sword, you may want to add some interactive lighting on the sword to match the color of the particles. Not too bright and be sure that the light intensity falls off appropriately. Just enough to tie the sword to being in the center of the particle animation. But as others noticed, there is a problem with how the first scene plays into the second scene. It is not smooth and you notice the edit. I do agree that the abrupt stop of the camera does not help and it would be better if the camera move continued through the edit as suggested. What does not help the camera stopping though is this: Dave

But on the plus side, Croatia came in third! That should put a smile on the face of certain hard-working moderators!!!!!

!@#$%% RAIDERS FAN! May both you and Belichick get coal in your stocking this year!!! 😃 Now lets get back to the whole point of this thread: Is the crux of the problem that they have yet to make a monitor that can support OCIO or ACES color space? As I read through the OP's message again, the issue was to get his OCIO and ACES defined color swatches to look like right on the UI. Is that an actual color value problem or a problem with how those values were reproduced on the monitor? Again, there is a whole other career in color space management (as if 3D is not hard enough). Dave

Thank you! Nothing major that kept me away other than extended business trips to Thailand and Vietnam for business. I don't think I watched any football the entire month of November and half of December. Though as I live in New England, finally being able to watch the Patriots on Sunday was a bit of a gut punch! Let's not go into it as the wounds are still fresh. But with that said, let me share a Christmas image I took in Vietnam in the hotel lobby: Children mesmerized by the Christmas tree is a universal constant the world over. Merry Christmas everyone and a Happy New Year! Dave

So glad I am a hobbyist where the extent of my color management is whether it looks good on my monitor. I do try to get good monitors (like Viewsonic) to handle my viewport (the controls all go the other cheaper monitor) to help me try to get the color's right by my eye. Again, as a hobbyist I can get away with that. But the dynamic range inherent with ACES is rather enticing and therefore will require further study in the future --- but probably when I retire and have the time to deep dive into such things. And by that time, I hope a standard has been defined as Igor stated. Dave

Two points to be made: 1) I love the suggestion that ONLY subscribing members can post here while all threads are available to everyone to be read. Honestly, how can you expect to grow the subscriber base unless you allow potential customers to see the benefits of having specific questions answered by some of the best C4D, Houdini, Blender etc. artists out there. Also, anyone who proves that they are on some level a subject matter expert either by their work, their scipts, or their plugins should be allowed full access for free provided that they are answering X questions a month. Not sure how you would track that....but you get the point. Give the experts free access to the forum provided that they are helping the community. Remember that people who serve the community only increase the desire for people to join that community via a subscription. Does Core4D want to be the "hermit kingdom" or an open society? If you open it up and allow people to see the value, then the revenue will grow. 2) Really confused by what is truth or rumor around C4D Cafe being forced to change its name. Honestly, after 20 years of being C4D Cafe something had to have happened to cause the site to now be called Core4D. You just don't change your brand after building it up over a 20-year period on a whim. So, if being "forced" is a rumor then that implies they were not forced and if they were not forced, then let's change it back!!! If that idea does not sit well with anyone, then tell us why so we can deal with facts rather than rumors. Dave

Cairyn, Sorry to see you go as you were an asset to the community - and we need those today. I've been away on business for longer than I care to admit and coming back to Core4D and trying to catch up on everything can be a bit daunting so I can understand the need to cut ties particularly if you are not keeping current with the program. Relative to keeping current (eg. subscriptions vs. perpetual), I have had my own epiphany and it actually coincides with your logic to leave C4D altogether. Your last perpetual license was R23 but as you said there is no point to learn new techniques only supported by later versions that you will not own. That does beg the following question though: will you still use R23 or are more interested in growing with the technology via Blender? I ask because it does point out that "perpetual" licenses really are not perpetual if you don't use the software. Their life ends when you decide to move to another program. If there were never any advancements in 3D, then maybe the pull to staying current with software would not be so great and we would all be happy with a nicely aging perpetual license. But that is not the world we live in. There are always improvements and advancements, so the life of a perpetual license really is only until the next updated version comes out - at which point, that is the version you want to use. I had perpetual licenses going back to R9. Would I ever want to use R9 again? Certainly not. So it went into the garbage. So much for that "perpetual" license. Thus, my change of heart from being a hard nose "never rent - always own" proponent to "subscriptions are okay provided that there are meaningful advancements with each release". And that is a very important caveat: "provided that there are meaningful advancements with each release". I wasn't so convinced with R25 but since then I have been very impressed. So C4D subscriptions work for me now. But I speak for myself. I would love to hear about your transition to Blender. Maybe Igor could have the occasional "welcome home day" every now and then where long-time members who have left get a free day of posting and access to Core4D....just to keep in touch. This would be just as important for current members to reconnect with past members. Hey, even HBO Max gives a free week every now and then. Just a thought. Dave

HB Scripts Magic Replace (free) One that I have my eye on is Instanceman. I think that is what it is called as I am in Thailand right now on business and typing this from memory. I would also love to purchase GSGs Aligner but that only comes with their $400/year subscription plan so that is out of scope for me. Simple plugin so hopefully someone else eventually makes a similar plugin for individual purchase!!! Dave

Simple pricing model and fair pricing for amazing software!!! Take note Insydium!! Simple rule of SaaS marketing: If you can’t explain your licensing in 90 seconds or less you will fail to attract new customers! Dave

I recognize that molecule! It is Indium DiSulphide Yttrium!! Otherwise known as “Insydium”. I think it is a rare earth transition material capable of turning loose ionic free particles into pretty much anything: fire, fluids, or cloth and even arrange other organic structures such as trees and flowers into self replicating fractal patterns!!!! Not sure but pretty confident that is what it is! Either that or it is the crusty residue that forms on your keyboard after long periods of programming while consuming only Mountain Dew and sugar glazed donuts!!!! Take your pick!! 😁 Dave

For the non-PS user (too expensive for my needs so I would just get Paint Shop Pro) , I find the $41 USD price for Photo V2 pretty attractive and equivalent to the 2023 upgrade price for PSP (whose updates are more gimmicky than useful IMHO). So for the sub $100 photo editing tools out there (eg PSP, Gimp, etc) where would you rate Affinity? Dave

I would agree. Radial symmetry is both simple to use and powerful. Living in the Northeast, my initial inclination is NOT to create snowflakes....we will be getting plenty of those soon enough. But I would love to see how you create a snowflake without any triangles in it!!!!! I am also happy to see deeper RS integration into C4D with the RS camera and its interaction with the standard viewport. Overall, this update (63 days after R2023) feels more like a 0.5 than a 0.1 release. So very impressed with Maxon deciding to release these new features sooner rather than later. Is this a new behavior with the subscription only model? That is, the need to bundle features to create a more meaningful purchase for perpetual licenses no longer exists. So once the feature is stable out it goes! That could explain why it is 2023.1 rather than 2023.5 because more may be planned within the year. Therefore, they started the amount of incrementation in release numbers pretty low. Does this mean that there is more to come and the standard pattern of release cycles we have come to expect no longer exist? I have no idea....but I like the indications. So with all that said, it is apparent that Maxon is NOT becoming an Adobe clone and any comparisons to Adobe are unjustified given how much and how fast they are improving C4D. Dave

For a first effort I am impressed. My understanding is that there is really one full time developer on this so not sure if it is fair to compare it to TP which benefited from two technology acquisitions (explosiaFX and DPIT fluids) and TFD which has been around for well over 10 years and still improving. Comparisons to Houdini are also unfair given how long Houdini has been around and I think their development staff has 4 PhD's working on fluids? Not sure, but what I faintly recall was impressive. I just want to make sure that people's expectations are appropriately balanced because our eyes have been trained to expect results from far more mature programs so the playing field is by no means even. Plus, this was GPU/CPU from the start where my expectation would have been CPU and then a migration to GPU given the complexities of coding fluids on the GPU (look how long it took Insydium to get there and they have a much larger development team). Also, and I brought this up in another thread, the "look" of the final image really has more to do with the shaders for both the density and temperature channels (black body shaders) than how the simulation generates that channel data in the VDB files. Density and temperature data is created by the simulation engine in the course of solving the physics to make fluids move like fluids. So, if that data is off then it won't be the "look" that bothers you but rather how the fluids move as their motion is impacted by temperature and density (pressure) within each voxel - all things the simulation engine is resolving with each frame. If it moves right, then chances are you have enough accurate data to shade it any way you want. So, the "look" is driven by the shading. The motion is driven by the physical calculations. If you don't like the motion, then that is a fair criticism but as for me I am impressed by the first release. Dave

Interesting comments on the finished images as it implies that the creation of the VDB files is the predominant determinant in the final image and therefore if it doesn't look good it must be how the VDB file was created. I always thought that the purpose of the simulation engine is to get the fluid motion correct. The predominant channels that impact rendering are density and temperature. So, if the simulation engine is off in its calculation of density and temperature for each voxel element then not only would you get funny looking renders but funny looking fluid motion. But if the fluid motion looks correct, then how the image is rendered is really up to the artist manipulating the shaders for both smoke (using the density channel) and black body illumination (using the temperature channel) in the VDB dataset that is created by the simulation engine. Viewport rendering really doesn't mean that much to me other than it gives me some representation of the amount of fire vs. smoke being created because it will all be tweaked after caching that VDB file and passing it to the render engine. So all the occlusion effects, self-illumination, etc that you want in your final image is determined there and then and not before. Is that a naive view or am I missing something? Dave

This video made me want to learn more about Affinity because very little was said other than something great is coming. Well, you go the website and it is down because they are "working on something big". Well, not sure why they had to take the old site down but all I know is that if you are creating this much of a mystery....you better deliver. History has shown that rarely does reality live up to the hype and this just feels like hype to me.....but I could be cynical. Always happy to be pleasantly surprised --- so here's to hoping. Dave

I think there is something sinister about AI. Its engine goes beyond what is seen and into the unseen areas of our psyche with the art it creates. How does it do that? I have no idea but check out this example and you tell me if it is not scary: I entered the text "Self Portrait of what Cerbera is thinking while he models"... ....and I got this disturbing result...... Nothing but triangles!!!! And in a pleasant and artistic arrangement as well. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!! That shook me to my very core!!! Dave

Thank you for the link. But I have to say, the download process and additional dependencies required gave me some concerns as to whether all those executables exist ONLY when Blender runs or are they going to create conflicts/registry issues with other programs on my computer. I've been bitten before on these types of things so the old adage "once bitten, twice shy" applies. Dave

My ideal AI application for textures were that you provide it one or more separate base texture(s) and it generates a non-repeating, perfectly tiled texture that goes until infinity. And from that base image it creates the appropriate masks for reflectance, AO, bump, normal, height, specular, luminance and alpha. Luxology actually had something to do this long ago called ImageSynth (not sure if it created all the channel textures other than the color channel) but it was too unstable and therefore discontinued. Of course, that was long before AI...so maybe it can be revived. Dave

I think this is a port to open-source AI programs like DALL-E or Jasper where you type a phrase like "Ferrari on the moon" and it generates the appropriate image based on the analysis of over 5 billion images. Those machine learning programs essentially work with text rather than 3D models but the port to 3D was a rather clever thing to do particularly when you understand how these AI "black box" engines were built....which I think is called Stable Diffusion. Again, not sure. What they did to program the "black box" of the AI engine was to take each of the 5 billion images and add random noise at increasing amounts to each along with a structured text description and then train the black box to de-noise that image. The black box engine then worked to denoise that image in a random way but based on a comparison between the denoised image to the original image the program would then ask: "am I getting better or worse?" Based on that answer, it would re-iterate again, and again, and again until it got an exact match. They went through this routine for each of the 5 billion images and each time the AI engine was successful, its "machine learning" algorithm was improved. Finally, when that was done, they added an image which was pure 100% noise and based on the text asked the engine to denoise it. Well, as there was no real starting image but rather just random noise, the AI engine had to use the algorithm it created from all the previous 5 billion runs and create an image purely based on the text alone. And that is how you can create art from text. So, getting back to this plugin, I wonder if there are two things going on: The simple low poly rendering creates an initial "noisy image" to the AI engine as a starting point. You still have to enter text to the program to get things started. What I am NOT sure of is whether any of the 3D scene file information is read (like object position, light direction, etc.) to help in the creation of the final image or whether it all comes from that crude render you created in Step 1. Now, you could add to the text how you want the image to look. For example, you could have entered "in the style of Monet" and instead of a photoreal Jaguar on the moon you would have gotten a French impressionistic painting of a Jaguar on the moon. So, this could do some pretty neat NPR animations as well. Again, I am over-simplifying how all this really works, but based on my understanding of how these AI engines were built, I think that is what is going on. Dave

Makes you wonder what he is going to do for an encore. 😀 No pressure!!! 😆 Dave

This is not a new problem having been written about in Pierre Grage's 2014 book "Inside VFX" I read this book and it basically touches on the same issues raised in that video. Now, what is surprising is that is appears that nothing has changed in over 8 years. The VFX industry is still in crises. So why has nothing changed or is this really and 8-year-old crises? VFX houses won't keep behaving in a way that burns out their team while losing money. That is not a sustainable model and certainly not a model that will keep people at their computers for 8 years working long hours for little pay. If the people who run VFX houses are all cold, heartless task masters who are happy to work their employees to death for little pay then the word gets out about that environment/company and the pool of talent dries up. People are just not going to pursue that career if there are no rewards. Any employer knows how much a high attrition rate negatively impacts the ability of their business to operate. If you can't recruit talent, you make changes. Again, I am looking at this from an 8-year perspective. No multi-billion-dollar industry can be in crises for 8 years. Problems either get fixed or the industry collapses. Well, the industry hasn't collapsed. Now, I am not dismissing the concern that is being raised and my heart and support does go out to the long hours of work that VFX artists put in for very little reward. But I have to ask this: If this is an 8-year (or more) crises for the reasons stated in that video, then what keeps you in that industry? Dave P.S. From my own personal experience, as a pre-college teen deciding on a career in the late 1970's, I was passionate about VFX in the pre-CGI days. Motion control, stop motion animation and optical printers is what excited me. But then I learned that only 2% of those in the film industry made over $15,000/year at that time ($49,000 in today's dollars). Sorry....those were not good odds and I decided to do something else. I would imagine that would be the same calculus for anyone considering that career today.

Amazing work and apart from the sheer artistry of it all which is very impressive, there is the mood, editing and pacing, and sound design/music. So much to appreciate and enjoy. What an introduction and very happy you have decided to join our little community. Dave

Thank you for taking the time and the initiative to explain how Vue and C4D work together. This I understood as I did read the manual. My issue was vIewport performance in C4D. Now , we know that at that time C4D was not known for its zippy viewport but for some reason, even Vue’s low poly proxy’s brought my viewport performance to a crawl in C4D. The same object would have no issues in Vue’s native viewport but once I opened that same asset (with the proxy safely held in C4D’s OM), everything would crawl from that point forward in C4D’s viewport. That was as far as I got with it. Add a tree and viewport manipulation became unmanageable. This is what I meant by operability being a nightmare in my original post. Drivers were updated, help tickets were created, Vue was re-installed, etc. Maybe I should have reinstalled C4D as suggested but that just did not sit well with me as Vue was not my only plugin. Now this is all ancient history but I think it just comes down to something missing from my PC that made C4D incompatible to Vue xStream. So while happy with Vue stand alone, that whole ordeal (coupled with the lack of updates after the Bentley acquisition and loss of account information from the site hack) really did not make me a believer in Vue at that time. Again… ancient history. Fortunately, recent moves by e-on is making me a believer again. Dave