GazzaMataz

Cool! I wish I had discovered this a while back would have been very helpful. It's one of those little C4D nuggets innit 🙂

Mesh Checker? That's a new one on me… I looked for this and couldn't find it. Is it in C4D 2025? I am still on 2024…

OMG! I was wondering where my latest issue had gone… I never got no notification that it had ended? I loved getting this mag every month and the last two where very useful since I need a new PC. I have every issue ever printed sitting in my loft so that’s since 2000 and over 200 issues. Maybe they will become collectable one day 🤣

Well I spoke to Sebastian who is the software development manager at Maxon and he said that xRefs have been fixed in C4D which I suspected and am over joyed about 🙂 Also I got it slightly only on the Redshift licencing front I only have to buy another Redshift licence to get Team Render working full blast rather than another C4D or Maxon One subscription so that works out even better. Lastly I have also found that turning off CPU in the Compute Devices in the Redshift preferences on the Mac speeds up rendering a fraction too - happy about this. But dedicated GPUs are still gonna be faster in Redshift than any of the current Macs. I was hoping Apple where going to be releasing an M4 Studio this month but alas no… I guess I will have to repair my ailing PC at some point LOL. Hope the xRef fix helps others.

Well I spoke to Maxon again and I think I have solved the Team Render issue. What I didn't realise it that Cinema 4D only includes the CPU version of Redshift for use with Team Render which will be slower. The only way I can use the GPU version of Team Render is by either taking out a Maxon One subscription or another Cinema 4D subscription for my PC. Still doesn't explain why the xRef character rendered correctly in Team Render on both machines. I will have to conduct further tests on this since I have found a way for it to work I will be a very happy bunny since I use xRefs for character work on nearly every project that I do. BTW in my Redshift settings I do not have Hybrid Rendering enabled since it is turned off by default. But I do have all my compute devices turned on both my Mac and PC. I never normally touch any of the settings in the Redshift preferences. The only option I have tinkered with is the Bucket Rendering size which I change from the default 128 to 256 since it can shave off quite a few seconds on render times especially on my Mac mini M2 Pro.

I sent this through to Maxon support back at the beginning of October and the problem then was that I didn't have all the textures in the right place. When I sorted this out it worked as expected and I was seeing faster render speeds on my PC. Now I have done the update to 2024.5.1 it seems to have gone back to what it was before again (slower render times on my PC) even with all the textures present. What is good it that the character animation is now unaffected by Team render and renders fine on both machines. Another point that was interesting is that in Cinebench 2024 my PC scores 14,000 on the GPU score whereas my Mac mini M2 Pro hits 2,700 so in theory five times faster. But when I have tried a few scenes I am finding that my PC is only twice as fast as my Mac mini which I was actually quite pleased about. So on that note a base Mac Studio M2 Max should render my scene at the same speed as my PC and be quieter and use less juice. Please note I am not trying to start a PC/Mac war just looking at real world results 🙂

Hi All OK I wanted to try an experiment using Team Renderer using CPU rendering and GPU rendering with Redshift. I am using my Mac mini M2 Pro as the host machine with my Threadripper 1920x as the client. Now when I render using CPU rendering my Mac mini is as fast as my Threadripper - which I expected. But when I render the same scene setup with Redshift my PC is three times slower than my Mac mini and my Threadripper system sports TWO RTX 2800ti GPUs. This just doesn't make sense, the Threadripper system should be 2-3 times faster than my Mac mini. It seems that Redshift is the problem perhaps? And another very weird thing. When using Team Render and xRefs (in this case characters) normally one machine will render the animated character correctly and the other will not and render it in it's T-Pose. The only way to fix this is to make the xRef character editable. BUT! In this instance it rendered the animated character on both machines absolutely fine… I am completely mystified but hoping that I have discovered a way to render xRefs using Team Render. Anyone got any ideas on the Redshift rendering conundrum?

Has this been sorted?

Latest update with an extra character, sound and a few lights 😁 BB Catwalk PR HB v01.mp4

Worked out the spots - de-noising required and the patches are all to do with hair thickness. So a bit of tweaking here and there and it is now sort of sorted. Next, the control rig to tweak the animation 🙂

OK bit more fun wanted to see how the character looked moving. I am wondering if the hands and arms are too long? Also I seem to have a black patch on the tummy area - more investigation is needed! BTW the sampling was low on this so that is why I have the white spots… I think… BB Catwalk HB v03.mp4

Started on the hairdo and eyelashes today. Think it is an improvement?

Thanks for the tip Kingcoma and Vector (I did know about density/length) maps - I will give that a try but I think I have found another workaround using RS Principled Hair. It was hard work trying to find a tut that is up to date with the new Principled Hair and I have yet to find a way to give the hair colour based on an image map. I mean if I wanted to have giraffe or cheetah fur on the character it just don't work using the SURFACE setting. You used to be able to do that but now it doesn't seem to work. So what I have done is create two sets of hair one for the body and one for the belly using density maps. It's getting there but there must be an easier way.

OK been working on this project today UVing all the meshes and painting away with BodyPaint (why do I feel I am using something that is dated?) I haven't added the hair on this render but now I am wondering if I should? I will do it anyway and also try doing some sub-surface scattering on the skin. I am liking what I have done so far - much more appealing that the origonal I think?

Agh! I thought someone would look at it and say straight away that’s cos you didn’t do this or that…

Hi Peeps I am in the process of reworking an old character I created back in the early 2000s - And why not! So I have finished the remodelling (it was originally done in Animation Master) and am working on the texturing and UVs. So I thought I would add the fur on the body, which looks teddy-bearish which is what I wanted, but I don't get those white lines? I am using principled hair since I am rendering in RS. Not sure what the white worms are though…

OK for anyone else who might be wondering I contacted Maxon Support. It seems that when rendering several frames a lot of the computing is initially done on the CPU and then sent to the GPU to render. So in my case the actual rendering of the frame on my PC using the GPUs was lightening fast. But because it had to do all the computing then that's what made it seem to be the same speed as my Mac mini. It wouldn't always be the case depending on the complexity of the scene. I was starting to wonder that Apple's Metal was getting A LOT better… Also when using Team Render you get several CPU nodes but not GPU nodes so any rendering on Team Render with my Mac would be done on the CPU which is pretty impressive speed wise anyway for a little computer.

This is really starting to seem weird… What I am finding weird about it is when I render my image in Redshift RenderView on my PC it takes on a couple of seconds to render but when I render the sequence it takes approx 20 per frame to render - don't make sense?

I know I posted this a while ago but I finally got around to pointing this out to Maxon Support and they told they are aware of this issue and it is a bug in Xrefs which will get fixed but they don't know when. It's probably not on the top of their list… Although for me it should be on the top of the list cos I have been waiting for this to be fixed since Xrefs first appeared back in R13? @JBatista Seems the only way to get this to work is to make the Xref editable but that is for Xrefs using the Character rig. I haven't actually tried it with other types of Xrefs. I think it works fine for geometry items and nothing too complicated like character rigs.

I don't get this… I have setup my PC to use my Mac mini as a Team Render machine using Redshift. Now my understanding from what I have read is that for a Team Render machine to use Redshift GPU you need another Redshift Licence. However when I push the 'Team Render to Picture Viewer' button it renders away quite happily on both my PC and Mac (I am not using hybrid node on either computer). Now another bit I really don't get is my PC has two RTX 2800Ti GPUs and my Mac mini only has it's 16 core M2Pro chip and yet it renders only a tiny bit slower than my two nVidia GPUs? I was somewhat stunned… Some please explain cos I am quite confused. Have Maxon done something in 2024.4.0 version of C4D?

@Bezo It rendered beautifully. I just didn't wait long enough for frame 20 when the particles actually enter view. It was me rushing and not using my noddle 🤣

Hi Cebera I did cache the particles but now I am looking at the project (Surface Flow) with more time on my hands I realised I was being a complete doughnut! When I was rendering the first few frames I saw no particles in the scene so thought something was wrong (why do I always suspect bugs?). Now I realised that's because the particles didn't enter the scene until about frame 20 and I was preview rendering frame 76 where the particles are half way down the blob object! I gotta learn to slow down a bit… I feel a complete particle now… BTW what do you mean by PV - Preview?

Finally got aroud to taking a lok at the new particle system in the latest update to C4D and it was looking good once I also update to the latest version Redshift. Now when I render to the Redshift RenderView it look lovely but when I want to render out an image sequence NO PARTICLES... What am I doing wrong? I have watch a few tuts but none of them show rendering out an image sequence. I am hoping that this feature is not restricted to a Maxon One subscription? I don't think so... Any quick tips appreciated :0)

I find this really annoying. I have a project that uses an Xref character and I want to use good old Team Renderer to render it. Believe it or not it is quicker to use for this project than Redshift. Problem is that when I setup my two machines to render one renders the character animation properly and the other just renders a T-Pose. Strangely the machine that renders the T-Pose is the host machine not the client. I know that I could make the character editable but it is a bit of a fag to keep doing this whenever I want to render something. I am wondering if I should approach Maxon about this conundrum?

Actually I wondered can you import hair from C4D into UE? Probably not…