GazzaMataz

Thanks for all the replies peeps interesting stuff. But I am still not sure why playback in Picture Viewer is so much slower than in AE even if you set the memory higher in Picture Viewer it still seems to struggle keeping to 25fps even at 1280p…

Don't suppose you do much character work in S26 Cerbera? That's what I do most and have loads of rigs that I think might break in the newer version of C4D… Mind you most of them use the built in rig.

OK having spoken to Maxon Support a while back it seems that when I render something to Picture Viewer and have the Memory set to anything but the default render times can increase quite a lot. Case in point I started a render yesterday (I had rendered other scenes out before hand) and it was taking nearly two minutes per frame with the Memory for Picture Viewer set to 4096mb. So I restarted C4D (which clears Picture Viewer cache anyway) and was then rendering the same scene at eleven seconds per frame, I also reset the Memory to 2048 for Picture Viewer. Now I don't understand that when you playback a relatively short sequence of say 100 frames in Picture Viewer it takes a while to cache the frame and then it doesn't always play back smoothly. Now if I load the same sequence in AE it always plays back smoothly. So it looks like Picture Viewer sucks. This is all using C4D S24 BTW. I was tempted by R26 but colleagues of mine where all reporting bugs and I am fed up with those…

I am still using C4D r24 since I am nervous about upgrading to the latest version for fear of bugs and all my rigs breaking. One thing that plagues me with C4D is Xrefs. Whilst they work they seem to take ages to load files containing them, saving files containing them and when changing the modify option they really drag… Is this any faster in newer versions of C4D (I doubt) or does anyone know if and when Maxon will overhaul Xrefs any time soon?

After a lot of tinkering around I think I might have solved this. If I download a character with motion on it and several other clips using the same character I can either copy and paste the key frames from the joints hierarchy in the Dope Sheet from one to the other. Or I can use the character definition tag and the character solver WITHOUT using Set Reference Pose. This seems to work. I cannot get a Mixamo rig to work with the one that come with C4D though, even when tinkering with the retargeting of joints. I still get ministry of silly walks… 🙂 I have looked at quite a few tuts online but none of them seem to show what I am trying to achieve.

Hi all I have watched several tuts on YouTube and elsewhere on how to apply Mixamo motion data to a Mixamo character and it never seems to work. It works if you use the use the motion clip method but using the character definition tag and character solver tag even between clips that are both Mixamo generated causes problems. I can upload my character to Mixamo and download a character with a rig and motion on it but as soon as I try to apply any other clip computer says no… Anyone got any ideas or fixes or can point me in the right direction?

OK, I don't think the lag is due Windows. I have been rendering a very large scene of 3,000 frames in Redshift and in preview quality (no GI and low samples) each frame is taking about 7 secs to render. As the render drags on the render time creeps up to 30 secs per frame. So I quit C4D and relaunch it and start the render again. It then goes back to rendering each frame at 7 secs again. Anyone got any ideas why it does this? It never used to with Advanced Renderer.

I am very tempted to sign up for the three months just to watch this myself 🙂

That's a Scottish Diplodocus playing the Bag Pipes 🙂 Seriously though I know what you mean they really are making estimated guesses on some of the things they are animating and creating but it is food for thought. I mean have a look at the replica Victorian dinosaurs in Crystal Palace they are their interpretations...

Saw this yesterday and thought 'WOW!'. Prehistoric Planet I love anything to do with history and remember watching 'Walking with Dinosaurs' 20 odd years ago, which blew me away - but this look in another league. Not so sure about how much of it is conjecture though, a swimming T-Rex with babies following? I am wondering if this can be done with C4D and all it's toolset - probably 🙂

And another thing I find that is starting to nag! When I render a scene (which usually contains Xref characters) it will start rendering relatively fast. If I run out of time and have to stop the render and come back to it, say from half way through, it can take up to 10 minutes preparing before it starts to render. I thought this had something to do with hair but my scene doesn't contain hair. When I just render a single frame it takes no time at all or when I switch SDS off it renders with hardly any processing - anyone else experienced this? This is all rendering using Redshift BTW and I am not on the very latest version.

I actually find when I have C4D and AE running concurrently sometimes when I flick between apps AE will just sit there with a spinning ball for a minute before it responds. Also closing down both apps can take ages and even when C4D has apparently quit Task manager says it is still running… So I think it is both memory management and GPU drivers?

Think this is an Xref thing on experimentation. Soon as I add Xrefs which use rigged characters using the character Object they take much longer to load and save…

Thanks Cerbera! Don't think I will bother upgrading the RAM in my workstation just yet then 🙂

Would help adding more memory? I often wonder if 32gb is enough. I monitor it in Task Manager and it always says there is some spare but it's all those invisible swap files that get created. I normally only have AE and C4D running concurrently.

I work in C4D practically everyday along with some After Effects. I find that as the day draws on C4D seems to get more sluggish and that a restart of the app brings it back to speed. Could this be a memory/cache thing or does C4D need a restart every now and then anyway. Incidentally I am using C4D R24 and with 32gb RAM on my Threadripper system.

So overall it appears from most people here that R25 is another underwhelming update to C4D… What I would like to know is who comes up with the new improvements? Is it Maxon HQ? Do they listen to the users? Is it based on what other software developers are doing? If it is based on listening to the users there must be a lot of users out there that wanted a new UI which I find very hard to believe… I found that R23 was the most buggy version of C4D I had ever used S24 was MUCH better, in fact R23 nearly put me off using C4D but I don't really want to learn another 3D app. Now I need to learn the new UI and am nervous 🙂

@3D Pangel Good luck on getting a newer GPU they seem to be pretty scarce and expensive when you do find them…

Actually apart from the improvement in Xrefs and Parent Constraints I forgot to mention I would like to see improvements in the viewport! When doing character work I find that when I have more than two characters in a scene C4D really starts to chug…

Well I would kind of argue this one. When I used to do graphic design work we did a lot of InDesign work and Powerpoint stuff. But the clients where taking this work away from us so that they could do it in house and save money. Nine times out of ten though the jobs used to come back to us to fix since the people they used to create the work did have the creativity or software knowledge to make these projects look good. I think that ability you are born with. Same principle applies to artistic things including 3D. You can have so much automated stuff but it all looks a bit similar bit like a lot of websites which all seem to be off the shelf these days. Innovation comes out but gets consumed by automation and becomes bland. Going a bit off topic here but it does apply 🙂

Actually when comparing various 3D packages one thing I love the most about C4D is that you can cut and paste almost any object and paste it into a new scene without it renaming everything or adding 'pasted item' as a suffix (Maya) and being able to have more than one file open at a time. I find that invaluable. You might be able to do this in Blender but I have never used it but I have used all the other big ones including Maya, Max, XSI and Lightwave…

Sorry I should have said Blender is free and very good software 🙂 I actually think it kind of parodies the in-house software that Pixar and Dreamworks (?) use Caricature and Marionette - although that was probably more just for character work…

I think many studios are looking at Blender since it is free and when you have quite a few staff and other overheads, loads of subscriptions can add up and in this day and age clients are getting thriftier and thriftier…

And then there is cloth… I use Marvelous Designer 🙂

I think most 3D artists just don't like spending any money 🙂 But on that list of prices I think you have to perhaps factor in Redshift and X-Particles which does put the annual price up a bit…