An open letter to MAXON CEO McGavran

[Jops 44]

17 hours ago, srek said:

The first part goes well beyond expressions, but is certainly interesting. The second part is an own topic but something i personally would like to see, just like an at least basic compositing node system.

Both not really Xpresso features though.

+1 for compositing

[Cairyn 10]

18 hours ago, 3DKiwi said:

Cinema 4D could have a lot more procedural modelling type stuff if there were modelling nodes e.g. extrude. Even some limited stuff like a "Merge meshes" node where you hook up multiple objects to the Merge Mesh node either by wires or the node has a list function where you drag and drop objects. The Merge Mesh node then behaves like a procedural Combine function combing all of the source meshes / objects into one object. You can then apply booleans etc to the merged mesh object. And then a Boolean node where one object can be subtracted from a lot of other objects. Hooked up by XPresso rather than in the Object Manager.

 

Maybe things have changed since I was using CInema 4D but having nodes for render settings could be useful. Maybe the new nodal shading does this?

The procedural modeling thing is interesting but there always was an issue with parametrization. For example, to define an extrude you needed to define the faces that you want to extrude. Now if you procedurally change the object you extrude from, your previous manual polygon selection becomes invalid as it's now totally different polygons (bot the index and the count) that need to be extruded. So the old method of selection cannot be used.

 

With the advent of Fields, a selection can be made by using another object, which solves that issue - for polygons at least. Still, there are other types of parameters that would make a fully procedural workflow difficult. I wonder how other programs do it...

 

As C4D does its procedural modeling (as far as it exists) through the object tree hierarchy, I wonder whether extending XPresso is the way to go... of course you can use XPresso as alternative view to the objects in the tree, which sounds fairly interesting but maybe needs an adaption in the general paradigm here.

 

[3DKiwi 515]

7 hours ago, Cairyn said:

The procedural modeling thing is interesting but there always was an issue with parametrization. For example, to define an extrude you needed to define the faces that you want to extrude. Now if you procedurally change the object you extrude from, your previous manual polygon selection becomes invalid as it's now totally different polygons (bot the index and the count) that need to be extruded. So the old method of selection cannot be used.

 

With the advent of Fields, a selection can be made by using another object, which solves that issue - for polygons at least. Still, there are other types of parameters that would make a fully procedural workflow difficult. I wonder how other programs do it...

 

As C4D does its procedural modeling (as far as it exists) through the object tree hierarchy, I wonder whether extending XPresso is the way to go... of course you can use XPresso as alternative view to the objects in the tree, which sounds fairly interesting but maybe needs an adaption in the general paradigm here.

 

There are ways around this. Modo has procedural modelling and while you can make selections in the normal way, these do get messed up if you change something earlier on. There's a whole swag of procedural selection options e.g. select by previous operation and then subsets of that, select by angle etc etc. Then of course the selection you made can be updated by reselecting / updating. I do a lot of my modelling now starting off with a procedural model. I can then experiment with various mesh densities. Much better than doing a whole heap of undo's and losing your modelling.

[Cairyn 10]

13 hours ago, 3DKiwi said:

There are ways around this. Modo has procedural modelling and while you can make selections in the normal way, these do get messed up if you change something earlier on. There's a whole swag of procedural selection options e.g. select by previous operation and then subsets of that, select by angle etc etc. Then of course the selection you made can be updated by reselecting / updating. I do a lot of my modelling now starting off with a procedural model. I can then experiment with various mesh densities. Much better than doing a whole heap of undo's and losing your modelling.

C4D can do a lot more procedural modeling now that Fields have been introduced, which allow selections by (among others) spatial ranges or intersections with other objects. The generative selections (stuff like C1, C2 etc) could get extended depending on the operation. MaxonLab's PyParametric objects point in the same direction (although they aren't R21 capable yet?). So, it's not completely out of range.

 

The conceptual combination with XPresso is another question though; currently XPresso is one thing, and the hierarchical operations in the object tree are another thing. While it would be desirable to have some XPresso capabilities in modeling (in fact, one large concept for materials, procedural generative modeling, animation, and simulation with nodes...) I don't quite see that yet.

 

Maybe needs a new core

 

(and a different discussion thread, really)