DasFrodo

Hey everybody! Recently I found this little but very helpful tool called PureRef. You can pay for it if you want, but it's generally free. It allows you display multiple reference pictures in a small standalone window as well as move, rotate and scale them freely. You can even set up a transparency and have them always on top of C4D for example. You can also just drag and drop images out of your webbrowser into the software! No more fiddly saving first!

I have Cycles 4D so take this with a grain of salt, there might be differences. Cycles is definitely faster than physical, especially when you compare the image quality. It is slower than other GPU renders by far, but the result is really nice. And considering it's 100% free (in Blender) it's an amazing render engine.

I can understand that, but the uptick is really insane. I bet you could hire specialisits that fix your occasional issues and still pay way, way less. I wouldn't expect any miracles to be honest. AMD is just way behind when it comes to pure GPU power and some code won't fix that. C4D is also very, very stable on windows and has been for years. Adobe software also practically never crashes. I am no expert on software engineering of course but I expect the renderspeed to be a massive disappointment for many, many people that already bought Mac Pros.

Even with the Metal support coming soon, don't you think you're better off with a Windows based machine for GPU rendering? Honestly, the amount of rendering performance you get out of this 14.000$ machine does not stand in any relation to what you'd get if you just built a custom workstation. You can get around 10-11 (!!!) 2080ti's plus the rest of the hardware you need for the same price and they have far, FAR more power than what the Mac Pro could ever dream to deliver. OSX just isn't a good platform for 3D work at all anymore, especially since GPU based renders have become big.

Why do you want to use Booleans for this? Unless you have a very good reason not to, i'd suggest just modeling it. Booleans are just prone to cause errors like this.

Huh, that is a good point. Years back I remember taking very long to understand how it exactly works, how to stack stuff etc. You're right, it IS highly confusing but I just forgot about it because I learned it.

If at all possible, yeah, don't use ProRender.

Uh, I didn't know about the price reductions, just saw the Cycles update... thanks for the heads up!

While there's many, many smaller things I'd like to see, these are the ones that come to mind for me: Faster rendering. ProRender was obviously a complete waste of time. Nobody uses it. If I want GPU rendering right now I either use Redshift or Octane. I think C4D needs an up-to-date CPU and/or GPU renderer like Arnold. The standard and physical render is just WAY too slow nowadays if you want to do anything even close to realistic. Seriously, just add a default PBR Material to a sphere, add an HDRI and look at it crawl. UV-Tools. This is so, so overdue. In a package that is as expensive as C4D I should not have to rely on external programs if I want to keep my sanity while doing UV's on complex objects. Yes, the tools we have work (for the most part) but they're not fun to use at all and make UVing an even more tedious task. X-Presso UI overhaul. X-Presso is nice and works for everything I want to do with it (although I'm sure it could use some love for the powerusers with new nodes etc) but the UI is fiddly as hell, connecting things can be a pain. Look at Substance Designer if you want to see an amazing nodebased workflow. Or just use the the new material node system. Subscription model adjustments. At the very least we need true monthly payment, not the monthly-but-not-really price we have right now. Honestly, I was so excited when they announced the subscription but the moment I saw the pricing... just no. Especially, as others have said, in the upcoming months and years that I can imagine will be a pain for freelancers especially. Preferably we'd get a true monthly payment and several price tiers for different revenue levels, just like the substance suite has. In this business it makes no sense to me that a freelancer has to pay as much as a big studio. Further enhancements to the field forces. What we have right now is already a major, major step towards actual particles that C4D was severely lacking in the last years, unless you wanted to make a deep dive into TP which is... well confusing compared to other particle solutions. Honestly I am pretty sure some trapcode particular code will find it's way into C4D so I'm not too concerned there. I just don't think it will be R22. I think with the whole Covid-19 story MAXON really, really need to get their sh** together. I'm sure the financials for the upcoming years will push MANY artists to Blender and if the packages don't deliver a good reason to stay it might not look too good.

Oof, that is a tough question. In the end it all depends on what level of detail and control you need and how close you're going to be with the camera. If you need some space shots I think a well made material should be enough but as soon as you want to show some more detail I think it could get a bit too complicated with materials. SPD can do a lot but getting the shader to look realistic at that level is a task.

Maybe this could help as a starting point... If you have trouble understanding the setup, ask away! Planet.c4d

You are right, but I fail to see how the displacement would help with realizing the car paint? As far as I know you can't stack "volumetric" layers of materials with displacement, it just deforms the actual geometry... I think the SPD is just wreaking havoc on the topology somehow and that's what's causing it, even though it's not all over the model. I just tested this; if you have a single model and you apply a material with SDS only on a certain amount of polygons the main effect will be there yes, but it destroys the topology of the rest as well. Looks like this: However, with "round geometry" active it looks like this: So yeah. Either enable "round geometry" on your SPD material or get rid of the SPD entirely if possible. That's definitely where the facetting is coming from. EDIT: Another way would be just to seperate the model that needs the SPD material entirely from the rest of the model.

Found it! In the material "Sci_Fi_Rubber_Panel_01" you have displacement enabled. Once you disable that the facetting is gone

Is this an animation? If so, enable full animation mode in the "cache files" tab. Otherwise try disabling "Auto Load" and "Auto Save".

That's some nice design on your Instagram, like it a lot! Welcome!

Finished it! Mainly did some more detail passes and minor adjustments. Thoughts?

Can you guys contact MAXON regarding this problem? Maybe there's already a different solution for this. Otherwise yeah, it seems for now saving locally is the only solution right now.

Where are you saving these files to? If it's network drives / NAS, try saving it locally first. I've had similiar issues in the past and ever since I started saving my frames to local disc I haven't had it anymore but I have no idea if that was the fix or just luck.

I man, I feel you, my condolences. Same thing happened to me about a year ago after one of my dogs had a kidney failure. Nothing I want to ever experience again. The only comfort I felt was that she died while her entire family was holding her. My mom and my dad, me, and my other dog. That said, I would have never thought I'd see some Tarkov content here. Are you planning on detailing this some more or is this done? This looks like it's for a stream, or is it just for fun?

I'd say overall thats looking pretty good already, espacially for such a short time. What is missing for me is the "bam" factor renderings with such style can have. Right now you have a pretty even look to it, a lot of gray. Don't be scared to go to more extremes with your lights, especially if you colored your light already. Make them brighter so the specular reflections pop more and don't forget that you can always get the last 10% out of your renderings in Photoshop with some color correction.

Half-Life Alyx is five days away. Thought I'd try to get inspired by a material from Half-Life 2. I always loved the unique look of the citadel environment, so I went with it. This is how it looks: It's not done yet, but I'm pretty happy with it already. Thoughts?

In that case what you can do is use the filters as well as the flat tree option in the object manager. Whenever I want to delete everything of a single tag I use that.