www.si-community.com

MauricioPC wrote:...Maxon is addressing this right now given that in the last few years, Autodesk invested heavily to improve viewport performance on 3ds Max and Maya.

The main "obstacle" to a "quick" solution is stability. Maxon has created one of the most stable applications in the industry and they will NEVER surrender that. It may take a bit longer, but it will happen.
But to say the truth, overall the object handling is NOT that bad, but could get much better. Comparing the Dandelion Piston Softimage video (at the end when the speaker is complaining about the screen recording software), I was recording as well, and also running Safari, Skype, Quicktime, Photoshop, After Effects, Cinema 4D, Mail and TextEdit at the same time, and my viewport speed was not that shabby.
That doesn't say anything negative about Softimage, mind you, as it's extremely fast, but we're not far behind either.
;)

Seeing you recreating that scene from Softimage quite easily makes me think how long would I take to create that in Maya.

Thanks noseman for your answers.

I must say that interface wise i think Cinema4D is the next app for me after Softimage. It is more important than for most people. I need to feel confortable and not in constant struggle or looking to something ugly for 10 hours a day.
If they evolve expresso in a ICE way or even better i would go there for sure.

You're not alone in this. We've all learned what a good interface brings to the table and most other software lacks serious interface love...

For any users in Toronto - Canada, I am doing a presentation of Cinema 4D on Wednesday, 26 March 2014 from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM (EDT) at the AETO (After Effects Toronto) user group.

I mentioned this before but in case it got lost, I managed to get a 50% thanks to Tim from HelloLuxx.com.

He has plenty of C4D tutorials and also some houdini jumpstarts:

http://softimage.tv/tutorials-from-hellolux/

Hi everyone

My name is Hrvoje, most of the people know me in C4D circles as "Vertex Pusher".
I am doing 3D actively for almost 15 years, been a freelancer generalist and C4D tutor both in person and via my training series for few years now. Also, I am community admin on C4Dcafe run by Nigel Doyle (3D Kiwi). Currently I am working at MAXON for last two years. I must add that I joined this community as private person and am not representing MAXON in any form.

First of all, I am sad to see you Softimage artists lose their everyday tool for producing beautiful content, my sympathy goes to you all. I've read the complete thread and felt the need to provide some additional info about Cinema 4D and let you all be the judge of it's capabilities. For that reason I also created a very short C4D tech demo you can find here where I loaded bunch of scenes (setups, rigs, prototypes) to illustrate what can be done.

https://vimeo.com/90033424

You can also find some speed modeling and rig demo:
https://vimeo.com/74443935
https://vimeo.com/25486876

If you have some questions, please, feel free to fire away and I'll do my best to give you precise answers.

Cheers

Hi Hrvoje

Welcome to the community and thank you for taking the time to make the videos and sharing them

Kind regards

Angus

Great stuff Hrvoje!

First, I wanna thanks all C4D users here on the forum. I think the help you've been providing is the best possible and way better than only discount to purchase the software. Time is money and you guys have taken your time to make videos sharing knowledge and tips with us and I leaned a lot from noseman videos and I'm really happy you guys could come up here and help us.

I would like to ask a question ... one for FX. For animation, I already got some answers from Brian Horgan (he's very good and helpful). I know about TurbulenceFD, which is a great plugin, but what other tools aside TFD and X-Particles is a must for FX work on C4D? I'm talking explosions, fire, smoke, demolition and dynamics. Is there any other plugin that it's a must and what exactly C4D lacks in this subject?


Thanks again.

Cheers.

Realflow plays nicely with C4D also.

krakatoa is in final development stages and looking really good!
;)

@Angus

Thanks for the welcome

@MauricioPC

Personally I don't use plugins since my work revolved around modeling, rigging and rendering of all kinds.
For FX I am not really into that and someone else who is more experienced in that department can provide better answers but as far as I can tell, for FX people tend to rely on plugins.
One thing that would probably be valuable to Softimage users is that C4D is very procedural and non destructive. MoGraph, CA toolset and Xpresso combo is very powerful and gives result with very few elements and quick turn around time. Here are some facts that many people don't know about C4D

- Rock stable
- Hair&fur tools are very good and can be used for a lot more then hair. Deep and complex, renders quite fast.
- CA offers plethora of tools, any rig is possible, existing templates are very good. There is dedicated system for creating templates which is robust and offers python scripting
- There is a L-system built into one of MoGraph's spline generators
- Modeling tools are very good. SDS, All the tools you need (best bevel), decent knife and symmetry, sliding,full snapping, workplanes&guides. Built in deformers are very nice.
- Has one the most advanced muscle object
- MoGraph is not only for motion graphics and can be used way outside it's original scope
- Sculpting in Cinema is in fact really nice and doesn't lack anything (it is not Zbrush but compares to Mudbox easily)
- Rendering is improved quite a lot, offers full GI, QMC and Irradiance cache, AO, Light mapping, physical camera, motion blur etc. Full monty
- Viewport performance with low amount of objects, or single object is better than in Maya.
- Alembic fully supported

One thing to be aware off is that Xpresso is not ICE, however It is quite powerful and pretty much the same concept and often more than enough for majority of users.

This looks very cool ... Lots of fun stuff.

https://vimeo.com/ondemand/c4dapt/90223066

Hey noseman ... Just saw you will be presenting at Maxon booth on NAB man. Good luck, I'll be at c4dlive.com watching it.

MauricioPC wrote:Hey noseman ... Just saw you will be presenting at Maxon booth on NAB man. Good luck, I'll be at c4dlive.com watching it.

Thanks a lot Mauricio
I'll be surrounded by C4D royalty, so I need to be good