3DKiwi wrote:Re the text example. C4D can do all that you mention except the outline. It can do an outline of the text spline but the text spline needs to be made editable first. You can't then change the font or the letters. You can however still change the extrusion amount, edge bevel etc as the editable text spline is a child object of the Extrude object as it was before it was made editable. One of the recent enhancements for C4D was Text spline and MoText kerning. You can go back and change things around on a per letter basis. modo by the way can't do any of this. It can create text but it's a polygon object and you have to bevel it etc. No going back and playing around with settings.
Re ICE modelling. Nothing like this in C4D. C4D does have a node based expression system called XPresso. I watched the 9 minute ICE modelling video. You can for example change the level of subdivision of an object the closer the object is to a camera or if the object is above the ground plane. You can do simple logic expressions i.e. if object is higher than x do this if not do something else. Cloning objects and adjusting offsets etc is a piece of cake using a cloner object. You can control the number of clones a number of ways, one being manual or you can do it with XPresso, say add a clone every 30 frames.
Not sure what you mean by modelling graph.
Re the Houdini chair example. I reckon I pretty much replicate most of this in C4D. Bit of work setting it all up but generally doable.
Modelling is an area in C4D that was negelected for a long time. That's changed and it's now getting a lot of love.
Thanks for the answer, 3DKiwi!
It's like I'm imagining - no operator stack for topology edits. As I've heard, there's at least a deform stack of sorts, right? Modo has it, too, afaik.
If you don't change the number of components in an operator graph, everything remains nice and simple. But if you change the number of polys, the following operators might even loose their input completely, because the part of the mesh it was working on is missing now. There have to be failsafe mechanisms to deal with this.
Making things 'editable', btw., is the same as 'freezing' the modeling stack in Softimage, and you loose the ability to edit earlier parameters.
With 'modeling graph' I simply mean a network of nodes, like in ICE or Houdini.
Honestly, Softimage has some ugly quirks/restrictions in the field of parametric modelling, too, e.g. the ability to create 'forks' in the operator stack is limited (booleans, or extrusions curves... in 3ds max, those 'forks' are called 'compounds').
ICE was introduced at a much later point, and it's a world of it's own, so to say. Operators and ICE nodes are something completely different (ICE graphs live inside of an operator), although they do basically the same: get whatever scene data via ports, process it, and output the resulting data.
Would the system have been redesigned these days, this would be unified, I bet. I'm curious what will come out of the Maya-Bifröst implementation, because Maya (besides it's countless quirks) has the advantage of a very granular and flexible approach in constructing the scene graph.
Fabric Engine will work that way, too. A node-based/ICE-like approach is in the making.
Back to C4D: I watched the video by Holger Biebrach, and I have to say I'm impressed by the level of customizability, and the seeming consistency of the UI.
For example, I like the way you can stitch together menus, or this global menu. Softimage could learn a lot from this!
I wrote a quadrant menu system myself some years ago for Softimage (which I use all the time still), because I deem this of vital importance. Again, although not really difficult, almost nothing was done in that area under Autodesk.
In fact, the last years were so massively frustrating... I just start to realize the epic failure on Soft's development. But let's leave this out here...
Best,
Eugen