why not cinema 4d?

Discussions about migration to other software
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noseman
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Re: why not cinema 4d?

Post by noseman » 12 Mar 2014, 12:09

NNois wrote:@noseman I must say you have to try at least once in your life the pass/partition/override Softimage system in your life.

And then, you'll say "what the fuck !" ( like every max/maya and as i see C4D users generally says when they saw )
Would you be kind enough to create a short presentation of your Partition workflow?
Apparently I haven't understood the importance and power of it. I apologise for that.
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Re: why not cinema 4d?

Post by Eugen » 12 Mar 2014, 23:40

Hello noseman,
can you also please elaborate a bit about the operator stack / construction history of C4D? Mathaeus mentioned that it has this feature (not sure if it is called like that, but I assume you know what I mean.)
Thanks!
Best regards,
Eugen

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noseman
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Re: why not cinema 4d?

Post by noseman » 13 Mar 2014, 00:10

there is no operator stack or construction history, but depending on how you work, there are other ways to achieve intuitive workflows.
If you have some scenario in mind, where an operation stack or construction history is imperative, I would like to know and see if I can offer an elegant substitute.
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Re: why not cinema 4d?

Post by 3DKiwi » 13 Mar 2014, 00:36

Re Construction history. My understanding of Construction History is way to to go back and change things on your model from an earlier time and not upset modelling actions that were done later. If that's the case then Cinema 4D has this with its primitive objects, spline primitives, MoGraph Cloner, Array, MoText and a couple of other objects.

For example the text spline can be extruded using an Extrude object. At any time you can go back and change any of the settings e.g. different font, different text, different extrusion amount, different edge bevel etc Plus all of this can be animated.
Last edited by 3DKiwi on 13 Mar 2014, 01:59, edited 1 time in total.

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Mathaeus
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Re: why not cinema 4d?

Post by Mathaeus » 13 Mar 2014, 01:46

Eugen wrote: can you also please elaborate a bit about the operator stack / construction history of C4D? Mathaeus mentioned that it has this feature (not sure if it is called like that}
my, personal definition of operator stack was: if you want to use FFD (lattice) as modeling or animation operator, applied non destructively over mesh - you can do that in Cinema. Non destructively = if you remove FFD (lattice), mesh goes back into previous state.

missingkey
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Re: why not cinema 4d?

Post by missingkey » 13 Mar 2014, 06:22

lol, the cinema guys never quite fully 'get' what SI's passes & partitions or maya's render layers are. Contribution maps!... Ha! Object buffers are not the replacement for any of that advanced rendering stuff. Sorry, but nothing exists in c4d like that. it's just not a production tool.

I won't get into it. But I hate C4D. I hope I never ever have to open the pos app. No offsense to the guys trying to sell it on the forum, or use it... er, teach it.

I'd easily go back to maya over cinema. whatever.

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Re: why not cinema 4d?

Post by Eugen » 13 Mar 2014, 09:25

noseman wrote:there is no operator stack or construction history, but depending on how you work, there are other ways to achieve intuitive workflows.
If you have some scenario in mind, where an operation stack or construction history is imperative, I would like to know and see if I can offer an elegant substitute.
Well, for parametric modelling of any kind you will need operators (Softimage), modfiers (3ds max), or SOPs (Houdini).
It's about being able to work on a model in a fully non-linear fashion; going back and change whatever parameters whenever, and of course animate them if needed. It's a level of flexibility that I'm used to since the mid-nineties from 3ds max, and I'd be missing it.


But anyway, would this be possible in C4D (see screenshot):
Create some text, apply an outline, extrude it with some bevel, and be able to change any parameter any time afterwards, like changing the text. Everthing updates accordingly, if you do.
For architectural jobs, a huge part of the scene consists of a similar setup, and I like being able to make quick adaptions should the plans change.

This is just a small example. ICE modelling is where it's getting really sophisticated - check out some related videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQAv0q6pcco
(as a sidenote, it's sad that ICE modeling never fully matured - no proper Nurbs support, quirks with UVs - but it had great potential.)


I don't know C4D's often cited motion graphics capabilities, but wouldn't that have to be based on some kind of modelling graph as well?
Thanks!
Best regards,
Eugen


EDIT:
Just found this Houdini video:
https://vimeo.com/88951413
Just as an example what procedural modeling is about. We could of course go into a long debate now when or if at all this makes sense.
Softimage In my opinion has a good balanced here - you could do a setup like this (maybe not as consistently as in Houdini), but you can also work in 'immediate mode', and forget about the whole non-linear business.

Btw.: as we all know, the rate of development of modeling features (and plenty of other areas, of course) has decreased to almost 0 in the Autodesk years, and still there's so much you can do. Imagine there would have been a dedicated effort and will to invest in that platform...
Anyway...
Attachments
screenshot extrusion.jpg

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Re: why not cinema 4d?

Post by 3DKiwi » 13 Mar 2014, 09:59

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.

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Re: why not cinema 4d?

Post by Mathaeus » 13 Mar 2014, 10:16

Eugen wrote: But anyway, would this be possible in C4D (see screenshot):
Create some text, apply an outline, extrude it with some bevel, and be able to change any parameter any time afterwards, like changing the text. Everthing updates accordingly, if you do.
For architectural jobs, a huge part of the scene consists of a similar setup, and I like being able to make quick adaptions should the plans change.

I don't know C4D's often cited motion graphics capabilities, but wouldn't that have to be based on some kind of modelling graph as well?
Thanks!
Best regards,
Eugen
Yeah, there's 'generator' operator, able to this from multiple curves at once, still keeping the parameters in one place. A bit of nit picking, but in SI, once operators are applied to multiple objects, you have to catch them, using multi-thing feature in PPG. Possible, but not enough easy as in Cinema. Still, no big deal to put all curves in 'object list' in xPresso, and animate them procedurally - while in SI, there is not-so-pleasant procedure of instancing into point cloud. So, supporter of C4d could say, C4d can set data back to the group, while SI can't. Of course, later on, ICE is so much stronger than xpresso.

I really don't want to defend C4d here, after all I'm more and more in 'shut up and play this Maya' direction. But, imho, we should see all these features in appropriate context, and these contexts are specific.

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Re: why not cinema 4d?

Post by Eugen » 13 Mar 2014, 10:47

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

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Re: why not cinema 4d?

Post by Eugen » 13 Mar 2014, 14:37

Something else:

Is there an official roadmap for C4D? Any announcements?
(Autodesk, for example, is never allowed to make future plans public, because corporate laws forbid it.)


What impression do you have about the Maxon developers? Are they open-minded and listening / a bunch of blockheads with tunnel view? ; )

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Re: why not cinema 4d?

Post by luchifer » 13 Mar 2014, 15:08

missingkey wrote:lol, the cinema guys never quite fully 'get' what SI's passes & partitions or maya's render layers are. Contribution maps!... Ha! Object buffers are not the replacement for any of that advanced rendering stuff. Sorry, but nothing exists in c4d like that. it's just not a production tool.

I won't get into it. But I hate C4D. I hope I never ever have to open the pos app. No offsense to the guys trying to sell it on the forum, or use it... er, teach it.

I'd easily go back to maya over cinema. whatever.
Im sorry but you cant translate XSI onto other software, that just wont work. You can try to find a workaround for what you need though. For me, XSI was great but I never understood why something like a simple spline editing was such a pain compared to 3dsmax, or C4D, and the workaround for me was to use Illustrator for that particular scenario.

Calling it "not a production tool" is really disrespectfull for all the people using it. Not everyone wants to work in the film industry, I love broadcasting and C4D is way better for that than XSI. Just look at font managment in XSI and C4D (wich is a must for broadcasting). Or MoGraph vs Motion Tools (a very good plugin, but not the same). For television, I use a lot of object buffers all the time, and C4D allows me to have 10 different passes, 10 buffers, 1 composition ready in After Effects (because I can save my project directly to AE unlike XSI) with camera, light and position data for all my objects, and all of that with few clicks and just one render time. Last time I used XSI, each pass render separatedly, thus increasing render time dramatically.

Im not trying to sell C4D, my point is, whatever you decide to use, dont force XSI way of work into it. It just wont work.

edit --- 10 is just a reference, I can easily use more than that.

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Re: why not cinema 4d?

Post by Eugen » 13 Mar 2014, 15:26

luchifer wrote: Im sorry but you cant translate XSI onto other software, that just wont work. You can try to find a workaround for what you need though. For me, XSI was great but I never understood why something like a simple spline editing was such a pain compared to 3dsmax, or C4D, and the workaround for me was to use Illustrator for that particular scenario.
Correct... curve editing is a catastrophe in Softimage, and furthermore, the SDK does not fully cater to those who try to write their own modeling tools ( I tried - that offset operator is one of them).

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noseman
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Re: why not cinema 4d?

Post by noseman » 13 Mar 2014, 15:28

Eugen wrote:Something else:

Is there an official roadmap for C4D? Any announcements?
(Autodesk, for example, is never allowed to make future plans public, because corporate laws forbid it.)


What impression do you have about the Maxon developers? Are they open-minded and listening / a bunch of blockheads with tunnel view? ; )
The US is one of Maxon's largest markets, so they obide to the same laws as Autodesk. That's the ENRON legacy I guess.
No announcements whatsoever.
As for the developers, I happen to know most of them personally and I have to say they are brilliant and quite open minded .One thing that is prevelant in Maxon development cycles is an obsession with stability. C4D just never crashes because of bad code. Pretty much all crashes are either 3rd party plugin errors or graphics card driver related.
That poses a minor problem, that no new features are added unless they are bug free, and that means that there are features that will be delayed in getting released.
On another note, I will make another video later today that shows our way of parametric modeling.
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Re: why not cinema 4d?

Post by Eugen » 13 Mar 2014, 15:52

noseman wrote: The US is one of Maxon's largest markets, so they obide to the same laws as Autodesk. That's the ENRON legacy I guess.
No announcements whatsoever.
As for the developers, I happen to know most of them personally and I have to say they are brilliant and quite open minded .One thing that is prevelant in Maxon development cycles is an obsession with stability. C4D just never crashes because of bad code. Pretty much all crashes are either 3rd party plugin errors or graphics card driver related.
That poses a minor problem, that no new features are added unless they are bug free, and that means that there are features that will be delayed in getting released.
On another note, I will make another video later today that shows our way of parametric modeling.
Thanks! Looking forward...

missingkey
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Re: why not cinema 4d?

Post by missingkey » 13 Mar 2014, 16:18

Cinema is a toy, don't be fooled.

It sits nicely on an individuals workstation, who uses photoshop, after effects, and illustrator religiously. They show all their friends the cool 3D text they can make, and how they can orbit around it, and change materials. Ooooooo look, I can clone an object. And export my 3d scene to after effects to add 3d stroke and shine. Lmao

If you like cinema, you probably didn't need to be using softimage in the first place. Koodos to you. But if your seriously looking for a replacement to SI.... Well, keep looking.

This is silly, about as silly as wanting softimage for macosx. Lol.

Moderator edit: please tone it down a little... - HB

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