why not cinema 4d?

[luchifer]

Also, from the noseman videos and my humble experience working with C4D, you can say that, while XSI phylosphy was "non destructive workflow", C4D is more a "drag and drop workflow". And is very fast doing it.

For example, usually in a 3d software you create a text or a circle spline and then apply extrude, in C4D you can start with the extrude operator, and drag and drop your splines inside of it and it will extrude them all at once (you just need to click on hierarchical on the extrude operator).

So, my point is, try to see the benefits of the new software and a new workflow instead of what can it do to be more like XSI. Because, frankly, nothing will ever be like XSI and trying to force C4D into Softimage it would only lead to frustration.

edit ( i dont know why I edit so much)... also the materials dont necesarily belong to the objects in C4D. You can apply materials to extrude operators or even empty nulls.

I do maps as a part of my work (broadcast television), sometimes the client asks me to lighten a country or a state if the country is at war for example, so I have two extrude operators, one with a yellow material, and one with a white material, so If I need to lighten a state or a country, I just drag and drop the countries I need to the extrude operator with the yellow material assigned and drag the ones I dont want to the extrude with the white material.

I have my example scene at work, tomorrow I can post a link so you can see it. Its a fast workflow, but I never tried to apply materials to nulls in XSI, so perhaps it works too in softimage.

another edit.. in c4d children inherit parent material unless they have their own materials assigned, very useful when you arent sure of the materials you want or when the client ask for changes, you just put the materials you arent sure in an empty null (they stack), and drag -drop them to your objects to test changes for your client.

last edit, I promise... also, another difference I found: In XSI you can mute operators, but in C4D you can mute operators and objects... in fact you can mute splines, polygons, operators, deformers, effects, etc, etc, so if you have an object an you arent sure if you need to use it in the scene, instead of hiding it, you can uncheck it from the explorer. Example in dynamics: you can have 3 boxes and a floor, drop the boxes to the floor for a quick simulation, and if you uncheck one of the boxes it wont compute it for the simulation (if you just hide the box, your other boxes will still collide with the hidden box because is just invisible but is still there)

[angus_davidson]

@noseman - You could take the ancient Mod Tool for spin, all the fundamentals are there...

one minor issue is that I'm on Mac…
I have a Windows bootcamp partition, but I can't change OS right now as I'm doing this while working
I have some old version of Softimage XSI 6 but I need to find the dongle as well
If I have some time over the next few days, I will try and take a look.

If you have parallels for mac you can run softimage from there quite well. ;)

[Hirazi Blue]

Well, I just got my answer why there is no retirement offer from Maxon from Björn Dirk Marl AKA Srek, Technical Design, Maxon Computer GmbH in this thread over @ the CGTalk:

I'm not sure that this would make so much sense. The money saved isn't much if the tool is not the right one for you. If it is the right one the rebate wouldn't make much of a difference as well. Would it really be the signal you want to see from Maxon?
Just my personal € 0.02 of course
Cheers
Björn

Funny stuff...

[Srek]

Well, I just got my answer why there is no retirement offer from Maxon from Björn Dirk Marl AKA Srek, Technical Design, Maxon Computer GmbH in

What you got were my personal 2 Cent, not anything official from Maxon.

Short introduction here.
I'm Björn Marl, i headed Maxon QA for the last decade and recently switched to technical design. I'm not related to Maxon Marketing and Sales, so please don't expect any official statements from me.
At CG Society i've been a CINEMA 4D Forumsleader for 12 years now.
As an artists i'm useless, i am a technician. Hobbies are 3D printing and reading SciFi.
Since i was involved heavily in the development of Xpresso and Thinking Particles as well as Dynamics for c4d, feel free to ask me anything related to that. I might also be able to help when it comes to technical questions around CINEMA 4D, hardware etc.

Personally i am pretty bummed by AD dropping SI, not surprised though since I expected this from AD. I would have loved to be proven wrong since healthy competition is something that keeps any application on the market alive and SI certainly was/is the yardstick in many areas.

Cheers
Björn

[talent103]

Thanks Bjorn. I am sure I will have many questions on the particles/ dynamics once I start to really get into C4D. My first question however; would be :
Have you used Ice, know it enough, to make a comparison on Ice Vs Xpresso, C4D Particles? Hope to talk to you more in the future.
J

[Hirazi Blue]

What you got were my personal 2 Cent, not anything official from Maxon.

Oh, I believe I made this perfectly clear by quoting your reply in full
(and I never wanted/intended to imply otherwise anyway)...
;)

[Srek]

While i had a closer look towards ICE i never really worked with it and never tried particles in XSI. It's not possible for me to really compare the two.

[Eugen]

Hi Srek, thanks for joining our little conversation!

You worked on Xpresso and TP for C4D, and never had a look at ICE? Hard to believe... just google it, there's countless videos out there.
You could consider both a subset of ICE, so to speak.

What I'm interested most at this point is C4D's roadmap. Anything to share? What direction is Maxon taking it?
Any plans even for implementing something operator-stack-like (if that would be possible at all now, since it's something that's very fundamental), or anything that allows for a better non-linear workflow? Is there even the awareness about this being a 'first-class' feature?

Any information is welcome!
Cheers!
Eugen

[Srek]

Hi Srek, thanks for joining our little conversation!

You worked on Xpresso and TP for C4D, and never had a look at ICE? Hard to believe... just google it, there's countless videos out there.
You could consider both a subset of ICE, so to speak.

What I'm interested most at this point is C4D's roadmap. Anything to share? What direction is Maxon taking it?
Any plans even for implementing something operator-stack-like (if that would be possible at all now, since it's something that's very fundamental), or anything that allows for a better non-linear workflow? Is there even the awareness about this being a 'first-class' feature?

Any information is welcome!
Cheers!
Eugen

Xpresso and TP were implemented in 2001 and 2002, 6 years before ICE came to market, i did not have much of a chance to evaluate ICE before we implemented ;)
I did have a good look at ICE, and Houdini at that, over the time, i just didn't really work with it.

Unfortunately i am not at large to give any information on future or ongoing development, this is a general policy at Maxon that i can't go against. The only thing i can say is that being a technical designer is a lot more interesting than one might expect from the dry title

I get the impression though that many users of SI and other apps think they are missing things that are actually available, albeit in a different shape and maybe not as complete as you want.
CINEMA 4D does many things via the Object Manager and hierarchical structures of generators and deformers, that other applications resolve via stacks. While there is not much flexibility in changing the topology in a parametric way, many other things can be done fully parametric and to a greater extent than many know. It just doesn't happen via a node graph but in the OMs hierarchy.
This does need some getting used to for someone that starts with CINEMA 4D, but it is one of the reasons why many people prefer CINEMA 4D when it comes to time critical work.
Personally i think that quite a few SI user will end up with CINEMA 4D and Houdini as the two main 3D tools in their pipeline. I see a nice example on how this can work in what http://www.aixsponza.com/ does. Their pipeline revolves around CINEMA 4D, Houdini and a good part of SI.
Cheers
Björn

[talent103]

The Big Pluses for me about C4D is that it works on a Mac and It is not Maya. I agree that people have a hard time wrapping their heads around a different work flow. Unless Autodesk changes their mind they are going to have to change or die on the VFX vine.

[Eugen]

Unfortunately i am not at large to give any information on future or ongoing development, this is a general policy at Maxon that i can't go against. The only thing i can say is that being a technical designer is a lot more interesting than one might expect from the dry title

Understandable, though unfortunate. I, as many, am having a hard time making up my mind now, and as you surely understand, I like to have a 'perspective'.

I get the impression though that many users of SI and other apps think they are missing things that are actually available, albeit in a different shape and maybe not as complete as you want.
CINEMA 4D does many things via the Object Manager and hierarchical structures of generators and deformers, that other applications resolve via stacks. While there is not much flexibility in changing the topology in a parametric way, many other things can be done fully parametric and to a greater extent than many know. It just doesn't happen via a node graph but in the OMs hierarchy.

Let's talk about some of the concepts in a little more detail, so we can avoid misunderstandings:

In Softimage, the complement to C4D's Object Manager would be the Scene Explorer. It's the central hub of scene management, and you practically use it all the time. Selecting objects, opening Property Pages (PPGs) for the operators and thus accessing parameters, parenting, muting/freezing ops, grouping, re-arranging (of course there are freely configurable keyboard shortcuts and context menus as well) So, not so much difference, I suppose.
A must have, actually. Ridiculous, how awkwardly this is handled in 3ds Max, for example.

Hierarchical structures of input objects to deformers are there, of course, too, but I have to say the way this is handled in C4D is quite nice. More user-friendly in some regards.
Example: create an extrusion from a curve and a profile - you will see this 'hierarchy' in the 'Schematic View', but you cannot simply d&d other curves onto the extrusion object to swap the input.
You would have to use a command that changes the op's inputs. There is no general paradigm here, which of course could be criticized.
It could be invoked by a 'Pick curve' button in the operator's PPG, or in a menu item. This decisions, as well as the PPG layout, are left to the operator's developer.

There are operators that allow for changing it's inputs (dynamic), whereas others do not (static). Developer's decision, too.
Factory booleans, for example, have static (unchangeable) inputs. Also, they are not a generator operator, which create new scene objects, but a topology operator, which modifies an object - which is the point I'm trying to get to.
e.g. if you subtract B from A, object A changes - no new object is created (as a sidenote, the 'ImplosiaFX' plugin by Exocortex, features a boolean op that is implemented as a generator).
If the topology operator has parameters, they remain editable until you freeze the object's operator stack. See page 10 of this thread for an example.


Deformers (bend, twist...) are operators, too, of course. The can reside on either a single object, but also on multiple objects at the same time.
The way to achieve this is create a group of all needed objects and put the deformer on the group. In that case, it's easy to swap input objects by adding or removing them to the group.
So, the way deformers are handled are very similar to the C4D way. SI doesn't have many interactive handles for param changes, though.

This does need some getting used to for someone that starts with CINEMA 4D, but it is one of the reasons why many people prefer CINEMA 4D when it comes to time critical work.
Personally i think that quite a few SI user will end up with CINEMA 4D and Houdini as the two main 3D tools in their pipeline. I see a nice example on how this can work in what http://www.aixsponza.com/ does. Their pipeline revolves around CINEMA 4D, Houdini and a good part of SI.
Cheers
Björn

Noseman posted this video recently, too, recently. Very impressive.

But again:
From the information I could gather from you guys, I think I get an idea of how C4D is ticking, and first let me say it's far from being unflexible application.
That said, I deem handling topology in a parametric way very important. Softimage had the concept right from the start.
Full parametric approach on any level is where it gets really 'cutting edge'. I say this without arrogance, it's just a fact.

Before the introduction of ICE, you had to use the operator SDK for writing ops (either in C++ or one of the available script languages: JScript, VBasic, now also Python).
As you know, with ICE, you can now create operators with a node-based programming paradigm. It has full access to almost any scene data - geometry, particles, kinematics, parameters, all the attributes - UVs, velocity, locations... you can even create custom ICE attributes.
An ICE graph, however, always sits in an operator. It's not a replacement for the operator stack, but lives within.
It has still some shortcomings, maybe due to the late point it was added, and/or the sparse development resources of late, but just look around what's possible with it. A lot!

Not Even Maya has something comparable to ICE. There are huge development efforts being put into it now, project Bifröst, though.
It's the real hot topic now in the Softimage userbase - when will Bifröst be up and running, and will it be a full complement to ICE, and why were we forced to a transition without an equivalent tool at hand.
(Besides the many workflow issues that still make Maya so awkward to use)

Just browse a bit into the Softimage mailing list, and you will understand what it means for most SI users to loose such a level of flexibility. It's like cutting the bird's wings in a way... ICE is what made all the difference.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/xsi_list

I'm well aware that Houdini has an even more generalized approach to the whole subject, but I have the feeling that it is not the suitable application for me at this time, so let's leave it aside for a moment.



Now what I really want to know from you C4D professionals is if there will ever be something comparable in it? Parametric topo changes/some kind of operator stack, maybe even something ICE-like?
All the many other things we deal with in a 3D application seem to be in place in C4D, but that's not what I'm worrying about.


Btw...
I found that C4D has problems with the Wacom tablet in mouse mode. This is nonsense that makes me want to go down to the street and throw a molotow cocktail... is there a patch for this??

Thanks!!
Best regards,
Eugen

[milanvasek]

has anyone mentioned Arnold? it would be one of the main reasons for me not to go with C4D (the plugin that is being developed is not official work of solidangle, so there is no guarantee how, when and if it will work...)

Softimage Passes/Partitions/Overrides etc. together with Arnold and ICE support are just so incredibly powerful...

I think lighting and rendering is still one of the weakest points of C4D

[luchifer]

From my personal experience with xpresso in cinema 4d, I can, to a certain extent, make custom parameters to have a lot of non-destructive workflow. In fact, I do that all the time.

This is a small example (its a still image)

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid ... =3&theater

What you are seeing is a custom - lets say excel chart - useful for election day, I can select up to 12 candidates, change their % values and the bars will flow accordingly. If I have a large title, the fonts automaticaly change size and add a new paragraph, and my camera will always keep everything at full screen, no matter if I have 2 or 12 candidates. Color bars also change from higher to lower values. (Cinema 4D also had something similar as a preset, but I build this from the ground). I have similar custom charts for pies, for maps, for anything that can be useful for my work (tv broadcasting).

I know maybe is not what your looking for, and perhaps this is something very simple for most of you guys, but It did took me some python coding and math and xpresso knowdledge to do it.

My point is, you can build yourself a non-destructive workflow for some situations. And as far as I could go with xpresso, you can build your own get data / set data.

edit.. for the wacom problem , in C4D go to preference (ctrl E) and then in input devices check graphics tablet on and hi-res tablet on/off.

[Srek]

Usually Wacom support should simply work. If it doesn't please get in contact with Maxon techsupport.
It does sometimes have problems if you use remote access (RDP) or similar.

While i can't say anything about future development i think it is clear from the development history of CINEMA 4D that the way forward is flexibility. The way MoGraph effectors can be used as deformers as well for example.

I'm not directly involved in the Arnold/C4D connection, but to the best of my knowledge it is coming along nicely. This is quite often and in depth discussed on the CINEMA 4D subforum on CG Talk.
I can recommend CG Society and C4D Cafe as resources for know how regarding CINEMA 4D. Very much, like the XSI users the C4D community
is a very helpful bunch, which was actually one of the main reasons why i choose c4d >13 years ago when i began with 3D.

Cheers
Björn

[Eugen]

Usually Wacom support should simply work. If it doesn't please get in contact with Maxon techsupport.
It does sometimes have problems if you use remote access (RDP) or similar.

It works fine in 'pen mode', but I prefer 'mouse mode', because I don't want to move my arm so much. Here, the cursor is 'jumpy', and clicks with the pen don't work properly.
I had no problems whatsoever in any other application with the mouse mode.

Posted more than a year ago here:
http://forum.wacom.eu/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=12777
Quote: "Cinema4D expects that a tablet is always in pen mode and other situations do not work well. Especially with a second display and the pen in mouse mode, clicks can have an offset to right or left and click somewhere else. I think Maxon has seen this problem."

While i can't say anything about future development i think it is clear from the development history of CINEMA 4D that the way forward is flexibility. The way MoGraph effectors can be used as deformers as well for example.

Allright, thanks.

Best,
Eugen

[noseman]

A point that hasn't been mentioned is that C4D has a Python "Generator" and Xpresso has a Python "Node".
Since our version of python supports the creation of topology, you can actually use Xpresso and python to create your own "Operators" as well.