Maxon developing new core for Cinema 4D

[MauricioPC]

http://www.cgchannel.com/2016/02/maxon- ... cinema-4d/

http://www.maxon.net/en/news/maxon-blog ... uture.html

Foundations for the Future
I have had the privilege of leading our incredibly talented group of creative developers for the last two decades. We’ve been fortunate to have a consistent, loyal and dedicated team. All but one of our original core developers are still working on Cinema 4D. Few software companies can assert this kind of stability. So I’m honored to give you a peek into the great work our development team has and will be doing.

Cinema 4D has enjoyed great success, and it’s exciting to see how you, our customers, are using our software to create visual effects, futuristic user interfaces in movies like Avengers, Spectre and Mockingjay, countless motion graphics across television and the web, for architectural and scientific visualization, gaming, designing new consumer products, and so much more. It’s your artistic vision and passion that drive us to create a Cinema 4D that’s robust, easy to use, feature-rich and modern.

Keeping any software package modern is indeed a struggle, especially in the fast evolving, cutting-edge arena of 3D. Cinema 4D was introduced over 20 years ago and is still one of the top 3D packages on the market today. That wouldn’t be the case if we hadn’t been constantly updating and enhancing Cinema 4D.

The core architecture our developers put in place 16 years ago with Cinema 4D R6 has served us incredibly well and we are working to ensure Cinema 4D’s long-term future. What you don’t know is that work has already been underway for a few years, with those same core developers joined by many others to build a strong new foundation for Cinema 4D’s future. We’ve been gradually incorporating these efforts for several releases, and here are some of the results:

A rich foundation of groundbreaking fundamental technologies have been created, including a highly-efficient threading system for massive data-parallelism and new optimized data structures, to name just a few. We are using the latest state of the art algorithms, compilers, tools and technologies to build the foundation that will drive Cinema 4D's progress and innovation for the next decade.

Everything is based on a highly modular architecture that allows us to combine the current Cinema 4D with the new core. This in fact took place in Release 16 and means that you are in part already experiencing the future of Cinema 4D today!

Our development team is adopting these advanced capabilities into the products we are creating today. While new developments are based on the new core, existing functionality continues to work seamlessly and will become even more powerful once it's transitioned natively to the new architecture.

We’ve progressed deliberately - and yes, quietly. We wanted our team to have space to carefully consider the best path for the future, to avoid pitfalls and to keep Cinema 4D moving forward throughout the process.

Transitioning Cinema 4D fully to the new core will still take several more releases. Lots of existing code will need to be tweaked and tested, both internally and by our third-party development partners.

With this ongoing effort, we have still been able to refresh aspects of Cinema 4D and to deliver outstanding new features. To maintain these efforts, we've hired quite a number of new programmers in the last two years and we are actively recruiting. Last year, we opened an office in Canada specifically for recruiting and hosting the excellent 3D development talent in Montreal.

Above all, we will maintain the essence of Cinema 4D and further improve its workflow, ease of use, legendary stability, and provide you with great tools to achieve your artistic goals.
Harald Schneider, CTO and Managing Partner

[MauricioPC]

I really really hope his new version kicks some major ass. I for one don't have that much faith on Modo and I feel Cinema 4D could be a rival and a powerful substitute to Softimage if they improve on performance, animation, particles.

Let's wait and see.

[Bullit]

This is good news. I am afraid they lost capital by their silence but maybe could not be another way.

I tested Cinema 4D after Softimage ended and in some parts it felt old, to setup the program defaults as i wished i have to go to some not logical menus for the propose.

[xsi_fanatic]

I really really hope his new version kicks some major ass. I for one don't have that much faith on Modo and I feel Cinema 4D could be a rival and a powerful substitute to Softimage if they improve on performance, animation, particles.

Let's wait and see.

Likewise, I tried Modo and C4D. I feel C4D has far more potential but still has some drawbacks that needs work.

I'm curious to know why you didn't feel positive about Modo while on the other hand many people were giving positive reviews. Care to share ?

As for me, the reason being is Modo didn't have the right "touch". C4D, I could see myself making a switch to eventually but if and only if they do something about their short comings.

[MauricioPC]

Well,

I have grown used to some parametric modeling. Modo is very much destructive and click. I don't like that much.

To be honest, I'm studying Maya right now and enjoying the 2016 version. Who knew. But than again, most jobs are Maya. :/

[Hirazi Blue]

I think Maxon should reconsider its pricing policy or introduce a version solely geared towards advanced animation (without MoGraph, Cloth, Hair and all that stuff),
but with all the advanced animation stuff now only available in the Studio version...

[FXDude]

I too find this news rather good.

From my own trials, C4D's envoronment is one that I found to be the most intuitive and workable.

Notably for it's modelessness (being in every mode all the time), single/multi-object selection agnosticism, a quite decent scene explorer, and you feel that lots of attention goes around user experience and interaction in general, or the many little things that make your life easier on a daily basis, and their new takes system leaves not much to be desired to SI's passes, and is a fine example of something extremely capable while very easy to work with, compared to say Houdini styles recently posted here.

What I felt it's drawback were, unlike their newer introductions like takes, it would be in regards to the flexibility/userfriendlyness balance in general I refereed to in another recent thread, except here it would be somewhat too much on the other end of the scale, or that it's perhaps a bit too black-boxed and inflexible, relative to again Houdini which can be the exact opposite, having arguably rather poor user-friendliness and extremely high flexibility.

Also as mentionned here there seemed to be some performance and/or optimization issues, with lots of geometry in either amount of objects or polycount, and even if all was hidden still had a big impact on interaction/playback performance.

Nevertheless I hope efforts with this new engine would address such drawbacks, or whichever else may prevent it from being more broadly considered for "high-end" VFX tasks, and/or as a descent well balanced XSI alternative.


Also by the way, they mentionned their newish Montreal office,
Montreal which is fairly rich in develpment talent, and among a few others, one of the lead RND developpers is Alain Laferrière who'm I had the pleasure of working with on a few occasions in SI SpecialProjects, when he was like an embassador to various japenese clients, had a big hand in the .xsi format development, and had some hand in XSI dev which I don't know about, but nevertheless, something which I know could'nt be a bad thing for the future outlook of C4d and it's new core

[FXDude]

Further discussion on Foundry Forum

http://community.thefoundry.co.uk/discu ... 137&page=0

[FXDude]

Inputting C4d poly selction groups (like clusters) into Houdini engine



Can also just as easily input (and output) vertex maps/attributes.


But Houdini (and/or at least currently C4d) solving is slooow,
and wrapping your head around certain aspects of Houdini can have a way of making your hair more gray.

[NNois]

This highly remember me Lightwave Core... Hopes not !

[FXDude]

This highly remember me Lightwave Core... Hopes not !

In the past, Maxon hasn't been the kind to make announcements lightly, if making any annoucement at all,
and not being so forthcoming is even a common criticism, but that seems to have much improved with that new blog, devs showing-up on forums, and more openly staying in tune with user impressions, like coming out with calls like this : C4D Feedback summary response which invoked many responses,

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Hi folks

Thank you all for taking precious time to give feedback.
What I gathered here and summarized is now sent directly to Oliver and Bernd in MAXON Product management for direct examination and will be taken seriously into account as any other feedback we receive from various inputs.

They are also informed and aware of opinions expressed in this and many other topics here on cafe, cgtalk and other forums.
At this point I am not in position to provide you with official response but hope I will be able to give some information soon in form of response that doesn't violate current company policy and NDA. Hope you understand

Cheers

But in the case of the new core, they seemed to have announced it once it was already partly there without mentionning it before despite that certain tools were apparently already benefiting from it.

Maybe to be more on the "about to happen side" before making claims, or to not invoke any expectations until things are certain enough to be considered more like probabilities.

I find the Cg channel article also adds a bit of perspective.
New core architecture for Cinema 4D | CG Channel


The XSI List Thread from another announcement from just about a year ago is also interesting.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic ... w5tAyOupO4



They also seemed to have remained themselves over time, including most of the original devs which I think is an important point, for the new core among other things.

Interesting post :

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Thought I would chime in here since I see my name popping up.

So to get things into perspective a bit, only 3 developers left in the past 7 years.

Out of the past 25 years maybe a total of 5 developers moved on, the core team who first brought C4D into existence are still there, and they are some of the most talented developers I have ever had the privilege of working with.

If you have been checking the job postings on MAXON.net you would have seen many developer jobs advertised and filled. Including a brand new office in Canada, picking up a lot of other extremely talented devs who other companies foolishly made redundant (their loss Maxons gain).


I am really happy to see that MAXON has announced the new core being developed. And the fact that it has been in C4D since R16 and no one noticed (i.e. its stable and not crashing all the time) is a testament to their dev and planning skills. The new threading has been talked about and this has already made it into various parts of C4D already.

Previous announcements were made regarding speed ups for rendering, deformers and many other parts. You may not have noticed a massive speed boost since C4D is huge and you can do so much, but you might have noticed certain things feel smoother to use.

Maybe that deformer now updates in 1 second instead of 2. Multiply that through your scenes and animations and you start to see a difference. As each release comes out you will start to see more parts working faster and smoother.


The core is the foundation on what the entire application is built upon.
This is not something simple that can be thrown together over 1 year, this takes very careful planning and even more careful integration and testing. And as said, its in there! From now on you will start to see more new and exciting features and speed improvements.

These guys and gals are doing an extremely impressive job here. This is not a new app. You are getting (or will get ) all the benefits of the new core without interrupting your workflow. You won't have to change to use a different app, C5D?

Instead the devs have been swapping out the old for the new right under your nose, and have been doing so for the past 3 years without anyone noticing. And each following release is only going to get better.


MAXON has made the announcement but people will still want more (more blog posts, faster this, feature X). But I think they are doing a great job. They are posting updates to the blog, they are working on "faster this", which threading is the backbone for, and this will lead onto features XYZ. They have a bigger dev team now, lots of great people working in QA, Support (and SDK Support) and Product Management.

I myself am now on the MSA train and am happily going to pay to get R18. Get excited people. This is good news!

For me I wouln't mind using like a high-performance version of C4d (or more or less comparably performant to XSI) and manage with Houdini Engine (used as an ICE for FX and not as a DCC) in a not too distant future, or with perhaps eventually Canvas (for that probably in a longer time depending on how things turn out), in a studio production (with deadlines).

It also already has, as it is, a fair level of non-destructive side to it, covering most modeling and rigging operations that are either more, or better implemented than in other DCCs.
(if at-all existant, and is one of the multiple aspects that reminds alot of XSI)



A discussion about construction stacks and other things on the "Future of C4d" thread on C4dCafé.

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Since 3ds Max and the modifier stack are mentioned...

This might be a tad bit off topic, but now that C4D's new 'core' technology has been brought into position,
it might be a good time to reflect on the 'stack', or 'scene graph'.

The approach of C4D to intermingle object hierarchy with generators/deformers, and 3ds Max' modifier stack are not so much different, after all.
Both combine input objects (e.g. splines -> extrude, objects -> booleans, ...) into one object. Move the result, and the children move, too (in Softimage e.g. , this is not the case).

Personally I like C4D more, since it keeps all objects separate, so it's easy to d&d them around, whereas Max crams everything into one object (with ways to 'extract' the originating objects again, should you need them).

BUT Max is much better equipped when it comes to topology-changing modifiers (modifiers that add/remove components vs. those that just just push them around).
E.g. it has EditPoly, which is the uber-modifier that contains all the modelling tools there are.
Put that on top of a parametric primitive, edit around, and still you can change the primitive beneath.

It is debatable of course for how long it makes sense to keep modelling 'parametricism', since this automatically leads to certain quirks (keeping selection sets in snyc etc.), but the choice should be left to the user for sure!

Often, C4D is praised for it's parametricism, but, without contradicting, there's much potential when it comes to topology-parametricism. For now, it's only topo-deformers are Bevel, MoExtude, PolygonReduction. Correct me if I forgot something.

Look ahead (or back, actually), what Softimage ICE modelling can do.
It was 'latest and greatest' tech, and there are amazing production examples. However, ICE is kind of 'glued-on', and it was far from being perfectly consistent or worry-free.


Also, there's the 'Max Creation Graph' now.

Nothing comparable in C4D - yet!
I'm willing to believe that MAXON devs have this in mind already: a most flexible scene graph, including topo changes, which can be edited both in the object manager, or in a node-based environment, complementary.

That would be a topic I'd love to read about in the MAXON blog...

Generally, debates about how all the different 3d apps approach the complexity of 3D are highly interesting and informative.

Best regards

Eugen

I agree, the edit poly modifier is pretty crazy. I sometimes wish I could add/remove edge loops when working with the correction deformer in C4D (closest thing we have to editPoly I think).

But at the same time when using the correction deformer you can work with the peace of mind that you won't break any other generator/deformer/mograph object down the line whereas with Max's editPoly you can very easily mess up your edge flow, UVs, material IDs and so on. It's definitely a trade-off.

& others about "Workflow"
mostly from "Tuapia", how's posts I found to be among some of the more objective and comprehensive comments, and seems to have experience on many platforms including XSI. (any emphasis mine)

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C4d very clearly tells you when you have a selection tool active, you just have to know what to look for;) Considering there's absolutely no guarantee that an axis will even show in the viewport (the active object could be anywhere in the scene, not necessarily in view of camera), using its presence/absence as your tool indicator is a poor idea. Better to use the cursor cue options that MAXON has provided.

When you have a selection tool active, you get a cursor AND an icon indicating what kind of selection tool it is. Selection tools are the only ones that ALWAYS show an icon with the cursor (ironically, this irritates people when it comes to the live selection tool, as its icon tends to lag). Tool and PSR icons can be turned off in the preferences, but not selection tools.

So, if you see JUST a cursor, then you know for certain that you do not have a selection tool active;)

If the axis is in your way, just hit Alt+D to hide it:)

-kvb

Good that you mention it...

If an object gets off-screen in Softimage, the axis just stays inside the viewport. That's a super handy way to handle this case! (it's a preference you can set, of course...)
C4D offers only that little blue arrow that points in the object's direction, and if you click it, VP zooms to the object.
In Softimage, the viewport remains, and you can move(rot, scl) the object normally. (See screenshots)

The selection tool has no axis icon there, so you can tell 100% if you are in a selection tool or not.
I never had any problems with that approach.

Also, I don't want to press additional buttons to hide the axis when I select - I just want to select with the select tool, not transform.
(Not that XSI could not hide the axis if needed. It could, of course)

So, a preference to hide the axis in selection tools would be cool...


No offense, but: Have you ever worked with any other application than C4D?

It's no shame to check out other workflows, and get inspired, as a dev or as a user.

Maya (don't like it) does it too since a few years.
They had, or have, XSI devs on board, just like C4D now, as I hear.


Since I worked in Max, XSI, C4D, Rhino, and others, I humbly dare say I can tell the differences between good and less good workflows/user interfaces.

Softimage has such a streamlined way of handling things... brilliant in it's 'simplicity' (from a user's standpoint). It still can be used as a great example.


Please, no "different application, different workflow" statements... I try to be very open-minded, and really like to dig into things, and will happily adopt other workflows. Rhino is quite different, for example, but has a very nice and dry workflow, too.

Since C4D is comparable to Softimage in many regards,
and it still could learn a lot from it (or from 3ds Max, or most others, as all have their virtues).

It's not bad at all, of course (wouldn't linger here otherwise) , but it simply feels way clunkier. We can go in more details if you wish.


All this is meant to transfer good UI ideas to MAXON, for what it's worth.

For me, C4D is the one candidate among all 3D apps with the most promising future. Not trying to run anyone or anything down!!

This guy has some good ideas for simplicity on some c4d tasks.
http://youtu.be/AhgLNzXMfEI

This looks new to you?
It's Softimage's age old "Manipulate Tool" (use the bounding box of an object for transformations), the 'Working Pivot' (place and snap the transformation Axis freely), and an interactive 'Normal Align' feature.

In fact, none of these are new ideas. But anyway, C4D really need this stuff, especially the 'Working Pivot'!

All this should come from MAXON, though.

Never said it was new. I was just pointing out that a guy alone is having great ideas on how to improve C4D modeling workflows. ;)

On the other hand: that's why applications have an SDK, so users can add what MAXON is not willing to.
C4D's is seemingly open enough to allow for such things. Good to know!

Btw., I have a lengthy list of 'workflow improvements' like this, too.
Don't you? Doesn't anybody?
But we might not have the means to realize it.

By 'workflow' improvements I mean the 'immediate', or 'top' layer of interface functionality - that which we spend our clicks on most of the time.

Selection, the Axis, coordinate systems, snapping, consistency of tools, consistency in navigation in panels (e.g. Object Manager vs. LayerManager), ...


We know that MAXON knows. The question I ask myself is, why are these things not prioritized much higher?
Some of this stuff is the famous 'low hanging fruit' for sure.
Granted, other stuff might require deeper changes.

Personally, with the next couple of releases I would love to see a clear initiative to further improve the 'workflow', thrown in the mix with all the other things that needs doing.
Less clicks, finished sooner...

A few versions ago Autodesk started something what they called the "humanize Maya" initiative, and they seem to be serious about it as it looks.

C4D is MUCH MUCH more 'human', regarding the interface, but it's not there yet.

Other general notable quotes
including from a few Montreal devs

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maybe some of those maya lay offs can come over to MAXON and help out here

Let me just highlight this ;)

"Last year, we opened an office in Canada specifically for recruiting and hosting the excellent 3D development talent in Montreal."

The good thing about that news is that there's some ex-Softies in the middle. I love Softimage developers and they rock! :

Now this is the sort of stuff MAXON could be posting in their blog about. Introduce the new developers to the community.

Well, the Canadian office founding was communicated last year, sadly, it didn't made it to CNN's headlines though.
http://www.MAXON.net/pt/news/singleview-default/article/MAXON-announces-opening-of-new-canada-office.html

This thread asks about transparency, disclosure of roadmap. As Rick pointed at, our development team discloses information and collect feedback under our private alpha and beta forums. I wouldn't blame any of our developer for keeping away from trouble and avoid a conversation that isn't constructive to them.

There is great responsibility to sharing information publicly. Announcing a great feature and failing to deliver in time is very bad. Best case, people are angry. Worst case, the corporation can be sued for failing to deliver the product as advertised.

This is why most corporations only speak of their release after the features and benefits statement is released. Perhaps you will find our blogpost a bit dodgy or on the light side. We're consciously avoiding making promises we are not sure to deliver on.

Ready for a safe announcement ?

I may, or may not, write something to the blog too, at some point in the future. If I ever do, I will probably speak of our Montréal office which grew from 3 contractors to 9 full time employees in a year. That most of our talents are either coming from other notorious 3D software development team or equally notorious game developers. I might also add that we think Cinema 4D's future looks bright.

Hrvoje doesn't want to tell you, but he gets a lot of gossips from us.

Jean-Francois Yelle, From MAXON Canada

we think Cinema 4D's future looks bright.

Given that you've worked for the AutoBorg, don't say that! That was the phrase they used before axing down Softimage.

The future is sunny for Cinema 4D works fine!

Since you worked on Max (from your linkedin), I'm hopeful you can help bring some workflows that Max has that are pretty useful for modeling (not the ribbon or caddies for the love of God).

It's funny you mention that. I wasn't aware until this morning that it was a famous last sentence... My time with Autodesk was already done when it happened.

Cinema is already rich of its own history. I'd rather not bring over things I've already explored up to their limits...
With a bit of luck, that mandatory Autodesk ribbon won't hunt me where I am now.

Hi, I developed the Houdini Engine plugin integration for C4D, working closely with Noseman and the very nice people at Side Effects!

Cheers,
Alain [Laferrière]

So I really (really) hope some of the next few releases would satisfy enough for it to be fairly widely considered for "High(er)End" ends,
and IMO, after Houdini, Fabric, Sylyn, Buf B-Studio, is the highest (post EOL) potential to date for what could be a reasonably "close enough" XSI-like production experience without involving a decade gap.

[NNois]

hummm, what's bother me too with C4D compared to XSI is the innovative side.
With Softimage (Before 2008) / Houdini / Maya (on some points) / Clarisse you get on each release some great mind blowing Tech innovation.

Maybe I'm wrong but you don't get that with C4D / Lightwave / Modo... agree with me ?

[FXDude]

hummm, what's bother me too with C4D compared to XSI is the innovative side.
With Softimage (Before 2008) / Houdini / Maya (on some points) / Clarisse you get on each release some great mind blowing Tech innovation.

Maybe I'm wrong but you don't get that with C4D / Lightwave / Modo... agree with me ?

Well, perhaps to a degree, except for many, flashy new features (often to an extent "gadjets") is often considered far less important than for the base system (bread and butter) to be agreeable. Including for myself.

And In regards to the latest (and quite unprecedented) rush of new things on Maya's side, there is a good chance that you couldn't count on that being sustained, and although it remains to be seen, there is reason to believe it was (perhaps partly) a measure to offset other (rather unpopular) policies in regards to general sentiment, in which it happened to coincide with.


Otherwise for C4d it seems there is technically very little that is generally considered "wrong" with it, relative to "pro" software, at least technically in terms of available features.

For instance, the call for feedback thread I linked to (C4D Feedback summary response) is some 9 pages long, and it almost seemed difficult for users to mention what they would like to see added, despite more than a few reminders of exactly that sprinkled around, among topics mostly relating to things like "communication" of what developers were up to, (ending in Maxon reps showing-up to say hi)

And in many respects at least conceptually, they really nailed a bunch of things UX and workflow wise, and it seems that it's mostly a question of making what it already has... (perhaps even a host of different things) work either better (more reliably), or faster.


Uwrapping UV's, and Referencing seems like areas than would need work if not overhauls.

But using Referencing as an example, it's clear, comprehensive easy to use and has every feature you could think of.

BUT ! it can become VERY slow especially though a network, a "regular" character can involve some 10 minutes to load, and everything becomes IFFY, ... materials go blank, ... things change position... ... if you use it you have do, or -not- do a whole bunch of things for it to be okay, for the most part, almost defeating the purpose of having things referenced.

________________________

So From what I could gather, as far as I can tell after sifting through lots of threads on CGTalk and C4dCafé,
it seemed to come down to quite few (yet not necessarily small) points (narrowed-down below),
to which I came across many instances of what C4d may have been lacking relative to apps like Soft/Maya,

I think if they were to seriously tackle ::

-- viewport speed ---
for amounts of polys and/or amount of objects, and/or with deformed geometry, and/or not evaluating what it doesnt need to (ie: hidden objects/layers.. ) ---
to become improved to a fair degree, or at least comparative to Soft, Maya, Max.


--- Referencing ---
to become as robust in as many contexts as possible and zippy enough to be relied upon on a daily basis, and allow scenes to be fully loaded with them.

This can be touchy area where all (or any that have referencing) including Maya, have lots of issues with but can still be workable (Soft which despite it's own issues really shined there)


-- import/export --
to support more formats (including alembic) and have at least "standard" IO options (relative to Soft, Maya, Max) and be reasonably worry/bug free. (currently not the case)


-- NODES --
for materials, (despite the existence of a quite stirdy (and free) plugin),
and in a scene graph to manage relationships and influences.

Hopefully being innovative there, with some carefully thought-out abstractions, or without using maya as a guide or an example or have it become like just a huge mess, or having to look through a straw to make sense of things.


-- Character Animation /rigging --
here its seemed to be mostly realted to reponsiveness (1st point) and viewing relationships for rigging (4th point),
but there may be other specifics worth investigating further.


-- Scripting --
and flexible (and intuitive) command structure--

Ideally more like Soft (simple/intuitive yet powerful) than Maya,
and have everything (or most of everything) accessible through scripts.

and for everything (or most of everything) to be logged with values / arguments ready to be pasted in a script,
ideally with a good script editor with sytax (and error/typo) highlighting,
listing of possible arguments at cursor or under mouse, tabs ....

(PythonCoffee?)

Which would greatly add to C4d already seemingly being quite open (for custom dev) with an API considered to be very good.


--UV Editing --
Identifying and Ironing out (also from the community) whichever UV workflow issues there may be (there seems to be many)


________________________________

None of which I'm sure by any means would be a small feats, and some of which are probably already on roadmaps.

... but I am quite convinced that C4d would then (further and *really*) -seriously- kick ass
(as it already does with Arnold ;P ... and Redshift just around the corner)

... start dabbling in the high-end dept,

... would no longer be considered as a "toy", or feel that it starts rattling beyond 60 kph (despite already almost never crashing)

while remaining by a good margin, one of the most intuitive and friendly environments (a pleasure or not a torture) to work with.

(I suspect it would also then not *at-all* be difficult to justify it's price.)

[NNois]

... but I am quite convinced that C4d would then (further and *really*) -seriously- kick ass
(as it already does with Arnold ;P ... and Redshift just around the corner)

Well, like i've said, if they don't innovate and don't invent they will be always behind to catch up...
exemple:
- Arnold who simplified by 10x the number of parameters to render and bringed the speed of the old lightwave plugin fprime to the real life.
- Clarisse who made a viewport entirely with raytracing
- XSI who made the Mixer / Gator / Gigapolygon core / and ICE
- Houdini bringall the great solvers, the VDB and Alembic Deeply on their core

[Bullit]

The problem with C4D is that i think they lack of ideas.

It seems the same situation that Softimage was in last years.

[FXDude]

I agree there has been lots of breakthroughs from in various solutions over time, but I don't think that excludes C4d or Maxon, BodyPaint was one of them (and also still very used in studios sometimes specifically for bodypaint). Mograph and Xpresso are perhaps not as "breakthough-y" as ICE, but in their own way they had many advantages.

While it's clear there would be some 'catching-up' in some areas, it can be argued that for some important things, the main packages have a long way to catch-up to C4d (or XSI) in certain regards..

Cinema 4D vs Softimage vs Maya “Dorrito Approach” workflow on Vimeo
https://vimeo.com/88615637


This seems to leave not much to be desired to AnimationMixer ;


And who knows how it will evolve, it seems that they have only been expanding.

I've personally been asking myself the same question as this :

This is a curious thing with cinema 4D.
It's insanely easy to use, extremely powerful and well engineered but you almost can't tell "in the wild" that you are using it because it is regarded, at least a bit, as a toy software.

I wonder if this would be still the case if it performed in the "heavy lifting category" as well as Maya and co. does.

Also it seems that a few things alluded me.

Firstly, that XSpresso is in fact a relationship viewer (for expressions, constraints between objects etc...) and a quite good one at that (with some pros and cons relative to Maya nodes )

Because in my very limited knowledge of C4d, I thought only MoGraph had nodes to make parametric animations

Second that there seemed to have good improvement at least of evaluation time for cetain things (at least for playback or "viewport performance"), so it's encouraging to see that things are indeed changing for the better.


I recently found the the following thread to be quite enlightening and greatly helped give better perspective regarding C4d, and can be useful to make comparative assessments, and get a feel of it' current state.

CGTalk - Why use C4D in a MAX / Maya world?
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread. ... ht=rigging



I found the following quotes (below) to be particularly interesting (mostly from "Horganovski")
and I also gathered these in a C4dCafé feedback thread post.

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This is one of the things that seems to be a -big- plus for C4d

Whilst I think some of the tools are really showing their age it really is the software I keep coming back to because it's just easier to do stuff in. And in my line of work speed is essential. The fewer steps I have to take between packages the better.

About "Viewport Performance" (also sometimes related to rigging)

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C4D performs very well with small numbers of high-poly objects compared to those other programs;
where it falls down is with large numbers of objects.

For instance, I can very happily and interactively orbit a 54 million poly mesh in C4D at 25+ fps on a 5K iMac. I can't even import that OBJ file into Maya; it freezes mid-import.

On the other hand, C4D will bog horribly with thousands of objects, even if the aggregate poly count is relatively minimal.

So, the issue is not with the speed of C4D's viewport, per se, but with its object handing, and how that interacts with the display code.

(That sounds a bit like XSI)

But when it comes to rendering, you will understand that this software is not suitable for the really serious work - VFX, architecture, etc. [...] Modo, Blender, 3D Max, Maya are able to render billions.

C4D isn't perfect by a long shot, but this is ludicrous. I don't know what you're doing wrong, but I just replicated you scene and with my modest machine, I can render 200 000 lowpoly trees like this in 15 seconds!

Viewport perf is bad with the cloner, but using the hair system and instances I fly around the 200K trees in real time in the viewport.

Bumping it up to 2 000 000 trees with the hair system, I can still fly around at about 5 FPS. Exporting/preparing/rendering takes about 6 minutes.

Speaking more generally, there are definitely some quirks in how C4D calculates the scene in my experience.

I was working on a shot today with an animated character rig in it and some baked animation and the scene was running at 15fps (not great but not that unusual in Cinema).

I wanted a simple way of adding a frame counter to the scene though for hardware previews (can't seem to find a way of rendering the HUD in those? ) so I created a default MoText object and added an Xpresso tag to it, dragged the MoText into the tag and hooked it up to a Time node, with the Frame output driving the Text property of it.
That worked fine for a make-shift frame counter that would show in hardware previews but the scene fps dropped from 15 to 8. I deleted the MoText object and it went back to 15.

I notice even in an empty scene this will seriously impact the FPS, and it's not the MoText object, it's the Xpresso node, as soon as I delete that or disconnect it from the MoText object the scene speeds up again. So it seems just asking C4D to give you the frame number as each frame updates takes a lot of processing.

Very strange. If I create the same kind of setup in Maya (BonusTools PolyDigits node connected to the Time node directly or driven by an expression which should be closer to the C4D setup) there's no appreciable change in the scene FPS in either case.

[...]

For me running 4 medium/low res characters in the same shot with open subdiv smoothing enabled, live AO and AA in the view and still getting 40-50 fps in the viewport while animating makes for a pretty decent working experience.

Animating 1 character, with a similar level of detail to the 4 above but a much simpler rig, no smoothing enabled and all of the settings as low as I can crank them (textures switched off even) and still only getting 15 fps maximum is a lot less pleasant. It means far more previewing just to check timing for one thing. Even manipulating keys in the curve editor feels sluggish in a scene like that.

Both of those are actual jobs I've done recently, the former was in Maya 2016, the latter C4D R16.

Cheers,
Brian

[In C4d] I get over 60 fps on simple characters with the advanced biped rig (plus custom additions for facial animation.)

Always using refs flawlessly which you haven't been able to work with. It's a mystery really.

LOL, I think you may have a point. I was animating in a shot tonight where with every preview render I'd make the scene would take longer and longer to Prepare before each hardware render would start. Up to the point where the final one which was 61 frames took 7 minutes until I force quit the machine (couldn't even get out to the task manager, had to power down.)

I'm also seeing that other issue mentioned here recently where on closing C4D it will hang my machine for 30-40 seconds until it finally closes (I can see it still active in the task manager).

For most of 2014 I did rigging work almost exclusively in C4D with all of the animation work in Maya and all of those jobs seemed to go smoothly, for this year it's been half and half with rigging and animation in both and it seems C4D is bearing me a grudge for spending too much time with the new girl

I'm hoping on the next project I'll get to switch to R17 and will get an easier time of it there, I've never found R15 or 16 seem to run particularly well on my machine (I find the same thing with Maya 2015, 2014 and 2016 both run better).

Cheers,
Brian

Out of curiousity I tried the same file in R17 (the studio asked me to stick to R16) and it's about 3-4 fps faster on average which is a little better. Indeed 24 fps is great really as you spend less time previewing, even if it's not a totally accurate impression of the timing it's often close enough. Any more than that and it just makes things feel snappier when scrubbing/flipping keys and editing curves etc.

One thing I notice in the file I have here (it's really long, almost 1400 frames) is that different sections of it will play back slower and faster, it seems the more keys there are the more it bogs down, which makes sense I guess. An empty scene always feels fast until you start animating in it. I read that was improved in R17 but I'm not seeing a huge difference with the file I have here.

One thing I did though that's seemed to squeeze a few more FPS out is to take any deformer in the scene that's absolutely not essential and put it on a layer and turn off everything for that layer. What's weird though is that those were off in any case (with the red x in the OM) but putting them in a layer seemed to make them 'more off'.. strange, but I'll take it!

Cheers,
Brian

The video in this post can be Very interesting for identifying what can affect performance most.

I just made a Tutorial to show some Tricks for optimizing the Rig and Scene for Performance in C4D. With my tricks you get 18 FPS with four complex characters (adcanced biped Template) instead of 4 FPS.
Of course it would be nice if c4d would perform better with Subdivisions and Expressions but there is some stuff you can do to make the Scene work quite good. Hope this helps some of you.

https://youtu.be/75ZCqQLQqwM

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About Rigging (here specifically about corrective morphs)

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Heh, looking at some rigs I have here they do appear to work (and for some reason they continue to work when the legs/arms are at weird poses, maybe because the leg/arm joints are in a hierarchy of other joints, who knows... )

.. but as soon as I switch the morph tag settings (say from Relative to Correctional and then back again) the morphs completely freak out and produce all kinds of weird shapes. So clearly there are some major bugs there alright.

So yup, add this to the 'why use Maya' list I guess, because this stuff does work in Maya for sure, I've seen it in plenty of rigs and I've built them myself. In those cases the shapes are always applied before the skin cluster so they may not be correctionals in the true sense of it but they do allow you to fix poses.

Or.. if you are rigging in C4D - use Cactus Dans plugins and stay away from the buggy native stuff

Cheers,
Brian

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About scripting

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Scripting : Python is Python, Xpresso is really simple and powerful, and then you have coffee and an API...

Maya has Python (it can be argued that C4D's implementation is more 'pythonic', it can also be argued that the documentation for Maya is far better than what we get with C4D), as well as MEL (like COFFEE in C4D I guess as it's the native scripting language, much more flexible though and has deeper integration and again, much better documentation), PyMel, PyQt (very easy to create custom GUIs with QT designer without even needing to code), Expressions, direct connections and C++. Maya's script editor is also much better with tabbing, code highlighting, and the console gives you much more information as you work, which makes it much easier for a non coder to create their own macros just by copy/pasting chunks of code it spits out. By contrast, C4D's script editor only got Undo support in R16.. something extremely fundamental (and something which caused much swearing in the past, one false press of the back-space key could do a lot of damage!)

Xpresso for me is a double-edged sword, yes it's simple to use and you can create cool stuff with it, I've built lots of rigs that way myself. But it has lots of limitations too - it's slow to calculate, it's prone to priority issues if not managed correctly, it's very tedious when you want to make connections between a large number of objects, and the biggest one for me - when you open a rig created by someone else with Xpresso tags spread all the way through the file it's an absolute mess trying to figure out what is driving what, especially with those classic 'one frame late' refresh issues we run into with C4D rigs. You can waste a lot of time trying to track these down on a complex rig if you are unfamiliar with how it was set up.

By contrast, with Shading Nodes in Maya I've yet to encounter something I could do with Xpresso that I can't do with them (they have many of direct equivalents - range mapper is a remap value node, mix node is a blend colors node etc etc). Shading Nodes though calculate faster and when you need to see what is driving what it's very simple to get a birds-eye view of the rig/scene through the node editor, because unlike C4D you are not dealing with just expressions connecting objects (which is what Xpresso is really under the hood - it's just a visual way of creating expressions), you are dealing with direct connections between objects. Might seem like a minor distinction but it's really quite a significant one in practice.

One of my jobs these days is maintaining the character rigs for one of the major online animation schools, I regularly get sent rigs the students have managed to break or found a bug with to fix. These are feature-level rigs and are very complex in some cases but 9 times out of 10 I'm able to trace the connections in the rig and find the problem. Those are all Maya rigs, I'm honestly not confident I could do that task if they were C4D rigs and I've been rigging for much longer in C4D than I have been in Maya and I reckon I'm a competent C4D rigger (I've made my living out of it). I can fix my own C4D rigs of course because I built them and I know how they work, starting from scratch with something someone else rigged is entirely different.

So for me Xpresso is great for something quick but the more complex things get the more of a mess you have when something breaks.

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About Parametrism

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Proceduralism : is maya more procedural?

I would argue that in some areas, yes it is. Say for example modelling commands - in C4D if you apply a bevel to a mesh and then do some other tasks to it you can't later go back and change the bevel settings. In Maya if you haven't deleted the History on the object you can, you can even animate the settings if needed.
C4D is trying to improve in that area, now in more recent versions we have Deformers like the Bevel Deformer which achieves a similar thing, but only if you leave it live, same as with History in Maya. But we don't have deformers in C4D for every single modeling task.

Another example would be situations like say mixing Cloth and Skinning in the same rig, in C4D once you apply a Cloth tag to an object that's it , the Cloth takes over the mesh entirely. With Maya because it's nodal you can drive a cloth mesh with joints and using the Input Attract parameter you can blend how much influence the joints have vs the cloth. That can make simulating clothing for an animated character much simpler.

While we're on dynamics- I'd totally agree with CGBeige that Bullet is a mess in Maya, it's much cleaner in C4D, on the other hand nDynamics is more integrated in Maya so you can have cloth, hair and particles all interacting with each other, in C4D you have several dynamic systems that are all completely independent and don't talk to each other at all.

On the other hand you have things like Mograph in C4D which is highly procedural, but again there are limitations there, there's no priority controls over Mograph effectors (which is something I've often wished for, you could do some cool stuff combining the effectors and character deformers if there was control over the calculation order).

So on balance, I would say both C4D and Maya have areas where they have the 'procedural edge' but I think Maya goes further in key areas.

Many of these points won't matter to a majority of C4D users though, so it comes back to what I keep saying, if C4D works for you then great - stick with it. Stop looking over the fence and get back to work! But dismissing other options without knowing what those options really are is short sighted IMO.

The OP owes us all coffee and donuts now though I reckon for starting this argu.. eh..discussion

Cheers,
Brian

It doesn't really matter how it works programattically if it's not presented in a clear way. The logic is in line with how deformer/expression priority is presented to the user in C4D so it makes perfect sense.

Well that was my point - as a rigger when I'm creating corrective morphs I would think to myself 'ok I need these to calculate before the skin deformer', because I need the skin deformer to deform the morphed shape of the mesh, not the other way around. So for me calling it 'post deformers' is actually confusing, it doesn't seem sensible to me!

I remember in fact making a note of this when rigging in C4D after a break from it for a while as I wanted to remember that it's not intuitive to what I expect, so I took a screen cap of the setting with a note 'remember that this needs to be enabled for correctives to work'.

So in my opinion the fact that I had to do that instead of just assuming I could use an option that seems logical and represents the actual calculation order is actually a failure to be clear.

It's a bit like that 'Relative or Absolute?' option that pops up when you create morphs to begin with, that was like that for several versions until MAXON added the '(yes/no)' qualification to it.. to make it more clear.. or the reversed colours for the rotation curves (H and P) in the F-Curve editor, another example where C4D was not clear, that is finally fixed in R17.

I guess on one level if you work exclusively in one package you get used to these kinds of things to the point that you don't really notice them, but if you move between different packages they can trip you up. I'm so used to associating the colour red with translate and rotate X (or P in C4D) that it still trips me up in C4D every time I start polishing curves. Looking forward to switching to R17 and not having to deal with that, the current studio I'm working for are still using R16 though so I'm stuck with it for a while longer

[Edit- Dans images below illustrate very clearly what I'm trying to say - the corrective morphs should effect the default (T pose/A pose etc) shape of the mesh, not the deformed one, otherwise you would get different results in every pose of the rig making them useless.

Cheers,
Brian

I would argue that in some areas, yes it is. Say for example modelling commands - in C4D if you apply a bevel to a mesh and then do some other tasks to it you can't later go back and change the bevel settings. In Maya if you haven't deleted the History on the object you can, you can even animate the settings if needed.

That in Maya never worked, if you have two or more operations after the bevel (in this case) and you try to edit something, most likely the operations after will find a different vertex order and doesn't know what to do, making the model look weird or breaking it.

On the other hand the Bevel Deformer in Cinema 4D doesn't support multiple bevels, so if you edit your mesh with a bevel, you can't add another on top of it.

So, yeah, they are not Houdini in this case.

I personally still have a hard time with how Soft had/has most of these advantages into one ( / )

in regards to

Ease of use, (Like C4d Apparently, fast workflow)

Performance ; more in some, and less in other cases than in Maya, yet I'm sure parralell rig thing must be good for chars.
(despite sometimes being difficult about what it accepts for parallelism to work)

Scripting (un-like C4d Apparently) and easy to deal with API (-Like- C4d Apparently)

Parametrism ; changing order of operations on the fly, despite often having to "disable from here" first.
(in a MUCH more accessible and reliable way than either Maya or to date anything else except Houdini which is another story)
everything you do is "an operator" that can easily be reordered (also for "order of operations" for different setups),
manipulated, concactenated, frozen (baked), etc.. + ICE
- in C4d the most important operators are parametric, yet many are not (for the moment)

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Relationship management is where Maya may have an edge in a number of ways, but it's nodes can become very messy unless you look and very tiny portions at a time which isn't great for overviewing things, and using the (very old) XSI schematic remains easier to deal with in that regard (despite without being able to connect things through there),
- and C4d looks to have a still quite good interface with Xpresso, notwithstanding perhaps some performance and representation drawbacks with live expressions and drivers, which hopefully and no doubt will continue to improve and can't wait to see what the new core will address over time.

Cheers!