Hey there, fellow blendheads.
As blender developed over the years and the community grew, blender gain alot more attention and for some reason over the last years alot of videos grew like weed on youtube with tiles like “Why you should switch to blender.” and everything. Some people of our community have the audacity to believe that blender became absolutely superior to everything else in the meantime and everyone who doesnt agree is dumb. That being said; thats a sad development. This community was once humble and nice and for some reason (some people) turned into the same trashbags we once believed the community of 3Ds Max, Maya or C4D was like. But thats not what i want to talk about.
I use both blender and C4D. Blender for modelling, C4D for basically everything else (for the reasons i want to talk about).
I really, REALLY miss a few features c4d offers which blender does not, but maybe i just didnt find them so far?
#1.
seperate Render outputs.
in c4d its the take manager. I can set up multiple takes with childtakes etc. let childtakes inherit settings from parent, set a different rendering setting (and output path with variables) to every take, even select different render engines for takes.
Ofc i can set object visibility, mattes (holdouts) etc. for every take as well and even which camera is being used.
C4D then renders everything, and saves it in /%filepath/%projectname/%take_%frame with all AOV’s stored in the right folders.
does blender offer something similar? I know we got the layer system, but i never found a way to render multiple layers and then saving the direct output somethere, and for sure not with variables in the output.
#2.
xPresso in cinema. I believe it could be best explained as a node-based, complex driversetup. You can just create a null, add an xpresso tag to it and in that you can create controls. You can take ANY attribute of any object in the scene and let them work together. create rigs, complex structures, even bools (true/false), work with range mappers etc.
you can set up user defined control GUIs and just create whatever you want.
Blender offers drivers and modifiers, but is there something like this in blender?
#3.
Various redshift features;
- Tesselation; Redshift offers super high tesselation at render times. subdividing the mesh’s edgelength to even -1px if wanted. adjust to camera distance and even out of camera view. In blender we have subdiv (limited to 6) and displacement, yes. But is there a better option?
(edit: okay, found something similar under experimental settings for cycles.) - RSobject; instances from another file. Viewport display can be set to geometry or just a bounding box, replaced at render times.
I saw somewhere someone doing something alike with geo nodes. 3D-Viewport it was a convex hull, and in render times the real object. How does blender handle it?
Please dont get me wrong. This is no thread to praise cinema nor bash blender. i really like blender, but the points i mentioned kinda make me stick to cinema at work. some projects of mine had around 30 takes organized with variable outputs etc. for post in AE.
I just start the render over night/weekend and go home.
Am i missing something? Does this exist somewhere in a form i just dont know? Is it on the roadmap maybe?
And please, no (paid) addons from blender market.
with kind regards