From C4D to Blender 2.8

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#1

hi guys, i am very happy to see that there is many going on in the blender universe!
I have some questions about Blender 2.8. So far I have spent some time with Cinema 4D and I know a little there. I’m not a professional, I do this because I enjoy it. But I want to switch to Blender now. I find it very difficult to change. While I’ve already looked at some entry-level tutorials, I don’t feel really smarter. Can perhaps one of you give me some tips to help me think differently? What are the big differences between 2.8 and C4D. How do i have to rethink? Do you know good tutorials that allow me to help and get started well?
I’m particularly interested in Stilllife and hard surface modelling, architecture and sci-fi, also a little bit of interior. I’m rather less interested in animation. Node-based work I know about the Octane Renderer. I also bought the instructions for the Cycles Renderer-but I have to start with this:D.
I’ve also signed up to the cloud-I have no idea how to integrate the addons … Please excuse my stupidity. I am currently very overwhelmed by the many possibilities and the community. I don’t know where to start. Perhaps this is my main question: Where should I start?

thanks a lot and have nice day!

#2

I do use Cinema 4D since R11. I don’t think you need to rething much at all. The bigger difference is between the drag and drop of C4D and the modifiers. A Subdivision Surface in Blender is not an object which you put a geometry in, but rather something like the C4D’s tags. So, everything that you change your mesh behavior is a modifier/tag.
You will only model on Edit Mode, it’s like turn the primitive editable in C4D’s Language. The main differecente is that in Blender you can toggle back to Object mode.

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#3

Hi, thx for your reply.
iam testing the modifiers. there are similiar to the mograph options in cinema, u are right.
what about the effectors? if i have a chair und i will fill one room with 30 chairs, i do not want that all chairs stand in the exact same angel. so in c4d i would use a clone mograph + an effector to bring a variation in it. how can i solve this in blender? is there anything similar to the clone mograph? i only see the array, but i dont know how to set it as a circle?
And one more question, how can i transform in one axes to 0%?

#4

what about the effectors? if i have a chair und i will fill one room with 30 chairs, i do not want that all chairs stand in the exact same angel.

I believe animation nodes are capable of doing similar things that the effectors do, the downside is that you have to manually setup the nodes, and the logic of them is a little trick to wrap your head around, at least for me anyway. There are many tutorial videos on YouTube that can get you started though.

There’s another addon by Jacques Lucke (author of animation nodes) called Scatter Objects, which allows you to organically scatter objects on a selected object/plane. This is very quick and easy to do, so I think this should work for you, so long as you tweak the settings.

You could also achieve this through a particle or hair system, and you can more precisely control where the particle/hair system is generated through weight painting.

This is easy to do with shortcuts, if you want to flatten the Z axis, you would hit S for scale, then press Z to scale only on the Z axis, and then hit 0. If you wanted to double the Z scale, you would hit 2 instead of 0, and etc.

#5

How does this usually go in blender? Accepted I want to build a classroom and I have modeled a table and a chair. In c4d I would reproduce it with a cloner and bring a variation with an effector. So the chairs and tables always stand a little turned to each other. If I have to do this with the node editor, is it probably easier to position these 30 tables by hand?

#6

Check out the link to scatter objects in my previous post, that should be able to do what you’re asking. By default, I think it introduces some size variation, but I think you can minimize that or turn it off.

#7

i will watch it.
thanks

is there any shortcut to toggle between the last two used tools?

#8

do have blender something similar to c4d´s “optimize”?

#9

@xeonow, yes, kind-of-sort-of I believe. In ‘Edit Mode’ under the ‘Mesh’ drop-down menu is the ‘Clean Up’ tools. In the ‘Clean Up’ tools is a ‘Remove Doubles’ option, that is the closest thing I have found to Cinema 4D’s ‘Optimize’. It works, though I’ve run into quirks. Quirks I presume, hopefully, are from Blender 2.80’s beta status.