Have the c4d forum been hijacked?

If you are talking about Motion Graphics than you have a point. If you mean in general than I strongly disagree. Working in C4d felt like driving with the handbrake pulled. User-friendliness means nothing if they force me to click on everything (I prefer shortcuts).
Yes its easier, but its also makes you weak and complacent.
I am 300% faster with Blender. Absolutely no software compares with Blender when it comes to raw speed, unless it’s inability to do the job without workarounds slows it down.

Yes, I prophetize that people/teams using Blender and Houdini together will bring the downfall of C4d in the long run.
There is nothing Maxon can do against them if this tag-team starts to go seriously after their jobmarket.
Blender pushes from below, Houdini from the top, there is not enough room left for C4d in its niche, especially since both B and H can do much, much more than just Motion Graphics.
Not only these 2, Maya and Max aren’t exactly weak when it comes to Motion graphics.
A single strong push from Autodesk with their Bitfrost and Maxon might get not only squished from 2 sides, but literally crushed from all sides.
Not only will the software be crushed, its users too. They don’t have a chance to adapt, since C4d is a walled garden and many of them are used to hand-holding and the easy way of doings things.
By the time they realize they have to reorient themself, they are way behind the competition.
Can’t say I have much empathy.
It might get as ugly as with Lightwave.

Slide tool improvements is an old dream of mine too… :slightly_frowning_face:

Hmm, quite the opposite really…
Blender has some nice and unique tools and features, but when it comes to the basic modeling tools, they are still kind of incomplete and missing some basic key features… so not better at all, yet… IMHO

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Well, this is very personal stuff. I mostly work on modeling, look dew, fixing someone $#1T, and such things. I think that this is matter how someone use software. I write long message, but delete it, after all this is not place and time for such comparison. I talk with C4D and Max users couple times about this topic. Just like Max in Blender is not possible to make some changes. And / or people don’t want to make change in his workflow.
Remember, in daily modeling work you use just few tools 99% of time, and there C4D shine, even without plugins, out of box, cinema is designed to be fast.
btw. couple years ago I win bet with one very, very advanced Max user. He customize his Max to max :slight_smile: and have shortcuts for everything. he, he he lose and use zillion excuses… like I use something illegal :smiley: In his defense I must say that you can’t do same in Max… just like in Blender.

I think that you say what I want to say in one sentence.

Geometry nodes are word of day… But people forget that Maxon work on similar stuff for years. I don’t care about this too much, Motion Graphic is not my bread and butter. But don’t underestimate Maxon. His version have all power of mograph, XP, Xpresso behind. Yap Houdini can do ( almost everything ), but what is cost? Most of stuff you can recreate in C4D in fraction of time and effort. Blender like Blender don’t care to be user friendly, more to be playground for nerds. Most Motion Graphic people are not willing to learn programming or to waste enormous time and effort to get into Blender, stalking social media to get basic infos about software and struggle with buggy, unstable, unpolished features… Y’know, this are regular people, with private life, tight deadlines, and other interests in his private time. During years I do bunch of small jobs for some of them. Well, most of them don’t know how to model even simple cube :smiley: but they know other stuff much better than me. So if they don’t bother to learn simple modeling stuff, instead they find some cheap dude like me, why they will bother with Blender?
Same is for Houdini, they pay someone to make stuff in Houdini and via bridge import them in C4D, with exposed controls.
XParticles are very popular, and for sure there will be bunch of Blender users which will buy it. But first, I don’t think that developer are willing to agree on FOS. Also this developer is… money lover :wink: , so don’t expect that this will be cheap. On the end, XP are in his core deeply dependent of C4D functions, this mean that he must write XP for Blender almost from scratch… well, do you believe in Santa…

I strongly disagree. I have worked in C4d for years, I never found it to be particularly fast. Compared to max and maya it fares well, but only when compared with “normal” users. If you see some real pro’s working with both you might be surprised. Maya for example has the repuation to be lame, but people using the marking menu’s to its fullest potential can get really fast, like so fast you don’t even see what they are doing in the marking menu’s because you can use it blindly, you don’t have to wait for the menu to pop up. Same is true for Blender and its pie menu’s, you can just flick your wrist and its done before the pie menu becomes fully visible.
That’s how I work in Blender I have tons of custom pie menus and I just use them blindly. Button smash, wrist flick in the right direction - its done in a fracture of a second.
Since Blender doesn’t use the left click and drag method its also a fracture of a second faster than any other tool which adds up over the day.
The only tool that can keep up with Blender in terms of modelling speed is a heavily customized Modo.

Exactly, and that’s what will cost them their job if they don’t watch out. Hungry artists who are not yet part of the industry will be able to do the same stuff with Blender for half the price because they are faster and more flexible. User-friendliness is irrelevant, what counts is raw productivity.

They don’t until this mindset falls on their feet.
Blender will become more able and doing Mograph will become more easy. And on top of that Blender artists are often generalists in their approach, they will be able to do more than just one thing (mograph) slowly eroding the job-market by making better offers (in price and ability).

Sure, but there will come a time where THEY as the middle man are no longer needed. They become redundant.
Houdini cuts in this market segment because it too becomes easier to handle, so more people learn it, - prices go down.
Also customers see that high end stuff is becoming easier and more affordable so they’ll push the limit and might upgrade their artistic vision to be more complex.

XP is one of the strongest arguments for C4d right now (btw i think it will NEVER come to Blender, that’s just fantasy) but this too will pass. If the BF implements a new particle system from the ground up and if this will be performant enough, it will be a strong competitor for C4d XP.
You seem to forget that Geometry nodes enables addon/plugin makers to use its full potential, so If Geometry nodes becomes more complete, addons that make the life easier will pop up. There will be no need to dive deep into nodes if they act as a bridge.
So even here Blender will cut into their market, and if customers want more complex particle systems and simulations there is always Houdini.
Like I said, C4d will be crushed from the easy and cheap angle (Blender) and from the high end top level (Houdini).
It already has begun. Lots of famous Mograph artist took the leap of faith and they use either Houdini or Blender now (often both).

Sure it will take some more time until this becomes a strong movement (years) and at first agencies and freelancers will ignore it and stick to what they know and what is working for them, but they will get stronger and stronger competition up until the moment the dam breaks.

C4d has no other speciality. Blender doesn’t need one. Houdini is already strong and becomes stronger in everything. Maya is still the animation queen and Max is the king of the production industries.
Modo is already slowly dying and Lightwave is already rotting. C4d’s life hangs on one shiny silver thread.
Greed will be its downfall, one way or another if they go along with their current trajectory.
There is a way for them to save themself, investing a HUGE amount of money into C4d to make it more able on all fronts while cutting the price.
But they are too arrogant and complacent for that road.

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We all use different style in modeling. I look on how different people use his software. Usually in tutorials or demo’s people don’t use heavily customized software, anyway from time to time I see exactly this. Heavily customized soft, including Modo and Blender. And I’m not so impressed.
… only little thing is that Blender often broke stuff in new daily releases, but this is different story. However you can customize C4D in similar way if this make you happy. But there is wall big wall which all pie menu can not break.
I have luck to in real life see people which don’t have personal portfolio… because like one dude say: “what I can put in my portfolio? Screen shoots from YT videos?”. Other than that I from time to time work for people which are ab-normal modelers, I’m not fast like they, and never be. But this is my, not software fail. btw. do you ever see C4D user on steroids?

Looking on your message I recognize pattern, mindset. But this game can play others too. You are one of: C4D will die, Max will die, Maya will die, Pixologic will die, even mighty Houdini will be crushed… until remain only
ArtStation - Demon’s Gate - Unreal Engine 5 Environment, Wiktor Öhman
( read description )
Yap, we live in transition times, anyway I will follow your logic. You mention Hungry ( starving ) artists which will disrupt job market with fast, cheap work ( and adequate “quality” )… maybe you think that this is good, to people work for peanuts… I personally consider such stuff disgusting.
I see in real life how many professions are destroyed for this reasons, and probably even you from time to time feel consequences.
Also you mention “middle man”… I agree with you… very likely in future middle man will disappear. But this middle man are exactly your starving artists. AI already make “art”, in near future will be enough rough input, rough VR sketch, hand gesture or voice guidance and you will get finished “artwork”. So not only software will become obsolete, human “hardware” will be trashed also.

It’s very common that someone which change his political, religious, diet, etc. affiliation suddenly start to attack his previous favorites. Psychologists have name for such behavior… well they have name for everything, even for psychologists which give name for everything ( seriously :smiley: ). Anyway I newer see such feelings toward other software like from some NEW Blender users. Whatever…

C4D modeling tools are not horrible, but they are slow. When using the tools they have to be constantly changed by moving the mouse and clicking in the Attributes making it slow. There is also the axis orientation system which is 20 years old and can take minutes to get in the right spot when modeling, but not accurately to the right spot. With the axis orientation system alone in C4D I would never touch it again for modeling. Not to mention the horrible snapping C4D has. Something I see they just got a little better with the Place Tool in S24. Still compare that to CAD Like Transform and we can see how far behind C4D is still. C4D also just got a Scatter Tool which Maya has had for what? 10 years? Then from a modeling sculpting workflow point of view no one can sculpt then retopo in C4D because there is no dynatopo, retopology, or good way of baking high poly to low at all. There is baking in C4D, but it sucks for getting high poly model to low poly model. Then I go to render in C4D and the viewport sucks as a representation in comparison to Eevee which is very close to final Cycles results saving me tons of time. When considering all that I don’t care about a slide tool that does something that Blender also does, but better in Blender because it’s spread over 3 tools with even more functions and keyboard shortcuts spread over them.

When I was using C4D way back in the day I couldn’t even use other programs with it because the fbx import was so horrible. You want to import something good luck. So I was suck making things slow with polygon modeling and slowly rendering with a cpu render engine. I cringe thinking about it. Sad thing is they are about the same now with a good fbx importer. So make everything in other programs and import to C4D so mograph can move things around. Render with Redshift.

It’s no wonder C4DCafe went under when the free program Blender is so vastly superior in every way, but mograph. In addition when 3DKiwi ran the cafe it was a fun place to hang. The new guy Kiwi gave it to made it a toxic place full of haters. The new guy also seemed to only care about money. With not enough money flowing into the Cafe he probably sold it to the casino. Just a guess.

Have you ever seen a ex-hardcore gamer applying his fast reflexes and ability to press a button 120-150 times per minute on a 3D program, constantly customizing it in order to get his performance even faster?
That’s me.
I have 10 years experience in C4d. 8 in Maya, 6 in Blender.
I am telling you, C4D is NOT fast. I was 1.5x faster in Blender after my first year using it. Now I am 3x faster.

No I am not, stop putting words in my mouth. I have made very clear why I think C4d is the only program besides Modo that is suffering from slow braindrain and lack of enthusiasm of its user-base because of a potentially grim future. Just listen to their communities, they tell you outright. Both Foundry and C4d-cafe forums have(had) big Blender/Houdini threads which were the most frequent threads on their forums. Foundry closed that Blender thread because it became a place for a heated software war. It had more posts than all other threads in that general forum added together.
Writing on the wall.
Even more writing on the wall is when known people in the community jump ship and don’t look back.

Maybe that was an loaded expression and I actually did not mean literal starving or hungry artists, rather young people that are eager to proof themself in the industry (who are yet unproven).
The realists among them will look at C4d and the advertising/mograph/visualization market and its bloated budgets and mediocrity and will think: “I might be actually able to compete with that and make a lot of money by being a better businessmen and more flexible artist.”
Its funny that you mention people working for peanuts, when its actually the gaming industry were people work for peanuts, while these disciplines make shittons of money.

I was a C4D user from RDXL6 to Studio 11.5
I stopped upgrading During the MSA years
and languished until Blender released 2.8
and I forced myself to migrate

I was always interested in Character animation and VFX
I even made a feature length animated Marvel Fan film
with C4D and Daz /Iclone figures imported via MDD using the third party
“Riptide pro” plugin.

it took six years to complete.
trailer

I have seen soooo many critical, single point of failure, third party plugins come and go over the years
(Usually broken by a C4D update) and was always frustrated by the Cavalier attitude of those loyalists who would say "Just buy Cactus Dan’s"tools for mocap retargeting or "$$just buy Realflow for fluid sims$$"while eternally excusing Maxons refusal to implement a professional tool set that justified its price.

Seriously… kiddie toys like Daz/poser should not have a better dynamic cloth solver on moving Characters than a pro app that claims to be in league with Autodesk.

I accept the reality that we are in the age of subscriptions
and I am not opposed to useful third party “Enhancments”

I spent a few hundred dollars on Blender market
for Hard Ops/Boxcutter, flip fluids, physical Starlight& Atmosphere
fracture iterator ,Decal machine and with the free version of
“machine tools” I have become a speed master of customized Shortcuts/pie menus.

all perpetual licenses that have already given me major updates
as part of my Lifetime of free updates.

As great as Xparticles might be I find the notion of paying monthly
for features that should be in the core application abhorrent.

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I don’t agree with most stuff you say, but it’s okay, people will always have different experience with a software… :wink:

Cool Trailer. How long do you think making that would take using Blender now a days?

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Hi thanks mate.

Here is a link to the full 93 minute feature film
if you are ever bored and fancy a laugh.

That film had a self imposed frame budget of 7- 10 minutes per frame
on an ancient intel mac with 2 gigs of Ram!!.

As horrible as that sounds, the math still does not add up to a six year render time (even rendering constantly as I was) and using all prefabbed content from Daz.
or factoring in post production&VFX in Adobe after effects

After the film was complete and I finally completely migrated to Windows and got my first taste of working with EEVEE, I realized that most of my time in C4D was was destroyed in Look Dev& TD work (lighting) Due to C4D’s infamously Poor veiwport “performance” requiring full test renders to sort out final lighting.

At one point, briefly before moving to Blender 2.8x, I was so desparate that I was actually sorting out a migration of My Iclone/DAZ/MDD pipeline to an old seat of Lightwave3D 2015 just for the the better VPR
and because LW had a really good MDD handler built in for my Daz figure imports as pre animated .obj/MDD

So in answer to your query here is a comparison to a recent project

These two episodes took about five days each start to finish.

The only prefabs I use now are the underlying human bipeds imported from
Reallusion Character creator as FBX.

All of the clothing & sets are My original models created in blender
with hardOps & Decal Machine.

All of my post production is done in the free Davinci Resolve suite

My self imposed EEVEE frame budget is 59 second per frame maximum.

I will go longer for Volmetric smoke and fire which IMHO really needs to be rendered in Cycles.

However My look dev /TD lighting is basiclly realtime viewport

I have three PC’s Now
Basicaly at 3.5 minutes of completed footage every 5 days

I could have created “Galactus Rising” in about 6 months in Blender on my newest PC I bought last July.

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Well, I suck in such games :smiley: Anyway, you say that you use workarounds. In C4D for some operation I can use only rectangle selection ( which use as select, move and extrude tool ) and scale tool,( which use as scale, select and extrude ). With two button on keyboard, ctrl and space bar, on mouse left click and middle if I wish to change view. Now imagine how much you will be faster if Blender have such logic/design. I don’t want to make this in comparison, battle, my point is that Blender have too many such obstacles. Some of them are relatively easy to be improved, other, I guess need more work under the hub. I really wish to Blender be better, after all this is my main software now.
Maxon now have issues with bugs and stability, also his tech support is joke these days. I see this as big threat to cinema.
Like you say modelars are on bottom of food chain, not only in game industry, one dude which for movie Prometheus make some magic in Houdini and get recognition from Houdini community, in movie theater see that all his work and research are covered with some mediocre dust added in post production. So, people which are closer to finished product get more attention ( $$$$$$ ).
btw. same is with programmers in software companies, marketing get mush more attention :wink: from management. From Maxon developer… on some new feature work one dude, other test this, third man, control this two… and fourth “developer” control this three developers. So 4 man for job which can do one or two. So when I read how many developers have Maxon, Autodesk I wonder how many of them actually do work. Maxon promo movie… title was something like: Meet your Maxon, in this movie they show people behind C4D. Very few developers-programmers and bunch of Marketing, PR, HR, etc. useless ballast. This is state of C4D now. They also put some Adobe guy as senior executive, if I remember correctly… now all be fine… I’m sure :wink:

Impressive. So many in this field dream of making their own feature length film. You went and did it.

6 years down to 6 months. So 12 times faster. Sounds about right for Blender. I tried using C4D again lately and it’s not that the tools that are there are bad it’s just there are so many missing tools needed to make making stuff with it way faster. With Blender I feel I got all the major tools to fix the biggest time suckers. For your future films I found a plugin for Blender you might like. Ghost IK helps out a ton when doing character animation. Maybe it takes the time down to 3 month for your next film. :wink:

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That’s one of the reasons I still prefer to model in c4d…
If blender implements this kind of workflows, then I guess I’ll start modeling exclusively in blender, hehe, even though a lot stuff is still missing in the basic modeling tools…

Btw, blender almost got this feature, but for some reason the patch died on the dev site… shame…

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Situation is not always so simple, in blender I cry for C4D features… and vice versa, in C4D I miss Blender stuff :smiley:
Anyway this is not only modeling. Currently I have one job from HELL. Y’know, when customer don’t know what he want, but also don’t know what he don’t want. He constantly change mind, get new idea, consult someone… I change geometry, remodel, make zillion changes, iterations… have almost 4X more geometry in couple layers. Barely can track where is what, give some funny names to object just to can find this when he ask for something before couple days. Last I need in such situation are that Blender reorganize my files… also moving and parenting with simple click and drag is very important in such situations. This are extreme situation, and can be handled in Blender, for sure, but not in such simple and fast, efficient way.

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That’s the point… :wink:

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Sounds like you would profit from working with linked assets.
I know this problem all too well and since i started becoming better scene managment and using the available tools these problems habe been drastically reduced.

by coincidence I watch one video on YT and this message come just in this moment

this is problem with Blender, unnecessary complication… simple solutions are mostly best solutions. Don’t get me wrong, linked assets are nice, sometime, but in most situations can cause more troubles, when their number increases unnecessarily, unplanned.

What is your specific problem? In my experience linked assets are the solution for increasing, unplaned varaiations.

Can you point to an impressive time-lapse video of someone modeling in C4D using some of the things you feel are missing from Blender? I enjoy time-lapses in Blender and Modo much more than in Max and Maya but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a “modeling” time-lapse in C4D that wasn’t general mograph stuff like this and this