Seems like Cinema 4D is cooking some noodles as well with “Project: Neutron”:
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This Project Neutron is 6 years too late for me and I doubt it’ll be finished in 5 years probably not by the end of the decade. There’s so much of C4D that hasn’t been updated in well over a decade and will need to be rewritten and so much is missing like unified dynamics, cloth, particles and fluids before this Project:Neutron becomes useful.
It’s fairly easy to make a high performance tech demo that isn’t touching the rest of the application. You can see this is not integrated into the main application timeline as they’ve got to drive values with a Frame node. The fish dual mesh example at the end didn’t look amazingly fast, nothing you couldn’t already do as fast if not faster in Sverchok.
Will this stop the exodus to Houdini by the bigger studios? I doubt it. If C4D become Houdini4D then why would freelancers continue to pay $800/year when they could pay $200/yr for Houdini Indie?
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People tend to come up with names just like we have seen some commenting “Blendini” when they saw the everything nodes project we now have ppl throwing the same joke with “Houdini 4D” if that means anything, it only confirms Houdini position as the leading 3d software when it comes to fully procedural workflow using nodes and other 3d software “trying” to get to a certain degree of similarity.
The only difference is “Time”, on one side we have “fledglings” who just recently started working on node implementations, on the other side we have a “fully fledged” solution with a decade of experience.
But as they say: better late than never.
23 years of experience! 
Or even 35 years of experience if you start with PRISMS!!!
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Correction: on the other side we have a “fully fledged” solution with over two decades of experience!! 
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If I were a millennial I’d say, OK Boomer at that!
Whats up with the Cinema4D bashing guys?
I think their demo looks great!
There a lot of neat things in there. Like that overview widget in the bottom right corner … I’d love to see something like that in Blender too please
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Cinema 4D is known for it’s artist friendly UI/UX approach, if there is a company to implement “nodes for artists” it’s probably them. But i do root for blender !
Seeing how both 3D packages are joining the noodle world at the exact same time, it would be interesting to see how they both become fleshed out through out the upcoming years.
As a user of C4D and someone whose business sunk over £30k in licenses over more than a decade I have paid for the privilege of having an opinion on C4D.
Pretty soon after R12 it became clear that C4D’s viewport was incapable of handling the number of objects you could easily make with the mograph toolset. Both myself and my business partner sent in yearly feature request to sort this problem out. We heard nothing back.
We also requested an updated and multithreaded upgrade of Xpresso and Thinking Particles. Again we heard nothing back. To cut a very long and tiresome story short we decided to transition to Houdini after the debacle of R17. My business partner kept one C4D license updated but that ended with R20.
This whole Neutron demo is smoke and mirrors, it’s very clearly a sandbox running parallel to normal C4D, virtually nothing is hooked into Neutron. There are huge swathes of C4D that haven’t been updated literally since R10 so this project Neutron isn’t going to be a magic bullet that automagically brings performance to C4D literally everything will have to be refactored and rewritten to make use of this new object management system. This means C4D will effectively have to be rewritten. They’ve admitted they’ve been working on a new modelling core but what about Mograph, particles, dynamics, etc etc? Maxon has moved to the rental system so you can bet they’ll manage the roll out of new features to maximise the number of subscription payments. This isn’t going to arrive in a couple of releases think a minimum of 5 years based on Maxon’s history of update features.
The procedural modelling demo at the end of the video didn’t look particularly good from a performance point of view. When Barrett dragged the sliders the mesh updated pretty slowly. Sverchok a python Addon looks faster to me based on my usage.
I briefly had a look in C4DLand today and there’s understandable excitement but no one asking the obvious question, when will it all be done.
There is this “CGChannel” post regarding “Project: Neutron” with extra info that wasn’t shown in the video (I don’t know which source they got it from but here it is anyway):
Source: http://www.cgchannel.com/2020/07/maxon-unveils-project-neutron/
You realise they’re marketing quotes?
If I were a betting man I’d wager that the Tech preview that will appear in R22 will have extremely limited functionality.
The most important phrase is ‘subsequent updates’… How loooong is this particular piece of string?
I’m only quoting what’s in there, nobody would believe a wild “blazingly fast” marketing paint-over, especially when the demo shows some slowdowns to update that final fish object.
ICE anyone…
Anything can be blazingly fast if it’s running in its own sandbox or using proxy objects which are all the same and not animated. Wait until it’s all hooked up, lets see if it’s blazingly fast on production scenes.
If I sound cynical it’s because I am. Over the years you get tuned into Maxon’s marketing language and I can smell the BS a mile off.
They are announcing a very early demo like this because they’re scared of losing more users to Houdini which is becoming synonymous with highend mograph, virtually all the C4D users I used to follow on Vimeo have converted to Houdini. The mindshare has moved very quickly to Houdini, the reason for this is because Project Neutron should’ve been delivered years ago not just happening now.
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Hi, Infograph, I hope you are doing well, C4D and Houdini have different markets, im not sure if C4D is merging with After Effects but it sure does look like. In the end, if they implement their tech demo, it will only benefit us users. One thing I loved about C4D (and hated in maya) was the interoperability between tools. Xparticles benefits from C4D clones, so does deformers and everything else, so even something with very few nodes will make quite an impact in C4D. Not sure if you know, but the same ease of use in Maya Mash is not possible, you need to convert things and do a lot of extra work for Maya particles to work with Mash.
I have completed my first big project in Blender, due to deadline at 28 july, when its live, I will upload it here. Its basically some assets in Blender and Unreal, but modeling in Blender is quite fast. Looking forward for the Blender to Unreal plugin. I only see great things in Blender future, and like you, im waiting for Jacques Luque Everything Nodes.
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@Luis_Riera
Good to see you here Luis and I trust you’re well too?
I realise Houdini is not going to replace the broadcast style of mograph C4D is known for but it is the go to tool for high end mograph where vfx and mograph come together. You only have to look at the output of Man v Machine and Panoply to see the effect on the mograph market.
C4D would never be getting Project Neutron without Houdini radically changing the mograph market after all Maxon were content to ignore calls for a modern high performance node system for all these years.
I have absolutely no doubt Jacques Lucke will deliver an awesome featureset with the Everything Nodes project. In recent days there have been a huge amount of particle system commits, things are getting close!
I look forward to seeing your project when it’s live.
All the best
Just because it hasn’t been mentioned in this thread yet and just in case some of you never heard of this:
Super intuitive, super performant. Simply a “must install” for any Houdini artist. 
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Everything Nodes in master is now at the point where for particles at least, visible results are possible.
I imagine the power is going to grow rapidly because it will have the full power of a nodal system, but C4D users can’t throw away their app. yet (as it is just some emission stuff so far).
Yes, I’ve been watching all the commits today getting ready to do some testing over the weekend if there’s a build.
Jacques is very clearly a super smart dude and his work output seems incredible, I’m sure it will not be long before the particle system is well enough fleshed out to be useful on projects.
Looks like C4D is trying to copy of Everything Nodes. 