About to buy C4D 8.5 - Need You to Shed Light

[ThirdEye]

"1. It's a little unsettling that I have not seen much character animation done with C4D since this will be the main function for which I will be using it. Is the lack of examples of character animation due to:"

C4D can do a good job at CA, especially if you combine it with Xpresso, it's just not its strongest point, people often choose it for other reasons, there are not many character animators using C4D, just that.

"2. I've been planning to add Realflow to my shopping cart but my budget just doesn't allow it. Is it possible to create ultra rialistic liquid effects that does not demand weeks of work within C4D without having to purchase Realflow?"

It depends. If you have to do something very simple C4D can help with particles, metaballs and stuff like that, if you want something realistic and complex your only choice is Reaflow. Basically it's the only choice of any other program but Maya Unlimited, which comes with Fluid Effects.

"3. Is Shave & a Haircut really as powerful as it's made out to be? Could you point me to some examples?"

www.joealter.com (http://www.joealter.com) it's not bad

"4. I noticed in the Tips & Tricks tutorial page on Maxon's site in the tutorial about soft bodies that there is a clothing tab. Is it easy to create convincing cloth in C4D and how accurate is the collision detection? (In other words does the cloth tend to break through the character's geometry etc.?)"

No, Soft Bodies are Soft Bodies, Cloth is Cloth. Don't expect to get Cloth Simulations with Dynamics.

"5. All-'n-all, would you recommend C4D and what are the features you value most about it?"

Robustness, workflow, ease of use, stability, fast and good looking rendering, development speed, Toon rendering, 2D/3D painting, lighting.

[Byla]

Probably I am not the best person to give comments and answers to those questions because I am still pretty much a Maya user. I did start with cinema, then went to school that teaches maya only and again I am trying to get back into the cinema because Maya is just not aplicable for a small company. Too many problems.

1. Character animation has been a mayor problem for Cinema until recenty with intruduction of advanced character rigging and animation tools in MOCCA. And if you are buying Kaydara as well then be sure that you will own probably the most advanced CA tools avaliable. So no worries bout that whatsoever!

Why is there such a lack of CA done in Cinema? One reason I ve already mentioned, the other is that Cinema is still not involved in the big companies CA pipelines (but Kaydara is!), the third is the fact that Cinema has not been comparable to major players until... hmm, version 7.3?? and that was not so long time ago, the forth in my opinion: lack of good CA and rigging tutorials. But again if you are getting Kaydara then all this "issues" suddenly vanish.

2. Realflow is a nice piece of software, with realy bad support and with heaps of bugs. But still it is the easiest way to get good liquid simulations (in my opinion). On the other hand, metaballs are great in Cinema so with good particle simulations, dynamics and shaders I think you could get very very good results. again, new noodle based expressions in Cinema are just awesome!

3. Dont know. It looks good in Maya and I guess it is as good in Cinema.

4. If you think about doing CA cloth simulations then I think the build-in tool for that in Cinema is not gonna do the job. Syflex, another high end tool for that, is the solution in my opinion. I think for Maya and XSI only. But you have to know that cloth simulation is a major thing and not something that is easy to do. And one man cant be good at everything :)

5. I think cinema is the best tool for a small to mid size company.... extremly stable, very easy to learn, with good to great allround tools and very good rendering with great shaders. Plus Bodypaint for texturing and awesome support for After Effects. And yeah, I do recomend Cinema specialy if you cant afford Mental Ray operator, RenderMan operator, dynamics operator, network rendering operator and a good compositing artist. :). Plus a TD for fixin problems :).

[Jannis]

You have there alot of questions understandably, since you are about to spend alot of money, but they only come down to one, is Cinema good enough for character animation.


The answer, from someone who has done alot of CA is yes it is, but then it is followed by another question which is, are you dedicated enough to become a Character modeler, rigger, animator? You see the field of character animation is perhaps the most difficult one and before you spend alot of money on an application you have to be aware of a very steep learning curve, one that requires years and not months.

Most of the top applications are now prety much on a par for Character animation. If you ever reach the hights of crowd simulation, cloth dynamics, motion capture and so on it would not matter to you what application you are using. At the moment your qustion should be what application can assist you best in learning character animation and not which has the most buttons.

To this extend Cinema is ideal. It is far easier to learn than any other application and that is not because it is simpler but because it is organised better (made by Germans, need I say more?). The Mocca module is one of the most powerful caracter animation tool in my opinion, it allowes you to do stuff that are not possible in Maya or Max. Some people say that it is complex but then any advanced rigg is complex. And like someone else said, as you are buying Motionbuilder the sky is the limit. To add to that, if version 9 builds on to what is here already you can't go wrong.

Good luck with what ever dicision you make

regards

jannis

[thorn3d]

If your main focus is character animation, why aren't you purchasing XSI Foundations or Maya? Both of the are stronger with characters than C4D.

C4D has many good abilities, but character work isn't among them compared to other apps, so I'm curious as to why C4D is your first choice.

thorn

[Per-Anders]

i would have to agree with Thorn, other apps would be far superior in this area. C4D's strengths lay elsewhere, however you have motionbuilder in there too so again it's odd to worry about cinema's CA toolset anyway (as presumably you'd be using MB for all the actual CA work itself in this configuration).

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