Character Tools

[Ejecta]

Also is there a good rig that comes with the demo or out there that I can test the speed of C4D?

[Mo3allem]

in the Cinema4d R11 , you should find a folder called " scene_files" or so ...

[danb]

...Right, plenty of good rigs in the "scene files" folder in the r 11 demo directory.

I think there is an autorigger on one of the cd's of earlier versions of c4d, but i don't know which. Other than that i'm pretty sure there are no autoriggers.

However, there are tricks to getting existing example rigs to work on your own models.

[soccerrprp]

Dan,

Any idea where these tips are? Also, do you remember which CD had the autorigger?

Thanks.


Richard

[Jannis]

CD IK has a virtual autorigger with the CD IK set up tool. With it you can rig a character with all controlers in place including hand sliders for all fingers and poses for fingers, tails and ears and the rest in a matter of minutes. To rigg a production ready rig with FK IK switches custom attributes and the rest in a matter of hours. You can't beat that unless you can write your own dedicated tool.

I think maybe Dan should be calling his CD IK Set Up tool Autorigger because that is what it is in essense and better in many ways because it gives you modular options. Maybe then people would realise what a great workflow tool it is

[WillBellJr]

^^ Now even more incentive for me to become a Cactus Dan customer!

Still it would be nice if those "tips" on how to take existing rigs and move them (uh, in a timely fashion) between characters was POSTED somewhere... :shrug:

-Will

PS - Is there a demo for Cactus Dan's tools?

Never mind I see I need to use the demo - actually that's sorta cool being able to do that - using the demo to use a demo of a plugin! (Hope it works for R11's demo!)

[bobzilla]

When Dan first came out with CD IK Tools he was seeing how long (after bones were set up) it would take to make a basic, functioning rig.

All tries were well under a minute, I believe.

[danb]

Dan,

Any idea where these tips are? Also, do you remember which CD had the autorigger?

Thanks.


Richard

Sorry i don't remember which CD it was.

Its not really one or two threads that cover the whole thing, but if you pieced together about a dozen different tips, you could figure out how to adapt a premade rig to fit your mesh.

Sorry i don't have time to get into it. :(

[Horganovski]

You can put Cactus Dans' plugins in the plugins folder of the R11 demo and they work just fine, I've been enjoying onionskinning some of my animation files:D

I've been doing viewport speed comparisons between 10.5 and 11 and unfortunately I'm not seeing any improvement though, getting the same FPS in both:sad:, (this is with both Mocca rigs and Dans' plugins, although in my experience Dans' rigs generally play back faster than Mocca ones anyway)

Would be really nice to see some kind of significant viewport speed boost for character rigs.
Long overdue imo.

Cheers,
Brian

[Ejecta]

You can put Cactus Dans' plugins in the plugins folder of the R11 demo and they work just fine, I've been enjoying onionskinning some of my animation files:D

I've been doing viewport speed comparisons between 10.5 and 11 and unfortunately I'm not seeing any improvement though, getting the same FPS in both:sad:, (this is with both Mocca rigs and Dans' plugins, although in my experience Dans' rigs generally play back faster than Mocca ones anyway)

Would be really nice to see some kind of significant viewport speed boost for character rigs.
Long overdue imo.

Cheers,
Brian

Is it slower than Maya? Cause if it is I will go with Maya.

[51M0N]

It's not the actual viewport that's slow, it's when the characters are moving, deforming. Maya's the same thing, you can move the camera pretty fast, but when the character moves it's pretty slow.

[danb]

I get 30 fps in the viewport when doing character animation (now). Probably don't need it to be faster than that. Right?

[bobzilla]

Characters with HyperNURBS turned off (smoothing in Maya, I guess) isn't bad.

Turned on, and it slows down to a crawl...

You can't get realtime playback, if that's what you're after.

[Ejecta]

So it isnt the rigs like the constrants etc that are slowing it down, it's the hypernurbs thats doing it. Well there are work arounds for that with making a low res model for most of the animating.

[Ejecta]

I get 30 fps in the viewport when doing character animation (now). Probably don't need it to be faster than that. Right?

How are you doing that?

[Horganovski]

I can get 30 FPS on a very simple rig, if I use anything more elaborate with bendy limbs etc, ie the Rabbit Rig that came with the 10.5 dvd, it drops to around 10, even with HNurbs off.

What kind of rigs/hardware are you running?

Cheers,
Brian


BTW Ejecta, not to be smart, but why not download the demo of R11, Maya Ple and whatever other programs you're considering and try them all out? I don't think I'd make a decision to spend between 1000 to 7000 dollars on a program based on other peoples' advice.. I'd definitely try them out myself first..

[Ejecta]

I can get 30 FPS on a very simple rig, if I use anything more elaborate with bendy limbs etc, ie the Rabbit Rig that came with the 10.5 dvd, it drops to around 10, even with HNurbs off.

What kind of rigs/hardware are you running?

Cheers,
Brian


BTW Ejecta, not to be smart, but why not download the demo of R11, Maya Ple and whatever other programs you're considering and try them all out? I don't think I'd make a decision to spend between 1000 to 7000 dollars on a program based on other peoples' advice.. I'd definitely try them out myself first..




Oh Im downloading the demo od C4D as I already have experience with Maya. I was just wanted to get other's perspectives. You know you can try a demo with demo scenes but not know how to optmise feedback. The rigs I run are mainly created by Anzovin's Rig Machine and Face Machine. Nice rigs with squash and stretch etc. I really wantt features like you described for the rabbit rig. It adds so much to your animations to have those abilites. I like XSI but thse features slow it down too but Raf's rigs are pretty quick. I'll check out the rigs in the C4D demo but 10 fps isnt doable for me so we'll see. Anyway, thanks for the input. :D

[danb]

I can get 30 FPS on a very simple rig, if I use anything more elaborate with bendy limbs etc, ie the Rabbit Rig that came with the 10.5 dvd, it drops to around 10, even with HNurbs off.

What kind of rigs/hardware are you running?

Cheers,
Brian


I'm using standard biped rigs with a lot of xpresso and toon rigs. I make sure to keep my characters very low poly.

I have an intel core 2 duo with 2 gb ram and an ATI 756mb card. Nothing too spectacular. :)

[StanrickKubley]

I also use the Anzovin rigs in Maya. I'd guess that most rigs you do in Cinema will be just as fast or faster, since the Setup Machine rig uses so many influence objects.

[Horganovski]

Thanks for the info on your hardware. it might not be cutting edge, but it's quite a bit better than mine right now:hmm:

I think it's time I upgraded my PC !, curse Maxon and their tempting upgrades, couldn't they wait a little longer until I've gotten my hardware up to speed.:D

Cheers,
Brian

[Cactus Dan]

Howdy,

The performance of a character rig all depends on how you build the rig. There are many things you can do to increase the performance of a character rig.

A while back, I was hired to rebuild a Maya rig in Cinema 4D with my plugins, and I must say that my rig in Cinema 4D had faster viewport speed than the one in Maya. The rig I built had all of the same features as the Maya rig (I had the Maya rig to study in Maya PLE) plus a couple of more feature requests from the animators. ;)

Here is a comparison video of the viewport speed on a 1.83 GHz intel core duo iMac:
http://www.cactus3d.com/RigPerformance.mov

Adios,
Cactus Dan

[aigle]

The only thing I can say is WoW...Dan this comparison is looking really great!

Bye

[-mindcache-]

Maya viewport speed has never impressed me it's on par if not inferior to what Cinema 4D has to offer. Softimage|XSI is the only app that blows my mind when it comes to view port speed I've seen multi-million polygon rigged models(no low-res ref./proxy) animated right in viewport in real time the rigs seemed relatively simple though. I'm sure thats all be accelerated from a very low level in the app possibly using a similar system to what Zbrush uses to handel massive data sets. Project Messiah if I recall has great viewport speed too but again the app was engineered from the ground up for 1 main task in mind, animating.

While it would nice to see that level in Cinema 4D be realstic about it. That level of performance would probably require core rewrite in any app Maya/C4D/LW you name it. That isn't an easy task nor a short one either. I think with proper proxy/ref models set up you should be able to get more then suitable performance for film level work others certainly have been doing it. I'm sure in time we'll see improvements in the time-being it is still more then suitable of film quality work.

Also I'm not sure how you're making your setups but rarely have I seen the actual film/render-res version of the model actually used for animating in app. If thats what you're doing start building lower res versions to animate with.

[Ejecta]

Also I'm not sure how you're making your setups but rarely have I seen the actual film/render-res version of the model actually used for animating in app. If thats what you're doing start building lower res versions to animate with.

Exactly. I havnt either but I knew that a high res mesh wasnt going to be fast, I was just wondering if like in XSI and Maya certain expressions kill scrubbing feedback. I hate playblasting and like to get a decent feedback to scrub through and it also speeds up previews when you do them. Thats huge time saver. And you are right doing a low res mesh would be the way to go as it always is. I just didnt have a ton of time to really dig into figuring that stuff out in C4D so I thought I'd ask and I see now that I should have been more specific.

That said, Catcus Dan has impressed me and Ive heard his plugs and customer support are top notch. C4D may still be a good option for me. I'll just have to play with the demo and see how I gel with the app. Thanks for the input!

[bobzilla]

Well, I think we're talking about two different things here: Animation speed and playback speed.

I haven't had a problem with a low res mesh with IK, Xpresso, Constraints, etc, when animating, but I don't think I ever had anything remotely realtime in scrubbing and playback. I always make a Preview (Playblast in Maya-speak).

[Horganovski]

I'm in the same boat as Bobzilla, (Cool rig btw Dan!)

Manipulating the character in the viewport is responsive enough most of the time. It's trying to get decent playback speed when animation, say a walkcycle for example, is in place that's always slow for me. Even with 'Show all frames' off.

The weird thing is that when I scrub the timeline back and forward the response is pretty good, it's just slow when the timeline is playing.

Cheers,
Brian

[-mindcache-]

The weird thing is that when I scrub the timeline back and forward the response is pretty good, it's just slow when the timeline is playing.


Unfortunately with any heavily rigged character this is going to be the case in any app thats why they all have some kind of play back cache method Playbast/Preview etc..

[Cactus Dan]

Howdy,
.... It's trying to get decent playback speed when animation, say a walkcycle for example, is in place that's always slow for me. Even with 'Show all frames' off....

One thing that you may not be aware of is that your layout can affect the animation playback speed. Having the timeline and the object manager in your layout slows down the animation playback.

Another thing you can do is, if you make the viewport the active window, then click on the full screen mode icon:
http://www.cactus3d.com/FullScreen.jpg

... your animation playback will speed up. ;)

But, rendering an editor preview is still the most accurate determination.

Adios,
Cactus Dan

[Horganovski]

That's a handy tip about the layout Dan, I'll be sure to try that.

Many thanks.

Cheers,
Brian

[unseenthings]

Howdy,

One thing that you may not be aware of is that your layout can affect the animation playback speed. Having the timeline and the object manager in your layout slows down the animation playback.

Another thing you can do is, if you make the viewport the active window, then click on the full screen mode icon:
http://www.cactus3d.com/FullScreen.jpg

... your animation playback will speed up. ;)

But, rendering an editor preview is still the most accurate determination.

Adios,
Cactus Dan
Wow, fullscreen mode speeds things up? That seems a bit counter intuitive. I'd have thought the smaller the viewport the faster it would be. Definitely gonna try that one out.

[Srek]

The fewer managers are visible, the fewer need updating

[danb]

If you don't want to go into fullscreen mode you can fold managers to speed up things also. Quick way to fold managers, which i found by mistake, is to middle mouse button click on the bar above the text of a manager.

I find the timeline manager to be the worst at hogging speed. I usually work in "semi-fullscreen" mode. Meaning i close everything but the OM, AM and powerslider, which i dock to the right of the viewport and the powerslider at the bottom of the viewport. Then i use space bar to play or ctrl space to rewind, or g to step forward or f to step backward.

I work in this layout pretty much most of the time thanks to the use of the "v" menu (don't know what that menu is actually called). :) Otherwise i just open a new manager through window - layout if need be.

Ejecta... you will love the "v" menu (press v on your keyboard), because its very close to maya but better, imo.

[Ejecta]

Thanks for all the input guys! If I can ever get the demo of 11 to download I'll try this stuff out. :banghead:

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