Rebirth of CSTOOLS at NAB 2012

CSTools came out in 2006, as free Xpresso setups. It was a set of 23 tools including lighting rigs (b4 lighting rigs were popular!), camera animation systems, as well as mograph oriented animation helpers. I assumed only a few people would want them. In the last 6 years, they have been included with Cinema 4D broadcast addition, been used all over the world, I've received many dozens of emails from design houses telling me how they use them, and last time I checked my FTP stats 3 years ago they had been downloaded over 200,000 times. That being said, I have left them for dead.

But the good news is for any fans out there, I have been working on a completely new set from the ground up, not as Xpresso setups but true plug-ins to Cinema4D. So they live in your menus and have far more power and convenience than the old CSTools.

I will presenting the tool I've spent a year of R&D on at NAB next week as a first look. It is a dream camera system I have always wanted. It was spawned off of all the things I didn't like about MoCam + many new ideas I had about a system that is flexible, smooth, and immediately changeable without fixing all the work you have done. In addition, a camera that is aware of it's space and timing so it changes paths based on it's velocity so that it feels that it has mass like a real camera. Listen to this glowing review from an early beta tester:

"It kind of pisses me off you made smooth, natural camera animation so easy" - Mike "The Monkey" Senften

If you're at NAB, come see the presentation at 5:30pm on Tues, the 17th at the Maxon booth. If you are NOT attending, immediately go to http://c4dlive.com and sign up now to view the whole show live.

Sounds excellent Chris, will be on the live feed

cheers
brasc

Awesome news! Your tools have saved me days on production time and have made many clients happy!

Oooooooh...

Looking forward to seeing these!

Can't wait!

Great news, Chris!

(and now with the questions..)--will the cam tools work well on NET? and if not will baking be straightforward? Just curious

THANKS--this is all great news and looking forward to its release

Thanks, all. Joel. Yes baking will be way easier as it will be a one button click this time. As in I'm actually adding a bake button on every cam tool and all the data will be correct this time as it's all one plug-in object, not a tree of objects like it used to be. That being said you won't see that at the NAB show. There I'm showing the prototype with the core function and not with all the secondary features.

EDIT: .NET, I think the only thing that gets in trouble with .NET are any random functions or noise/turbulence. As each machine's seed may not necessarily derive from the same source. So, I can't say at this point. But yeah like you said, I would recommend baking everything anyways before distributing.

Thanks Chris!

Quick/easy baking is my usual request to developers these days---especially when it comes to processes like dynamics, noise, particles or springy stuff or anything thats evaluated differently on multiple clients. Good news!

Never was a big fan of the original CSTools. I am sure the new tools will be even worse

I'll assume you are being sarcastic and didn't spend part of your life to rag on free tools you have the option not to use. ()

That was sarcasm. They're great tools and its kind of you to share them for free. In fact they are totally impossible to rag on, hence the humor. Someday I'll learn how to get sarcasm through the internet.

I don't think you were using sarcasm but in fact irony ( que Blackadder Joke), irony is where “the literal meaning is opposite to the intended”; and sarcasm is “aggressive humor that pokes fun”

By virtue of your definition, either term would be appropriate.

Just as long as no one is abusing the term 'literally'. That figuratively drives me nuts