R21 First Impressions

#124

Hey Wilfried,
just coming back to this subject, I was curious to ask what the benefits are to Cinema relying on OS events vs polling the state of your input? The reason I ask is because I think it would be a real shame to lose the use of certain apps or extensions that I’ve always relied and continue to rely upon because C4D now bypasses them. My other 3D app of choice is Houdini which seems to have no trouble recognising remapped keys and shows no latency in the viewport, timeline, etc.

I heard back that your dev team are now able to recreate this issue by following the steps mentioned in my previous posts which I’m really glad to hear. I really hope you guys will be able to do something about it in the coming weeks/months.

Thank you

#125

Basically four reasons:

  1. Events consume less energy (polling is active constantly and “eats” your battery, if you’re on a notebook and prevents the CPU to go into lower energy states - on notebook as well as desktop)
  2. Events allow to work with more complex user interactions (e.g. gestures)
  3. As the OS is working with events, polling input data in one part of the app frequently has the inherent risk of stealing input from other parts of the app
  4. On some OS the over-consumption of input data (due to frequent polling) is punished by the OS scheduler (you get less cpu cycles), which is a trend we expect to pick up in other future OS as well

Yup, working on a fix…

Best regards,

Wilfried

#126

I like the new more relaxed and open way maxon is comunicating with the userbase. Thanks for that

Jops

#127

Another good one from twitter on TP and field forces. I’ll need time to wrap my head around this, no doubt.

#128

Greyscalegorilla finally made a video about R21

#129

Even CineWorks/Cinerender partner - Vectorworks 2020 has python 3.5 :sunglasses:
I feel - C4D behind mainstream :disappointed_relieved:

#130

See my reply from Sep. third. R21 First Impressions

#131

I got a strange thing from R21 today. I’m involved in python and a little c++ development and often open c4d with debug console to see my bugs.
So i tried open old project with char. While R21 is redoing the old scene, a service dialog appears indicating that the character need to update. I saw in console a message:

You MUST NOT NEVER EVER use a modal dialog in a timer. Please run a job on the main thread (see job.h).

:smiley:
It was not for me. It was for maxon developer who is maintaining Char tools.

#132

Please report the bug and attach a scene file.

We added several extra warnings in case UI functions are used outside of the main thread, as OS version are getting inreasingly picky how they deal with such UI calls (all three major OS require you to use the main thread for UI calls, to be in a “defined” state).

The warning happens no matter if the call is done by our code or 3rd party code - and it makes such calls obvious in R21 now; prior to R21 they would have just slipped under the radar.

Best regards,

Wifried

#133

Thank you Wifried
I’m thinking i will not report. Need to build scene from scratch as R21 is revolutionary new.

#134

Python 2.7 is being sunset January 2020, so not that far away now…
From: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0373/#id4
Maintenance releases
Being the last of the 2.x series, 2.7 will receive bugfix support until 2020. Support officially stops January 1 2020, but the final release will occur after that date.

#135

@Benek I have good news (for me at least) re the MMB issue I was having

Just did a system update to Mac OS High Sierra 10.13.6 and also updated my Wacom drivers for my rather old Wacom Intuos 4 M tablet. The Wacom Driver version is 6.3.36-2

I can confirm that the MMB and Option to pan the viewport which wasnt working in R21 prior to the updates I applied is now working as it should

I hope this helps with your situation

On another issue using the Edge Slide tool to select a loop by double clicking is not as nice as it used to be. I have tried in both R20 and R21 and there is a difference. Affects workflow quite a bit. Also this is repeatable in High Sierra and Mojave

#136

Hey, thanks for sharing that…

In the end Maxon were able to recreate the issue I was experiencing and I believe are sitting on a fix. For me, Alt+RMB just doesn’t register. And just to be clear, when I say Alt+RMB I’m talking about the Mac combination for that, ie. Alt+Ctrl+Click and drag with Wacom.

The other issue I had was that C4D was bypassing one of my OS extensions, Karabiner. I use this to remap the redundant function key in the bottom left corner to MMB. Although I’ve been a Wacom user for around 20 years, I’ve never been able to get used to using the side buttons on the stylus as it seems to involve contorting or shifting the position of my wrist which makes it quite uncomfortable and not fluid.

Anyway, thanks for the update.

#137

I hope there will be an update of the Insydium Bridge soon.
A lot of very useful plugins don’t work anymore.

#138

Some random observations related to texturing / rendering after some hours of playing around:

  • Denoiser: This has been discussed to death, but I think most agree that it is a great addtion despite its limitations
  • Node materials:
    • The few new nodes are not really the big additions…
    • I would have wished for some advanced nodes like SSS (really? no SSS?), a Proximal pendant, maybe even beter (basically a signed distance function; allowing you to texture objects using other objects, that would have been insane), a node to access fields (Imagine the possibilities! and no, using the vertex map is not the same ), a node to acces VDBs
    • no examples that would show how to use the new multi-ray node in order to achieve the efects that are used to advertise it (rounded edge shader…)
    • volumerendering only for ProRender
    • minor but a problem when reading unknown graphs: the node type can not be seen anywhere if the name is changed. So if you do not know the nodes just by their parameters you are kind of lost.At the moment the only way to find out the type of the node is to use the context help on one of the parameters. Or am I missing something?
  • Node spaces
    • Nice idea!
    • but why limit it to nodal materials? The same issue arises with classic materials used for physical and ProRender. If you switch the renderer in the render settings, the material also changes slightly, especially if certain nodes like sub surface scattering are used. Obviously there are two different implementations with different GUIs for SSS. It switches with the renderersettings, but not with the node space… If you use nodal and non-nodal materials in the same scene (which you are forced to as eachl system has pros & cons, see above), you get quite confused… Why not call it Render Space and include the classic materials? That way you could also have classical/PBR materials for each renderer, automatically switching with the Space. The current solution seems unfinished to me…

There are nice things here and there, but one year after the introduction of fields, volumes and nodes it would have been a good time to bring this all together into a coherent system, but to me it seems this will still take some time :frowning: Sure, my analysis is focused on a few spots that didn’t get the love and the nodal system itself is quite nice otherwise. The thread about the fake interior shader shows the power of this system, but some things are just not possible yet.

#139

Hair’s surface color does not work with nodes?! Or needs special work-flow for it, doesn’t it?

#140

Not sure whether anyone else has noticed or experienced this, but whenever I drag out a rectangle selection, either in the 3D viewport, timeline, material manager, there’s quite a noticeable lag before the rectangle begins to draw. I just thought this was strange a) because I’ve never really experienced this in previous versions and b) because I was under the impression there were big improvements to the UI speed… Anyone else getting this, or is it just me as always?

Logitech mouse trouble R21
#141

this is caused by your onboard gfx chipset fighting with the nvidia/amd gfx card. either update your drivers or disable the intel onboard card in the bios

#142

The rectangular selection is instantaneous for me.

A very minor thing I like per the GUI, is they tweaked the XYZ colors for the PSR tools; things like the axis and rotation bands. The Z axis especially is a brighter blue and much easier to see.