R21 Service Pack - When?

#27

The whole 3D market has been void of competition for such a long time it’s refreshing to finally have other viable options. I really don’t think it’ll be just Maxon that will feel the heat from Blender it’ll be everyone who have taken their collective feet of the peddles in recent years, cough Autodesk cough.

I wholeheartedly believe in competition and Blender’s arrival as a credible tool will hopefully kickstart the competition between 3D applications again. You made a valid point about the cost of Blender, the fact it’s free if you can’t afford to donate is just the icing. If Blender was no good or still had it’s horrible UI they could pay me and I wouldn’t be interested.

I would never rule out returning to C4D if the application is brought up to date in the future. I want C4D to excite me again with next level shit like it did when the Mograph features were added. Where have all the plugin developers gone too? It’s one thing I love about Blender is buying little nick-nack Addons from Blendermarket or Gumroad, I used to do the same with C4D plugins back in the day.

#28

I just purchased the hard ops/box cutter bundle, pro-lighting studio and decal machine. Nice savings w/BF. Sadly I won’t even be able to play with them until Christmas holidays. Now…for me…back to work…

#29

not exactly fan of buying lots of plugins for Blender, I try to choose carefully what to buy because as we all know Blender development is incredible fast, more than once I have a plugin that doesnt work correctly with the new version - pro lightning studio gave me background issues with 2.81

#30

I have remesher from exoside, I think for organics it does a pretty good job, but for hard surface im still looking for a better workflow, because I had some issues with boxcutter, remeshing, etc. I did a revolver to test boxcutter and have some issues with the barrel. but in the end, I figured, the artifacts look kinda cool in the final render so I didnt even corrected them.

revolver%20blender
revolver blender.jpg1920x1080 143 KB

edit… rendered in Cycles, not eevee.

I forgot, about C4D, i havent used exoside for C4D so Im not sure if I can edit my remesh, Im assuming I can because most C4D tools work that way.

In Blender, Exoside Remesher is a plugin, not a modifier. When you remesh your object you lose the original (unless you work with a copy), I miss C4D stack of operators, where I hardly lose anything If I want to go back in history.

#31

wireframe%20gun
wireframe gun.jpg1923x1080 812 KB

I forgot to add the wireframe view

Cheers.

#32

The 21.115 update is there.
The blurry rendering in the viewport is not fixed.

#33

ProRender is still garbage. Add a cube, add a Physical Sky, turn on ProRender… then wait while it takes a lifetime to ‘compile shaders’ and ‘update the scene’. Compile what shaders? Update what scene? There’s nothing there, just a sky and six polygons!

I know I’m on an outdated old Mac, but Octane was never this bad.

It finally did it - took about four minutes. It’s rendering okay now, but what takes all that time!?

EDIT. Had to force quit when I changed a material. Groan.

#34

ProRender is being compiled for your graphics card driver version. This is a one time thing per c4d install or driver update. Octane uses a different programming language that only works on Nvidia cards which provides a way to deliver already compiled versions of the renderer. The one programming language ProRender uses does not have that feature.
Regards
Fritz

#35

Ah, okay, interesting. Yes, I see on restart it’s much faster to get going!

#37

There was nothing to fix. It’s intended (for speed reasons) that the rendering works with standard (100% scaling) resolution, like it did in prior releases, in the viewport.

Otherwise test renders in the viewport would be massively slower due to the increased amount of pixels (e.g. with 200% scaling rendering would have to deal with 4x the number of pixels to process).

For OpenGL however the extended resolution is used, if available, as modern gfx cards usually can deal with it (and have no or only a slight slowdown).

Best regards,

Wilfried

#38

ProRender 2.0 beta, as far as I’m able to tell does not need the tedious ‘compiling’ step. If it did do any compiling it happened so fast I never noticed it.

ProRender 2.0 beta is night and day better than ProRender in C4D. I had written off ProRender because of the shockingly bad performance in C4D. My advice is keep an open mind, V2.0 feels many times faster and with IOID render times are very acceptable. The Vulkan based rendering modes make ProRender 2.0 a very interesting option to keep an eye on.

#39

‘Garbage’ was perhaps a bit extreme. Once it’s compiled and is up and running, ProRender is pretty decent. But then, just when you think it’s all good, you do something crazy like add a material and it just goes into spinning beachball mode and needs a force quit.

I’ve always believed ProRender would be great one day. They just need to sort out the performance and stability, and add the necessary features that professional productions need. Good to hear v2.0 shows promise – I wonder when C4D will get that version? Certainly wasn’t in today’s update – sorry, bug fix.

EDIT: Will have a play with the latest version in Blender. Seems okay so far…

#40

Hi Wilfried,
wouldn’t it be better to have the possibility as a user to decide if you want slower rendering in the viewport and have a sharp picture (like in the releases until R20) or use this blurry mess which is meant to be faster? As a switch in the preferences maybe?
I am able to understand the intentions behind your decision, but for me as user it doesn’t feel right.
With the same argument you could say: let’s render in the viewport always 480x360 px and blow this up. The visual outcome is the same, but perhaps it’s even faster.
For me the best thing of the viewport rendering is to testrender small areas of the picture, the render times are perhaps not the most important thing.
Sounds a bit like the VW-way to go: make the diesel look good on the test bench (= windows scaling on 100%), but in real life conditions it’s a bit worse. The highres compatibility feature was one of the main selling points for R21 as far as i remember.
I hope you understand my disappointment. At least I see now that I don’t have to wait any longer for an improvement.

Regards,
Simon

#41

Hi Simon,

prior versions interally rendered with 100% and then Windows scaled up the viewport result to you window scaling (if you used any).
In R21 we render in 100% and then scale up the rendered output adapt it to the viewport resolution (which might be higher due to window scaling).

So the only way I see how you could get a sharp rendering in R20 but not in R21, is if you used no Window scaling in R20 but now do (esp. if it is one of the fractional scaling values Windows allows you to select).

Best regards,

Wilfried

#42

Hi Wilfried,

I used always Windows scaling (which was the reason the node editor was unusable in R20). There is a sharp rendering in R20 in the viewport. But not in R21. Same machine, two parallel installed versions of C4D.

#43

Feel free to contact Maxon’s support and file a report with your machine config, window scaling and an example scene - and ask support to forward it to me …

Best regards,

Wilfried

#44

Hi Wilfried,
opened a ticket 5 minutes ago (946-069).
Thank you!
S

#45

I didn’t realise that 2.1 had been released and is no longer Beta.

Now that Maxon have adopted the Subscription model there’s absolutely no impediment to them bringing updates ASAP. Let’s see how long it takes for C4D customers to get ProRender 2.0.

#46

Think I was just lucky when I checked and downloaded the new version. With C4D I’m on my last MSA so I probably won’t be getting anything for a while.

#47

It’s still very much Beta unfortunately. It seems to have regressed from 2.0.162.

I did an overnight render with 2.0.162 last night and it was perfect. I don’t think I’d trust 2.1.1…

At least with 2.1.1 the Vulkan rendering modes can be used for output. The Medium quality setting is Eevee with raytracing so it could be a game changer when stable enough to use.

I don’t know where that leaves Mac support for these Vulkan modes, presumably there will be a Metal version. I understand Metal has raytracing support.