Re: Cinema 4D an option?

[Jason S]

I went through a similar process, but instead of Blender, it was Houdini. I tested Modo and C4D and Houdini and came to very similar conclusions about how easy it is to use. Yeah, I also found 'straight-forwardness' to be one of the most important things..  (mostly for what "not (over-)complicated" means well *after* the learning part) C4D also (I agree) has a lot of stuff that makes it very easy to use for 90% of most jobs I do. Yes, and just to say, I admit that we aren't always making like these huge scenes, but countless times do I recall very-much relying on SI's ability of being pushed, or saw people doing things that could hardly be even imagined being done in anything else.. But anyway, Thanks for your great insight! On 08/05/14 12:19, Perry Harovas wrote: Hi Jason, I went through a similar process, but instead of Blender, it was Houdini. I tested Modo and C4D and Houdini and came to very similar conclusions about how easy it is to use. Where I see clear advantages in C4D and Modo over Houdini and Softimage is in OpenGL quality. C4D can display many, many things in OpenGL that I cannot get to display in any version of Softimage (procedurals, certain lighting effects, plugin results, etc.). C4D also (I agree) has a lot of stuff that makes it very easy to use for 90% of most jobs I do. While I am not happy to have to go down the paid plugin route, which makes me think of what 3DS Max users deal with) at least the plugins are almost always low or no cost and they also work with multiple versions of C4D, not always having to be recompiled for each new release of C4D. Not quite as flexible as Softimage, but a far cry from the stupiditity that is Maya when it comes to needing a new compile for each and every new version of Maya. This was one of (IMHO) Softimage's hidden talents. When you base an entire project around a plugin, and then upgrade the host application, you don't want to worry that the plugin maker might have gone out of business, thereby effectively locking you to the most recent version of the host app that worked with the plugin. Maya has this problem in SPADES. As a freelancer, or even small studios, this can mean never wanting to invest in a plugin because of the fear of having to lock (forever) to a specific release of the host DCC. While C4D isn't as flexible, I was very happy to see that it was close enough to Softimage to make me comfortable that I would be OK. Where C4D really lacks, in my opinion, is in a lack of Render Passes (sure, you can cheat them into working, but no developer created way of doing them yet). One more point: The rather large advantage that small developers like Maxon and The Foundry (OK, small compared to Autodesk) have over Autodesk, is that they can quickly jump on the bandwagon of a new technique or industry standard. It usually takes many, many, many versions of the Autodesk lineup to include something (for instance, Alembic) and when they do finally get it, it is usually a bare-bones implementation at first. I don't advocate that every new standard or technique get adopted, but it is nice to know that when it does, it will happen faster than the Autodesk implementation and will generally be more feature complete. The sweeping generalizations I have made are mostly from my own experience, your mileage may vary...