Has anyone here worked with Cycles4D?
will2power
Posts: 270
I'm interested in perhaps working with Cycles4D inside of Cinema 4D. I was wondering if any DAZ users have ever worked with it? The reason I want to know is that I like Cycles, but I haven't really gotten into Blender. Cinema 4D, to me is the platform that I find myself most comfortable working in outside of DAZ. I'm not really happy with Octane and how they've screwed over perpetual license holders, so I have been looking at Redshift and Cycles 4D. I know that Redshift was purchased by Maxon, but Cycles seems to be a strong alternative since it works with Turbulence FD and X-Particles, and renders C4D Hair. Has anyone here had experience with it?
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I used Cycles4D (and X-Particles) to render this:
I find Blender frustrating, so I didn't have any background with Cycles before I tried using it in C4D, and there was a bit of a learning curve, but I'm getting the hang of it. I've never used Octane, so I can't compare.
I've been using it intensively as an alternative to Vray when moving from my old R13 Visualize copy to a R23 subscription, fairly easy to get the hang of so far but it does have a bit of a learning curve as Gordig said since it handles some things a bit differently than Cinema's default shader system (and I imagine Redshift as well, but I haven't used that one before)
I think Redshift works with X-Particles as well, though it has the best compatibility with Cycles4D (Coming from the same plugin developer and all that). The only real downside to Cycles so far for me is that plugins like Forester, GSG's suite, and if I recall the DAZ Bridge don't support it, just Octane/Redshift. So you'll have to assemble materials by hand for these (And can't make much use of the light kit setups from GSG at the moment)
Then again, the DAZ Bridge doesn't support R23 right now anyway so xD
There's a command in C4D to convert materials to Cycles materials, and it works okay, but creates materials that seem way more complex than they need to be. Also, I don't have GSG's light kit, but have you tried adding a Cycles light tag to them?
They also often come out.... Weird, as well. Unless I need to adjust a large number of materials, I often end up just doing it by hand.
I'm not really interested in converting materials, if that's what everyone calls a downside. I have Octane for C4D already, but I don't support Otoy's move to force perpetual license holders into a subscription so I'm moving away from them entirely. No, if I'm going to be making a move, I am going to be learning how to make my own materials. Quite frankly, since the system supports C4D hair, I'm really interested in it. Cycles seems to give me what I want which is Volumetrics and Hair. (I can't tell you how much I want to make simple animated fire on a torch or a campfire and Octane was kind of convoluted when it came to working it out--and since they have pretty much ignored making native support for Strand based hair in either Cinema or Maya, the subscription thing was the straw that broke the camels back. To be honest, Cycles in Blender gave me the best experience when it came to rendering and I'd rather learn Cycles in Cinema rather then Blender(It's not that I hate Blender, but C4D suits my thinking more)
Yeah I could never get the hang of Blender and just threw up my hands and said "Forget it" - but Cycles itself seems pretty easy to get into and understand (For the most part!), so running it in Cinema's been amazing. It's been almost painful not rendering with it now, while I'm trying to troubleshoot a mysterious crashing issue... If it's Wacom OpenGL related like some things are pointing towards, then great - I can reinstall Cycles and all that stuff. But then I'll need to find a WC driver that doesn't disagree with Cinema :/ But I digress.
hi will2power,
I'm a cycles4d user.
first things first
if you are the nvidia guy then you could go ahead with cycles4d for GPU rendering, if you are AMD like me be aware that OpenCL is no longer an option (neither in Cycles4D nor in Blender obviously and to be honest the argument given on why doesn't jive with me a bit, but it's their show...).
Cycles has a per session or a 30 day license seat model which means you need to connect at most every time you start C4D or every 30 days to the Insydium license server to validate your Cycles4D license (make sure you uncheck in Cinema 4D Preferences close seat on exit otherwise you need to connect every startup to Insydium - just saying if that bothers you like me; they gave me a beyond the 30 days seat)
that out of the way let's talk...
as cycles has evolved a lot over the past so has obviously the shading technique. I recommend that you study the Principled BSDF Shader in detail (you can do that in Blender without buying Cycles4D) this will save you a LOT of time. I personally use only Principled BSDF for really EVERYTHING (only emission shaders I sometimes fall back in the old mixed shader technique). In fact, I haven't noticed anything important missing from Cycles 4D other than for laziness a PBR node. If you are on the PBR hype bandwagon then read these two articles, please PBR Shader Node for Blender | MeshLogic and Black material artifacts on flat-angle surface areas - Support / Materials and Textures - Blender Artists Community . Don't be fooled, Cycles is a PBR render engine but the way you build the shading nodes could be a lot easier like implementing the Ubernode.
Skin shading and SSS in general is very good nowadays and doesn't really fall behind of other engines. In regard to hair I heard mixed opinions based on actual facts and perception as well. I'm no expert with hair other than in fron of the mirror every morning... so I can't give any advise here. The Cycles 4D integration into C4D is very good and reliable. You have a realtime resizable preview window where you can cut off at a your predefined sample level. The shading nodes is a right mouse click to Blender where it is from menu pick so not that you wonder where the nodes are or you pick them from the left-hand-side.
You can download all previous versions of cycles from your customer account to the day of purchase. as you can see in the screenshot below I have deliberatly downloaded the last version with OpenCL.
In Blender I use AMD Pro Render because of hardware rendering.
I'm glad if that helped you to come closer to a buying decision.
I took advantage of the Black Friday deal, which ends today. Picked it up for $145.90 which is like the lowest cost for any third party render engine I've seen. I'm looking forward to taking it for a spin and seeing what I can do with it. I'm preparing to step into R23, which I'm compromising on because I can't afford the $4000 price tag yet, but to me Cinema is probably the most thoughtfully laid out and easy to use in comparison to Maya, Blender and Modo. ( I really like Modo but their workflow thought process is convoluted to me.) Cinema's the most straightforward out of them all --but I do like some of Blender's creation tools so I do some modeling tasks in Blender, but the bulk of my Rendering is in Cinema 4D and now that we have the animation rig --I can get much more into the aspects of Cinema I've most wanted to which is basically animation.
More accurately it's closer to $3,500, but yah it's pretty steep. I still own R13 Visualize and support said I can still qualify for a discount on upgrading - an offer which is only available via contacting support, since the option isn't in the store at all - but it's still steep for me. It takes like a thousand off the price sure, but that's still $2,000 something. So I just ran with the subscription.
I'd been giving the Character Object a run with a dinosaur model I have, though I don't think I have any real idea what I'm doing even then xD Lot of weights to fix up but I'm not really sure why I can't adjust the positions of any of the joints - they don't look like they're Restricted or anything but I can't move them. I'm worried about removing any of the joints on the feet either (The 'Toe' preset adds like five joints, which is too much xD)
I own Bodypaint 3D with sculpting R19 and it was the most affordable at the time - now they even don't do that anymore (I was lucky)
seems they are all desperate for a permanent drip feed to our bank accounts
saying that I don't need Mograph for what i do but only on rare occasions I would love to have it
"Permanent" or until you no longer have need for it. I still prefer perpetual when I can get it, but there's times when I find the subscriptions actually feel more appealing. That being said, I like it when developers offer both options - like INSYDIUM has 3-month and 6-month and annual options for their bundle or you can get one/both of their plugins permanently. Something I wish Vray was doing, but $80 a month on top of Cinema's license made me look at Octane/Redshift/Cycles instead.
With things like After Effects I remember subscribing long enough to finish some animations I was working on then un'subbed since I honestly don't use animations enough to justify buying a program like that for just a few projects (Not that Adobe offers perpetuals anymore). Granted nowadays I've come to use DaVinci Resolve instead; free but only missing a few obscure features like VR and not being compatible with Trapcode.
I'm not opposed to the subscriptions when there's a value to be had. Maxon's updates from 20 through 23 have added a lot of real value to their program --especially the face rig Character object. Wheras Maya and Modo really haven't given me much interest when it comes to the value of what they offer. Maya 2020 was little more than bugfixes --with no improvement to working in Hypershade, which the community at large has been begging for for years according to my observations. Cinema 4D Acquired Redshift, Added a lot of new tools and plugins that are of use to me, and with the introduction of the Toon Rig and Face Rig Character Objects, I feel like it's finally reached a point of real value. I think they finally heard what people were saying when it came to animating, so until I can put together the funds for a perpetual license, a subscription keeps me where I want to be. I just canceled my Subscription to American Family Fitness and Pluralsight, bought a Pair of Walking shoes and now it's there for me to explore fully. Oh, and the one other thing that made me consider Cycles4D was that it was Team Render capable. For an IT Guy like me, that was a strong selling point. I can put together a render farm if I need to without a lot of extra licenses and get a decent production pipeline going.
Have you used Redshift before? I keep hearing people talk about it, Octane, and Arnold all the time but I'm entirely unfamiliar with it. I could get it with the subscription for $20 extra but since I already have Cycles I'm not sure what use it'd be (Other than perhaps for some plugins that out of the box support Redshift but would require tinkering with to get working with Cycles). I remember I used to have Maxwell, Indigo, Vray and I swear one other but nowadays I felt it was better to just buckle down and invest in one or at most two. For my 'secondary engine' I was contemplating between Octane or Redshift but I'm not quite sure which to go with.
I'm not against Redshift, but Cycles4D was on sale for $145.90 till the end of the day, today. I couldn't pass up that kind of price. I've had Redshift before when I was working for the university, and I can say it's really good but even at full price, Cycles4D is $200 cheaper. This was basically a strategic purchase because I wanted something that could Render Hair and Volumetric Fire. Octane can do it, and I do own a license for Version 4 but they basically screwed over perpetual license holders by making it impossible to upgrade what you have to the current version. If I started as a subscription holder I wouldn't have minded it. I didn't mind paying the upgrade cost and I've upgraded like three times over the years but suddenly telling us that is no longer valid and we have to buy a subscription? That's where we parted ways. I don't mind paying a maintenence fee but I'm not going to be strong armed into a subscription from being a perpetual license holder.
Sounds like what Maxwell did too, except they took it a step further by making it impossible to use your existing licenses anymore - you HAD to upgrade or just use a different engine. So I just dropped Next Limit and stuck with Vray 'till today when I made the jump to R23 and went with Cycles. Which wasn't a big problem since I mostly used Vray and Indigo anyway.
I don't know how native Cinema handles volumetrics since I've not used theirs just yet, but I know Redshift is compatible with INSYDIUM's X-Particles flames and stuff. It's just Cycles has better compatibility with it since the same group's working on both plugins.
Well being compatible with X-Particles AND TurbulenceFD was a really big selling point. Not to mention, but for what I want to do, Cinema 4D offered a lot of tools natively that are really cool. I'm learning Xpresso and Python right now on Udemy because I want to be able to take advantage of a lot of capabilities that just aren't easily done in other software packages. I'm using AXYZ Anima as well which is natively supported in Cinema so the possiblity of scenes with a lot of people are more easily done. Plus if I don't like rendering in Cinema, you can render the whole scene in Unreal Engine which is a BIG deal. I personally don't want to render in Unreal, but it's there if I need it. To me, Cinema offers the best chance of staying in one application to do everything that you want with a learning curve I can manage. I like Maya, but honestly the Hypershade made me not want to work with it because it's so poorly thought out and Autodesk doesn't seem to be interested in upgrading it. Since I don't have a lot of time, whatever I can do to make things simpler is what I'm after. I'd have actually stuck with iClone if they stopped trying to lock everyone into the Company Store and let us rig and setup rig controls, but they're not having it so I'm not wasting my time wishing.
To be fair Iclone targets the same click and load preset demographic that Daz/poser does, except for animation.
Reallusion is trying to appeal to the Professional game dev community with the live link plugin for UE4 however I doubt any serious game development studio would pay the export licence fees when they can either model superior content them selves or buy it from the Unity or unreal stores for less cost
CC3 is a great resource particularly for someone like myself who recently Migrated away from the Daz/Genesis Character Eco system and from Maxon C4D over to Blender.
I model my own content in Blender for the CC3 base avatars and export pre-animated figures from cc3 to Blender for rendering , which of course makes me an outlier in the Iclone community but I just cant accept the render engine in Iclone although I like the Lipsync& facial animation tools/options.
I have seen the Cycles4D in action and you have made a good choice for your node based external engine for C4D as those guys at Insidyum have done a great job at integration.
I tried to move away from C4D to Blender, I can't C4D has too much superior polygon modelinhg tools to ditch in favor for Blender
I like Blender but it's way off to call it in for good
I use both
just watching your film
awesome
"Galactus Rising" was My last major C4D project before my complete migration from both the Mac OS and C4D.
It was rendered on a year 2007 Macbook in C4D R11.5 Studio ( hence the 6 year production time LOL!!)
I used the Old 'Riptide pro" plugin to import animated genesis figures into C4D as .obj/MDD from Daz studio.
Now I use the Hard-ops and Box Cutter Add-ons for my modeling in Blender,on my new win 10 rig, and the realtime EEVEE veiwport display ,during look dev, has spoiled me for any other program.
I am working on an animated web series based on the popular video game franchise "HALO" that will be rendered in EEVEE with some VFX shots in Cycles which renders Volumetric smoke& fire ,much better than EEVEE.
am I right that Boxcutter and Hard ops is similar to KIT-OPS (I have the free version, pretty cool stuff)
keep up the good work
you doing great
Kitops is more of an automated way to do kitbashing of preset shapes.
Hard-ops is literally a completely alternate hard surface workflow for Blender particularly for managing large numbers of nondestructive. sharpening beveling and boolean modifiers.
looking good
No offense, but I was asking about Cycles 4D in Cinema 4D --Not Blender. I understand you like Blender, but Blender has it's own section of the forum. I'd appreciate it if you'd relocate your Blender conversation somewhere else, please.
all your questions have been answered
I can't see any more value to be added to your conversation and as far as Blender is concerned it is the creator of Cycles, so please respect the makers of Cycles because without them there would be no Cycles 4D.
Thank You