Posts by BryceHowitson

Asking if Blender is “good” is a very relative term in the same way as asking which hammer and saw were used to build a house. Really you could use most an hammer or saw to build a house and it comes down to understanding the theories of construction more than owning the same tools as they builder down the street.

In the world of 3D the basic concepts are very much the same (menu location and terminology differ slightly). You need to get stared understanding how the world of 3D works (modeling types/styles, texturing, lighting, rendering, post) and realizing that you won’t be creating something that taxes the abilities of any software right away. Blender has almost all the same features/capabilities as Max/Maya/Lightwave/C4D and its cost makes for a very low barrier to entry.

As was stated before you will want to specialize down the road, but you still have to learn the basics before you need to worry too much which package is the absolute best for you. When you are ready to specialize I assume your looking into video game dev (Thats about all I can think of for integration into C#) in which case I believe 3DS Max is pretty much the standard for that part of the industry.

Fixed the link for you because there were a couple of scwiffy characters. Should be OK now.

Thanks

I just noticed that Maxon is shipping C4D 12 today. Maxon Cinema 4D 12 Studio

As usual there are a bunch of new features, but the one I found most interesting is something they’re calling “linear workflow”. Seems like the wrong name to me but it essentially removes all the gamma correction from scenes/textures so they’re all the same baseline.

Any new features that stuck out to anyone else?

Unless of course he’s the type of guy that’s into active-gpu renders such as octane-render, arion, and few others.

Octane render looks really cool. Too bad I spent my money on an ATI video card

Yep according to Mental Images their only product that uses the video processor for acceleration is Iray. MentalRay is completely CPU based so you won’t see much if any difference there by using a new video card.

Nvidia has been pushing something called CUDA for quite a while that was supposed to turn your GPU into essentially another processor core that would assist with rendering. Basically if you had a 4 core CPU your app would think it had 5 cores to utilize for renders. It seems like a good idea since most GPUs are optimized for geometry calculations, but unfortunately it doesn’t seem like that project has really been adopted by any of the major players in the 3D industry.

That said you should see some difference working in the program itself especially if you enable Open GL/Direct 3D interactive previews.

Just a heads up. Dual GPU ’s don’t help a whole lot unless your gaming (games are pretty much the only software thats taking advantage of that much video power). If your looking to improve your 3D workflow/general desktop experience, your probably better off with one more powerful card than two less powerful ones. The HD5670 is a pretty nice card with a lot of power for the price. You’ll see a huge performance increase over the x1550 in most games, but again not as much of an increase in most other things.

If your not a big gamer you might want to look into a workstation grade card (Nvidia Quadro or ATI Fire lines) Those will give you a big boost in your realtime previews and workflow but still won’t do a lot for rendering.

@BryceHowitson – I have played with the 3D planes in After Effects but it just like moving a flat image around.

Right think of everything in AE as a sheet of paper. You can stack sheets of paper in front or behind each other and move the camera around them, but as soon as you move the off to the side/top of the sheet of paper its revealed for what it is a flat object without depth. This is where the concept of 2.5D comes in. AE understands 3D space in that the sheets of paper can be arranged in x/y/z space from each other producing some cool stuff like Depth of Field, Parallax, etc. However AE doesn’t allow for full 3D in that every object can only have a front and back and cannot have sides, top or bottom.

What this means for you and your client is that all 3d objects need to be animated and rendered in another program so that your always feeding AE a flat object (either video or still images) that contains the illusion of 3D space. The best advise I ever got when working with AE/C4D was to think of AE as a compositeing program and not a content creation program. Meaning use C4D to make your objects, animation, lighting, etc and then use AE to do things that would be really time/render intensive in C4D like DoF, color grading, and compositing your animation with other footage. The nice thing about using C4D for the content creation process is that it can export a composition that contains your animation with an alpha channel so you don’t have to worry about “cutting out” your video inside AE giving you even more illusion of 3D space.

And I think the real answer to your original question is that even though After Effects feels like a moving version of Photoshop, it doesn’t have the same tools to understand/manipulate a 3D model the way Photoshop Extended can.

To the best of my knowledge you CANNOT open a 3d model in AE. You must render it out as either still frames or animation and then import into AE as footage. C4D is actually capable of creating an AE project file that includes your render footage and some camera data (as if its pre-tracked) but it still requires that C4D do the rendering. Basically AE is what’s called 2.5D it doesn’t support objects having depth, but they can exist in 3D space. So what this means is that you’ll have to create all the animation within C4D and then use AE for finishing.

Nick Campbell has a bunch of tutorials that illustrate the process, but he never mention’s that you need an exchange plugin to make this work: Available from Maxon

GSG tutorials: Camera Mapping and projection part 1 and Part 2

Daphne & Apollo by Adel Adili http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=121&t=250175

That style for Daphne & Apollo is really cool. Its not photoreal but it sure ups the artistry of the image.

Yes you are absolutely right! That has been my #1 request since the launch of this site. All I can say at this stage is that its in the works.

As long as its on the todo list and isn’t getting lost, I’m happy.