Are there any Cinema 4D users here?
Does that answer your question?
It may be more popular outside of this site’s audience, though.
I’m a C4D user, you can see some of the tools and rigs I’ve created for it on my site here - http://www.graphite9.com/Rigs.html http://www.graphite9.com/CinemaDownloads.html
These days though I find myself working more with Maya and less with Cinema although for client work I still do a good bit with Cinema (mainly rigging I guess, a little animation sometimes too).
Cheers,
Brian
Great stuff Horganovski. Being a technical artist primarily using Maya and working in a Cinema 4D studio I’ve found the lack of documentation horrific while trying to merge what I’ve learned in Maya. It’s a great thing that the method of being a technical artist is the same no matter where you go and what your using. An artist proves his worth by keeping his consistency while using any tool in from of them.
Cinema is slowly growing on me though.
Thanks. I guess in some ways I’m heading in the opposite direction. I started learning 3D with Cinema and I’d get cheezed off when I’d watch animation tutorials and see Maya animators using tools like Tween Machine to speed up their workflow. So that was my motivation to start scripting in Cinema (with COFFEE initially, then Python later when it was added). I managed to write a Tween Machine equivalent and a few other tools and went from there. The Python docs are horrible IMO so it’s tough to get started and often you run into things that just aren’t implemented or possible yet which can be frustrating.
When I got started with Maya I felt like a kid in a candy shop and couldn’t believe how much I could do with even a basic grasp of MEL. I also find the nodal architecture and the way you can get an overview of the entire scene through the hypershade/node editor to be fantastic and it feels claustrophobic now in some ways when I’m rigging in C4D after working with Maya for a while, especially trying to dissect a rig someone else built can be pretty tedious.
The other thing that pushes me towards Maya is how slow Cinema gets when you increase the object count in the scene. With even a couple of basic rigs loaded it can really bog down. Given the choice to animate in Maya vs C4D there’s just no contest IMO.
On the positive side, if you are doing mograph or illustration-style work Cinema is more ‘artist friendly’ I guess and can do some cool motion graphic tricks out of the box that would need plugins or scripting for in Maya. It has some cool deformers too, a negative being that you often run into priority issues that are unsolvable when you try to combine things.
My main interest is character animation though and I love to animate in Maya so that’s my focus these days. I write tools for it too, mainly animation workflow stuff, but some rigging tools too.
Some examples here like a ghosting tool that got a great reaction from a lot of animators https://vimeo.com/50029607 and a weight painting tool https://vimeo.com/51260543. Other bits and pieces here - http://www.graphite9.com/MayaDownloads.html
Cheers,
Brian