Cinema 4D R11.5 Announced

For those interested, Maxon announced R11.5 here:

http://www.maxon.net/en/home.html


Thomas P.

 

Shweeeeeet.

I so love C4D interface ...

 

Hmm I wonder if Zbrush's GoZ (coming out end of Sept), will work with 11.5? I should probably wait to upgrade

 

Looks like an interesting upgrade..

Here is a feature from the full feature list that might make some unity folks happy


CINEMA 4D Core

* FBX now supports Joints, multiple UV tags and evaluates expressions upon export.

Full list can be found here:
http://www.maxon.net/en/products/new/cinema-4d-r115/new-feature-list.html

I would love anyone who gets 11.5 to report back about the data interchange between 11.5 and Unity.

Cheers,
Jeremy

 

I have been using 11.5 for a while now (beta tester) and found it to be great. However, I didn't have enough time to check if rigged characters export in a nicer fashion quite yet. Anybody care to share their rigged characters with me to test this can contact me.


Thomas

 

Honestly, I got R11, and what comes out in my exported FBX is strictly the same as in C4D

And I'm heavily using Xpresso coffee formulas, constraints and stuff, practically on each of the 41 joints 10 helpers ...

I wonder how it could be better ^^

edit : or maybe we won't be forced to bake IKs on every frame anymore ?!? It would be so huge ...

 

Does this mean that the lack of multiple UV set export via FBX has finally been resolved in R11.5?

 

It would appear to be the case. I have not tested this however since I just upgraded to R.11 and not 11.5....Yet. I do not qualify for a free upgrade to 11.5 apparently, even though I upgraded to R11 last week. Grrrrr. Maxon is being reasonable about it at least and offering me a nice deal to upgrade to 11.5

Hey Thomas can you confirm the multiple UV set .fbx export?

n0mad I dare to say there are a few Cinema 4D / Unity users who would gladly offer their first born's to see your process for CA data export first hand. Personally I am a game designer/level designer and not a character animator so my interest is more general knowledge and workflow.

Cheers,
Jeremy

 

Hey there,

I would be pleased to help you, but I'm afraid my process is so basic that you would be disappointed :roll:

Anyway, here it is :

1) Character Rigging. You don't have to be restrictive at all on this one, just put whatever you want in term of animation (constraints, formulas, xpresso, IKs, physics, etc)

2) baking the joints driven by something else than keyframes.

--> Here, everyone would have a very custom script, following his Rigs rules.
For example, mine got a 41 joints hierarchy, with 4 helpers (legs feet), 5 up vectors, 10 rotation sliders (for the hands), 4 IKs (feet legs), 6 Z-rotation joints (legs, feet, forearms), 20 constraint tags, and 1 basic handmade physics switch for the feet (for them to stick the ground).
So all of these "custom" joints have to be baked.

In order to do that, I use a custom version of the one and only script you can find on Unifycommunity.
Modified because I didn't want it to bake all the joints, indeed.

Warning : before launching the script, you have to turn off keyframed Animation for those joints, as it does an iterative frame calculation, each frame would take in account the previous baked one, and produce a weird result.
Don't forget to work on a clone file of your original one, we never know ...

3) delete all of your helpers, constraints, IKs, etc, anything that would alter your joints.

4) turn on keyframed Animation for your baked joints

5) if everything is ok, you will now have joints baked on each frame, which can be huge for big animations. I personally added some functions that would turn this baking into intelligent recognition, like what should be baked on each frame, or what should only write on already written frames.

An additional method would be to import your resulting FBX into 3DS, and use the "reduce keyframes" function. This is a very powerful pattern recognition tool that can cut your frames by 10 times, without altering your animation at all.

6) Enjoy

 

Great ... I own the commercial version of Cinema4D R11 for less than a month and there's the update with the FBX functions I've been looking for.

Being the sceptic that I am ... can someone who has it please confirm if it really DOES work better?
Is baking animations not needed any more?

 

Hey Motionblur

Confirmation of this working aside, as far I have been told by Maxon, unless you bought a shinny new version of R11 within the month you will have to fork out more $ to upgrade to R11.5 So if you just upgraded to R11 from any version prior this past month, you will have to pay again to upgrade to 11.5. I was able to get a credit on my 11.5 upgrade price since I upgraded last week to R11, but who knows what kind of deal you might get. I would call you Maxon rep and see.

Cheers,
Jeremy

 

Thanks so much for useful info

taux simulation credit auto comparatif pret automobile calcul voiture Lors d’une simulation crédit auto, le souscripteur doit remplir certains renseignements taux simulation credit auto comparatif pret automobile calcul voiture

 

Thank you n0mad for the information and process. Very helpful indeed.

Cheers,
Jeremy

 

Decidedly mixed results with 11.5 on a simple test...

I created an object with a three joint chain, added IK and animated the goal. Exported to Unity via FBX and it worked fine, automatically baking from the IK goal to the bones. Cool.

Next I created a new Null Target and constrained the IK goal to it. I then animated the Null Target. When exporting to Unity via FBX it did not automatically bake the motion to the IK Goal. That's not surprising, but then...

I chose the IK goal and baked the motion to it from the Null Target it was constrained to. It looks fine in Cinema, with one keyframe per frame, but when I exported that to Unity I got two awful "pops" in the animation, same as I often encountered with R11.

So, looks like some things are better and some are the same. Obviously more testing is needed. I also haven't tried the baking script in R11.5 yet.

Kevin

 

Thanks for your feedback Kevin :wink:

 

my "great" was a little sarcastic... I know that I'll have to pay for it. Otherwise they woudn't have timed the release of 11.5 to the 50% rabate action the way they did.

I just want to know if exporting joints works flawlessly before I pay more money. That and the bucket renderer are the only two things I'd care about in the update. Maybe the SubPoly displacement speed-up, too.

Aw, well. *shrug*
Maybe with the new exporter UT can improve Unity a little further on their side, as well. I'll keep hoping but still wait with the upgrade.

 

Wait, joints are already exporting perfectly with my R11 ... What do you mean by perfectly ? Without baking IKs, constraints and formulas ?

 

When I export animations to Unity from c4d R11, the animations have little hiccups in them (there are frames in the animation where the object doesn't move and then the next frame it moves to it's designated spot).

Does this happen to anyone else? Also, has it been fixed with the new FBX plugin in R11.5?

 

I don't have this problem at all :/

 

Any chance of sharing the offending "popping" file?

 

Yes - that's what I meant.

 

Ok, then something I realized lately is that it's nearly impossible

Because the usual way to put keyframes on IKs is relative to the amount of reduction you want on an all-baked-frames basis.

If C4D had to make your export so effortless, it would mean that you'd have no control on it.
Like how much reduction do you want ? What do you want to keyframe ? What objects are helpers or not ? What helper do you want to keep ? etc ...

The best solution that Maxxon could offer is Autodesk's pattern reducer.

But maybe I'm wrong, because as long as we can do it manually, then it can be automated.

 

I don't mind if I had to do all that in the end but it's in general a lot easier to tweak if you can skip the baking/exporting during the testing phase.

Blender's exporter work's super smooth but I'd rather learn Cinema than Blender for animation. I mean - right now I'm not *the* über-animator, anyways. I'll stick to modeling and texturing for some time as that's what I'm good at ^^

Still it would be cool to have the option of simply importing a rigged animated model.

BTW - what about 2UV Sets? Does this work, now? Just curious.

 

We have this problem as well, seems to happen on frame 11/12 most of the time and then periodically afterwards.

 

Check your FBX export settings, Animation Options, Key Filters.. make them all 0% and see if that helps.

 

Oh yes I forgot this one ...

It will solve the problem, I remind having the same now.

When two keyframes have the same approximate values (which means too close positions), this filter will just crop the animation for one of the two. Even at 1%.

 

I'm also curious about this. Can any 11.5 user shed any light on that issue?

 

Guys ... Did you just read the thread ? :roll:

 

I did read the thread, but Maxon telling me something works now and someone actually confirming it works are two different things in my book. So I was hoping someone who actually uses 11.5 now could validate this information.

I'm still deciding whether to apply for the upgrade plan (with the 50% discount which ends today) and that depends on some of the new functions working as intended.

 

Don't forget this thread

 

Doesn't work. Changing the animation filters doesn't do anything to change the animation.

Any other tips? Am I supposed to use the plugin or whatever in order for the animation to work properly with the filters?

 

I can't find a clue anymore :/

In addition to the filter on export, FBX importer has the same parameters, so if you're importing your FBX in the first place, you should deactivate those filters too.

 

Speaking of FBX, has anyone tried the R11.5 and found the broken phong edges to be exported properly? I haven't been able to import broken phong shade edges into Unity ever, figured it was some kind of FBX bug. Makes it really difficult when it comes to making clean simple models with hard edges :/

 

You can download the C4D 11.5 demo, it is fully functional for 40 days.

I did a couple of quick Joints test, and it looks like the exporter handles them much, much better. My bones based animation was totally messed up when using the 2010 fbx exporter (but you can revert back to the previous one if needed).

gr.jakko

 

What specifically do you have to do to get clean animation from C4d to Unity now? I'd love to update to 11.5.

 

Well I downloaded the demo and was pleased to find out that the fbx 6 exporter exports my animations glitch free!

Unfortunately, the fbx 2010 exporter creates problems with the models in that the phong shading gets screwed up and it randomly deletes polygons on the model. Is anyone experiencing this?

Try exporting one of the mocca characters from c4d to see what I mean. If your not experiencing this, then why is it happening to me?

 

Also noticed that the 2010 exporter doesn't handle multiple materials per object correctly (in my tests at least), while the fbx 6 exporter takes care of it perfectly.

Still no one size fits all solution when using C4D. Bummer.

gr.jakko

 

I wonder if Unity will implement something similar to GoZBrush. Unity Tech would then have complete control over the import process using c4d's script system. That way, Unity Tech wouldn't have to rely on Maxon fixing their broken fbx exporter.

 

I'm not getting any random polygon deletions here, are you sure you're not just seeing it delete the HyperNURBS and other NURBS shapes? It doesn't export the high res mesh unless you make that editable first.

On the multiple materials stuff again not seeing the same problems here. Maybe if you guys could share a scene-file that shows the problem could help to debug.

 

No, all my meshes are editable polygon objects. Are you on Windows by any chance?

 

Dual boot, OSX and Windows. Maybe if you have a scenefile to share that I could test?

 

Sorry to dig this old thread out of nowhere but I do have problems with wacky animations after cinema 4D export. This is really a heavy problem since I do want to use slow motion playback in Unity.

I do have a bone based model which I animated using a coffee script. After baking the animations everything looks fine inside of cinema. If I go export to FBX, it seems that not all keyframes are exported. I tried really a lot with interpolation options and settings, but even if cinema plays the animation quite well after reimport, Unity does not.

I tried the R11 exporter as well as the new 11.5 exporter, but with the new exporter the model is not animated at all. I also tried to switch to Joints, but this breaks my mesh

Maybe anyone has figured out how to export animations without juggling to Unity at all?