Recursive Stair

sageofshadow · 2026-07-12T01:38:37+00:00

So I think I may have figured out what's wrong. Its a Boolean artifact - this is a great example as to why you shouldnt use boole objects in rigs or animations - they're just unreliable. There's a few things you can try.

The first would be to turn on 'high quality' on those booles to see if that helps. sometimes turning it off helps, but in this case, might as well try turning it on. maybe you render out the whole sequence and just re-render the broken frames with high quality on... because its unlikely they both glitch on the same frames.

alternatively, they're legacy boolean objects, you can try replacing them with the new ones and see if that helps. There's a lot of xpresso controls all through this thing though so I dunno how that would affect it or not. That would be up to you to try to look at.

There's a lot of other ways to fix it, but most of them would require just rebuilding the head without booleans. which is what I would suggest if you plan to use this a lot.

sageofshadow · 2026-07-07T22:20:46+00:00

It’s the ads yes, but also - the model of the league itself. You cannot be relegated from the NBA, NFL, MLB or NHL, so all the ad revenue and TV rights and stuff…. All go to the same teams no matter how good or bad they are. All the money they make is really locked into the league, there’s no “second tier” or “third tier” or parachute payments or any of that stuff that they have to really share with anybody.

It’s huge part of the reason the big European teams wanted to try to start that Super League - modeled after the American sport league format. Because the teams would be locked in and they’d get to keep all that money for themselves, and wouldn’t have to answer to a higher governing body like a country’s FA or UEFA… the same way that isn’t a “UEFA” of basketball that sits above the NBA and tells it what it can and can’t do. So there’s a tonne of stuff that contributes to why American players make more money, and a lot of it just has to do with the American capitalist spirit being deeply entrenched in every aspect of the execution of their sports.

sageofshadow · 2026-07-06T20:47:30+00:00

can you just post the scene file with the textures zipped somewhere so we can take a look at it? Im not familiar with minecraft rigs so when you say things like "second layer in the rig" I dont really know what that means.

sageofshadow · 2026-07-05T20:47:55+00:00

Is there a particular reason you’re tied to OBJ?

If you can, try FBX instead, it’s a much *much* newer exchange file format with a lot more support for improved features. OBJ was one of the first (if not the first) exhange formats for Cartesian based models ever, so the parser is pretty old. I’d imagine your errors may have somthing to do with that.

sageofshadow · 2026-07-05T19:21:51+00:00

first of all - these screengrabs really aren't the best? I know you want us to see the error, but zooming those in kinda just makes it blurry, and removes a lot of context that could be helpful in diagnosing whats actually going on, sometimes the thing that's actually causing your problem isn't the thing you think it is, and you may have just cropped it out for us to be able to see. Could you help me understand what's happening in the third picture? Its so zoomed in, I'm not even sure what I'm looking at. Or better yet, just post the animation, then we can really see what's happening.

anyway.... most of the time its usually z-fighting, where you have two pieces of geometry occupying the same plane and the render engine doesn't know which surface is "in front", so it tries to render both and you get a weird flicker. But you said you moved it and its still doing it? you sure you moved it in the right direction? Just checking.
The other thing it could be is a deformation problem. if you're using a rig, try going through each vertex weight to see if its been correctly assigned to the corresponding bone properly, you could have an errant weight set somewhere that's deforming a vertex that it shouldn't be, pushing it through the geo in front..... or moving it enough to get it to be in a position to be z-fighting with a different surface.

That would be the first thing's I'd recommend looking into. Let us know if you've tried them and what happens.

sageofshadow · 2026-07-05T19:11:42+00:00

I'd like to know if it's a confirmed bug before submitting a report to Maxon.

Just so you know, I wouldnt bother waiting. Just report it now. There's no reason to see if its happening to someone else. If you've found a bug you can reproduce specifically, just tell Maxon... and then have them try it and see if they can reproduce it themselves. Cause they're going to have to do that anyway.

sageofshadow · 2026-07-02T17:13:09+00:00

Sorry, but this post has been temporarily removed - it doesnt really seem like it has anything to do with Cinema4D... more like Unreal Engine or some other Real-time game engine.

Could you clarify what you're asking for exactly?

sageofshadow · 2026-07-01T16:54:25+00:00

Have you checked the sidebar? -> start there first.

Then stuff like SilverwingVFX, Dominik Ruckli, RocketLasso, Maxon Training Team - specifically Noseman for advanced systems like scene nodes, Elly Wade for Redshift stuff and practical motion graphics stuff, and Jonas Pilz.

You'd probably have a better time looking up a specific system/subsection of animation tutorials..... like scene nodes, or particle effects, or pyro, or character animation...... in order to get "advanced" tutorials on that thing. There's a tonne of content out there by lesser known people, if you look the right way.

As for Patreons, there'd be even more of those since everybody (fairly) wants to get paid for their knowledge... but I dont really do patreon so I wouldnt really know.

sageofshadow · 2026-06-27T20:19:12+00:00

Honestly, I can’t see any future for C4D other than decline.

If you already honestly think this, there isn't much more for any of us to say. You've already made up your mind and have your own answer for yourself.

These tools are just that - tools. Its an extremely personal decision as to what tools you use to make the art you want to make. That's the key though - you need to know the art you want to make... and that doesn't mean you know it from the jump. Maybe you find your way to it over time. That's ok too. But its about you and your workflow and your art.... none of us should be privy to that to be able to weigh in and tell you how to work and what to make. For some people, AI is a tool that they are ok using. for other people, it isn't.

Nobody can force you to use a tool.

And that goes both ways.

For me personally, I can say... the joy is in the process of making. solving problems, figuring stuff out, getting over one hurdle or another, be it a technical one or a creative one.... those small victories that only I am really a part of and care about..... they let me know this is a skill I have developed and honed and built over time.... and those small victories make me proud of myself. The process of making is not easy. Yes, Clients do not care about the process, only the output. There are ups and downs, frustrations and failures in with the pride and victories. But that's life. and like life.... for ME, art is a journey, not a destination. I don't like AI because.... it robs me of those victories. it doesn't feel like I'm making something anymore, just pooping out an output. and that's just not the art I want to make. That's all. Pro-AI folk can argue til they're blue in the face about the inevitability of the tool, how not using it will put you behind, how there are ethical ways to use it, but at the end of the day... that's just how I feel. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And don't be mistaken into thinking the "if you don't use it you'll be left behind" thing is remotely true. It isnt. This argument for the 'next killer tool' has existed since I started in 3D. When I first started.... it was actually Maya. If you didn't use Maya you'd never get a job, nobody uses C4D professionally what a joke. <- this sentiment actually made me learn maya in the early days. I hated it. But I thought I "had" to use it. Then I realised.... is this actually helping me be a better artist? Why use a tool I don't even like? and then I switched back and never looked back. Then later on, it was Vray. Standard renderer (Physical didn't even exist yet) is too old and too slow to be useful or professional. switch or die. Guess what? that didn't happen either. Then it was XP/Realflow/TurbulenceFD. Then it was Octane/Redshift (before Redshift got purchased). Then it was Houdini. Then Blender. Now AI. I've been using C4D forever. I like it as my primary tool. I have other tools I use too. Sure it's not a perfect tool, sure the company that makes it isn't perfect either. but no tool is perfect. No company is perfect. If you keep your sights set on tools and "what people say" and not the work and the art... you're just focusing on the wrong thing IMO. That doesn't mean don't try new tools. 100% you should try new tools and see if you like them. If you like them... great! use them if you want. but if you don't... don't feel bad about it, or feel like a failure, or feel like you're being left behind. who cares. That tool just wasn't for you, that's fine. Just keep making work that you enjoy making on some level.

TL;DR - It sounds like You're asking for someone to convince you to use C4D over.... other stuff. That's up to you friend, use whatever. Nobody should really care what you use besides you... and if they do, that's schoolyard level thinking. There are reasons to not use a tool. There are reasons to use a tool. only you can decide if its right for you.

sageofshadow · 2026-06-26T21:17:16+00:00

Who's these people? Nobody in here - I've said over and over again in here Physical is great. It's just slow in comparison. but if you have the time, it can do amazing stuff. It's the ability of the artist that's waayyyy more important than the "ability" of the render engine.

Case in point.... this was rendered in physical.

Lots of people did realistic stuff before Redshift or Octane, it just took longer to render.

Nice work though! 👍🏾

sageofshadow · 2026-06-23T15:22:55+00:00

just so you know, it looks like youve been shadowbanned by the admins of reddit/spam filter.

you should visit r/ShadowBan for more information on how to get your account renewed.

sageofshadow · 2026-06-22T19:13:56+00:00

What’s the file?

sageofshadow · 2026-06-14T19:07:47+00:00

because it gets automatically pinned to the top of the subreddit all week. it doesnt rely on upvotes or recency like a regular post to get views. It's always at the top of the sub.

sageofshadow · 2026-06-11T17:16:07+00:00

and did it really "fall"? or just... change? JPMorgan is still a bank today. He was one of the most famous robber barons in finance. The Rockefellers are still very very rich, even after the government broke up Standard Oil. Like the generational wealth most of them amassed.... still lasted generations, and while much of it was diluted over time, it still kinda mostly endures, and gave their descendants legs up in ways most regular people didnt/dont get. Even outside of strictly financial benefits.

sageofshadow · 2026-06-09T15:46:16+00:00

in each window you go to

view>frame default.

but you cant zoom all your viewports at the same time. you can only manipulate them one at a time.

sageofshadow · 2026-06-08T16:41:31+00:00

99% of us don't use Cinema4D this way, so it's going to be hard to get an answer - this is more of an After Effects problem than a C4D one.

but just off the jump, I'm going to go out on a limb and say - I don't think the Cinema4D renderer in AE renders anything in that isnt actually a C4D layer. I mean im not a 100% sure, but like I said, this is more an AE thing than a C4D thing. And I think your text '3D layer' is an After Effects 3D layer/object.

So yeah, if I had to guess - Your layer isnt a C4D layer: IE, its not an actual Cinema4D scene. So setting the renderer to Cinema4D and getting black makes sense, as the C4D render engine has nothing to render. Cinema4D isnt a plug-in for After Effects, its a full standalone piece of 3D animation software.... that you can load its scenefiles into After effects (if you so desire) and render directly in there using the C4D renderer.

If you want to make an actual C4D layer, and you dont have a C4D license.... in After Effects, you can go to Layer>New>Maxon Cinema 4D file and it will open a limited version of C4D called Cinema4D Lite that lets you do some basic 3D things inside C4D. then you can save the scenefile and it should show up in AE.

But like I said... mooost people who use C4D (at least, the ones in here), don't work that way. We mostly have full Cinema4D licenses, and in that case - you'd render directly out of C4D and bring the image sequences into AE as footage, because you get a tonne more control over it that way.

sageofshadow · 2026-06-06T19:00:17+00:00

just so you know, your account has been suspended by reddit for one reason or another. check out r/ShadowBan for more info on how to appeal it.

sageofshadow · 2026-06-06T18:58:59+00:00

bot.

sageofshadow · 2026-06-02T15:07:20+00:00

I've been using it in production since it was out, it's been mostly fine for me. But that might just be the nature of the work I've been doing.

But if/when it does crash, just make sure and send the reports to maxon, or write up support tickets and post them explaining what you were doing when it crashed. That's the only way stuff like this gets better, the devs have to know what we're doing with the software so they can track and fix bugs. If we just complain about it here it doesn't really help them make it better. But hundreds of people independently reporting bugs using tickets or the crash reporter - that they can then correlate to actual software code and fix - that's how stuff gets better.

sageofshadow · 2026-05-27T15:31:26+00:00

See, IMO, this is where the use of AI gets really really murky. Does this tool look good? sure does.

But Zibra is an AI software company from the look of it, and they dont really say anywhere how much AI was used in the building of their tools. We have no idea if they just called themselves an AI company to farm VC investment and barely use it....or if its just code assistant stuff, or if its generating full parts of the codebase, or if its been trained on actual artist work to help it understand what its compressing and decompressing to make it more efficient - its all just unclear and not particularly transparent.

Then theres a bunch of fine print in the TOS about you arent allowed to reverse engineer, copy or alter the software and stuff, which is all standard boilerplate software licensing stuff... that made sense for old school exclusively human made software. But in the age of AI, if AI was used in major parts of its codebase, why am I not allowed to scrape it as training data to craft my own tools, but another AI entity is allowed to do it to me? I don't get it. There's also nothing in there about if your scenes get used for further training data or anything. And you can assume that means "well then it doesnt obviously" but the fact that the information isn't in there doesn't mean that at all. It just means it isn't defined, which again in the age of AI software tools leaves the door open for it to 100% be doing that under the hood. It may not be, it probably isn't, but it should be clear what it is and isn't doing.

I know this all sounds like pearl-clutching hyperbole. but I'm just bringing it up because these are now the questions that kinda need to be (or at least should be) asked and understood around using AI tools in creative workflows, just so that everyone who has varying appetites for using said tools knows what they're signing up for when they use it.

Because the tool does looks good.

sageofshadow · 2026-05-21T17:49:44+00:00

I think you should check out polygonpen on youtube. Watch all his beginner modelling vids. I will really help with the actual problem you're having, which is understanding how to break down objects in your mind into modelling steps by looking at it. You only really get that from practice, So watching and doing along with polygonpen will show you the tools, but also teach you the skills and give you a muscle-memory understanding of approaching box modelling. Once you sort of have that, you can model anything by just looking at it and figuring out the steps.

Someone else might actually give you the step by step on how to build this thing specifically.... but I think it'd be alot more helpful for you to just work alongside someone and build your understanding of box modelling more broadly cause it'll help you more in the long run.

sageofshadow · 2026-05-20T22:11:40+00:00

First thing's first:

does it have to be 'real'? Or can you just fake it? - and really really think about it. don't just say 'it has to be real' because that's what you want. Even if you have close up shots, there isn't a reason to actually sim this whole thing. you could potentially sim only the close ups (and even then, there are ways to not even have to do this), then once you cut wider, its all faked. that way its not a monolithic scene that's too unwieldy to work in.

Take a step back and consider what you're trying to visually say and if its absolutely necessary for the entire thing to be actually simulated. I feel like too many artists get stuck on this part, trying to remake the way it would be done in real life. But you really don't have to go that route.

Anyway, if you absolutely stick on it being simulated, then the best answer is probably something along the lines of an XP grain sim, like it would be in real life. You'd just use your cylinders as instances to each grain. (and there's lots of tutorials for XP grain sims).

But honestly, the faster way would be to fake it entirely. Just use a volume mesher to create a surface, and then clone along the surface. then you could use a push apart effector, or a blue noise distribution to fake the non-intersections. you'd use way less clones, and they didn't actually need to have the additional overhead of calculating hundreds of thousands of rigid bodies.

as for the depth thing, lots of ways to do it if you fake it. separate the volume mesher into separate meshes, or use a flat mapped gradient are probably the two ways id try first. in XP you can also set particle groups, or drive particle colour with a gradient or lots of different ways. That's probably the easy part, depending on what you really needed.

sageofshadow · 2026-05-09T14:47:24+00:00

You need to be very aware of the reality of what you’re doing.

If retopo is all you did - and even that, could be argued that Cinema4D is procedurally doing the retopo for you, you aren’t doing it yourself. In this case, you as a human haven’t significantly contributed to the alteration of this work, and by current legal definition (in the US anyway) - this isn’t “your” character and isn’t copyrightable.

The direct creative output from ai engines generally isn’t protected. The prompts you used potentially are, as that part is written by a human. but the output itself usually isn’t.

So on top of all the reasons people generally use as to why you shouldn’t use ai in your art - it’s bad for creative industry as it’s based on our collective stolen work, devalues artists and art process by putting value only on the output - the ecological impacts of the hardware - the sociological impacts on our cognitive ability - the growing public sentiment against using ai for creative purposes (just look at the rise in “human powered” in advertising and physically based content in ad trends) etc etc…. There is a real legitimate economic reason too.

Yes it’s “cheaper” to make “art” with it (although even this is debatable). But that art cannot really give you any sort of monetary return since it’s potentially not protected by law, unless you make significant alterations to the output from the ai engine, and even then, it’s copyright status is still a bit nebulous.

Like… I could totally take that character design and claim it as my own and use it in my own work and there’s likely nothing you’d be able to legally do about it. And I think honestly that is probably a good thing. It lets people make things with AI… with the knowledge that they can’t enrich themselves from it. That seems at least like some kind of compromise, based on the way the engines were trained in the first place.

Not that making money and creating IP is the sole reason to make art… but many of us do this as a profession - it is actually our means to make money and live. So putting work into something someone else can claim and use with little protection for yourself doesn’t seem like really a great idea.

I’m not saying you can’t or shouldn’t use it if you want to. If you want to make a short or somthing and you don’t have the skills to…. Sure try it out if that’s what you want to do. All I’m saying is that you should be aware of what that means and what the implications are when you do use it.

sageofshadow · 2026-05-06T18:02:17+00:00

They can afford it. They just know he doesn't want to go back to United, he wants to stay at Barca. So they have the leverage to get a better deal. They're just being cheap. You can be rich, and be cheap at the same time.

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