Hasta La Motion!

 Prestigious Pixellence awards throws spotlight on students of India’s leading animation mentor.

Creative Multimedia, ‘India’s Largest Digital Media Academy’ and winner of the Best Digital Media Academy in India Award celebrated ‘International Animation Day’ on Sunday, the 28 October, 2018 at Ravindra Bharathi, Hyderabad, Telangana. Leading lights of the animation, VFX and gaming industries graced the event to inspire students and share their insights.

Studio Eeksaurus founder Suresh Eriyat and the man behind the iconic Amaron Batteries clay animation Commercial, Makuta co-founder Pete Draper, the studio behind the CGI-heavy blockbuster ‘Bahubali’, and Gamitronics founder Rajat Ojha graced the event. Gold Animation CEO Rajiv Chilaka couldn’t make it to the event but he greeted the students through a pre-recorded video and offered his best wishes to Creative Multimedia.

Creative Multimedia Services CEO and MD Raja Sekhar Buggaveeti delivered the inaugural address and renewed his commitment to ‘Enhancing Employability’, following which the guests were invited to address the gathering.

Animation maestro Suresh Eriyat delivers a spellbinding master session

Suresh Eriyat, one of India’s most celebrated animation professionals was the chief guest of the day. Reminiscing his childhood days and retracing his career path, he said that animation was always his first love and that during the initial days of his professional career 20 years back when animation was in a nascent stage in India, he was hard put to make animation films despite his passion as there was little demand for the craft then.

Spelling out his work ethic and citing examples from his past projects, he inspired students to always give their best, saying: “I’m a story teller first and I’ve always strived to do the best with every task, no matter how small or big. As young Animators with a promising career ahead, all of you must explore all mediums, especially the manual versions including stop motion animation and clay animation. Familiarise yourself with these mediums before mastering the animation software so as to build a strong foundation. As future artists, you must build your potential and harness your passion to make films that become benchmarks for animation, not just in India but globally.”

He screened an introduction montage of his best animation works followed by two live action commercials that he created for popular chocolate brands Kit Kat and LuvIt. Post the screening, he recreated the entire post-production process of both films using the behind-the-scenes visuals to give students a glimpse into the process of drawings/sketches, shortlisting ideas, set construction, the lighting set-up, the wire work used to manipulate props and characters and the actual shoot.

His final presentation was a brilliant 12-minute Short Film ‘Tokri’ created by his studio using the medium of clay animation. Revealing that the film has been in the making for 8 years now and explaining the extraordinary time and effort it takes to create just one second of high quality clay animation footage, he delved into the depths of the pre-production process with on-set, live-action coverage of the shoot and the behind-the-scenes visuals of the animatronics, production design, prop design, puppet mock-ups, references, miniature set design and the manual lighting and animation. It turned out to be an immersive master session for students. Encouraging students to raise questions, he initiated an interactive session towards the end of presentation and addressed a wide range of queries on the animation process, his professional experience and career in the industry.

Rajat Ojha puts the spotlight on incredible career opportunities in the gaming space

Gamitronics CEO Rajat Ojha and a veteran gaming professional graced the event as a special guest. He delivered a presentation titled ‘Animation in Games and Career Opportunities’. Commenting on the extraordinary potential that the gaming industry offered for career aspirants he exclaimed: “The Gaming industry is by far the largest industry of all in the digital media and entertainment space, offering more than 200 unique career opportunities. The Indian gaming industry comprising about 450+ Gaming studios is valued at INR 2000 crores, ranked 3rd globally in install rankings and is all set to add 62,000 jobs in India in the next five years with a projected growth rate of 16 per cent. The fantastic growth potential of this virtually recession-free industry is enhanced by the vast demand-supply gap. All of you can expect a rewarding, high growth career ahead.”

Presenting the showreel of Gamitronics and showcasing a range of popular titles including Uncharted 4, God of War, HeavyRain and MSG4, Ojha took students on a steep learning curve, elucidating with illustrations, the behind-the-scenes of the design, the animation types and process levels, in-game cinematics and new-age tools such as motion capture and Euforia which are now being widely used in many games to build virtual skeleton and muscles for characters. Stating that body mechanics and timing are critical skills required to achieving good results, he also dwelt on the vital software skills including Wwise Unity, 3D Studio Max, ZBrush and Photoshop.

Discussing career opportunities in the gaming industry, he advised students to follow a multi-pronged approach including registering at leading gaming events, regularly browsing online gaming job portals, joining industry groups and participating in various industry forums apart from other conventional methods to scout for jobs. The presentation made for a great learning opportunity with invaluable tips for students aspiring for a career in the rewarding, roller-coaster world of Gaming.

VFX virtuoso Pete Draper counsels VFX students

Pete Draper, the CGI veteran with several VFX-related books, tutorials to his credit and the co-founder of Makuta, the studio behind the CG of Bahubali graced the event as a special guest. Pete allowed students a sneak peek into his best CG projects through a crisp showreel and held forth on a range of project-critical tools/effects including mapping filters, lighting, explosions, shading, GI walkthroughs and real time systems. Drawing from his vast experience spanning 25 years, he had several words of wisdoms for VFX students. Stressing on the importance of constantly self evaluation to improve skills, he offered: “your ability to create is inversely proportional to your ability to assess.”

In his brief yet informative presentation, Draper thoughtfully included a section on how to prep for a career in VFX. He addressed a range of FAQs including: How to get into the industry?, How to stand out from the crowd?, What’s most important to build a career in VFX? And how to succeed? Narrowing down to the key factor – the showreel, he belted out seven powerful ideas on crafting the perfect showreel that can help one stand out and compete for the big job. Stating that it takes time to succeed, he gave students his formula for success: Practice> Experiment> Fail> Practice> Repeat. Pete wrapped up his presentation by telling students: “Have fun! This is a creative field and a creative career.” And students did have loads of fun with Pete’s presentation, cheering animatedly as the VFX virtuoso left the stage.

The celebrations ended with the coveted Pixellence Awards for excellence in Digital Media Art presented to the winners by chief guest Suresh Eriyat, special guest Rajat Ojha and Creative Multimedia CEO Raja Sekhar. Buggaveeti congratulated the winners and thanked all the guests for attending the event to make it a memorable success.

The post Creative Multimedia’s ‘International Animation Day’ celebrations end on a high note appeared first on AnimationXpress.

See how Blind used Cinema 4D, After Effects, Octane, and Redshift to create several 3D scenes of popular games to announce Xbox Game Pass at E3 2018.

All images courtesy of Microsoft / Blind.

In 2018, for the fourth year in a row, Microsoft and the Ayzenberg Group tapped Los Angeles-based design and brand strategy studio Blind to create content for their high-profile E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) show. While last year’s project was devoted to the launch of the Xbox One X, this year’s goal was to highlight Microsoft’s monthly subscription service, Xbox Game Pass.

Blind’s challenge was two-fold: create something fun and engaging that amps up excitement about Xbox’s subscription service while also announcing current and upcoming games in some kind of creative way.

Collaborating closely with the Ayzenberg Group, Blind’s team, led by Creative Director Matt Encina, used Cinema 4D, After Effects, Octane, and Redshift to create a narrative that builds on Xbox Game Pass’s current drive-thru-themed marketing campaign.

The result brings the drive-thru to life, taking viewers on an animated, 3D adventure past glowing neon signs and game art featuring some of Xbox Game Pass’s current offerings, as well as action-packed dioramas showing off games coming soon to the catalog.

The adventure begins when viewers enter a tunnel into Xbox Game Pass’s animated, 3D drive-thru.

I asked Encina and John Robson, who served as associate creative director on the project, to explain how they dreamed up and executed the captivating project, which took intense coordination between many different teams.

Meleah Maynard: Matt, can you talk your process for dreaming up the kinds of things you do at Blind?

Matt Encina: Sure, my process is definitely something I’ve developed over time. I think that anytime you’re designing you are problem solving. And it’s not an art: It’s a science. I mean, there’s artistry in it, of course, but design is an objective process and you have to drill down to solve key problems.

Blind’s Executive Creative Director, Chris Do, has taught me that you need to make sure you understand things like: What is the goal? What are the challenges? Who is the audience? Once we understand those things, we know that whatever we make will be useful for the client. Then we move on to define the creative parameters.

Throughout the spot, the camera flies through dioramas of famed Xbox games and characters.

From the very first creative kickoff meeting with the client, I try to box in the creative. I find creativity in limitation, so I try to determine a very small box defining what the creative can and cannot be. I don’t like it when anything is possible because then everything is possible, and that is too daunting. Narrowing down allows me to focus 100 percent of my attention on one idea, rather that 1 percent on 100 ideas. (Watch Encina’s video on creating his presentation for Maxon’s 2018 SIGGRAPH booth.)

MM: Once you decided on a narrative for this, where did you go from there?

ME: To visualize the aesthetic, I first designed frames in Cinema 4D and Octane so I could get an idea of the overall look and also some of the key moments. After that I worked with a storyboard artist to create the sequence, and then I teamed up with John Robson to do the animatic. I’ve been working with John since 2006, and the good thing about him he has more of a film background and I have more of a design background and we really push each other throughout the process.

Neon and illuminated signs highlight the breadth of the Xbox Game Pass catalog.

If I can dream up a story, John can come up with ways to do it using C4D and third-party plugins. He’s always the guy who pushes me to try something new. I can be pretty simple in terms of the tools I use, but John is always experimenting on the fringe, and pushes us to adopt new tools and techniques. From there, I just scale up and build the team and hardware according to the specific needs of the project.

After researching how neon looks, Robson and Encina used Cinema 4D to design and create all of the neon signs to appear as realistic as possible.

MM: John, talk about your role in this project and what you tried that was new.

John Robson: There’s definitely been an evolution of how Matt and I work together. We push each other, and with this project, the client knows our potential and wanted to push the bar further too. Matt did some really beautiful style frames and we worked together to come up with ways to expand the drive-thru theme into more of a roller coaster ride. That’s how we came up with the idea for the dioramas. Those were fun, beautiful moments that felt like they were trapped in time. I really like the sense of realism and scale, which makes them feel less CG and more tactile.

Assets from each developer helped bring each diorama to life.

The new technology we tried for this project was Redshift. We worked in 4K and with Redshift, we were able to optimize our scenes and get through everything really fast. We were able to add so much more detail and volumetric lighting. But another big thing was that we didn’t have pre-rendered elements from the client.

We were able to bring in all of the assets from the different game companies and texture and light them to the level we needed on a really tight deadline. Back in the day, it took so many more steps and technical knowledge to create something that was in your head. Some of these shots only took a week from start to finish and they turned out beautifully.

MM: The dioramas are really striking. Explain a bit more about them.

ME: The neon signs are fun and based on actual game content, but we needed something more exciting to announce the new games, like Sea of Thieves and State of Decay.

We tried a lot of things, but they didn’t stick. Then we thought, ‘Hey, maybe there’s a way to incorporate game models into the drive-thru concept?’ So we put together two or three mockups and style frames and the client loved them so much, they expanded the project to include announce a few more games that are coming soon, like Forza Horizon 4.

Using Mixamo, Blind was able to pose game assets, including these for State of Decay, without having to rig the characters themselves.

JR: For the dioramas, we needed to stick pretty closely to what is possible in the game, so we would go back and forth with the game developers to make sure the situations were plausible. They were fun to work on, but we didn’t have a lot of time so we had to think about how to do things pretty quickly. State of Decay needed a hoard of zombies, so we used Adobe’s Mixamo to upload a model. It’s great because it creates the rig for you, which allowed us get a lot of poses really quickly without relying on a character animator for anything other than the kraken with all the tentacles that you see in Sea of Thieves.

After receiving a lot of different assets from the game, Sea of Thieves, Robson used Substance Painter to create all of the textures for the ships, treasure and other elements in the diorama.

MM: Describe how you brought your team together and how you worked with others.

ME: Our process is often the same for a lot of what we do. We try and keep the team as small as possible during development. Once the idea and technique are clear, we build the team based on what we need.

For this project, it was me and a few designers at the beginning, and then I brought on John to flesh things out. Then, in the last half of the project, we brought on six Cinema 4D artists and a Maya artist to get us to the finish line. We like to work that way because it allows us to spend our money very wisely.

With projects that are as big as this, it’s important to make sure everyone is in sync. Over the years, we’ve developed a great relationship with Ayzenberg and our partners at Microsoft, which allows us to work fluidly. When a change comes from the top, we’re able to move quickly, because egos don’t get in the way. Our team always stays objective, always tries to do right by our clients and we serve the best creative we can cook up.

Want more interviews like this? Check out these articles:

• The Rise of Redshift: An Interview With Trevor Kerr of MANVSMACHINE
• Animating 6 PayPal Commercials Using Cinema 4D and Redshift
• Creating the Memorable ‘Humankind’ Titles for TEDxSydney
• A New Look for NBC’s Longtime Hit Show ‘The Voice’

The post Designing a 3D Neon Spot for Xbox Game Pass appeared first on Greyscalegorilla.

Like every year, The Animation Society of India (TASI) hosted the 14th Anifest India at Jai Hind College in Mumbai. Currently in its 18th year, TASI has been in the forefront for encouraging and recognising animation talents across the country along with providing various opportunities for them.

TASI  opened gates of its annual event, Anifest. As the event is rightly called for the animators, by the animators, the 14^th Anifest did saw the honchos from the animation industry and many aspiring animators gather at the auditorium of Jai Hind College, Mumbai.

With an intriguing fun travel video by Anand Baid, the crowd was left hooked to their seats for gthe entire day. The event opened with welcome address from the organisers that included Vaibhav Kumaresh and Vaibhav More – noted names in the animation industry. The first session found Aum Animation Studios founder Vivek Bolar talking about the future of animation with the help of the Open Source software. He gave a detailed presentation on Blender and informed with examples the immense possibilities of the software that’s is now offering cutting edge technology to artists for free.

He further emphasised on its benefits with an intention to create an awareness about the brighter future of the software which isn’t amateur anymore. Bolar also presented ‘Freshness’ (2013), a project that they created with the BETA version of the software for their client, which turned out to be better than their expectation.

He also showed some clips of the creation of their IP – ‘Andy Pirki’, which they have entirely created on Open Source software. They’re now currently working on 78 episodes of seven minutes of the successful animated series. He further mentioned that the approach for creating IPs and doing an outsourced work is entirely different. He said, “The approach while creating an IP and doing it as a service job is very different. If ‘Andy Pirki’ wasn’t our IP, we would have taken an approach and I don’t think we could have made it this way.”

With the minds ignited already, the audience were eager to know more about the industry and how an idea reaches the screen. The doubt was cleared with a fun session by Native Puppets Animation Studio and Academy founder Anand Baid, who showed how to pitch an animated concept by providing a behind the scenes look at how to successfully pitch one’s creative idea. A former DreamWorks India animator, Baid has over 18 years of experience in the field of animation. He segregated the pitches in few points namely Basic Idea, Visual Bible, Animatic, Teaser and Episodic.

Baid showed some humorous and well made clips along with live sound effects and dialogues by himself, from his IP – ‘Raja Mantri ke Royal Adventures’ and made them come alive on the screen. Targeted possibly at five to nine years 06 23 old, ‘Raja Mantri ke Royal Adventures’ follows a king and his ‘mantri’ getting transported to different places and time zones by playing the game of ‘Rock Paper Scissors’. The worlds the duo explored includes the Dino world, the Retro world, the Western world and the tribal world to name a few. He also mentioned how the creators should try to be flexible with their ideas or concepts and be open to make a change if the need arises, to make the animated series popular amongst broadcasters.

Both Bolar and Baid’s sessions were followed by extensive Q&A session where the audience that consisted of students, industry professionals and upcoming artists got their doubts cleared and questions answered.

The crowd left to grab a quick bite during the lunch break, as the hunger for knowledge was not going to end so soon.The next session attracted much more fans as independent artist and professor at Symbiosis, Vishal Wadaye presented the nitty gritties of character design and caricature with live demonstration of a completely new character sketch and caricature of artist Chetan Sharma.

An engineer by profession and trained in painting, Wadaye showed simultaneous expressive and funny rapid line drawing with plan layout followed by the construction of structural drawings. He showed the audience how the perspective in drawing needs to be considered to make any illustration stand out. Wadaye said, “No drawing is good or bad. It’s either mature or immature.” The crowd not only enjoyed the live demo of a cute illustration of Ganpati (the elephant head God), but also got the opportunity to tune in to melodious songs by Wadaye.

Bolar’s previous session was just not enough to give an idea about the Open Source community and hence another session talking about a feature from Blender, Grease Pencil followed. The Grease Pencil feature inside Blender, enables an artist to create fluid hand drawn animation. It was a look back to the period of nostalgia through the real charm of 2D animation using the latest digital technology.

First developed by Daniel Martinez and Lara, Grease Pencil is used to create the layout, planning the environment of the story/content, animation and ability to see the animation in that situation. Bolar showed a 30 seconds clip of a layout design using the Grease Pencil from scratch to the final output. He also showed how the 3D frame is put and the distance is maintained from its background.

The audience were enjoying the seminars when Vaibhav Kumaresh announced about the interesting next session – TASI Viewer’s Choice Awards. The fest saw the screenings and live voting of 18 chosen short animated films created by students across the globe. The list goes as follows – Aesthesis, Baba, Expend, Kim, Maa Tuki (Find me Mother), Mehua, Memo, My Body, Night Witches, Outremer, Parfum Fraise, Quand j’ai remplacé Camille, Sans Gravité, Sonder, Stress, Stuffed, The Stained Club and Touch.

Watch the space to know how tomorrow’s session is going to be all fun again!

The post Anifest 2018 opens its gates appeared first on AnimationXpress.

See how Blind used Cinema 4D, After Effects, Octane, and Redshift to create several 3D scenes of popular games to announce Xbox Game Pass at E3 2018.

All images courtesy of Microsoft / Blind.

In 2018, for the fourth year in a row, Microsoft and the Ayzenberg Group tapped Los Angeles-based design and brand strategy studio Blind to create content for their high-profile E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) show. While last year’s project was devoted to the launch of the Xbox One X, this year’s goal was to highlight Microsoft’s monthly subscription service, Xbox Game Pass.

Blind’s challenge was two-fold: create something fun and engaging that amps up excitement about Xbox’s subscription service while also announcing current and upcoming games in some kind of creative way.

Collaborating closely with the Ayzenberg Group, Blind’s team, led by Creative Director Matt Encina, used Cinema 4D, After Effects, Octane, and Redshift to create a narrative that builds on Xbox Game Pass’s current drive-thru-themed marketing campaign.

The result brings the drive-thru to life, taking viewers on an animated, 3D adventure past glowing neon signs and game art featuring some of Xbox Game Pass’s current offerings, as well as action-packed dioramas showing off games coming soon to the catalog.

The adventure begins when viewers enter a tunnel into Xbox Game Pass’s animated, 3D drive-thru.

I asked Encina and John Robson, who served as associate creative director on the project, to explain how they dreamed up and executed the captivating project, which took intense coordination between many different teams.

Meleah Maynard: Matt, can you talk your process for dreaming up the kinds of things you do at Blind?

Matt Encina: Sure, my process is definitely something I’ve developed over time. I think that anytime you’re designing you are problem solving. And it’s not an art: It’s a science. I mean, there’s artistry in it, of course, but design is an objective process and you have to drill down to solve key problems.

Blind’s Executive Creative Director, Chris Do, has taught me that you need to make sure you understand things like: What is the goal? What are the challenges? Who is the audience? Once we understand those things, we know that whatever we make will be useful for the client. Then we move on to define the creative parameters.

Throughout the spot, the camera flies through dioramas of famed Xbox games and characters.

From the very first creative kickoff meeting with the client, I try to box in the creative. I find creativity in limitation, so I try to determine a very small box defining what the creative can and cannot be. I don’t like it when anything is possible because then everything is possible, and that is too daunting. Narrowing down allows me to focus 100 percent of my attention on one idea, rather that 1 percent on 100 ideas. (Watch Encina’s video on creating his presentation for Maxon’s 2018 SIGGRAPH booth.)

MM: Once you decided on a narrative for this, where did you go from there?

ME: To visualize the aesthetic, I first designed frames in Cinema 4D and Octane so I could get an idea of the overall look and also some of the key moments. After that I worked with a storyboard artist to create the sequence, and then I teamed up with John Robson to do the animatic. I’ve been working with John since 2006, and the good thing about him he has more of a film background and I have more of a design background and we really push each other throughout the process.

Neon and illuminated signs highlight the breadth of the Xbox Game Pass catalog.

If I can dream up a story, John can come up with ways to do it using C4D and third-party plugins. He’s always the guy who pushes me to try something new. I can be pretty simple in terms of the tools I use, but John is always experimenting on the fringe, and pushes us to adopt new tools and techniques. From there, I just scale up and build the team and hardware according to the specific needs of the project.

After researching how neon looks, Robson and Encina used Cinema 4D to design and create all of the neon signs to appear as realistic as possible.

MM: John, talk about your role in this project and what you tried that was new.

John Robson: There’s definitely been an evolution of how Matt and I work together. We push each other, and with this project, the client knows our potential and wanted to push the bar further too. Matt did some really beautiful style frames and we worked together to come up with ways to expand the drive-thru theme into more of a roller coaster ride. That’s how we came up with the idea for the dioramas. Those were fun, beautiful moments that felt like they were trapped in time. I really like the sense of realism and scale, which makes them feel less CG and more tactile.

Assets from each developer helped bring each diorama to life.

The new technology we tried for this project was Redshift. We worked in 4K and with Redshift, we were able to optimize our scenes and get through everything really fast. We were able to add so much more detail and volumetric lighting. But another big thing was that we didn’t have pre-rendered elements from the client.

We were able to bring in all of the assets from the different game companies and texture and light them to the level we needed on a really tight deadline. Back in the day, it took so many more steps and technical knowledge to create something that was in your head. Some of these shots only took a week from start to finish and they turned out beautifully.

MM: The dioramas are really striking. Explain a bit more about them.

ME: The neon signs are fun and based on actual game content, but we needed something more exciting to announce the new games, like Sea of Thieves and State of Decay.

We tried a lot of things, but they didn’t stick. Then we thought, ‘Hey, maybe there’s a way to incorporate game models into the drive-thru concept?’ So we put together two or three mockups and style frames and the client loved them so much, they expanded the project to include announce a few more games that are coming soon, like Forza Horizon 4.

Using Mixamo, Blind was able to pose game assets, including these for State of Decay, without having to rig the characters themselves.

JR: For the dioramas, we needed to stick pretty closely to what is possible in the game, so we would go back and forth with the game developers to make sure the situations were plausible. They were fun to work on, but we didn’t have a lot of time so we had to think about how to do things pretty quickly. State of Decay needed a hoard of zombies, so we used Adobe’s Mixamo to upload a model. It’s great because it creates the rig for you, which allowed us get a lot of poses really quickly without relying on a character animator for anything other than the kraken with all the tentacles that you see in Sea of Thieves.

After receiving a lot of different assets from the game, Sea of Thieves, Robson used Substance Painter to create all of the textures for the ships, treasure and other elements in the diorama.

MM: Describe how you brought your team together and how you worked with others.

ME: Our process is often the same for a lot of what we do. We try and keep the team as small as possible during development. Once the idea and technique are clear, we build the team based on what we need.

For this project, it was me and a few designers at the beginning, and then I brought on John to flesh things out. Then, in the last half of the project, we brought on six Cinema 4D artists and a Maya artist to get us to the finish line. We like to work that way because it allows us to spend our money very wisely.

With projects that are as big as this, it’s important to make sure everyone is in sync. Over the years, we’ve developed a great relationship with Ayzenberg and our partners at Microsoft, which allows us to work fluidly. When a change comes from the top, we’re able to move quickly, because egos don’t get in the way. Our team always stays objective, always tries to do right by our clients and we serve the best creative we can cook up.

Want more interviews like this? Check out these articles:

• The Rise of Redshift: An Interview With Trevor Kerr of MANVSMACHINE
• Animating 6 PayPal Commercials Using Cinema 4D and Redshift
• Creating the Memorable ‘Humankind’ Titles for TEDxSydney
• A New Look for NBC’s Longtime Hit Show ‘The Voice’

The post Designing a 3D Neon Spot for Xbox Game Pass appeared first on Greyscalegorilla.

Chaos Group takes over the development of the V-Ray for Cinema 4D plugin, aiming to take on the likes of Arnold, Octane, and Redshift.

Image via Stefan Laub / Chaos Group.

Big news for those who love V-Ray renderer, Chaos Group has officially taken over the development and marketing of V-Ray for Cinema 4D. Previously, the V-Ray for C4D plugin was developed by LAUBLab. As of November 1st, 2018, it is now under the control of the inventors of V-Ray, Chaos Group.

I think this a fantastic move on Chaos Group’s part. I had been a long time V-Ray user back in my 3ds Max days, and I had always found the V-Ray for C4D plugin to be lacking many essential features and workflows. The outside produced Cinema 4D plugin was certainly not equal to the internally built Chaos Group plugins for Maya, 3ds Max, Blender, or Houdini.

According to their recently published FAQ, V-Ray for C4D will soon match other V-Ray versions in its feature list.  They’ve already released a 3.7 version which looks to be similar to the previous v3.6 but now offers their online license server (OLS).

It’s been an interesting few years for Chaos Group, who also recently purchased Corona. Many original theories suggested that Chaos Group intended to keep V-Ray focused on users of Maya, Max, Houdini, while using Corona as their Cinema 4D render engine. That doesn’t seem to be the case.

Once a fully developed Cinema 4D plugin is released, this could make V-Ray a real competitor taking on the likes of Redshift, Arnold, and Octane. The move makes sense after Autodesk purchased Arnold, giving Maya and 3ds Max users the Solid Angle Arnold render engine with their Autodesk license. So by building a Cinema 4D plugin, Chaos Group stands to make waves in the C4D space, while it continually battles it out with the other render engines used on major motion pictures and commercial space.

I’ll be keeping my eyes on this development. I genuinely hope they can bring the C4D version up to date with their other DCC offerings. I’ll definitely be giving it a shot once we have a fully developed Chaos Group plugin. 

V-Ray for Cinema 4D is available now for either Monthly or Annual subscriptions.

The post Chaos Group Takes Control of V-Ray for C4D appeared first on Greyscalegorilla.