Learn about all the new features added to the latest version of Maxon’s Cinema 4D subscription.
Maxon surprises subscribers with a new version of Cinema 4D. Dubbed S22, this subscription only release adds new UV tools, Viewport, modelling updates, and more. Chad Ashley and new team member Shawn Astrom dive into all the juicy details in this podcast.
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Episode Transcript:
Chad Ashley (00:48):
Before we get into it, I want to introduce a very special guest, the newest member of the Greyscalegorilla team, Shawn Astrom Ladies and gentlemen, thank you. Clap there. I don’t have a clap track, so I got to do that.
Shawn Astrom (01:02):
Yeah, we gotta we gotta add that in there.
Chad Ashley (01:05):
We’ll add a clap track. Yeah. Dude, I’m so excited that you’re here. Like you’ve been, how long have you been with us now? It feels like you’ve been with us forever cause you’ve done so many things with us, but you’ve only been here a few weeks now, right?
Shawn Astrom (01:19):
Yeah. Officially only a few weeks. But yeah, we’ve, you know, I’ve helped out on a few projects in the past, so it’s been a little while now that we’ve been kind of doing some things together and now I can, you know, contribute full time. So it’s very, very exciting.
Chad Ashley (01:37):
Shawn is amazing. And uh, he, he’s just, he’s the perfect addition to the Greyscalegorilla team. We think, um, if you haven’t, uh, seen any of his tutorials on our YouTube page, go check ’em out. And if you’ve seen any of our ultimate skies, uh, that’s all Shawn’s doing there. So he’s going to be on board helping me make materials and assets, just making as much killer stuff we can for you guys. Um, and he gets to help out with these podcasts so we can talk about tech and do some crazy stuff. Right. That’s cool. We’re gonna gonna we’re going to be geeking out pretty hard, I feel like. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that, I like that. I like having somebody that I can do that with. Uh, you know, my dog can only take so much of my banter. He’s already left. He’s already left the room. He’s had enough. All right. So as 22 subscription 22 is really, I think what it, what it is supposed to be known as a, normally they dropped new versions of cinema 40 in September area. Uh, but this year they’re doing something a little different. They’re dropping a subscription version, sort of a, a sort of a preview to what they’re going to be dropping in, uh, September. Now they’ve never done this before. Right. Shawn? Like, I can’t remember a time when they’ve done a drop that wasn’t their usual schedule drop. Yeah,
Shawn Astrom (03:00):
man. Um, it’s, it’s pretty crazy. Like, yeah, I’ve been using cinema for, gosh, I want to say like 10, 11 years now. And never seen an update come out in April. So it’s pretty exciting.
Chad Ashley (03:14):
Yeah, I, I, it’s cool because I feel like it’s unexpected and right about now with what’s going on in the world today, we could all use a bit more, uh, pleasant surprises, um, which is always welcome. But yeah, it’s definitely interesting. I think that it’s an obvious sort of like, okay, let’s try to get as many people on subscription as possible, right? Because it makes the most business sense for them. It makes the most sense from a, uh, just from a purely support tech support standpoint to have everybody on the latest version. So subscription is something that they’re really hoping people take advantage of and it’s fairly new for them obviously. Um, you know, I don’t have a ton of thoughts on MSA subscription and, and that whole thing. I saw a few people online saying that, uh, they were a little bit, a little bit annoyed that the longtime MSA customers were sort of, they felt a little snubbed by this as 22 because they’ve been asking for UV tools forever and then they finally drop and they can’t use them because they’re not on the subscription. You’ve been MSA, right? Like you were on MSA for awhile.
Shawn Astrom (04:29):
Yup. Yup. Yeah. I still have my MSA license, which yeah, it’s, it’s kind of, it’s kind of interesting. Like I feel like the goal with with this is to just obviously ultimately get people onto the subscription, but you know, they, it’s, it’s ultimately so they can put out more updates, you know, faster and get them out to people’s hands like quicker, which is exactly what we’re seeing here.
Chad Ashley (04:54):
Right. Yeah. I think that obviously like I prefer subscription personally because I just don’t want to think about going onto a site, purchasing an upgrade or managing a license upgrade. I would just rather pay a fee, like a known quantity yearly, monthly, whatever it is, and just not think about it and always have access to the latest stuff. Like that’s just my personal, um, thoughts on that. But Hey, everybody’s different, everybody’s got their own issues or maybe they, they are in the same boat as me and they like subscription, whatever the case, they’re making a strong case for going subscription. If you want to get these features before, uh, the new version comes out. So as 22 subscription drop, cinema 40 is going to have these new features before, uh, S or our 22, which again, all these features we’ll get into our 22 for those people that are, uh, not on subscription but the, it’s just a way to sort of reward the subscription members with a nice little advanced look at the features that are there coming into the application.
Chad Ashley (06:06):
So let’s, let’s break it down, dude. Like you and I have been playing with it for a few days now. Um, and just kinda checking out everything and it’s not a huge drop. There’s not like a ton of new stuff in here, but there’s some pretty significant stuff in here. And we’re going to break it down here. Um, piece by piece I guess. And Shawn and I are going to give everybody our opinion on, uh, on all these new features, the major new features. We’re not going to go like into the minutia of every tiny little update, but th the stuff that you care about, we’re going to go in there and we’re going to talk about it. So, all right, I’ll start us off the biggest one, right? Automatic UVS, the new UV workflow I think is probably the biggest thing in this version, wouldn’t you say?
Chad Ashley (06:55):
Yeah, yeah. No, I mean it’s kind of funny. I think people have been waiting for 10 years for them to update the UV tools and it’s here. So it’s a big update in that regard because so many people have been asking for this for a long time. So including me. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, when I came onto, uh, when I, when I first started using cinema 40, I was sort of like, well wait, this is, this is your UV tool. Like this seems like this can’t be it. And, and, and so I just honestly just stopped even thinking about doing UVS when I started using cinema. I would obviously would use it for like basic stuff, right? Like some cubic maps and you know, generic sort of stuff like that. But if I needed to unwrap an object, I would usually like hit up my buddy who’s a zebra guy and be like, yo, can you unwrap this for me two seconds and send it back to me.
Chad Ashley (07:49):
Yeah. Because it was just not easy. Right. It was, it didn’t really work well, it didn’t have a lot of the toolsets that a lot of other DCCS had. So yeah, it’s something that I’ve been asking for for a long time. Super stoked that they finally did something with it. Now I would go into Z brush and use the UV master tool inside of Z brush use. Exactly. Shoot. Shoot back over to cinema. So yeah. And, and myself, like starting out with cinema four D as really the first 3d application I ever used. Like the UVS never really crossed my mind. Like as like, Oh, these don’t work that good cause I hadn’t, you just never knew. And other programs. And then once I got a taste of how they worked and a few other applications, I was like, Oh yeah, this, this is not good.
Chad Ashley (08:39):
These, these really what you’d expect. Yeah. I feel like it’s been on the top of everybody’s wishlist for a long time. And I think they, they’ve listened. And I think that’s a great thing when, when, uh, when software manufacturers listen to their user base and prioritize what they want in their, uh, in their own internal to do list, it’s, it’s a great thing. And I think that that’s what we’re looking at here. And so, correct me if I’m wrong though, they licensed the, the, uh, the tool or the, sorry, the unwrapping, uh, algorithm, and I apologize if I’m getting that wrong, but they’d license that from an existing, uh, software existing tool. Right.
Shawn Astrom (09:27):
That’s what it looks like there. There’s, um, uh, I don’t know if it’s just like some, some code out there that, that, you know, he created so that people can go in and sort of implement it into their software. But yeah, so it’s, I’m from que solo LAR and it’s like,
Chad Ashley (09:48):
then we’ll put the link, the info on the, in the, in the show notes for sure. Yeah, that’s a strange name, odd name.
Shawn Astrom (09:55):
But you know, the, the algorithm is amazing. Like the, the testing that I’ve done. I’m sure you think you’ve done some. Um, it’s pretty darn impressive.
Chad Ashley (10:07):
Uh, so yeah, let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about the, the, the automatic, the automatic UVS as a feature, right? So the idea here is that you really don’t have to do much. You can select her object, you can cut some seams in a very simple, uh, pretty easy workflow and then automatically on wrap, uh, unwrap the UVS. What were your thoughts on the automatic UV workflow?
Shawn Astrom (10:33):
I mean, at first it’s a little unclear how to get it all going, but the biggest thing like with, you know, is the new layout. Like really kind of is, is much closer to uh, the kind of, you know, default standard layout, which is, which is great, but at first if you don’t have UV tags in there or, or UV tag on your object, it’s like a little confusing how to get it going. But once you have a union side, you kind of can get a goat going from there. And at that point it’s pretty darn easy.
Chad Ashley (11:03):
Yeah, I thought that too. I thought that like, okay, it works really well. And once you’ve, once you’ve got, whether you have seams or you don’t have seems uh, it’s really a couple of clicks and, and you’re really, you have decent looking UVS for most things. But the workflow, yeah, man, it’s a little weird cause you, you like you said you have to have a UV tag, which I didn’t really know. And it’s, it’s not, it doesn’t like bring you through the process super easy. Um, and I, I think that there is an opportunity there for them to create that because most of the time you’re sort of, you are following a pretty linear workflow when you’re, you being something. So I feel like the, the, the UX of it could be a little bit more intuitive, but the itself like getting something UV had quickly and in a really usable way, it was great.
Chad Ashley (12:00):
Yeah, no, it’s, it’s pretty darn impressive. And it, it kinda seems there’s a few different algorithms for the automatic UVS you have like packed cubic angle and so there’s a few different methods to kind of get those going. And then at that you can kind of do some different packing. Um, do, you’re relaxing and you’re pretty much good to go. I liked the, um, and maybe this is a feature in other UV tools, I just don’t do a lot of, I don’t spend a lot of time you being, but the overlapped mirrored geometry feature where if you have an identical Islander identify DentiCal geometry mirrored right. There’s no sense you can choose to have those, those UVS overlapped because maybe you just want to save space and you want to paint on one. It’s going to be the same on the other ones. So you might as well just have them mirrored overlapped.
Chad Ashley (12:52):
And that’s a great way to save space when you’re packing your reviews. I don’t know if that is, I can’t remember ever seeing that feature before, but I wasn’t looking all that hard. No, that’s, that’s actually huge. I, um, it’s an awesome feature. I don’t know that I’ve seen it in any other tools that I’ve used, but I, I know I was playing with 3d coat for a while to do some, you being for a client and it was, I was just in that case scenario where model had to be under 100,000 polys and the UVS had to be packed into one tile and there was certain objects on the model that totally could’ve been just stacked. So, and you know, any, uh, you know, identical objects could have been stacked on top of one another. And I ended up going into 3d coat and like manually placing um, some of the, some of the IOL like dragging stuff around.
Chad Ashley (13:43):
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the fact that that’s automated is pretty darn cool. Yeah. That, that, that’s pretty sweet. And I, I gotta I gotta believe that like for those out there that are looking for a quick UV solution, they don’t necessarily want to learn or buy zebra shh just to do UV. They maybe are thinking about rhythm cause they’re hearing about it. Um, we’re gonna talk about our findings after we get through the rest of the UV stuff. But um, yeah, let’s jump into the rest of the UV workflow cause that’s just the automatic UV. It’s like the, the complete UV workflow is different. It’s no longer like you go into the, to the BPU V which is a little weird that they kept the BPU V name in the workspace dropdown. Right. I would’ve thought they would’ve just said like UV workflow or something. The fact that they kept the body paint initials is a little strange to me, but maybe there’s something there for the future. I don’t know. Anyway, you’d go into this setting and it’s no longer, it longer feels like you’re using a completely different app. Everything is sort of organized in the same way that that cinema is. So things are predictably on the left menus and uh, tools up on the top and it just feels better. You know, didn’t you find that? Like it’s not as jarring
Shawn Astrom (15:09):
for sure. Yeah, it’s, it’s amazing. Um, once, once you get in here, like how you realize that a bad layout can really throw you off. Like in any software, if all of a sudden the UI just goes bonkers. Um, at least in the old cinema four D UV layout, it was pretty bad. So, um, it’s much better now. And I think the biggest, biggest change maybe is that there’s no separate UV modes now. So when you’re in point mode, edge mode and polygon mode, those are all consistent with,
Chad Ashley (15:44):
yeah. Thank God. Yeah, that was so confusing to me when I first started learning cinema, I was like, wait, I don’t understand. So there’s like a different poly mode, but it’s like UV poly mode. And it just made no sense to me at all. Yeah. This is makes way more sense for me for sure.
Shawn Astrom (16:02):
Definitely a massive improvement there. So,
Chad Ashley (16:06):
yeah, and I, I like, um, they’ve got a lot of new tools. I’m not gonna work, we’re not gonna like break it down tool by tool in the new UV workflow. But it, it’s good. And um, there’s all sorts of, I’ll, I’ll talk about some of my favorite things. And Shawn, I’d like you to like maybe expand on them or tell them, tell me what you think if you have any other ones. For sure. I liked, um, obviously all the packing, uh, stuff was good. The only, the only thing that I’ll say about, uh, the packing, uh, UI is a lot of the tools in Sonoma. I’ve kinda gotten used to that right click reset to default, uh, ability so that if I change a setting and I don’t like it, or maybe I completely break it with a setting, I can always right click and go back to default.
Chad Ashley (16:55):
You can’t do that on some of the, the packing menu items, which is a little bit annoying. Um, the other thing that I liked a lot was the uh, the Island workflows. Double clicking to select the Island and having the bounding box. All that stuff is fantastic. I really like the, uh, the modes. So you can go into like a view UV settings mode where you can turn on an overlay of a UV tile. You know those crazy textures that have like squares and numbers in them in different colors. You can turn on a mode where you can see that stuff. You can turn on a mode where you look at the Island. Every Island gets a different color randomly. Uh, and you can see that in your view port on the model as well as in the UV space. I love that. Yep. That was awesome.
Chad Ashley (17:44):
My only criticism is that that mode is not contextual. So that mode doesn’t like pop up and remind you that it’s there. If you’re using a tool or maybe in a specific workflow, you’d have to like go over to the attributes panel, drill down into the mode and find UV settings and then adjust it, which is a bit of a drag because sometimes I’m working and I just want to quickly see that UV overlay and I have to like go over to the attributes, click on modes, go down to UV, you know what I mean? Like it’s, it feels like that could be a little bit more front of mind.
Shawn Astrom (18:20):
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. They have it in there. Cause yeah. Previously there was nothing. Um, and it, it does look, it does look like to give you the ability to kind of load your own texture too, which was cool. Um,
Chad Ashley (18:34):
yeah. That’s cool. That’s definitely useful. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like it’s really, really a huge improvement. And the, um, yeah, I mean, if I had to pick some things that I wish were there, it would be, if we had like a, a, a relaxed brush that I could, Oh, the other thing I forgot to mention is you can, you can actually visualize the distortion, right. Of your, uh, re UVS. And so when I was looking at that, I was like, man, I really wish I just had a relaxed brush where I could just go in there and like relax those UVS as like a paintbrush kind of workflow. Uh, maybe that, maybe that’ll get added or maybe it’s there and I’m just like, too stupid to see it. But it’s something that, yeah,
Shawn Astrom (19:20):
I, I wasn’t able to, to see any tools like that in there yet, but, but my guess would be that gotta be, you know, planning on adding that stuff. Maybe that was part of some of the improvements to the modeling brushes, uh, that maybe they had to Recode so that they can eventually implement them into, right. Yeah.
Chad Ashley (19:43):
I think once they get that working, and honestly like I, I mean, to be honest, like this entire UV workflow is, is totally fine for me. Like I have absolutely no reason given the kind of work that I do. I don’t do a ton of UVA, but this is totally fine for my everyday needs. What did you, what, what are you, what are the thoughts on this? Like what did you like,
Shawn Astrom (20:05):
didn’t she like, yeah, no, I mean it’s night and day. Like this will keep me in cinema. I don’t feel like I need to jump out in a dizzy brush anymore or more recently rhythm and, and do my UVS there, which, you know, it’s like just having to go in and like learn a whole nother tool. It, it’s always like crazy time consuming, you know? So the fact that they finally got this implemented is huge. Like, and I don’t really see anything that stands out. I mean, I know there’s no UDM support yet, but I feel like that’s coming. Um, you know, but you know, apart from
Chad Ashley (20:40):
[inaudible], sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt. I want to talk about you, Dennis for a sec. So for, for those that don’t know, or maybe you’ve heard that term before, let’s explain that. So, um, I don’t even remember what it stands for and if you do jump in cause I don’t, but um, in a nutshell, uh, it basically means imagine having a multiple UV canvases that you can use in one, uh, in one set, sort of, so a texture could, um, access different UV canvases you’d M’s, uh, so that you’re making the most out of your, your UV space. And, um, it just, it allows you to like essentially have, without having like ridiculously huge textures that need to cover large pieces of an object, you can just throw that on different UDM. Right. I mean, that’s essentially, yeah,
Shawn Astrom (21:34):
yeah, it seems like it’s just a coordinate system. So you have, you know, like zero, you know, to 10 in, in either direction, but covering, you know, additional UV tiles. So, you know, yeah. You know, a whole UDM set can contain, you know, a hundred times the information that you get within one set. So, so it’s great. Like, I, I think, uh, if you just, you know, search like UTMs like, you know, there’s like a model of like, you know, like a star Wars, uh, the millennial Falcon and it has, you know, like a hundred UDM tiles. So to, to keep a UV set on a model that complex, um, it, it kind of gives you the ability to do that. Whereas otherwise you just have to break apart your model and have separate UV sets.
Chad Ashley (22:22):
Right? That’s a good way to explain it. So imagine a large super large asset like, like the millennium Falcon and imagine like how high Rez those textures are. Uh, and imagine trying to fit all of those textures in one UV, uh, canvas, right? That there’s just like, no way you could do it. So yeah, you’d M’s allow you to have multiple canvases really so that you can essentially have way more robust, uh, and, and maybe not a giant struggle to have giant textures. There’s no way around it. It’s millennium Falcon after all, but it’s going to allow you to be able to maximize that, that, that size of your texture. Totally. But anyway, it’s not really something that I’m needing a I and I think a lot of people talk about wanting you dims support. And of course it would be great if it was there, but I don’t think the average artist is really needing it. What do you think about that? Yeah, no,
Shawn Astrom (23:21):
totally. Um, you know, it was, it was developed, you know, more for just keeping, you know, in, in, in the game world, you know, in that pipeline, having, you know, you need your model to, to be one asset and it can’t be 10 assets, you know, that make up like one character. And so, you know, that was one need for it. Um, whereas like with what we do and send my four D, it’s pretty rare that we need to like merge everything into one object, you know, just because, um,
Chad Ashley (23:52):
so it’s, well, you can have, there’s other apps like three DS max. You could have multiple objects share a UV space and that wa without you Dems. So you could have like a hierarchy model, a completely separate models, but throw away a UV, a UV modifier on it. And all of a sudden you’ve got all these models existing in the same UV space. I do wish we had that. Like that is something that I think I wish we had because right now if you have, like you mentioned a character that maybe has, um, I dunno, a body maybe, um, a shirt, something like that and it’s separate geo for the shirt and you don’t, you want to be able to like put it in the same UV space. Like how would you even do that? You would, you couldn’t, right. Yeah, totally. Yeah. No,
Shawn Astrom (24:46):
and that’s been kind of the limitation and why they sort of came up with this whole, you know, standard if you will.
Chad Ashley (24:54):
Right. Yeah. And uh, that would be great if they could get something like that. Maybe. I, you know, I would subtle, even if they, if they can’t do [inaudible] just, you know, shared UV spaces would be good. That’s the same tech or what, but some, something like that would be good. Yeah. The F the interesting thing is it really is kind of one in the same. You, you know, you, you have UV, UV tiling, which
Shawn Astrom (25:19):
essentially you dims, but it’s like they had to kind of come up with this whole, um, you know, standard for it. Um, and I think even Pixar had P techs for a while.
Chad Ashley (25:29):
Oh, right. Can’t remember that. But it was really like, yeah. Limitation. Yeah.
Shawn Astrom (25:33):
And I think, you know, like if you go over to substance painter, like substance painter wants your object to be one mesh. And so that’s another good example of where you’d M’s do help out because you know, pretty much gives you incident resolution in terms of what you can get going. Right.
Chad Ashley (25:53):
Yeah. I think this, to sum it up, the new UV workflow is fantastic. It’s going to keep me from having to learn or use something else for you being, uh, there’s definitely, um, some finessing that needs to be done to the UX and things like that. But, uh, I feel like it’s a really good first step. Yeah, no, it’s, it’s huge.
Shawn Astrom (26:19):
Yeah. I’m, I’m pretty stoked. I don’t think I’m going to be bouncing out into other softwares for awhile.
Chad Ashley (26:26):
Yeah. Unless I’m doing something crazy, which he’ll probably won’t, but, well, and I have to, I have to assume that by the official, like our 22 release, September ish, you know, we’re gonna see UTMs or you know, multi UV space support and couple other of the things
Shawn Astrom (26:44):
they want to get in there, but just couldn’t get in there this quickly. I mean, cause you know, we’re talking seven months after our 21, so it’s pretty sweet.
Chad Ashley (26:53):
Yeah, it’s pretty crazy. Um, yeah. I, I, I’m, I’m still kind of like, wow, okay, cool. Is this, how is this going to be like this from now on? Know I’m gonna have to start like, uh, looking forward to this time. Uh, yeah. I mean it’s also a great, because NAB obviously being canceled. Uh, so super bummer cause you know, we hours out there hanging out with our friends and like catching up with people. So this was a nice little piece of news to, to cheer up our, our April. I know. Uh, yeah, for sure. Let’s move on to, uh, let’s just kind of move on to some of the other stuff, like the modeling improvements. Uh, there’s quite a bit of stuff in the modeling improvements part of the, um, bringing some of these tools into the new core. Um, I think the, the, the big ones here are the, uh, the, the Detroit, what is the untrained angulate or is it D triangulate? I don’t know what they’re calling. It’s untrained Gilead I believe. Triangulate, right. Yeah. It’s a super weird word to say and it’s even weirder to look at it when it’s written down, but, um, yeah, that’s pretty cool. And I think the, um, the bridge tool has been, uh, sort of revamped and it’s, it’s good. It’s definitely got some, I wish it did a few other things, but yet it’s definitely works much better. Uh, what, what’s your, what do you like it in the modeling improvements? What stood out to you?
Shawn Astrom (28:24):
Um, definitely the new, like mirrored selection, um, facial. Yeah. Yeah. I can’t, I think I had a plug in at one point that did that for me. But yeah, when you’re modeling and you need to just mirror selection, um, yeah, it’s, it’s awesome. So that’s, that’s huge. They added that. Um, and then what else? Uh, you know, there’s the non manifold geometries command, which, you know, like it’s kind of this oddball thing that happens, but sometimes you get a mash and the geometry is all messed up and you know, that can fix non manifold edges, um, now which is sweet cause it does have that capability before. Um, and then now you can generate Vertex normals via the falling tag, which is another like just kind of feature that was definitely missing that like, you know, [inaudible]
Chad Ashley (29:17):
yeah, that saves some clicks for sure.
Shawn Astrom (29:20):
Yeah. So, so yeah, there’s some, some solid stuff in there. Nothing like, you know, major standout, amazing, but really like quality of life improvements that we’ve been asking for for a while now.
Chad Ashley (29:33):
For sure. For sure. I hope they continue that too. I feel like, um, the modeling tools are a good, and I think there’s a lot of really nice stuff in there, but obviously it’s always good to, to kind of improve on that in, in the bridge I think is a good step. And what I w specifically for me, like that was like, Oh, okay, cool. They’re, they’re doing some stuff there. Um, I hope they continue with it. There’s some really good features in, in the bridge tool and 30 S max. I hope they look at, uh, kind of seems similar to what they’ve got, but sort of a little bit more, uh, features in their version of that. But yeah, it’s cool, man. I, I don’t do a ton of modeling. Um, but I always, I always appreciate when they, when they give modeling some love because that’s something that I think, um, it needs.
Chad Ashley (30:26):
But yeah. Yeah, no, definitely. Uh, I mean there’s a couple other little things like the, um, the closed polygon hole, uh, function in, in there was kind, kinda cool. There’s some new options with that. Um, I think there was some, some new selection options, which were kind of cool, like the um, uh, where is it? Like how I have to find it here. It’s like the loop. I want to open up my, if you don’t know this, you can always open up the help in any version of cinema and it will tell you what’s new so you can get a really can dive into the details of what’s new if you just open up the manual and take a look. But yeah, so there’s new, some new loop and ring selection tools that have some new uh, some new options that are really nice. Double clicking on an edge.
Chad Ashley (31:16):
We’ll select adjacent as edges and things like that, which is kind of nice. So it’s again, like you were saying, the quality of life stuff, which I don’t think you can, um, I don’t think quality of life stuff really gets the attention that it deserves. You know, like people want to be like, Oh, it’s the coolest flagship feature. And I like, I would take 20, I would take five good quality of life features over 15. You know, crazy features that may be only, you’ll use twice of some new feature, but the everyday stuff makes a big difference in, in how you go through your day. But yeah. Um, yeah. What’s new? What else is new here? The nodal material exports, the FBX it’s pretty self explanatory. Your ability to export nodal materials out to FBX. Um, so the, the, the zebra shh, uh, bridge, the uh, Gosey bridge. I don’t use the brush. What is, what is different here? Like you use the brush. So you tell me like what, what are we able to do now that we weren’t able to do before? Yeah, well I think, um, yeah, this is a nice addition at, I think as of our 19 it kind of got broke or maybe it was our 20,
Shawn Astrom (32:40):
um, you know, as far as I understood it, I always thought picks a logic, developed the Gosey bridge in between these, you know, I mean, it even works with like Photoshop, like, you know, each, each, you know, software three DS max. Like it’s always, you’ve had this ability to shoot your zebrafish models right over. Um, right. And yes. So they’ve completely, it must be in their hands now in, in Maxons hands and they’ve just implemented a sweet new eat. So it works great.
Chad Ashley (33:14):
So I, I don’t use the brush, so like what does this mean? Like I click them off, I click a button and it brings my model into Z brush.
Shawn Astrom (33:21):
Well, and then back again. Yeah, totally. So you know, if you have your model in cinema and you want to shoot it over to Z brush to do some sculpting, like it’s literally just a click of a button in the UI and then you hop into zebra, shh, do what you want. Hit the Gosey button in zebra, shh. And it’s shoots it right back to cinema.
Chad Ashley (33:42):
All right. That’s pretty sweet. And that wasn’t working in our 19 or 20 in our 21
Shawn Astrom (33:49):
yeah, I think, gosh, I want to say broke are 20 but okay. Wow. Okay. So then people have been without that for a while then. Yeah, totally. I think someone made a plugin that was, that sort of worked for our 21, but I tested it and it did not work the same as like the official one. So the other thing is it looks like it supports poly groups, which, which basically is ZBrush ZBrush his version of selection sets. Um, but that it’s a really important part of zebra fish and working, like being able to go through and like select all the geometry, you know, per a poly group. And that’s also now, so if you have a bunch of selection sets inside of cinema, you can convert them to poly groups, shoot that over to Z brush. Do you need to do and it works. Awesome.
Chad Ashley (34:42):
Nice. Yeah, I mean, um, Oh, I, I forgot I did that reminded me for some reason, um, uh, of another feature that we forgot to mention, uh, that actually I’m not sure where this feature would fall, but I did want to mention that the, uh, uh, the substance engine, uh, for cinema 40 now supports, uh, up to eight K textures in 16 and 32 bit, which is good news. And I think that’s something that people have been looking for. So that’s, that’s pretty rad. Um,
Shawn Astrom (35:17):
wasn’t it kept it like two [inaudible] I think. Yeah, I think
Chad Ashley (35:20):
it, I think it was, yeah, it was capped at twoK and which is like a drag, you know, but, um, yeah, I mean it’s one of the reasons why we at Greyscalegorilla decided to go like bitmap based, not completely substance based and uh, the substance engine hadn’t been updated in a while, but yeah, so this is definitely a step in the right direction. I don’t think I would ever have us go into a full substance workflow for, for, uh, selling our materials. I still don’t think that’s really the right move for us, but it is great that that’s, that’s been, uh, improved. Yeah. Pretty cool. Yes. So let’s talk about the viewport enhancements because I, I think that’s, um, that’s probably next to the UVS. Uh, probably my second favorite thing about this, uh, drop. Um, so they’ve improved the viewport, uh, speed in its ability to show more stuff and, and not chug to a complete halt.
Chad Ashley (36:28):
I haven’t given it a complete stress test on that. So I can’t really say how much that, that sort of lives up to the, to the promise. But it does definitely feel zippier I will say the, uh, the shadow qualities overall looks a lot better. And um, yeah, and I was excited to see that, you know, they work that same shadow quality works with uh, Arnold lights and red shift lights. I didn’t check that. I didn’t check it with, uh, octane lights. But yeah, so that was cool. Yeah. And you know, it’s, it’s tough man. Like, so I’m super jealous. I have to say I’m super jealous of uh, Maya’s viewport and blenders viewport I feel like their view ports are, they benefit from having a, a builtin renderer to build off of. Right. So blender, you’ve got your, you report and they use cycles and they also have that Evy and you just get like a really good representation of what you’re rendering in the viewport. And with Maya them owning a Autodesk owning Arnold, they can really make Arnold look like Arnold in the viewport. And I think with cinema it’s hard because they use, and part of their strength is that they sort of allow users to use many different renders and they’re all really great. So how do you represent those in a, in a viewport experience consistently? It’s like, I don’t know if you can really write, so
Shawn Astrom (38:05):
no, it’s, it’s been a limitation for like a long time. I know with the way back in the day, like nothing ever worked right in the viewport with V-Ray and it seems like it’s still like a bottleneck. So I would have to imagine, and I really hope that with red shift now, you know, being part of Maxon like that, they’re gonna incorporate that somehow, you know, a much deeper integration. So what you see in the viewport as like, you know, 80% of what you’re getting at at render time, but it’s just,
Chad Ashley (38:37):
I think that’s actually a really smart move by max on if they can make that happen. And I think that’ll push a lot more people to use Redshift because obviously that they can’t, without a lot of effort, it would be hard to deliver that same experience of, let’s say you were using octane and cinema 40. Right? I mean, to get that same viewport, uh, integration, um, would be difficult. So if they really made it amazing with Redshift, it would be like, wow, man, the viewport looks so good with Redshift. It doesn’t look that good with Arnold or with octane. Maybe I’ll just use Redshift. And it really, it can have an influence on, on, on people’s decisions I think. So it’s kind of kind of a, a smart move to kind of push that even further. Um, yeah, I mean, obviously the viewport, if you’re using standard materials, it looks really good. In fact, it looks very close to what you would render out. Again, they’d be of an improved, um, transparencies, I think, and, and lighting. They’re doing a lot of work, but part of me is like, well, you know, that’s cool, but like I don’t, I don’t really use physical, so I’m not really gonna get the benefit of that. But if they do that with Redshift, then dude, that’d be, that’d be pretty sick. Yeah. And I think that there’s gotta be, they just have to be able to
Shawn Astrom (40:01):
[inaudible] with the other developers, you know, Arnold, you know, all these other engines and just really open up, cause I feel like the doors were a bit closed as to how to access, you know, the viewport. Um, and I’m hoping that that that’s a little more available now with some of the roommates and it seems more standardized. Like, you know, some of the affects and you know, I know they’ve, they’ve got it all working in metal now. Um, so I’m sure that they’ve been doing a lot of work behind the scenes. But
Chad Ashley (40:31):
yeah, I think the, the metal thing, we’ll have to do another podcast about that because I, I’m, I’m really trying to understand that whole thing, but, um, maybe it’s just not for me to understand, but yeah, let’s, let’s, let’s put a pin in Nuttall and let’s do another podcast on that because that’s definitely a subject that I think in the next few months we’re going to want to talk about for sure. Definitely, definitely. Yeah. But like the little, little things like being able to change that, change the resolution in the viewport like just so you can get faster playback like, you know, while, yeah, yeah. Explain that a little bit cause that, that I think if you just say that people are going to be like, well I can change the resolution of my objects or w what do you mean by that? Yeah. I believe if you go into, um,
Shawn Astrom (41:21):
gosh, where is it? I mean you go into the settings I’m in.
Chad Ashley (41:26):
Well basically it just stuff, it basically just like, um, uh, it, it, it unsafe moves your viewport experience into like a more low resolution viewport experience for sake of speed. Right? Like that’s the idea is that you’re, you’re going to get more FPS. Totally. Cause you’re, you’re, you, it’s a degraded, uh, viewport experience to try to speed it up. If Kelly really complex
Shawn Astrom (41:52):
scene or something. Yeah, it’s, it’s listed under the viewport effects. So like where you, you know, enable like, you know, your high quality noises and your shadows and everything. Um, at the very bottom there’s, you know, a resolution option. So if you, you know, put 0.5 in there, you’re getting half resolution in your viewport. So it’s effectively, you know, down sampling and doubling the frames per second. Well, I don’t know if it’s quite doubling it, but it’s, you know, it’s a nice speed improvement. So for animators, it’s huge. Like, if you’re, if you’re like, at that point where you’re, you know, you’re not able to animate quite at 30 frames per second, your, your frames per second are dropping. You just, you know, lower your viewport resolution a little bit and it’s gonna, you know?
Chad Ashley (42:36):
Yeah. I think that man, yeah, that is huge. So the other thing that I really liked too, building off of that is the under the, uh, the, the view filter is the geometry only. So if you’ve ever just wanted to see the objects like may, like you were saying, you’re an animator, you don’t need to see the ground plane, you don’t need to see all that other crap. Like you can go into geometry only and uh, and it just like filters out everything but your geo, which is really great and it just cleans up that whole experience. And then on top of that you can actually, um, create, uh, presets of your filters. So the view filters, you know, you want to turn off the grid, maybe you want to turn off the horizon, you want to turn off the, uh, center world axis, all that crap. Like you want to create your own presets for that. And, and maybe you have a preset for animating, like, like Shawn was saying, where you just like, Oh, I only need, when I’m animating to see the, the geo and the ground plane or something, whatever. You can create a preset for that, which is dope. I really like that a lot. I love that.
Shawn Astrom (43:47):
That’s a massive, just improvement just to the way all that works. Even like the icons, like I’m like, thank goodness for the little icons they put in there in the UI. Cause it, it was always like when you drop down that filter list and you’re like, uh,
Chad Ashley (44:02):
where you keep your, like maybe it’s one of the, Nope, that’s not it. Maybe. No, no, that’s not it. Yeah, you’re right.
Shawn Astrom (44:09):
Like a whack a mole situation for sure. Um, but yeah, it’s, it’s awesome now. So this is going to be great to have.
Chad Ashley (44:17):
Yeah. That, yeah, dude, I, I’m, I’m excited that, that I think this was something that, um, people were requesting and I know it, it’s something that, uh, we at Greyscalegorilla even made a tool that did this. Uh, uh, I forget exactly what the name was, but it was something that, that function very, very close to this because it was something that came up a lot, especially if you’re doing pre this or, or you’re going to play blast. Something. That ability to like quickly get everything else out of the way is pretty, pretty sweet. Um, I will say if I have any criticism about that whole workflow, it’s that I really hope they allow us to, uh, access a preset of a filter preset in the customized commands. So if I wanted to select, maybe make a hot key that went right to my, I dunno, my previous filter preset, I would love to be able to do that or have that be a button often the UI somewhere, that would be great too.
Shawn Astrom (45:22):
Yeah. Hockey assignments to the actual like presets will be really cool. Um, that’d be like super, super sweet. Be able to like highlight eyes, you know, you have like your four different modes you like to work in or whatever. Um, so that’d be nice. So
Chad Ashley (45:38):
yeah. And especially if you’re, you’re working and maybe your supervisor or your client walks over and you just want to like get rid of all the stuff that’s gonna, like confuse the shit out of them and you just like, can hit a button and be like, here, you know, look at this. It’s the lights and the, and the objects or whatever it is that you, you want to do. Yeah. That’s something that, um, I’m sure they’ll probably figure that out. That doesn’t seem like it would be that hard. But yeah, the viewport stuff. Super great. Love that stuff. Um, what I didn’t really play with the, uh, the hair stuff. I don’t really do much hair, but what did you think about the, the hair in the viewport? I keep seeing like images and stuff, people doing stuff with that and uh, apparently it’s much better now.
Shawn Astrom (46:28):
Yeah, it seems like you’re just getting, like, it’s probably using the same instancing tech that they’ve implemented, like, you know, with, with clones and instances now with like, you know, the multi cloner mode now, um, showing up kind of in real time. It’s gotta be the same, same tech basically. But yeah, like you know, I think you’re just getting actual previews of, you know, the actual hair geo, which is pretty sweet.
Chad Ashley (46:54):
Yeah. The, uh, what was that image? I think I saw it on their site or it’s like a cat or a kitten or something. Um, yeah, I look pretty good. I gotta say, uh, I don’t really ever touch hair, but like it’s nice. I would S I definitely would see the benefit of getting something close to what it would render like
Shawn Astrom (47:12):
in the viewport for sure. Yeah. No, I think, I think that’s going to be a nice, much, much welcome improvement.
Chad Ashley (47:22):
So we’re kind of reaching the bottom of the list that the other thing that kind of stood out was the, uh, the G L T F support for X sporting. I don’t do a lot of AR, but I understand that, um, it’s a, it’s a good exchange format. You said that, um, uh, it’s sort of like a, well, you had a, you were describing it to me. Can you expand on what that is?
Shawn Astrom (47:48):
Yeah. Like, I think it’s just, it’s kind of become, I think the industry standard in terms of, you know, kind of like how a limbic has in our world has kind of become the standard for, um, exchanging files between, you know, different DCCS, um, whereas this is more geared towards the real time world, you know, where you have your PBR based maps that all come along with it. Um, you know, I know like Sketchfab I believe, you know, I think they require or that’s kind of like their main format. So, so yeah. So being able to export that is pretty sweet.
Chad Ashley (48:26):
Oh, I’ll have to look into that. I haven’t played with that yet. It’s something that, uh, I’ve been meaning to check out. Um, but yeah, I gotta get, I gotta check that out. Uh, yeah, so that, I mean, that’s kind of the big stuff that we wanted to, uh, to talk to all of you about. Um, and we just got a couple other tech news items here that, that we should discuss. Uh, I think the, the other really sort of piece of news that came out in the last couple of weeks is, and this kind of flew under the radar a bit. So, uh, I’m, I, if you haven’t heard, uh, then this’ll be news to you, but I’m sure a lot of you already kind of heard about this. But, uh, we saw a couple tweets a couple of weeks back by both Autodesk and a toy talking about a partnership between the two of them, uh, for their, for a toys render service, R, N, D, R, which is a toys online cloud, GPU rendering service that, uh, that is using, um, parallel computing and uh, kind of like, uh, a blockchain.
Chad Ashley (49:37):
I’m not going to pretend even know about that stuff. I don’t do that. I don’t do the Bitcoin thing, but apparently it’s a whole thing with render and they’ve got their own thing going with that and they’re going to allow Arnold to render on the service. And so that tweet sort of sparked a little bit more information in a, and a toy. I even talked about this in a GTC video that they did, uh, about a month ago, I believe, where jewels talks a bit about the future of a toy and whatnot, and the plan for them to eventually support Arnold’s standard surface, which of course Shawn and I, our ears perked up and we were like, Oh, okay, well that’s kind of interesting, you know, and we were hitting each other back like, Oh dude, can you imagine if like we have a, uh, uh, a ubiquitous sort of like material format in standard surface.
Chad Ashley (50:39):
For those of you that don’t know, on an old stone standard surface is a fantastic sort of Uber material. Uh, but it really is a definition of a material and it’s got [inaudible] they’ve thought of everything. It’s really is like a, a really great, um, a really great system and we’ll throw links down below so you can, or into the show notes that you can learn about it. But yeah, dude, like that’s pretty crazy, right? To S to think about that, to think about what that could mean. Yeah, no, it’s, it’s huge, especially to see, you know, a toy come across, you know, it seems like they’ve kinda been in their world doing their own thing with, with some amazing tech. But the fact that they’re embracing, you know, standard surface from Autodesk Arnold, you know, it’s pretty, pretty cool. Um, I would love to see it implemented in other engines for sure.
Chad Ashley (51:31):
Yeah. I think that would be killer and it would really benefit you and I, uh, specifically, cause then we could author our materials in standard surface and they would just someday work everywhere that supports it, which would be amazing. Um, but yeah, so the, they, they started off by talking about that and then, um, Joel started to sort of expand on that on Twitter and a few other like Slack channels and, um, saying that he would like to support many of the Arnold nodes in octane as well, which I was kinda like, Whoa, that’s crazy. Like I was sort of like, Oh, like I have Y. Like, that’s crazy cool. Yeah, please do. Right. But at the same time I was kinda like, well I don’t like, I didn’t understand and I still don’t and I need, I need to talk to him about it. So I’ll, I’ll try to like follow up on this, but I’m curious about the, the business implications for that or what is, what are the business goals for that?
Chad Ashley (52:37):
You know, like why would you, why would you want to have Arnold features Arnold nodes in octane and if you’re Arnold, why would you want your features nodes in octane? You know what I mean? Like what’s the, what’s the uh, benefit? I mean it obviously benefits us like that goes without saying for sure. Um, yeah, man. I mean it’s, it’s, it’s a tricky one I think with all these different render engines, like obviously in a perfect world, wouldn’t it be nice? Like, you know, I know so many of us were like, just like we want cinema four D noises like working and render engine a, B, C and D. like, I think that’s just an example of like one aspect of one thing you learned that you want to work in everything else. And you know, if, if we could start to see more of that between all the different end engines, that would be huge.
Chad Ashley (53:33):
Like, you know, if, if I know that the ramp node is going to be the same as it is and octane and Arnold. Yeah, I mean the benefits for us are obvious, right? Like of course. Yeah, we want awesome features, uh, everywhere. Like yeah, I love this feature and Arnold, I wish I had it and I, you know, like that makes total sense for sure. But the, so cinema max on it makes total sense for them to get their noises into as many renders as possible because it’s basically, I’m like saying, Hey, cinema’s got really great features, really good tools, check out our noises, look at that. That’s how cool we are. You know, and, and I feel like, what’s the, how do you, if I’m aren’t older, I’m Autodesk and, uh, is going to put the jitter, uh, node in octane and all the other nodes and whatnot, then it’s kind of like, well, aren’t you sort of paving the way for people to not come back to Arnold?
Chad Ashley (54:34):
And then vice versa too. Like if you’re in octane and you’re using so many amazing Arnold nodes and you’re like, well they don’t kind of work the S, you know, I thought they’d work a little bit better, maybe I should try it. And Arnold like natively maybe they work a little bit better there. And it feels like there’s this sort of strange uh, effect where you’re kind of encouraging both sides to take a look over the fence to see if the grass is greener. And I don’t know, like, may, maybe they’re not thinking about it like that. Maybe they’re thinking about it purely from an idealistic, a user point of view. Like, these are great things. The users want to use it, their, they should use it there, they want wanna use it here, they should use it here. And if that’s the case, rad man, like if that’s the, if that’s really the case, like that’s so like, what’s so selfless.
Chad Ashley (55:26):
I, I’m picturing a world, you know, all the developers are just like so frustrated that every time they put out a new feature, you know, it’s doesn’t quite cover what you know Arnold does or vice versa, you know, so they’re probably just like the hell with it. We just need to like standardize all this stuff. Right. I mean it is kinda red. Like I, I’m, I’m not gonna lie. Like if octane had Arnold’s features and they worked well and they, and it was stable and all of that sort of thing, it would make me look at it again. It would make me be like, Oh, okay, well maybe I’ll, maybe I’ll use are obtained for this or what not. But yeah, and it’s just, it’s just a strange thing. Like I’m trying to wrap my business brain around it and maybe I shouldn’t, maybe I should just leave that up to the suits to figure out and I should just shut up and enjoy the potential crossover. I just have to wonder
Shawn Astrom (56:24):
like, yeah, like how, you know, how many people have hopped on to Arnold GPU now because, because they have GPU now to start comparing it to octane and you know. Right, right. So
Chad Ashley (56:40):
it’s interesting. I got to say though, um, I, I tweeted and I had a little bit of an exchange with jewels and just so people know, like, um, octane and Autodesk have been partners for quite some time. So this isn’t necessarily a new relationship they’ve actually been partners for for a while. So, um, it, it’s cool. I definitely love the idea of this sort of cross pollination. A few people hit me up on Twitter when I was talking about it and they were, they were sorta convinced that this was some sort of, uh, inverse reaction to cinema and Redshift. Like, Oh, they’re teaming up, we should team up or something like that. And I, I’m going to just squash that right now. As far as I know, there’s nothing like that going on. Everybody is just trying to make the best tools they can. Um, and it’s just, yeah. And I would love to see red shift, uh, adopt a standard surface. And I think that’s
Shawn Astrom (57:43):
hopefully in the, in the, in the pipeline for sure. Yeah, that would be, you know, monumental. I mean, it’s such a good shader and it’s so simple and easy to use, but yet it has like everything, almost everything you need right in there that yeah, it’d be like a no brainer. I think the more, you know, these companies make proprietary like, you know, shaders or tools or whatever it may be, like it’s, it, I think ultimately they’re going to alienate, you know, the user base because people just want stuff to just work, you know. So I think it’s a smart move and I think it’ll, it’s going to pave the way for some exciting stuff.
Chad Ashley (58:24):
Yeah, for sure. I’m excited about just making a, a standard surface material that works everywhere. That’s just like a dream of mine. Um, yeah, I mean, it’d be so cool. Anyway, well, uh, we’re, we’re kind of running out of time here, so this is probably a good place to, to wrap it up. Um, anyway. Well thanks. Uh, thanks so much for listening, everybody. We appreciate you. Uh, be sure to leave us review, uh, or whatever it is, the platform that you’re on, however you interact with our podcast, please do. And let, uh, let, let a friend know that we’re here and you can listen, uh, at home. You no longer can drive probably, but Assan while you’re working out or while you’re, uh, taking a shower, whatever works for you. Uh, and Shawn, thanks for joining us and welcome to the Greyscalegorilla team.
Shawn Astrom (59:17):
Absolutely ecstatic to be here.
Chad Ashley (59:20):
Yeah, we’re going to do some great things. I’m very, very excited. Anyway, uh, that wraps up the show. Um, have yourself a, a safe week and enjoy, uh, well, it’s going to be the weekend before you know it. So take some time, get outside, breathe some fresh air, and uh, remember, stay safe, stay home and we’ll see you next time.
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Said Daniels who’s also the executive producer, “I always loved science fiction when I was a kid and I thought I’d write my own science fiction short stories so I worked on that a little bit and then I started 
As WinZO shares to us, “Humans are social animals. We feel the need to connect with people despite the lockdown. Phone calls/ video calls may provide a way to connect with people – but after a while you connect over a common activity. At the same time, people want to be entertained too as they are sitting at home the entire day. Multiplayer Board Games provide two-way joy – fun audio/visual interaction and bite-sized entertainment. The surge in private play modes (Vs-Mode and Tournaments) clearly indicate that people are preferring to play with their friends, family and in many cases, significant others, separated by the COVID.”
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