Cinema 4D R11.5 Announced

Unity Engine
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For those interested, Maxon announced R11.5 here:

Thomas P.

2

Shweeeeeet.

I so love C4D interface …

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

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Looks like an interesting upgrade…

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

CINEMA 4D Core

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

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

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

Cheers,
Jeremy

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

Thomas

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

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

I wonder how it could be better ^^

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

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

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

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

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

Cheers,
Jeremy

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Hey there,

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

Anyway, here it is :

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

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

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

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

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

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

  2. turn on keyframed Animation for your baked joints

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

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

  1. Enjoy :slight_smile:
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Great … I own the commercial version of Cinema4D R11 for less than a month and there’s the update with the FBX functions I’ve been looking for.

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

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Hey Motionblur

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

Cheers,
Jeremy

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Thanks so much for useful info

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

Cheers,
Jeremy

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Decidedly mixed results with 11.5 on a simple test…

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

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

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

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

Kevin

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Thanks for your feedback Kevin :wink:

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my “great” was a little sarcastic… I know that I’ll have to pay for it. Otherwise they woudn’t have timed the release of 11.5 to the 50% rabate action the way they did. :wink:

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

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

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

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

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

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I don’t have this problem at all :confused:

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Any chance of sharing the offending “popping” file?