What's the soft/hardware needed for C4d + vray?

[D.B.]

I've been running a old version of c4d for many years, and realise it's time for a major upgrade, but have a limited amount of $ to do it with. (after a diastrous excersion into Modo)

 

If I buy C4D Prime and Vray, what would I be missing in function? Could I still be able to create and render grass and forest of trees with the vray functions?

 

Thanks...D.B.

[Frosty]

You're in luck! I have just made this jump to VRay with R13 Studio and a new work station.

 

Workstation - i7 3960X liquid cooled and O/C'd to 4.2GHZ, 64GB ram, SSD boot disk, Radeon 6900 series GPU. It scores ~13.2 on Cinebench at ~100FPS. I think there is still some room to squeeze a little more out of it. My old i7 scored 4.8CB.

 

If you opt for Prime you will be missing a few things that I consider critical.

1) Mograph. Awesome for randomizing clusters or lines of trees/bushes/people/cars etc. It can also randomize shaders so a parking lot gets filled with different colored cars even though you've only added one car to the scene. It can do a lot more, but this is what I have found useful so far.

2) Cloth. Tents, flags, curtains, blankets and all sorts of other fabric like objects can be made and animated with ease.

3) Net Render. I work in an architecture office with a lot of CPU power that went unused at night. Not any more! 250 cores...Thank You, Come Again

4) Sketch and Toon. I like to do NPR type images at early stages of the design process. I wish I knew how to use this better.

 

Arguments could made for the usefulness of the C4D sky object, AR, and fur, but VRay has all of that too.

[Tommy L]

Sorry to hear you didnt like Modo. You may be able to sell your license, not sure about the legality(?), but it could make up the shortfall between the cut-down version of C4D and the full one.

I haven't used C4D much, but I do know that MoGraph is the only C4D-envy I have as a Max user. Go for the full one, you'll only wonder what you're missing if you dont.

[D.B.]

It sounds like you have a very serious machine! I'm envious.

 

I was afraid that I would be missing some functions, and you've confirmed that. Modo has toon shading, and the functions you've described in Mograph. Net rendering isn't a factor for me, but cloth would be a handy tool. Too bad C4D isn't modular anymore.

 

Modo has very nice solid SDS modeling, and some "features" are not so nice...like the clumsy material system, a tendency to be unstable, and it handle large files poorly. The last two "features" has me looking at C4D again.

 

Thank You, I appreciate your help!