Http://www.maxon.net/products/new-in-cinema-4d-r17/overview.html
Videos:
Seems like a weak release…
OMG a parametric book shelf creator! Must… have… it…! 
The colour chooser looks nice. The new splines allow for booleans (something I would like to be able to do in Blender as well, btw).
Anyway, this release is not going to be helpful in stemming the flood of negativity which surrounds C4d lately. It is definitely more of a .5 upgrade that should have been free. Core features were left untouched, such as the aging BodyPaint, particles, Pyrocluster, still no decent symmetry, polygonal modeling remains unimproved, no viewport speed improvements, etc., etc., etc.).
Including a $20 book shelf plugin and touting it as a new feature is a bit painful to watch.
Some rather mixed feelings about this on CGTalk. Some are holding out hope that many big features are on the way via the refactoring of various parts of the code while others are making the decision to no longer be associated with Maxon.
Indeed, some are arguing that the new Take system alone is worth the upgrade, but it appears that R17 is not going to stop the decline in user numbers that began one or two years ago.
In Blender you can create color schemes from i.e. here, screenshot the output page and load up in UV editor. Then inside a node group put colors with outputs (no inputs), and you have a node with x number of colors that work well together. In materials, you pick one of these outputs as your material color. Only problem is, you have to enter the node group to visually check the colors.
But yeah, I would rather have a “color swatches” node containing all project colors with visible swatch outputs. I don’t think the actual designer is needed. I see many finished projects here by very color scheme aware artists that are great.
I’m not a C4D user, never was, but I for one like what I see in many respects. With a content library it seems a lot easier for noobs to get started. And plenty of noise and pattern generators in the material section. Cycles ones are severely lacking.
Looking at the Take video on the website, it seems to me like it’s an in-depth object/element swapping system (which I could see some at least being happy with).
Going over to the rendering section and noting the variation and formula shader, it really does seem to me like they are straining to avoid the idea of just moving everything over to a node-based workflow (if squeezing the reflection channel functionality into the stack wasn’t already an indication). Cycles can already do variation for instance, but applicable to every shader property you can think of thanks to nodes (Hint to Maxon; Adding a node-based shader builder will free you from having to construct specialized shaders and buttons for every possible scenario).
It also looks like the Houdini Engine is becoming standard-issue in a lot of applications (something which is impossible for Blender to have), it really depends on whether you need a full license of Houdini though if you want to use it for commercial work.
How do you do variation in Cycles? Ref this thread, and the examples they showed did look like some kind of array. I can do it for things like tiles and so on (I only need a random number per tile to generate a bunch of random numbers to be used for things like variation), but I haven’t figured out a way within mesh (i.e. array modifier). Using location, I’m guessing that would react to being relocated during animation, so that’s not idea either. Maybe array modifier needs an additional option “use random” or something?
YES YES
I have been waiting for this since 2015 started
I have to say… I’m a bit disappointed…
the only feature I kind of like is the variation shader… something that could already be done with mograph
this is more like C4D R16.5
The spline sculpting tools look amazing and the book generator is actually a nice feature to have, there’s a reason that there are hundreds of book generator plugins for pretty much all DCC apps out there
Other than that there’s some small improvements but nothing majorly exciting.
@Ninth
here’s how to create a book in previous c4d versions
1.model/download a book
2.use a cloner to clone the book.
The book generator offers a LOT more functions than simply cloning a book. The time and effort to set up such a system takes loads of time and technical know-how to be able to look natural and be simple to use.
Book generator scripts/plugins/addons exist for a reason and that is to skip that time-consuming task of creating it yourself. There’s even a few for Blender.
And you will need that once per month … Probably less.
You can use local position of mesh and it will work with animation (if the object is skinned though, it won’t work because the origin does not move).
@Had
my thoughts exactly.
One of the issues people have with this release is because they don’t share the same opinion of Maxon in calling it ‘groundbreaking’. There’s not a whole lot of stuff that you can say has never been seen before in a 3D tool.
The Take system and the Spline modeling are definite highlights, other areas leave you wondering such as how much dev. time they spent creating all of those new bells and whistles for color picking (so C4D now has the industry’s best color picker, was that a worthwhile goal though?).
@Ace yeah I understand why people don’t like this “release”, I share that sentiment as well. I simply thought that the spline tools were awesome 
That depends entirely on what your profession is. Books are present in most archviz renders today so if you are in that line of work it is really useful, while you might not need it at all if you do motion design. It all depends on the user and I think it is a nice tool to have included instead of having to purchase a plugin separately.
It is regrettable that it is not useful for you but there are other people using the software that might want/need it.
So I took sometime and thought about this…
Okay I should have seen this colour picker and workflow thing coming,
Ever since R14 maxon has been strengthening the weaknesses of C4D
Prior to R15, the GI was not really something to be proud of
Prior to R16 the material system was worse than blender internal in some areas.
Prior to R17 the color picker was just a joke, you couldn’t even add hexadecimal values inside it.
But still, the changes are not significant
There was nothing wrong with the spline tools of Cinema 4D prior to R17(Although I really do wish blender would adopt the spline tools of at least 3DS max)
The book shelve could already be done with a cloner and maybe a random effector(or shader effector if you want to get fancy) if you want it to feel natural
In my mind the BF approaches the ‘object generator’ stuff the right way, and that is by simply bundling addons made by various people within the community.
I simply do not think it should be the responsibility of the vendor to hardcode object generation wizards as a feature (yes, stuff like that might be useful for their designer audience who wants to get things done quickly, but it’s not like they have a shortage of community plugin makers they can talk to).
Exactly,
Maxon wasn’t always like this,
R16 was a great release
R15 was okay
R14 was very very good