Product Reviews

With its latest upgrade to Cinema 4D, Maxon has introduced a whole new range of very useful and much-needed features.

The application has long supported animation track mixing horizontally, but this new version expands the concept of non-linear animation by introducing animation layers. These are stacked vertically and operate conceptually, much like Adjustment Layers in Photoshop.

Any animation added while a layer is active is local to that layer. However, it will blend with the animation data of the tracks below it (whether hand-keyed or motion-captured). These animation tracks can be overlapped and blended, much like video clips. It's also possible to use an empty layer to reference existing animation data. This enables you to alter the original data non-destructively. Delete the layer (or just turn it off) and the original referenced data remains. Of course, multiple layers can reference the same data, which means repeating sequences is easy.

Two other additions that improve workflow are Ghosting and Doodling. The former, which is also known as 'onion-skinning', allows you to view a series of images both before and after the frame you are analysing, so you can fine-tune your animation. Doodling lets you add comments to the current on-screen file, which will only appear when you view a specific frame.

Cinema 4D's Advanced Render module has been almost completely rewritten. The Global Illumination (GI) renderer now makes better use of multi-core processors and multi-threading, and along with other efficiency improvements adds up to a 100% increase in rendering speed. This was certainly borne out in our tests - in fact, our test scene rendered 2.5 times faster.

Speed isn't the only area that has seen an improvement - quality has been enhanced, too. The new render engine produces far less scintillation and blotching from scratch. The range of presets for GI has also been greatly increased, resulting in usable, one-click

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rendering. The rendering of glass has been tweaked as well, adding an absorption component along with internal and external reflection parameters to give more realistic results.

Probably the biggest change in Advanced Render is the support for RenderMan-compliant rendering engines. RenderMan, developed by Pixar, is an open standard for creating render engines. These can be chosen from the Render Options - on the Mac, you have the choice of Pixar's PRMan and 3Delight, which you have to buy and install separately.

The most impressive aspect of Cinema 4D's approach is its seamless integration. Rendering takes place directly within the Cinema 4D editor window, and the setup for the external renderer is accessible directly from Cinema 4D's interface.

RenderMan specialities such as extremely fast sub-pixel displacement shaders are also supported, while lights can be used as material shaders. This should greatly endear this application to studios that depend on RenderMan in their production pipeline.

BodyPaint (now incorporated into the core application) has also seen some long-overdue changes, such as blending brushes, which enable you to colour an area without obliterating other bitmap detail such as dirt and gore maps. Tools also remember their brush preset, which is a big time-saver. Another great feature is the ability to use Photoshop's .abr brush presets. There's also a new tiling tool for the automatic creation of seamless textures.

Two under-the-hood features are also welcome. Cinema 4D now offers 64-bit support, so can take advantage of as much memory as you have on your Mac, and you now only need one serial number for both Mac and PC versions, effectively giving you two licences if you have a spare PC.

Cinema 4D is packaged in different modules. The main application, which does modelling, rendering, animation and texture painting, is supplemented by Advanced Render, which costs £467 and adds Global Illumination and HDRI rendering, caustics, sub-surface scattering and RenderMan support. A Dynamics module at £316 adds physics simulation. There are also modules for hair (Hair, £316); joint-based IK system and cloth simulation (Mocca, £398); motion graphics (MoGraph, £316); network-based rendering (Net Unlimited, £316); hand and cel-shader rendering (Sketch & Toon, £398); and thinking particles (Thinking Particles £259).

All in all, this is at least as big an upgrade as R10.5 and should be an automatic upgrade for anyone with a licence.