Product Review: Page (2) of 3 - 11/25/11

MAXON CINEMA 4D RELEASE 13

A more fluid experience than ever

A New Feel

I talked to about a dozen professional modelers and animators who have been using CINEMA 4D R13 to find out what tool is their favorite, and there were interesting answers.

Some artists loved how easily the new tools made character animation accessible. "I wouldn't be doing all of this character animation before R13," one animator told me. Working on a music video, he had to model, paint, rig, and animate characters to look and behave like the singers. "I've never done this before, but it's pretty easy (in R13)."

Another feature which is particularly handy to animators who use tracking data is a simple, yet effective option found in the Document Settings. In R13, you can easily adjust the scale of your entire scene. Changing the scale of your scene so that you don't lose the relative calculations of elements in your project or in XREFs used to be a difficult task. When data was imported from other applications, specifically tracking data or FBX data, the scale of the model and animation used to pose a problem when attempting to merge multiple projects. R13 solves that.

A personal favorite (thank you Bernd) is the ability to modify curves within attribute windows. As with many professional tools, CINEMA 4D provides you with deep options, allowing artists to modify detailed attributes of their work. One such option is the spline data window (for some attributes). For motion graphics modelers and animators, this attribute is a huge feature. The spline data interface just got infinitely better in R13. Rather than an "artistic" approximate graph, the spline data supports multiple spline types, handle types, deep zoom for precision, and even (for die hards), the ability to open the attribute window in a completely new palette.

EVERYONE AGREES ON ONE WORKFLOW CHANGE

Point of Interest Navigation

In a professional studio, the ability to quickly access the entire landscape of your scene is important, from the finite to the global view, a responsive editor interface is everything.

Even for those modelers who haven't used ANY of the other new features (and by 'any', I mean 'absolutely none'), navigating the scene means a savings of several minutes or more than an hour per day.

A modeler I interviewed told me that he hadn't used a single new feature. In fact, his work constructing models had allowed him to stay in R11. The new point of interest (and sticky keys) are the new upgrades that makes the new version so appealing to him.

BEAUTIFUL RENDERS

As nice as it is on the inside, what really matters is what comes out of it. Beauty is only a pixel deep? Not in CINEMA 4D. The application that works beautifully in your workflow also delivers stunning images and animations.

The animations that it produces are even far superior to the beautiful images that it had delivered in the past. One of the reasons is that the render engine has many more facets that allow you to dial in the way you want the image calculated on rendering. However, a big part of the new looks that you'll be able to create with R13 is found within the scene camera itself. With the physical camera settings now available in R13, you can capture wonderful motion blurs, true depth of field blurs, custom iris shapes for your camera. There are a host of attributes that allow you to get more out of your CINEMA 4D camera and lights than you had in previous versions.

One popular tool in CINEMA 4D is the ability to render out a great looking Ambient Occlusion pass. In previous versions, in certain animation projects, it was difficult to get the occlusion to appear in an animation without subtle changes. Those seem to have been corrected in the new version, as there haven't been any notable shifts in the ambient occlusion during complex, intersecting animations.

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