Cinema 4D 9.5

Cinema 4D has long been established as one of the best 3D apps for designers. Its ease of use is one of the main reasons it’s so popular with creatives used to traditional desktop tools, such as Photoshop and Illustrator.

Maxon has designed Cinema 4D to work closely with the industry-standard 2D and motion graphics apps from Adobe, with Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects all reading and outputting file formats native to those programs. Integration is very important in a production environment – few designers work with a single program and the ability to hop from Photoshop or After Effects and Cinema 4D with no fuss is one of the program’s great strengths.

The addition of significant tools and options make this release a compelling upgrade. Cinema’s interface has always been accessible, but this version includes a subtle yet useful full-screen mode. The interface panels can now be expanded to fill the screen at the touch of a button and then reduced back to normal. When modelling, you can get rid of unnecessary screen clutter by expanding the 3D views to give you a single, huge, full-screen view in which to build your 3D model, and when reduced back to normal size the interface is restored to its previous state.

Supermodelling
Modelling is superb in Cinema 4D. Stand-out features include the ability to quickly reposition the axis location when editing point edges. For example, you might select a group of points on a character’s nose and want to scale them, which would normally scale from the centre of the volume of the points selected. Using the axis offset slider you can now move the axis to the back edge of the points so that when you scale them they expand in the right direction, saving you the typical scale, move, scale, move procedure. Then there’s the Soft selection feature, which allows you make edits to object points, and a Brush tool for sculpting surfaces in many ways.

Other improvements to modelling include non-modal versions of Clone and Array for polygons, and Chamfer and Round for spline points. These non-modal interface panels allow you to make interactive changes to the tool parameters during editing, so you don’t need to guess beforehand how to set the tool before it’s actually applied.

A big change to the program is the Content Manager, which Maxon says is important to future workflow. The Content Manager is a bit like Adobe’s Bridge, offering a slick file management interface consistent with the working of the rest of the program. You no longer need to use the OS to open and save files – this can now be done via the Content Manager. The added benefit? You can now see mini-rendered or wireframe previews of scene files.

Unlike the Browser, the Content Manager displays your system file structure, not just folder contents, and supports the new presets feature in version 9.5. You can save and restore presets for many aspects of Cinema’s tools and settings, and these are saved in a User Preset directory accessible via the Content Manager. Another useful feature is the ability to store new default states for objects as a user preset. For example, if you like cubes to be created with two subdivisions on each face and positioned so they rest on the ground plane, you can do this and then choose Set As Default from the Attribute Manager’s Edit menu. Any cube primitives you now add will be the same as the current one. This can be done for Lights, Deformers and Generators, too.

Advanced rendering
The Sky generator, an all-new feature, comes with the Advanced Render Module and adds realistic sky rendering to Cinema’s burgeoning toolset. Including fairly realistic clouds and fog, this is not absolute realism, but is a creative-friendly tool that generates all kinds of skyscape renders and backdrops.

Cinema 4D 9.5’s lighting system has also been completely overhauled – many of the familiar settings have been changed and relocated for the better. The new Area light type encompasses the old linear and area types plus a whole bunch of other shapes, including Disc, Sphere and Object – the latter enabling you to use any polygon object as a light source. Area shadows have been improved too, and in general the lights render faster and produce much better results than before.

There’s a whole lot more in Cinema 4D 9.5 that we haven’t covered here, mostly refinements that make the program more user-friendly. This is a great upgrade that current users will want. Cinema 4D continues its reign as one of the best programs for 2D designers.