Cinema 4D R10

By nature, 3D is fairly complex, so it makes sense to have a well worked out system for managing the relationship between objects and their properties. While Cinema 4D had a decent animation and object management system, it was not ideal. It seems that this is one area that Maxon has addressed in v10.

In principle, the new Object Manager operates in much the same way as it did before, so there’s no new learning curve, but the way objects can be displayed and the visualisation of their grouping has been vastly overhauled. There is almost too much choice now when it comes to displaying the list of objects and their tags. In fact it would take a whole review just to cover this area of the program, so we can only skim the surface here.

Layers let you organise which objects are displayed in the Object Manager, and colour coding helps you to visualise group identity. You can also filter the list by type, or by keyword, display tags vertically as nested folders, choose from three icon sizes for items in the Object Manager, and do away entirely with structure and display the list in Flat Tree mode. In Cinema 4D, all ways of working are accommodated.

Even more drastic is the way the timeline has been revamped. But it has been a bit of a learning curve since v10 implements some fundamental changes in operation over v9. The benefit is a huge boost in efficiency, particularly when dealing with large amounts of animation data or complex scenes.

Another core change is to the character animation system; this is not a trivial improvement but a total rewrite. The system does away with bones (though the old system is still available) and works on joints and skinning as in apps such as Maya and XSI. Although a little more complex conceptually, the benefits for advanced character work are huge. The new IK system minimises the need for extraneous controls for joint orientation, while the joint weighting offers a better default deformation for elbows and knees.

Cinema 4D now comes with BodyPaint, the 3D paint and UV editing system. This is a huge boon for users and reduces the cost of a full 3D pipeline even more. Further useful improvements include a new Enhanced OpenGL mode that reduces the need for test rendering, a new interface scheme, Pyrocluster volumetrics, which are bundled with the Advanced Render Module, interactive rendering in the viewport and many other minor tweaks and enhancements.

Because the focus of this update has been on both animation and organisation, rendering and modelling have not been a priority. As a result, the global illumination looks a little weak compared to other apps (most of which seem to rely on mental ray). But overall these areas are by no means weak and Cinema 4D can still produce stunning renders when asked to.