Cinema 4D R8.5

Maxon has always been relatively quick at updating Cinema 4D, as the arrival of 8.5 proves. While this update targets the traditional areas of workflow, modelling, materials and so on, it also adds support for a significant new rendering module to its already extensive family of plug-ins.

Long missing in Cinema 4D but available in 8.5 is Vector Motion Blur, which complements the Object and Frame blurring already included. Vector-based blurring is relatively fast and because it’s a post effect, it can be rendered as a separate pass for compositing purposes.

There’s also an addition to the radiosity engine: Object Global Illumination. Previous radiosity methods for animation often produced noisy results, but now you can render in normal mode instead of stochastic with better results.

Subsurface scattering, which simulates the diffusion of light beneath the surface of objects, has been added as an integrated shader. Using it is as easy as applying a new material and adding the shader to the luminance channel.

Also included is support for the FBX file format, developed by Kaydara chiefly for use in MotionBuilder. FBX files can include geometry, textures, deformation, animation and other information, making it an ideal all-in-one delivery system, and is increasingly supported in other applications.

Better Boole replaces the previous Boolean operator with a cleaner and more feature-rich implementation. It reduces triangles, which can cause shading anomalies, and speeds up the Boolean calculations.

There are several new shaders that have been added to Cinema’s already huge library and the Dirt shader, a popular third party shader, is now part of the core application. Also included are the Ripple shader which adds deformations based on particle collisions, a Spline shader which projects splines onto surfaces and the Layer shader, to manipulate multiple layers for complex texturing.

The material window has been updated to present the information in the same way as the attributes manager, bringing more consistency to the display. Node-based construction is more obvious with the addition of browser-style forward and back buttons, and the material preview window now offers a variety of objects instead of just spheres.

Probably the biggest addition in 8.5 is the new all-powerful non-realistic renderer, Sketch and Toon. Oddly, though, it’s not part of either the XL or Studio upgrades and must be purchased separately. For a point release, version 8.5 offers a surprising number of new and genuinely useful features. The upgrade price is also agreeably low, but bear in mind that Sketch and Toon costs an extra £200, which seems excessive for a cel renderer.