CINEMA 4D R18
PRICE from £2,600 COMPANY Maxon WEBSITE www.maxon.net
We take you through the long list of features in Cinema 4D’s latest release
After the disappointment of R17, which offered little of substance apart from the Take System, Cinema 4D is back with a vengeance. With a feature list too long to cover, we only have room here to focus on the big ticket items, but Maxon’s website has a full list.
The one new feature of Cinema 4D R18 that affects everyone is the enhanced Opengl viewport, which now provides a really nice realtime preview of your scene, with environment-mapped reflections, screen-space ambient occlusion and realtime tessellation. Sadly, it only previews masked layers in the Reflectance channel rather than roughness or reflection maps, and shadows can still look grainy. So while it’s not quite Element 3D for Cinema 4D, it’s ideal for playblasts. And if Maxon can get the viewport working more accurately with Reflectance’s many functions, it would be invaluable for quickly previewing materials.
NEW tool
The tool that has everyone excited is the Voronoi Fracture object. Cinema 4D users have had this functionality for a while via plug-ins like Nitroblast, but now it’s deeply integrated in Cinema 4D’s Mograph toolset. In typical Maxon fashion, it might be late to the party, but boy, does it come in style. Fracturing is beautifully implemented – from the pastel-coloured preview to the application of distribution sources – providing exhaustive control over the type and location of the fracture. The wonderfully accurate results also work seamlessly with Cinema 4D’s Bullet physics – although that just makes us wish the engine itself had more options, such as influence weight maps or falloff, so that items broke progressively as they might in the real world, not into clearly-defined pieces all at once.
Of course, the fracturing is all procedural and compatible
with the rest of the Mograph toolset – not to mention all the plug-ins that work with Mograph and give users a rabbit hole of possibilities down which to venture. It may not be worth the entry price alone, but the Voronoi Fracture object is certainly a big selling point.
Mograph gets more love this release with the addition of the new Push Apart Effector, which prevents clones from overlapping; plus the Re Effector, which removes the influence of other effectors in the scene. Both are genuinely useful for motion graphics artists. Perhaps best of all is the new weight-painting function that affords precise control over the way your clones are created and modified, and is also of use in modelling. With lots of other neat touches, such as the ability to scale clones on polygon size and shape groups of clones with splines and other objects, this is a healthy update to the Mograph toolset.
useful extras
As well as these showy items, there’s a host of smaller, but just as useful additions in R18. Gaming tech comes in the shape of Parallax mapping, which sits between normal mapping and displacements as a clever way of adding detail without the rendering overhead. There is some artefacting on large or closeup textures, and as you raise the Parallax samples, you may well find it’s quicker to use displacement instead – but overall the effect is convincing and will no doubt become a staple of many rendering workflows.
With other features, such as the upgraded Knife tool, the long-awaited Shadow Catcher shader and the addition of object tracking to the Motion Tracker, R18 is an excellent upgrade. Many of Cinema 4D R17’s criticisms and complaints have been addressed, and Maxon has clearly listened to its user base in terms of the many tweaks and improvements that have been made to the standard workflow. With improvements to Bodypaint coming in the R18 cycle, plus major architectural restructuring under way, it all points to a really exciting future.