Cinema 4d r20
| | price From £555 standalone / £120 per 3-month subscription Company MAXON website www.maxon.net
We review C4D’S latest release
Cinema 4D is no longer a teenager! Version 20 is a milestone for any application, so MAXON has decided to imbue the latest release of its digital content creation application with a range of new features and toolsets, which have the potential to ensure that Cinema 4D is fighting its corner in adulthood.
MAXON, for a few versions, has been updating the core code of Cinema 4D. With Cinema 4D R20, the first real fruits of this long and mainly unsung task are starting to bear fruit; as with any Cinema 4D update, a read of the updated ‘What’s new’ section is essential, as the updates impact on many features that will now ‘work better’.
The biggest new feature for Cinema 4D R20, and one that has been clamoured for by Cinema 4D users for a long time, is Nodal Shaders. This is a huge development for Cinema 4D users – up until now creating Cinema 4D shaders had been an inefficient mix of tabs and buttons. Now using either the new Node or Uber material (or one their presets) enables the creation of an efficient and easy-to-digest shader system.
The Node Editor has a noticeably different UI to the more familiar Xpresso nodal system which has been a part of Cinema 4D for years. The new system is more intuitive than Xpresso, and will hopefully allow the older shader systems, and potentially the Xpresso paradigm, to deprecate in future versions.
Another major new feature is the support of a fantastic new volume/voxel-based system. This gives access to the use of volumes, which works with OPENVDB files as well as practically any object within Cinema 4D to create complex shapes and systems. These can be used as a much more efficient Boolean system, as well as a quick way to mesh particles for example.
The GPU render system, which is the MAXON implementation of AMD’S
Radeon Prorender, the hybrid rendering solution, offers accelerated rendering on practically any Windows or Mac computer, and receives some big updates in Cinema 4D R20. Key features such as motion blur, subsurface scattering, and Cinema 4D’s implementation of Shadow Catcher are now implemented.
A range of outputs are now available in Prorender for compositing, including a really useful implementation of Object ID and Object Group IDS using the existing Cinema 4D compositing tag, which now make the GPU render engine more than good enough for the majority of Cinema 4D work. This will bring a huge benefit to users who have avoided using Prorender, as they will be rewarded with tumbling render times and better images due to the more iterative workflow that Gpuaccelerated rendering offers.
One of Cinema 4D’s core markets is in motion graphics, and this has received one of the biggest updates in R20 with a major overhaul of the way that Mograph works. This is due to the complete reworking of the old Mograph Effectors into a new Fields paradigm, which to put it bluntly is a transformational step forward for Mograph use in Cinema 4D.
First of all, using Fields in Effectors shows a marked speed increase in UI responsiveness, and with features such as the new Multi-instance option in the cloner object, Mograph in general feels a lot faster. This is great in and of itself, but the fact that Fields can be added and grouped within a single property panel, and can easily affect clone colour as well as work with emitters and the new volume system, creates unique animated shapes and systems in a ridiculously powerful but easy-to-use workflow. This may make users of Cinema 4D who switched to Houdini come back home.
With all of this new power it is worth bearing in mind why Cinema 4D users remain Cinema 4D users. MAXON has built an enviable reputation in the market as the digital content creation application that is the easiest to get into, combined with rock-solid operation when compared to its competitors. With Cinema 4D R20 this is still true, as all of the new features have been given a way of working that is logical to Cinema 4D.
There are still some issues, for example the new Nodal materials are still finding their feet in the GPU render engine. It would also be great to see the character tools receive a polish, if for no other reason than to make Cinema 4D R20 a fantastic bedrock for standalone freelancers and studios, which other new features – such as the new 2D camera, Motion Tracker updates, Alembic, FBX and new CAD import options to name but a few – already make a compelling case for.
With Cinema 4D R20, MAXON has created an application which is in rude health, with impressive new features that improve and expand the core feature set. For artists looking for the best gateway into digital content creation, and one that is stable and easy to use, Cinema 4D R20 is the one to beat.
“Using either the new node or Uber Material enables the creation of an efficient and easyto-digest shader system”