Tech Reviews
Maxon’s Cinema 4D R15, iZotope’s RX 3 and the new Wacom Cintiq Companion. by Todd Sheridan Perry
In Maxon’s 15th release of Cinema 4D, plenty of features have been added across the spectrum of needs for the user base, making the workflow faster, more efficient and cleaner.
Beveling may not sound like a big deal, but for those of you modelers out there who have had to deal with it, you can attest to the frustration of binding corners and twisting edges. Cinema 4D’s new bevel algorithms get smooth verts, edges and polys quickly and interactively, even after the bevel has been created. Plus, for those pinch-y corners, you can choose between different mitre selections to get the best transition for your needs. Plus, if you want to get crazy, you can use splines to determine the profile of the bevel.
Already a 3D leader in the design world, Cinema 4D increases its foothold by adding to the typography tools. 3D Kerning provides control over settings of individual letters as well as blocks of letters, allowing precise and tailored font design work at a really high grain. Best of all, through all these edits, the text remains an editable spline.
Rendering is also extremely important, with a balance of speed and quality. Maxon has replaced their physical renderer with a faster mode they call Embree, with selections for Faster or Smaller. So, either use lots of RAM and go fast, or less RAM and go slower. Global Illumination can be more tailored to taste now with choices of different math for both primary and secondary rays. And, with the progressive rendering mode being the method du jour (“progressive” meaning: “Give me a quick look to get an idea and progressively increase the quality until I tell you to stop”), Cinema 4D includes the progressive mode. And you can send frames to team render to use multiple machines on an individual frame.
Sculpting advances include the ability to project a sculpt with crappy edge loops onto new geo with proper loops, and you can sculpt on poly surfaces, as opposed to the legacy method of having to jump through some hoops to prep a model for sculpting. There is a lot more new stuff going on under the hood which speeds up things (like multithreaded deformers) and forcing to 64-bit (sorry 32-bit users—start living for today).
With maturity comes respect, and I can sense the Cinema 4D user base growing around me. And they are demanding respect through the work they accomplish. Price: Studio: $3,695; Upgrades from $995 Website: maxon.net