Tech Reviews
Procreate Dreams
rocreate for the iPad has been around for a few years and has created a niche for itself for on-the-go designers and illustrators. Recently, the same team has expanded into animation and developed Procreate Dreams.
As of this writing, the app is still in its nascent form and is missing some key features one would expect of a full-fledged animation system. That said, a good number of these are on their development forecast for the future. So, let’s take a look at what’s in it so far.
One of the first things to note is that this new release takes many of the favorite features from Procreate and migrates them into
Dreams — specifically, the wide variety of brushes. These respond to touch, but you are going to get the best results using an Apple Pencil.
The user interface has a great design and feels good to work with. By using drag methods, you can scroll around your animation or pinch in and out to zoom into specific frames on specific tracks. You can also minimize the timeline down to just a little flipbook to give you maximum drawing real estate. And the flipbook can sit under your thumb as you flip back and forth with one hand, while your other hand does the drawing. Other functions are accessed through multi-finger taps and swipes.
The layer system is intuitive and will be recognizable to anyone who has used Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects, Toon Boom or any given graphic editing system. You can add additional layers to animate on, or to bring some footage for a background on a bottom layer and animate above it. You can even bring in video of a performer to rotoscope. Or, if you are already a Procreate user, you can dragand-drop your Procreations right into Dreams.
One of the most innovative features is Performance Mode, which gives you the option of dragging layers or parameters around in real time and recording the actions. So, you can have an animation going on at one layer and then drag something else around in response to the other animation. You can also quickly block things out and tweak them later. Of course, if you are a hardcore traditionalist, you can also do your keyframe thing!
I could start digging into the items that I feel are missing, but you can take five minutes and just look at the app reviews to find common themes among the user base. You will also find that the development team is extremely responsive to those user reviews, which tells me they are listening.
Seriously, with a price tag of only $19.99, what have you got to lose? If you want to create some cool-looking hand-drawn animation, or if you are just starting out and you need something to hone your walk-cycle skills you learned from reading Preston Blair books, this will take you a long way. And it’ll just keep getting better! Website: procreate.com
Price: $19.99
Maxon’s Cinema 4D 2024
o round out the journey through the Maxon One suite that I started a few months ago (see our archives), I’m taking a look at the Maxon flagship: Cinema 4D 2024. Topping the list of highlights is something that isn’t a spicy new tool, but it’s more important than those hot tools — the actual performance. With new core code, 2024 is markedly faster (up to 2x) than previous versions. Many of your scenes may see realistic, real-time playback without the viewport. Such features as simulations are more stable to boot (more on that shortly).
Cinema 4D’s Unified Simulation System has Rigid Body Simulations to work with now. It’s like Vellum for those coming from the Houdini world. All dynamic systems, including ropes, cloth, soft bodies and Pyro (Cinema 4D’s fluid simulation engine — fluids, not liquids) can work together and interact with each other. This interactivity is so critical for good simulations.
Speaking of Pyro, additional parameters have been added to better control your fire and smoke. For those who have played with any fluid simulators, there are already quite a lot of controls. But believe me: Additions like timing parameters to easily adjust smoke and temperature rates are incredibly time saving. Also, Pyro can now be applied to particle systems and matrix cloners, which, as anyone who works in vfx knows, we almost always guide the initial structure of an explosion or burn with particles that then drive the fire. Furthermore, you can easily iterate and save simulations at lower resolutions to get client-signoff, and then Up-Res the simulation for final renders.
Cinema 4D has always had strong modeling tools, and 2024 adds some powerful ones. Select Pattern gives you the ability to select a small pattern of faces on a mesh, and then repeat and expand that pattern across the whole mesh, which you can then apply operators on like extrusions or deleting them — a huge time saver. Then, the super powerful Projection Deformer projects points from one object to the surface of another. And the VAMP manager has also been updated to transfer UV and weight maps from on mesh to another. The Node UI has been updated as well, and not just with some new nodes for parametric modeling; the entire UX has been refined for increased readability and usability. Scaffolds (which Nuke users would call “backdrops”) can be used to organize and label groups of
nodes, ideally to cluster them into a logical function, such as “Check Motion Capture Data” or “Generate Text Objects.” You can also add a node to the scaffold by just dragging it in. And notes (like Sticky Notes) can also be added to annotate your node graph. I cannot express in less stern terms how important it is to keep your nodes clean and readable — not just in case someone else has to open your file, but also if you have to reopen your file in two months and find yourself staring at it, trying to remember what you were thinking.
In short, there are lots of good features for the C4D users out there, and it all comes as part of the Maxon One suite or your C4D subscription. Website: maxon.net/cinema-4d
Price: $1,399 per year
Maxon’s Redshift
edshift is Maxon’s GPU rendering engine, and as of 2024 it is the default renderer for Cinema 4D, with an emphasis on integrating the render workflow even more seamlessly in the C4D environment. For instance, when importing external 3D files like OBJ, FBX and USD, you can opt to have the materials be converted to native Redshift materials. The same is true for when you are exporting — simplified versions of the Redshift shader will be exported so that the other 3D software can import more smoothly. Yes, you’ll have to tweak some in this process, but this interchange makes things much less complicated.
New and/or improved shaders are also a thing with the latest builds of Redshift. One that I find particularly powerful is the interaction with Substance Designer created shader nodes. When importing, you will have deep controls over the parameters, but you also have direct interaction with the parameters that you (or the designer of the shader) have promoted to be accessible to the artists using it.
Another cool feature is a jitter node that can be used in your shader tree to create color variations with objects that are using the same shader — reducing complexity of the scene, as well as memory and computation overhead.
A MatCap node is also new to Redshift, which allows you to drive the look of a render not from lights but from images. The image used is wrapped around the object via world, camera or normal space with traditional transforms to tweak the look. The result gives you a very stylized non-photoreal look. However, you don’t need to use it on its own; you can feed the shader into a more standard shader so your MatCap is the base, but you also benefit from regular lights.
Cinema 4D’s Distorter node has migrated to Redshift and has been expanded so that you can use 3D distortion using Maxon Noise and bump maps as well as traditional color inputs to distort UV space in textures.
Let’s not forget that Redshift isn’t exclusive to Cinema 4D. It is a near-agnostic renderer that is also supported for Maya, Max, Houdini, Katana, Hydra (in general) and Blender. And the Redshift team is extremely diligent in consistently pushing out new builds with features and fixes all the time.
Website: maxon.net/redshift
Price: $22 per month, $264 per year ◆