Product Review: Cinema 4D r10.5

While this is a review of Maxon’s Cinema 4D version 10.5, we’ll also be looking at some of the changes that were introduced in version 10, which saw the biggest shake-up in Cinema 4D’s history. It’s also worthwhile stressing the modular nature of C4D before we continue. The app is based around a core module — the Cinema 4D application itself which retails at $895. Then the user can bolt on modules to extend the functionality and tailor the program precisely to their own needs. The additional modules are Advanced Render ($595, adds Global Illumination and HDRI rendering, caustics, sub-surface scattering), Dynamics ($395, physics simulation), Hair ($395), MOCCA ($595, Joint-based IK system and cloth simulation), MoGraph ($395, Motion Graphics toolbox), NET Unlimited ($395 Network based rendering and management), Sketch & Toon ($595, Hand-drawn and Cel-shader rendering) and Thinking Particles ($395, Particle systems). It’s also worth noting that the BodyPaint 3D painting and texturing application that was previously only available as a module, is now rolled into the core application.

Interface

For seasoned users, the most obvious change introduced in version 10 is the whole look of the program: it has taken on a less-sculpted, slate-grey look with all the button highlights in orange (somewhat reminiscent of modo, we have to say). However, interface flexibility has always been a forte of Cinema, and the old-style looks are still there lurking under the surface, ready to be called up from the Edit > Preferences > Common dialog box. Cinema has also eschewed the collection of printed manuals of previous versions, with all its documentation now being searchable hypertext that is shipped on the DVD and opened from within the program itself. However, the documentation isn’t installed by default, and to install it you actually have to install the relevant language file that you want your interface to ‘speak’. This caused us some head-scratching at first.

The Cinema 4D interface concept also merits an explanation. The program is really a GUI-within-a-GUI (i.e. neither Mac nor Widows.) In fact, the Mac version doesn’t even use the Mac Menu Bar – all menus are accessed from within Cinema 4D windows themselves. This also leads to some problems: since the interface basically sits in a Mac OS X window, the three window control buttons don’t do what you expect them to. Clicking the ‘x’ button doesn’t close the current document — it quits the whole program. This had us really confused at first. Also you don’t get the little dot in the Close button to tell you that your document is unsaved.

But this control over the GUI has allowed the developers to build in a great deal of flexibility with regards to screen layout. Basically, every interface element (toolbars, OpenGL views, Attribute dialogs, and the like) exist as separate windows. These windows can then be docked with one another– either vertically or horizontally — to create a ‘flat’ interface. Should you require a little depth to your interface, any window or docked ‘pane’ can be turned into a tab, and these tabs can then be stacked to allow multiple panes to reside in the same interface space. Of course, most of the time, you won’t have to think about this, since Cinema 4D comes complete with ready-to-use interface layouts for General use, Modeling, Animation, two layouts for BodyPaint (Maxon’s 3D painting solution) and…Architecture.

Yes, Architecture. Maxon is taking the field of architectural visualization rather seriously (see last section below). The number of layouts available to the user is essentially unlimited, and they can be chosen from the Layout drop-down in the standard interface or from the Window > Layout menu. Careful if you have you interface stretched across multiple monitors, though. Choosing a new layout snaps the entire interface into the monitor carrying the Menu Bar. Even with the interface split into two windows (one per monitor), both windows still crowded onto the main monitor when changing the layout. We hope this is addressed soon.

Another major interface change introduced in version 10 is Layers. These do what you would expect them to — organize various scene elements into groups that can be controlled as a whole — and a bit more besides. The architectural implications are obvious, in that you can group structural, service, landscape, entourage, etc. onto their own layers and hide and show them at will. Although you can also control visibility in final rendering, hiding in the Object and Material managers and in the Timeline.

Layers can, of course, be locked and they can have any deformers or HyperNURBS objects turned on or off at Layer level. Creating a new layer can be as easy as selecting some objects in the Object manager and Right-click > Add to New Layer. Naturally you can also add them to existing layers. Layers are also global: any item in a Layer will be affected wherever that item occurs: simultaneously in the Object manager and Timeline, for example. Layers also work independently of Groups in the object manager: the contents of a single layer can be drawn from members of different groups. We found the new layers extremely useful in organizing the often-messy hierarchy of imported model files — for instance we found them invaluable for organizing and controlling the visibility of the tangle of Cameras that seem to come in with our test SketchUp files.

Finally, we come on to the HUD. (see image 01) The HUD increases interface flexibility dramatically, by letting you simply drag commands from the interface into the OpenGL Editor (the 3D workspace). The commands then sit there independent of the view and give you immediate access to whatever attributes they control. For instance, select a number of attributes in the Attribute Manager, they become a collapsible HUD element. You can Command-drag to place the HUD element anywhere in the workspace. Then dragging on any of the fields in the HUD element, and the corresponding parameters update in real-time in the Editor. And in 10.5 the concept has been expanded so that just about anything can be used as a HUD element. We found that the positions of HUD elements could get a little ‘scrambled’ when changing between views, but luckily this is ameliorated by the new Auto Fold option.: this collapses any HUD element down to a single button that pops open when you mouse over it. The HUD really comes into its own when you want access to particular commands for a particular project, but don’t want to go to the trouble of designing a custom layout for the task.

Lighting Tool

Another feature of 10.5 that straddles the boundary between interface and feature is the Lighting tool. This is basically a new way of setting and aiming lights, and aims to make the process more “on-the-fly”. We could mention here that the inherent clunkiness of the previous system was brought about by C4D’s use of separate Move, Scale & Rotate tools, rather than the all-in-one ‘Gizmos’ favored by other programs. As well as placement, the light’s other attributes such as brightness or cone angle for spotlights, for example, can be set interactively in the Editor window (the 3D workspace) without ever going into the Attributes manager. (see QuickTimes QT1 – QT3)

QT1 – Lighting Tool Part 1 – QuickTime Movie. Shows placement of lighting tool. (click on triangle, far right in control bar and select Save As QuickTime Movie to save a larger version to your desktop).

This is all done by the use of various key combinations in conjunction with the Lighting tool — Shift varies the distance from a surface along a normal, and holding Alt will swap into target mode for spotlights. The various key combinations can be a little troublesome at first, but once learned, the set-up of lights becomes remarkably fluid. A nice touch is that multiple-selected lights will all have their attributes changed in concert. One slight hiccup was that when altering the light intensity, the numerical value in the Attributes manager didn’t update until after the mouse button was released — some feedback here would be nice, and we’re sure this minor oversight will be fixed soon.

QT2 – Lighting Tool Part 2 – QuickTime Movie. Adding second light, modifying lights in the attributes palette, et cetera. (click on triangle, far right in control bar and select Save As QuickTime Movie to save a larger version to your desktop).

QT3 – Lighting Tool Part 3 – QuickTime Movie. Shows the effect of Lighting with the Enhanced OpenGL features.

XRefs

Brand new in 10.5 — and a much-requested feature — are External References (XRefs). These are external files that can be ’embedded’ in a master scene via the new XRef object. This has obvious advantages working in a collaborative environment, where one person is responsible for the animation in a scene, and other artists are concentrating on modeling and texturing. Should decisions be taken and changes made somewhere else down the pipeline, the referenced objects can be changed and the changes passed down to the Master file without the person responsible for the master file batting an eyelid. The user of the Master file can, however, change materials and assign materials to an XRef, as well as applying any deformers, HyperNURBS (Subdivision) objects or Clone Array objects.

What can’t be altered is the actual geometry of the XRefed object itself — unless you first use the Make Editable or Current State to Object command, which then breaks the XRef link. The XRef now neatly circumvents the previous method, which was to fall back on the ‘Merge…’ command — an often time-consuming chore. This distributed method of working is also the standard in large Special Effects houses, so should help Cinema 4D to more closely integrate with those companies’ production workflows. (see QuickTime QT4)

QT4 – XRef System in Cinema 4D is new in version 10.5, more aligning the application to better suit the production pipelines in large special effects houses.

New Timeline

The Timeline has seen a thorough re-working in version 10.5. First thing to note is that the Timeline and the Layers function are linked: turn off a layer’s visibility, and those objects in the layer will disappear from the Timeline. This is, of course, useful for isolating elements and concentrating on them — the Timeline could get populated with tracks and keys very quickly. The Timeline is, in fact, now two Timelines: Normal and Advanced.

The Advanced mode allows you to split keys — into separate Position, Rotation and Scale or Heading, Pitch and Bank, for example, without ‘opening up’ tracks. There’s also a much-needed ability to scale the Mini f-curves vertically. Mini f-curves can be shown and revealed in the Track Editor, obviating the need to switch to a specific f-curve view. The vertical scaling is a real boon to seeing exactly what’s going on — before, a lot of the information got compressed in the vertical scale.

There’s also a new Clean Tracks command that helps to keep everything, well, clean. The purpose of this is to remove redundant keys — for instances where a value may not be changing in one channel, whilst varying in others. The redundant keys are stripped out leaving only start and end keys, greatly reducing clutter in the Timeline. In a similar vein are Reduced Modification curves. These are used when editing an f-curve which can get overly complex (like in imported Motion Capture data, where there are keys on every frame). The RM curve is a simplified ‘overlay’ on the actual f-curve, allowing the user to change the basic shape of the curve, without resorting to laborious dragging of multiple keys in multiple channels.

One thing that may dismay seasoned users is that Sequences (Cinema 4D’s non-linear animation implementation) are gone. Well, not gone entirely, rather their functionality has been rolled into those of the standard Tracks. Anything that you could do before with a Sequence you can now do with a Track.

MOCCA

A large part of the toolset in Cinema 4D is aimed at character animation, and 10.5 has added an array of tools to make the character animator’s life easier. Some of these are available only in the MOCCA add-on module, whilst others are available in the core program. First of these is the Squash & Stretch deformer. This is a technique used to give ‘life’ to characters and objects by over-exaggerating everyday deformations (a ball bouncing is the most obvious example). The S&S module is applied as a tag to an object and the Attributes editor can then be used to alter the characteristics. The results are nothing that you can’t achieve with other techniques, but the S&S tag makes it a whole lot faster & easier. Similarly, the Jiggle deformer gives random shaking motions to meshes– a lot more useful that it first sounds. Then there’s the Cluster deformer — this allows you to take a set of points (via a selection set) and link them to the motion of a Null object. The Null is then used as a ‘handle’ to animate the points: a series of nulls bound to a divided plane could be used to simulate Wave motion, for example.

The preceding features are available in the MOCCA module. The core application has also had this area addressed with a new option on the IK tag: IK joint systems now have the ability to squash and stretch — essentially changing the distance between the joints in an IK chain. You can also set the behavior of the bound mesh to vary with the stretching: the mesh can increase in volume (maintaining overall proportions) or the mesh volume can remain constant, resulting in ’emaciation’ as the bone chain stretches.

BodyPaint

As mentioned previously, BodyPaint is now rolled into the main application. This is a complete environment for painting and UV mapping characters. It allows you to paint directly onto the model’s mesh and the results update in real time in the Editor Window. (see image 02) You’ll need a pressure-sensitive graphics tablet for best results, and there can be a lag with painting and updating, when using complex, layered textures, but with newer Intel processors this is becoming less of a worry. Coupled with the new Advanced OpenGLmode, this allows not only painting of Color texture to be previewed in real time, but also Bump, Noise and Specular channels. (see image 02).

Architectural Edition (AE)

Cinema 4D has had a wide application in the 3D industry in general but now Maxon (along with quite a few other companies are going after the architectural visualization market with this $1,795 version of Cinema.

Cinema’s modular nature lends itself to this type of re-application and this incarnation features the base application plus the Advance Render module. The latter provides Radiosity and HDRI illumination, essential for getting top-notch photorealism — especially in interior scenes. However, for non-photoreal images, the highly extensible Sketch & Toon module is provided, which can produce a whole slew of hand-drawn effects. HDRI is essential in modern visualization, to get easily-achievable, naturalistic lighting. However, in comparison to other apps, Cinema 4D’s HDRI setup is a little more complex than it needs to be, relying, as it does, on setting up a double-skydome setup with the HDRI texture mapped to the skydome objects’ Luminance channels.

Another aspect of Advanced Render is the Sky object option. This allows the creation of either 2D or 3D Volumetric skies (the latter are more accurate but render more slowly.) Fifty pre-sets are supplied to start, and more can be derived and saved from these. Crucially important is the Sky object’s ability to accurately show the effects of the Sun (and the Moon) according to time of day and geographical location — vital for sun and shadow studies on buildings. Also introduced is the Shift Camera — basically a software implementation of a perspective-correction camera. This will give a two-point perspective, in which vertical lines will remain parallel. (see images 03 – 04)

Cinema’s interface layouts have also been tweaked to reflect better the workflow of visualization specialists with ready-provided modeling, texturing, lighting, animation and rendering layouts. Also, the layer structure introduced in the Object Browser in v.10 means that elements such as trees, people, cars and structure can sit on there own layer and be turned on and off at will.

Maxon Computer GmhH is a Nemetschek AG company, with the European AEC software giant owning a majority of its shares. With Nemetschek AG’s recent global re-branding efforts it should come as no surprise that Maxon has Cinema 4D import filters for AllPlan, ArchiCAD and VectorWorks — all sister products within the emerging Nemetschek AG juggernaut. But oddly enough, Google’s ubiquitous modeler, SketchUp is not provided for. These import filters allow for the easy exchange of ready-built CAD information into Cinema 4D to give a more presentation-style output.

These plug-ins output from the aforementioned programs in native .c4d format, and give the option, for example, of automatically re-grouping the scene according to materials. Any changes made in the originating program can then be re-imported back into Cinema 4D. Any material property changes made in Cinema 4D will, however, be preserved on updating the model file. This is fine with native .c4d files, but if you’re importing via exchange formats like FBX or 3DS, you still have to tellCinema 4D where to find the model’s texture files — the setting is buried in the Preferences dialog. Unfortunately, there also seems to be a bug in the Mac FBX importer that causes some imported texture maps to come out black. Maxon is aware of the problem and they are working on a solution.

Architectural visualization depends heavily on ‘Entourage’ — scene elements like vegetation, people and cars that give context and scale to an image. To this end, Cinema 4D architectural edition ships with libraries containing just such material– all available for inspection through the new Object Browser. There are human silhouettes from Zygote and content for interior furnishings fittings, although there’s no great variation in style — most of the stuff would look right at home in a bank. And curiously, while there’s an abundance of bathroom fittings, there are no kitchen furniture and fixtures at all. Also plants and automotives are under-represented, with just three of the former and one of the latter.

Closing Remarks and Recommendations

Given the meager upgrade price from 10.0/10.1 to 10.5, this new release clearly is an absolute must-have release for anyone with a Cinema license. The inclusion of the BodyPaint module in the main application — at no extra cost — is also an additional incentive. There were a few quirks — we hope the FBX texture import is fixed as soon as possible. Animation control continues to be further refined, and (you’ll wonder how you ever did without it) the new XRef system in particular will enable users working in effects production houses to implement new– and more efficient — workflows, saving that most precious of commodities: time. —- TIM DANAHER, Associate Editor

Pros: Tailored toolsets & layout for visualization; fantastic rendering quality via Advanced Render Module; Full multi-processor support; excellent animation controls; modular nature allows tailoring app; BodyPaint 3D now built-in; 10.5 upgrade is good value for money; AE kit dovetails nicely and uniquely with Nemetschek AG CAD/BIM apps.

Cons: Price can mount as modules are added; platform-agnostic interface can throw up a few oddities; quirks in UI when using multiple monitors; no SketchUp import filter.

Advice: If you are looking for suppior rendering and animation for ArchiCAD, Allplan or Vectorworks Maxon’s modules for C4D offer strong round-trip support; new Xref system keeps C4D a major contender for VFX houses; competitive pricing, powerful rendering and speed.

Cost: $895.USD, base, AE Kit $395.USD / Mac OS X Universal Binary Support

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