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.

00 – C4D Architecture Edition features exchange plugins for Allplan, ArchiCAD and Vectorworks, enabling

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.

01 – Cinema 4D’s flexible HUD system allows the user to drag commands into the main window as HUD elements.

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.

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But the inevitable question gets asked: “what about Photorealism?” Sure, it’s always been possible to export your geometry (and textures, depending on the export format used) to third party programs, but this has at any time been accompanied by several caveats. First of all, geometry doesn’t get translated properly (missing faces, wrong smoothing). Second, textures don’t always make the transition properly. Third, you only want to do a rendering, but have to buy a modeling, rendering and animation package to use just one third of it (well, two thirds if you want the animation as well).

The Use of TurboSketch

Given the preceding, how many of us have thought how nice it would be to produce photorealistic renderings right there, inside of SketchUp? IMSI/Design (makers of TurboCAD) certainly thought so, and came up with TurboSketch, to date the only Mac-based plug-in renderer forSketchUp.

TurboSketch Studio is basically a collection of Ruby scripts for handling model translation and the LightWork Design rendering engine. Oddly, IMSI/Design have chosen to bundle the rendering plug-in with a copy of the freely-downloadable Google SketchUp. However, this has meant that due to licensing problems with Google, the product is not currently available for the UK market. This one has us scratching our heads. Why make the decision to bundle a commercial application with a freely-available one, if including that freely-available product means that you close out a large part of your target market? The plug-in does, after all, install and work fine with copies of Google SketchUp that are already downloaded, and also works without any problems with the commercial Google SketchUp Pro. Answers on a postcard please…

Once it’s installed, TurboSketch Studio notifies its presence by posting a small palette of nine icons that you can place anywhere on the screen. These icons represent: Preview Render, Standard Render, Presentation Quality Render, Save Image: then come Lighting, Environment, Image and Render controls: then finally a button to summon the help. (see image 01).

You’ll also notice that when you right/ctrl-click on an object, you get two new entries in the contextual menu: TurboSketch Material andTurboSketch Light Attributes. (see image 02)

01 – TurboSketch Studio’s palette icons are a bit weak.

02 – New Context Menu items in Google’s SketchUp once TurboSketch Studio has been installed.

Finally, moving over to the Components Browser, you’ll find a new sub-section: TurboSketch Lights where seven new component light types are installed.

The main claim of TurboSketch is that it emulates the simplicity of SketchUp in offering one-click rendering. So how true is this claim? Well, one-hundred percent true. But is the rendering you obtain any good? Well, by and large, yes, it is.

I’m sure a lot of us are familiar with the first results from a render: the anticipation, followed by profound disappointment at the first results, followed by the usual round of tweak-and-refine until you get the results that you wanted the first time. With a few reservations, TurboSketch Studio largely avoids this and really does delivers on its promise of one-click rendering. We say “largely” because the first time we tried it we got a jumbled mess. We then realized that what we were looking at was geometry that was hidden in our SketchUp files, but was rendering in TurboSketch Studio. This is a limitation of the Mac version of the program, so if you’ve got hidden geometry you’ll need to “Save As” — then delete the hidden stuff. IMSI/Design are working with Google to resolve this problem.

The standard environment is set up to use the sun position from your SketchUp file, provides the sun as the only light source and uses the SketchUp horizon and ground colors. The results can be impressive, to say the least. When the Presentation Quality render option is chosen, the light and shading quality of the resultant render can be quite beguiling.

03 – With quality set to “Presentation” and sun as light source one click gets you renderers of this quality.

04 – Another rendering of the same model showing attractive results.

There’s an almost luminous quality to the sunlight, and the shading and drop-off in the shadows is extremely convincing (although the shadows themselves aren’t soft-edged). (see images 03-04). For the presentation quality renders you will have to wait, however: at 1024 x 768 the render took just over twenty minutes for our scenes. That’s because TurboSketch Studio is unable to take advantage of multiple processors, which seems a real shame, especially if you have a Mac Pro. In this release animation is also not supported.

The two other render modes are Preview (for rough-and-ready ‘thumbnail’ renders) and Standard — which is often good enough. The renders can be tweaked for brightness and contrast before and after rendering and any settings are automatically applied to the next render. The quality settings for each of the render types is also tweakable through the Render Settings Dialog, although there doesn’t seem to be a way to turn turn off reflections for Preview rendering, which is odd, given that they’re not really needed here and can slow down the rendering considerably.

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