Maxon's flagship product, and a 2011 Live Design Product of the Year, Cinema 4D will see a milestone release this September, promising more than 200 new features, with improvements to modeling tools, performance, and cross-application integration.
Adding a host of upgrades to the modeling tools--pull, wax, smooth, flatten, inflate, knife, and pinch--Maxon has also added preset options for stamps, stencils, brushes, and new attributes for size, pressure, and the like. There is a new option called "bake" that transforms sculpted polygons into standard and displacement maps, and Maxon promises increased performance using this tool, as it can be applied to low-poly count meshes.
Also new are interactive work plane modes, dynamic guides, and a "completely redesigned snapping system," according to the company, that is said to make "aligning objects when modeling dramatically faster."
The Camera Calibrator is a new feature in C4D R14 that offers a solution to matching a 3D camera image to a 3D environment. Maxon notes that "users can integrate 3D objects into the photographed environment" for visualization or use a camera mapping procedure to create matte paintings.
Other new tools include Motion Camera, Morph Camera, and Camera Composition Helper that can more quickly frame a 3D scene artistically or can be used to make photorealistic and natural camera movements. Another new feature, Camera Focus Picker, allows you to control the focal distance interactively and animate it over time.
Many enhancements to the render engine have been made, including improved shaders, materials, weathering effects, and an upgrade to the standard mapping. Maxon has also added support for "Radiosity Maps" and has included some new effects that allow for additional post-render changes. Now you can relight scenes, do color correction, and adjust mattes, all after the initial render.
The new version announcement also notes that "algorithms in R14 provide up to twice the speed for caustics, while further enhancements to subsurface scattering render materials such as milk, wax, and skin more efficiently."
Several system integration features have been added or improved, and now there is integration with Nuke by The Foundry. You can now save a Nuke project file to reconstruct a multi-pass render and also import OpenEXR and FBX files. Additionally, there is a new Adobe Photoshop plug-in that exports Cinema 4D scenes into a Photoshop 3D layer.
The entry-level Cinema 4D Prime R14 costs $995 plus tax. Cinema 4D Broadcast R14 adds Global Illumination, cloning, motion graphics tools, and a high-end content library packed with 3D models, materials, cameras, lighting setups, video footage, and scenes, plus integration with compositing tools, and costs $1,695 plus tax. Cinema 4D Visualize R14 for architectural visualization costs $2,295 plus tax. Cinema 4D Studio R14, the largest package, adds advanced character animation tools, hair, a dynamics engine, and unlimited-clients network rendering, and costs $3,695 plus tax.
For more information, visit Maxon.
