Archive notice: This article was originally published on February 1, 2016. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Maxon’s Cineware allows Adobe After Effects and Cinema 4D to be used together optimally: thanks to the tool bridge, After Effects supports native C4D files that can be brought into AE by drag and drop. The C4D Render Engine can also be used directly in the AE viewport with Cineware, giving you full control over the rendering results, while changed scenes are updated immediately and accordingly in AE.
Cineware 3.0
Version 3.0 newly adds OpenGL rendering, users can synchronise the AE and C4D time sliders automatically, and there are no longer any rendering limitations. The Take System, available in C4D since release 17, is now also supported. Individual takes can therefore be selected from C4D projects and rendered. (More about the Take System in Helge Maus’s tutorial series) Further features include the option of multi-pass layers via an alpha channel and extracting timeline markers from .c4d files into AE.
Cineware 3.0 is available now to all Adobe CC members as an integral part of AE.
AE users who do not own a commercial licence for C4D but would also like to integrate 3D content into the workflow can use Cinema 4D Lite, the compressed version of C4D that launches directly from After Effects.
More about Maxon’s Cineware here.
After Effects CC 2015 13.7
Alongside Maxon Cineware 3.0, the 13.7 update adds a new automatic save function for preferences before starting the render queue, as well as cache optimisations before the playback preview. The update also contains many bug fixes.
All information about the AE update 13.7 is available here.
Anyone who wants to try After Effects: a free 30-day trial version is available here.
For anyone who wants to learn more about Cineware: the free PDF with Robert Hranitzky’s article “Overflight Rights for AE – Cineware in Use” is available as a free download in the attachment.
