Cinema 4D R15

Archive notice: This article was originally published on July 23, 2013. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
According to Maxon, Release 15 of Cinema 4D has one main goal: to accelerate production speed. Cinema 4D R15 takes up the torch from previous versions and continues to expand the fast toolset.

Team Renderer

Network rendering was previously the only way to limit render times for animations. Each client computer was assigned images for processing through the Cinema 4D NET functionality. This function is removed completely with Cinema 4D 15, incidentally along with XP and 32-bit compatibility on Windows computers.

It is replaced by Team Render. Team Render is started directly through Cinema 4D. This allows render jobs from the Render Manager or Picture Viewer to be passed to Team Render. The required client architecture consists of a special Cinema 4D installation that must be installed across the network on every computer intended to support Team Render. The great advantage of Team Render is that it can distribute not only animation calculations but also still images across several computers. In other words, genuine distributed rendering.

Since many users still have unused computing power on their networks, it can now be used for both still images and animations. This feature alone can therefore reduce computing time considerably without great effort.

Physical Renderer

Until now, the Physical Renderer brought realistic camera calculations such as lens distortions, depth of field and motion blur. Anyone who did not need these had little reason to use this rendering mode. But Embree has now been added. Embree is a collection of Intel routines that can access the processors’ SSE3 instruction sets directly. In individual cases, this can halve render time. Scenes with many polygons, refractive materials, ambient occlusion, sub-polygon displacement and area shadows can benefit particularly.

Beveling

Breaking edges, or beveling, was available previously but, according to users, was not really satisfactory. Maxon has now completely reprogrammed it. New algorithms are available through menus and controls to break edges in every conceivable way. Even splines can serve as templates for a bevel cross-section.

Grass

Cinema 4D 15 brings its own architectural grass, which can be placed on arbitrary objects. It is based on the familiar Hair renderer known from the Studio package. The shape, size and, of course, colour of the blades of grass can be controlled, as can the density of the growth. Alternative textures can be used to colour the blades and influence the density of growth on the object.

Sculpting

One of the innovations in the previous version was sculpting. It allows objects to be subdivided more finely and then deformed naturally with stamp or brush tools. Retopology, however, had previously been somewhat neglected. If users already had precise ideas about the object to be shaped at the outset, it could be roughly modelled with polygons and the UV coordinates and topology could be prepared favourably. A new function now exists precisely for these cases, allowing an existing object, generally low-resolution but already favourably structured, to be projected onto one or even several sculpting objects. The projected object is automatically converted into a sculpting object with an arbitrary subdivision level, so that work can continue directly with the new object after projection. For this to work accurately enough, the mesh being projected should already lie close to the surface of the sculpting object.

You can read everything else, including a practical test by Arndt von Koenigsmarck, in the next issue of Digital Production, which will reach subscribers on September 4.