Maxon Cinema 4D Studio

About this release

Cinema 4D has a reputation among motion designers that no other three dimensional package quite matches, and the reason is not that it does more. It is that it is comprehensible. The object hierarchy behaves the way you expect, parameters are where you would look for them, and the whole thing can be picked up by somebody whose background is two dimensional design without a six month detour into technical documentation. That is why so much broadcast and advertising work goes through it.

The generator and deformer system is the heart of it. Cloners, effectors, fractures and fields build complex animated arrangements procedurally, so a thousand copies of an object can be driven by falloff, sound, shader or another object without a single keyframe placed by hand. Change the source object and the whole arrangement follows. This is the part that makes the abstract flowing geometry of title sequences and product spots practical on a deadline.

The Studio level is the complete package. Character rigging with weighting and pose tools, hair and fur, cloth, soft and rigid body dynamics, a full particle system, volume modelling and unified simulation are all included rather than sold separately, so a shot that needs cloth over a rigged character does not require a second application partway through.

Rendering covers both directions. The physically based renderer handles final frames with global illumination and proper materials, the viewport preview is close enough to the result that most look development happens interactively, and third party render engines integrate through the plug in system for anyone whose pipeline is already built around one. Handoff to compositing keeps passes, object buffers and camera data intact.

What it does

Procedural cloning and effectors

Large animated arrangements driven by falloff, sound or geometry rather than by hand keyframing.

Complete simulation set

Cloth, hair, particles, soft and rigid bodies and volumes included at this level rather than sold on.

Character tools

Rigging, weighting, posing and retargeting for figure work inside the same scene.

Interactive look development

The viewport preview is close enough to the final render that materials get judged live.

Render engine flexibility

The built in physically based renderer plus plug in support for the common third party engines.

Clean compositing handoff

Passes, object buffers and camera data export intact for finishing elsewhere.

Changed in this version

• Faster simulation solving on scenes with heavy cloth and dynamics.
• Node based material editor gains a simplified view for common setups.
• Improved viewport performance on scenes with very high polygon counts.
• Expanded falloff options across the effector system.
• Scene loading noticeably quicker on projects with many external references.

System requirements

Install order

1. Unpack the archive to a path with no accents or spaces.
2. Run the installer and choose which additional content libraries to deploy.
3. Launch once and let the shader and preset caches build.
4. Point simulation cache storage at a fast drive before starting heavy dynamics work.

Worth knowing before you start

File details