Best Buy

  • Price: 424.68 . 1190.64 . 1871.49

  • Company: Maxon

  • Pros: Impressive new rendering improvements, especially the Normal material channel and Normal baking, and Ambient Occlusion.

  • Cons: The global illumination is starting to look a little old and really needs updating, and the material system is crying out to be ‘nodal-network’ based.

  • Our Rating: We rate this 9 out of 10 We rate this 9 out of 10

Cinema 4D is continuing to become a more robust and production-friendly tool, and with the latest release Maxon’s 3D animation package is looking better than ever. Cinema’s interface has always been good, with plenty of user flexibility and adaptability depending on the task. The standalone BodyPaint 3D application, for example, is really just an interface layout of Cinema 4D with the BodyPaint tools engaged and others disabled.

border=0 />Version 9.5 adds some further interface improvements, including a good full screen mode. This allows you to open any manager or view to full screen with the click of a button in the top corner of each manager, or by typing control-tab. This is great for modelling when you just want as much 3D view as possible. You can still open other managers as floating windows with the Shift-Function Key short cuts, and clicking the button again (or hitting Control-Tab) restores the interface to wherever it was previously. </p> <p> There are lots of other minor, but important, interface improvements, such as the extension of the non-modal attributes to the Clone, Array, Round, and Chamfer tools and the ability to save new default settings for objects and lights. If you were fed up of having to enable shadows and change the map size from 250 pixels to something useful every time you created a Spot light, this will be very good news. </p> <p> Tied into the interface improvements are the workflow changes. A new Save Incremental File menu item gives a <BR> clue to what’s different – it allows you to save versions of your current scene with incrementally numbered suffixes. </p> <p> <img src= Print

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