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Home » Features » Product Reviews » Software » Cinema 4D 10
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Product: Cinema 4D 10
Developer: Maxon
Reviewer: John Hattan
Posted: August 2, 2007
Rating:
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Cinema 4D 10
by John Hattan

Introduction

At the recent GDC I got to talking with some of the Maxon folks, and they were interested in me doing a followup review to the Cinema 4D review that I did about a year ago. I really liked the product in that review, and I was eager to check out some of the new features as well as possibly cover a feature or two that I missed in the original review.

First off, Cinema 4D 10 comes in a bigass box about four inches thick. 90% of the box's volume is taken up by a large cardboard spacer.


Sheesh, with all that extra space in that box they could've at least thrown in a T-shirt!

Apart from the cardboard spacer, you get a DVD case with the software, an 8-page "installation guide" and a very well done 200-page tutorial manual. The tutorial is very approachable and has a good sense of humor, but it does cover a lot of features in its relatively small size, so you're really going to want to deal with the some of the other documentation that's available.

The case contains two DVD discs, one labeled "Installation" and one labeled "Video Tutorials". Rather than version 9's model of giving you several CD's containing "as much" Cinema4D as you ordered, the installer now asks which bundle you purchased (standard, deluxe, or studio) and installs that. Be sure to install the version you purchased or your serial numbers won't work and you'll have to start over.

. . .although to be honest you'll probably have to start over anyway.

While the installation is absurdly simple (choose the install directory, press "go" and sit back for a few minutes), the installation process is still a bit hairy. Serial numbers are registered the same as before, with a tempory 3-month serial that is replaced with a permanent serial once you've registered online or via snail-mail. Only problem is that each module comes with its own serial number (I had seven), and you have to type 'em all in individually into the "register this product" dialog box before you can try out the program.

And then I discovered that the online "press F1" help wasn't installed. According to placeholder text in the Cinema 4D help-browser, I needed to download the help file from Maxon's download site. So I did that only to find that the help wouldn't install because the help file was a later version than the Cinema 4D I had just installed. So I downloaded the latest update to Cinema 4D (version 10.1) and installed that. . .only to find that it wanted all seven serial numbers again!

By the time I had Cinema 4D installed and running with all the features enabled, I had almost memorized my temporary serial numbers. Thankfully the permanent serial numbers came in an email so I could just copy-n-paste 'em and could get on with my life.

Rather than detecting if your OS is 32 or 64-bit, the installer installs both. I suppose this is useful now that 32 to 64-bit OS upgrades are becoming commonplace, although it escapes me why the installer installs two versions of the program but doesn't install the help.

Unfortunately for me, I'm still living in a 32-bit world despite the fact that my processor (3.6 Ghz P4) claims to be 64-bit. But I digress. On to the software itself!

New Stuff

As for first impressions, the R10 UI isn't that much different from that of R9. It's still very clean and easy to follow for a 3D noob despite the obnoxious amount of features the program has. The icons are changed from the all-blue scheme of the previous versions to a bit clearer hand-drawn ZBrush-esque version. The old "try to look like the native UI" color schemes is now replaced with "light", "dark", and "classic".


How Cinema 4D 10 looks when you open it up with the default "light" color-scheme.
The "tools" menu is pulled down to show you what the menus look like.

Note: I noticed that recently a lot of art software (most conspicuously Adobe Photoshop) have moved to a darker color-scheme than in previous versions. According to the Adobe rep at a recent user's group meeting, that's because darker schemes allow for more contrast and allows the UI do distract less from the content on the screen.

Also (as you can see) the software works just fine under Vista.

One new UI feature I've noticed is that menus now tear off (via the little grayish bar at the top of each menu) and can be made into palettes or docked anywhere on the screen or made into tabs on existing palettes. Of all of the software I've seen, this one's probably got the most configurable UI of all. While the default UI is well thought-out, you could pretty easily make the UI more or less busy to suit your tastes.

Myself, I'm leaving the UI as-is for now, as I always worry that I'll close something and have to work for an hour to get it back.

Cinema 4D's documentation has changed from the previous version. With version 9, you had about a thousand pages of PDF documentation that you could browse if you didn't want to order the paper versions. Version 10 dispenses almost entirely with the concept of a manual in favor of online searchable HTML-based help, not unlike the CHM-based help you'll find in loads of Windows software. While the documentation is about as comprehensive as the old PDF documentation, the new search gave me fits. For example, at one point I was trying to figure out how to convert bones to joints (more on that later), so I typed "joint conversion" into the help and got no hits. I then tried "joint convert", "joints to bones", and even "joints bones" in the hopes of finding a page that'd help me. I finally gave up and started paging through the online documentation until I found it (in Manual/Modules/MOCCA/Conversion). Sadly, the page was chock-full of words that should have hit on those search-terms I used, but it appears that their help searcher defaults to only searching on the titles of the help pages unless you move an obscure slider marked "details" in the help-browser.

After the oddities with installation followed by the oddities of searching the help, I suddenly found myself longing for the old method of pressing "CTRL+F" in the PDF help.

BodyPaint

The nicest new addition to Cinema4D is that BodyPaint is included with every installation rather than just the high-end versions. In my opinion, BodyPaint really sets Cinema4D apart from other software of its type, and making it part of the base installation is a really good move. For those who haven't seen the gamedev banner-ads, BodyPaint is a paint program that lets you paint textures directly on the surfaces of models rather than flattening the surfaces to 2D so you can paint ‘em with conventional bitmap tools. Far as I know, this is the only modeler out there that has this feature built into the base installation.

And, given that the standalone BodyPaint 3D costs as much as the base version of Cinema 4D, this is a pretty significant inclusion. Mind you, while the Cinema 4D-embedded BodyPaint does have all the features of the standalone BodyPaint product, it's not quite the same. It is married to Cinema 4D and isn't a product that works on its own and merges itself with other high-end modelers. Still, unless your 3D design pipeline is so wrapped around a particular product that an "import into Cinema 4D for tweaking and texturing" step is impossible, the Cinema 4D 10 with built-in BodyPaint 3D is a much better value. Best I can tell, Cinema 4D talks as nicely with other 3D software as anything I've seen, so it shouldn't be a very hard decision.

That being said, the "cleverly hidden inside Cinema 4D" verson of BodyPaint 3D has undergone the same UI makeover. The icons have better contrast and are easier to see, especially on giant displays. Here's BodyPaint texturing a cone. Note that the toolbars change to more paint-related items.


Your humble author shows off his fine BodyPaint handiwork. Behold "Yellow Cone Man"!

Texturing a model using BodyPaint is as simple as can be. That icon near the top of the leftmost toolbar that looks like a paintbrush with stars around it is the Paint Setup Wizard. It lets you choose what parts of your model should be grouped together for painting and how the 2D texture map should be built. If you just want to scribble on the surface of a model, choose "next" a couple of times to accept the defaults and you're done. If you're used to using traditional 2D methods for texturing or you just want to see how your 2D texture map looks, the dark gray "texture" tab on top of the model's menubar switches you between the 2D and 3D representations of your texture map. You can paint on both.

Once you're done painting, simply switch your mode from "BP 3D Paint" back to "Modeling", and you're returned back to modeling, only with a textured model now. It's not a perfectly seamless process, but it's pretty close.

The Object Manager

If you refer back to my Cinema 4D 9 review, you'll see a bit about the object heirarchy window (called the "Object Manager"), which is really the "heart" of the program and is the thing that keeps your models nicely organized as a heirarchy of simpler stuff and not just a random collection of curvy blobs that add up to a model. The nicest new addition to the Object Manager is a search and browse function that lets your browse for objects by name ("left arm") or by type ("all NURBS objects"). If you've got objects that are a mite more complex than "Yellow Cone Man", then this'll be handy.

Also new to version 10 are layers. At first, layers had me crosseyed. Layers make sense in 2D paint programs for defining the order in which things are rendered, but a 3D modeling doesn't really need such a thing because the Z-axis is handled by. . .well. . .the Z axis. In the case of Cinema 4D, the layers are sort of a top-level group. They're also not constrained by the object heirarchy. For example, if you had an organization that made "left arm" and "right arm" child-nodes of "torso", you couldn't group 'em together because grouping objects makes them children of a null-object. You could, however, make an "arm layer" and put 'em on there. Then you could perform operations on both arms at once (make visible, lock, etc) by working with the layer.

Layers are still a bit limited, though. Best I can tell, they're top-level only. You can't put layers inside other layers. And you have to be judicious with 'em as an organizational tool, or else you can end up with something like this.


A bit of layer confusion (click for full-size)

Here I have four objects, a cube, my yellow cone, and two spheres. Each sphere is in its own layer (and is colored corresponding to the layer in the Object Manager). There appears to be an empty null-object in the unnamed (aka default) layer. This "empty" object, however is a group containing both spheres. Selecting it selects both of its child-spheres, as is shown in the picture. In days-past, it was obvious as to what was the child of what because they were clearly shown as children in the heirarchy. Layers, though, can let you break out of this, so use 'em judiciously.

Rendering

While true real-time rendering of complex scenes is on its way (and faster than you think if you read the next section), Cinema 4D 10 has added a compromise, the interactive renderer. While that sounds lofty, it's actually rather simple. It's a little resizable box that you can drop in your scene. Anything in that box gets rendered "live". For example, here's the interactive renderer dropped into my previous scene.


The Interactive Renderer

As you can see, those two spheres have been made a bit more interesting. One now has a cloud texture and the other is a gray reflective material that's reflecting the yellow cone. While you don't see that in the standard modeling view (they're still the purple and brown colors of the layer), the textures show up when rendered. I can still move or size the objects as always, but everything in the box gets rendered so all your lights, reflections, textures, etc show up like they would in the final render.

Interactive Rendering strikes me as something that could be a real time-saver if you've got a little piece of a complex scene that you're trying to get just right. Rather than repeatedly re-rendering a little piece of the scene, you could just slap an interactive rendering box on that bit and play with it until it looks the way you want.

That tiny white triangle in the upper-right of the Interactive Rendering box is the quality slider. By sliding it down you can reduce the render quality if you have something that's really slow to render.

Other than the Interactive Renderer, rendering in Cinema 4D 10 is mostly unchanged from the previous version. That means that my previous comments about vector rendering in Cinema 4D version 9 (i.e. that it is terrible) still applies to version 10. And if you don't believe me, check out a test render of my little bulldozer model spinning about 90 degrees here. C'mon guys!

Nicer Looking Modeling

If having a little box with real-time rendering just isn't enough for you, you can now enable a lot fancier-looking modeling with Cinema 4D 10, provided your graphics card is beefy enough to handle it. It's OpenGL-only (Cinema 4D's on-screen renderer is either OpenGL or software-based, no Direct3D), and it'll give you real-time bumpmapping and reflections in the modeler. Unfortunately for me, I couldn't squeeze quite enough new OpenGL features out of my graphics card to enable it. So I'm still working with the standard OpenGL renderer. Here is "how much" OpenGL that Cinema 4D expects to see before it will enable realtime rendering. Specifically it's what's shown on the "Required" column.


My ATI x300 with the MS driver under Vista. It runs OpenGL 1.1 just fine, but no 2.0 features.


The same graphics card with the latest OpenGL 2.0 driver from ATI. It's still not quite enough (not enough Fragment Program Length, whatever that is) to use the advanced rendering, but it's a lot better than the default.

That's not to say that all hardware-accelerated OpenGL is wasted if you can't run the Advanced OpenGL Renderer. If your card has reasonable OpenGL 1.1 support, you still get hardware-assisted modeling and don't have to retreat to the software-based renderer. All of the screenshots I've taken above were done with the standard OpenGL design-time renderer, and it performs really well.

I'm just thankful that the "gamer" and the "designer" OpenGL hardware has coalesced to the point where 3D modeling software no longer has to warn you that you're taking your life in your hands by enabling OpenGL display-lists. Both ATI and nVidia are both coming out with some very capable sub-$100 graphics cards, so I'll probably take a look at realtime rendering again after a little hardware upgrade. So, until then you'll have to drool over the Advanced OpenGL Renderer movies (here and here) on the Maxon site.

Bye Bye Bones

Well, not bye completely. Cinema 4D still has support for bones, but the manual states that bones now exist pretty-much for backwards compatibility. Cinema 4D 10 is all about "joints", which, far as I can tell, are "anti bones". Instead of concentrating on the spaces between the connections (where nothing interesting happens), they're concentrating on the connections themselves. This makes some of the more advanced bones operations, like weighting and making things bulge for muscle-movement, more straightforward.


A figure imported from Quidam with the bones removed and joints added (for the arm at least). The rotate tool will let me rotate the elbow at the selected joint, although this makes more sense for a wrist than an elbow.

Note that joints are, far as I know, a Cinema 4D-only kind of thing. Thankfully, though, since bones and joints occupy pretty-much the same space (joints existing between bones) Cinema 4D 10 includes one-step conversion tools that convert from joints to bones and back easily. And this is certainly important if you need to move your model to a character animation product like MotionBuilder or a modeler that doesn't grok joints.

Tutorials

Cinema 4D 10 comes with two DVDs. One contains the installer for all of Cinema 4D. The second DVD is labeled "Video Tutorials" and contains, some extra textures, some sample scenes made by people much more capable than you, a couple of PDF issues of the very-nice 3D Attack magazine, and a humongous (2.6 gb) animated tutorial. Version 9 also had a tutorial, but the new tutorial clearly benefits from not having to fit on a CD-ROM. Best I can tell, there's close to ten hours of Quicktime video tutorials on the disc showing you how to put together a short animated cartoon that shows off all of the Cinema4D features.

Conclusion

Cinema 4D 9 was a top-notch product, and it stands to reason that version 10 would not disappoint. While there are a couple of holdovers from version 9 that I was hoping would improve in version 10, specifically a mildly-annoying registration scheme and substandard vector rendering, it's gotten some compelling new features, like BodyPaint in the standard editions, better hardware-assisted rendering, and joints.

As with version 9, it's a compelling (and much more reasonably priced) alternative to the established players (3D Studio and Maya) in game-based modeling.


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