Cinema 4D XL 7
The Mac hosts only a few professional-level 3D animation apps—four,
to be exact—and one of the most capable is Maxon's Cinema 4D XL.
Like its main rival, NewTek's LightWave Cinema 4D XL is designed for serious
artists and productions. Like LightWave, it has a top-flight polygonal
modeler with subdivision surfaces and excels at producing extremely high-quality
images. But unlike LightWave, Cinema 4D is easy to learn and has a Mac-like
interface.
Version 7 includes a couple of outstanding new features—the
best is its unusually fast radiosity rendering. This complex and
potentially time-consuming technique closely reproduces the reflection
and diffusion of light bouncing interactively between surfaces.
Cinema 4D already has the fastest ray tracer on the Mac, and its
radiosity implementation is also extremely speedy—plus the
tool yields beautiful results and offers advanced features like
multipass rendering, caustics, and blurry transparencies and reflections.
Another welcome addition is network rendering, which enables multiple
machines to render a project simultaneously. We found it easy to
set up a TCP/IP-based "render farm" in our mixed Mac-and-PC
environment (the program ships with support for three render clients).
Game-graphics animators will get excited about Cinema 4D's new
polygon-reduction tool, which shaves polygons from models. For example,
you can reduce a dense polygon mesh—say, for a game character—to
the minimum number of polygons needed to render the object. Even
better, the reduction is a hierarchical, dynamically defined process;
you could, for example, compose a character with more polygons when
it appears closer to the viewer, and with fewer when it's further
away.
Like to blow stuff up? Maxon has thoughtfully added a new polygon-based
explosion tool called Explosion Gizmo. You can shatter a model into
polygons, polygon clusters, or user-defined clusters. When an object
explodes, Cinema 4D extrudes each cluster a bit to give each piece
an appearance of depth.
We found Cinema 4D's inverse-kinematics (IK) and skeletal-deformation
tools disappointing. Given our proclivity for character animation,
we hoped to see a significant improvement over the IK features of
the last version we reviewed (5). But the current IK system lacks
the range of relationships and constraint types that make advanced
skeletal-control systems possible. Some IK setups yield unpredictable
results. We found it impossible to make a muscle bulge accurately
when we bent our character's limb. This is not to say you can't
do character animation with Cinema 4D XL 7, but these tools aren't
on par with the rest of the application's features.
Cinema 4D XL 7 is one of the strongest 3D programs on the Mac,
and version 7 is a worthwhile upgrade. We recommend it to any game
artist or illustrator looking to create 3D images of the highest
caliber. |
Mayavi Studios News | Mayavi Blog 
