So, let’s be clear on what is covered in this review. I’m going to take a look specifically at the CINEMA 4D (C4D) R11 Core edition. What’s the “Core” edition? It’s the fundamental, base component of C4D. I make the distinction because elsewhere in this magazine I review the full C4D Studio edition which includes many extra advanced modules that may or may not be useful to a typical Micro Filmmaker. If you’d like to see what’s included in the full studio version, click here.
The C4D core provides a full set of modeling, texturing, lighting, rendering and animating functionality in a tight and elegant package. It costs some coin - $995 for a new edition and $395 for an upgrade the 10.5 Core edition. But, like all things of quality, you get what you pay for in C4D.
While C4D is probably better known in broadcasting circles than cinematic studios, due in large part to it’s excellent motion graphics capabilities (a module called MoGraph - not included with the Core edition), Maxon obviously shares a very close relationship with Sony’s Imageworks. C4D has been used in Hancock, Speed Racer, Beowulf, Surf’s Up and more. In fact, Projection Man, a new integration into C4D of a technique called Camera Mapping, has been used on everything from Sea Biscuit to Spider-Man 3 to Beowulf. That relationship brings some powerful but astonishingly easy-to-use feature sets to the mere mortal and Microfilmmaker alike. With “no-duh” workflows, a Master’s degree in mathematics isn’t required to get stellar results. (For more on the announcement of this feature, check out my article on Siggraph 2008.)
There is a ton of new, friendly features. I’ll talk about what each mean to small studios and how they might benefit you in more depth later:
- Non-Linear Timeline Animation and Motion layers (create animations within animation, save, modify and reuse them)
- Onion Skinning (super friendly tool to intelligently create animation motion with visual queues over time - this is essentially digital tracing paper)
- Collada Import/Export (Less useful to filmmakers - unless you’re making game characters from your film characters!)
- Online Updater (I adore this - it updates and installs the latest updates for you)
- Doodle (If your project has a couple of folks or more working on it, you can leave notes on the digital work itself -cool.)
Don’t be scared. The crew at Maxon has done an excellent job of hiding C4D’s power under a user friendly interface. This is very, very good for you as a user. While some software in the same marketspace *cough, Maya, cough* are excellent, those other software solutions also usually have sentences associated with them like this, “Technical understanding of modeling mathematics required” when used in connection with the pro or filmmaking needs. Maxon makes no such requirements by virtue of how they’ve made their program operate.
Maxon, instead of immersing you in a workspace with fields of numbers to create and control your work, provides a smart, graphical interface that assumes use of today’s larger monitors. (Yes, having a big monitor is a requirement) Drag and drop simplicity is used for applying textures and other functions to your 3D world. Clicking on any one of the tool windows or scene objects converts other windows simultaneously to show relevant additional controls. It’s little things that make software cross the line from only being good to being great. This type of interaction, appropriate information revealed appropriately, permeates the C4D experience.
