New Team Render Controls Processing Across a Network

At SIGGRAPH this week in Anaheim, CA, Maxon announced Cinema 4D R15, which will incorporate new tools for modeling, text creation, rendering, and sculpting.

Interactive beveling — a long-standing request from the C4D user base — offers increased control over object edges and curves, making it easier to create clean meshes. "We researched for a couple of years to come up with an efficient, interactive beveling algorithm," said Maxon President and CEO Paul Babb at a press event yesterday.

New type tools include kerning and tracking tools that can be applied with MoGraph effectors or through Xpresso. Kerning and baseline shifts can be specified in X, Y, and Z space for truly three-dimensional type effects. And Maxon has improved dynamic sculpting, with advanced masking, mirroring, and duplication and a new Amplify brush. Babb acknowledged that scultping tools are still a new realm for C4D, but said the company has been taking guidance from user demands. 

The new Team Render feature is a peer-to-peer networking system that allows users to control render nodes across an entire network, distributing rendering tasks for single frame or complete animations and viewing results in real time. It's geared to small- to mid-sized collaboration and is controlled entirely from within the Cinema 4D interface. A new, faster irradiance-caching algorithm has been created to improve performance.

Other new features include improved texture management, a camera crane, and color-grading curves for filter shaders. A new series of videos went live on Maxon's Cineversity site further explaining many of the new features.

Babb spoke briefly about Cineware, which bridges Cinema 4D and Adobe After Effects, and confirmed that Maxon is looking to integrate Cineware with "other applications" in the future — including other Adobe products.

Cinema 4D R15 is scheduled to ship in early September. (Availability of the new features via Cineware will depend on Adobe making an update to its own software, Babb said.) A complete list of new features is at the Maxon website: www.maxon.net/r15.