Maxon Cinema 4D Studio R12 Review

Maxon Cinema 4D Studio R12 boasts a vast array of new features including all new lighting schemes, new deformers, faster OpenGL rendering, and new color profiles.

It's been a while since the last official update to Cinema 4D, and make no mistake, Maxon has been working pretty hard to stuff this latest version with all kinds of high-end creative tools. We'll look at what's new and how this new package leaps ahead in the, so to speak, 3D software space.

We'll focus on the flagship software Cinema 4D Studio R12, but it's worth noting that Maxon made the bold move to split up the product into numerous versions. They include Cinema 4D Prime for graphic designers, Cinema 4D Broadcast for TV, Cinema 4D Visualize for previz, and the main "everything" Studio version. In the last version, the product was a combination of plug-ins with a huge array of serial numbers and licenses. This is a bit more orderly, and it also provides an easier entry to the software for media artists mulling over different price points and needed features.

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Studio R12 has many new features including dramatically improved rigid-body and soft-body dynamics. You can now have objects bouncing, floating, and interacting with the environment just by adding a tag to the object. Then just let it go. Your object can be rigid so it clanks against things with collision detection and hierarchical support. However, you easily change it with one click to soft-body mode, so your objects are more springy and doughy, and react and ripple between objects. If you've ever set up using physics, negative gravity, collision, and other events manually, you will appreciate the amazing ease of use with R12 using a simple object tag.

R12 also introduces a new feature called Linear Workflow that takes gamma variation settings out of the equation during rendering. The mode uses linear space to process lights and colors in your renderings for a more even look. In the end you'll spend less time tweaking and moving lights and get more consistent results from frame to frame. Although it is not mentioned anywhere, I find this mode similar to HDR. It's a term thrown around a lot lately, but really this new mode does provide similar results, I find my animations have a much more even feel as far as lighting. It is enabled by default but a click toggles it off.

Color profiles are now supported—meaning when you import, say, a bitmap to wrap onto an object, that image's color profile is taken into account for accuracy when displayed. If you use color profiles for your DSLRs and Adobe Photoshop projects, you can now use them in your 4D workflow. In fact, you can now use monitor color profiles in OpenGL mode for accurate previews and final renders. Photometric light parameters are also new, Lumen and Candela brightness values can now be set, and you can specify a color temperature on the light and sync that with the color temperature of your Cinema 4D camera. Have a lighting director on your staff? Sit him down in front of the software and produce some really accurate and gorgeous lighting schemes. Several new deformers are now included in the package, including a camera deformer for distorting objects based on their distance from the camera, jiggle deformer for quickly adding secondary motion, smoothing deformer for ironing out mesh wrinkles, and many more.

Cinema 4D Studio R12 really has added a ton more features (check out the website for a full list) so we've just touched on a few. I do like how the OpenGL implementation has been improved. Animation playback is up to 50 percent faster according to Maxon, and it really is speedy; my results have been at least that compared to the previous version. The interface is primarily the same and does not take advantage of the Mac OS X style guidelines; all the nonstandard dropdown menus are moved into the program itself. It would be nice to get a proper interface overhaul more tied into Leopard standards on the Mac side. Also there are no paths set up ahead of time internally in the program to point to items like texture libraries. The first time you load items, you'll end up doing some searching. On the whole, it is hard to find much fault. The new rendering modes and lighting make already stunning output look even better, there are scores of new tweaks and features everywhere, and the new move of going from a product to a product line at least lets some other types of creative users into the party at various price points. Cinema 4D Studio R12 for 3D work is very tough to beat.