Maxon Cinema 4D 11.5 review

Cinema 4D has long been *PC Pro's* recommended choice for 3D software for its brilliant mix of power, ease of use and creativity. Each new launch tends to focus on a particular area and, for this latest 11.5 release, Maxon has concentrated its attentions on rendering.

The most immediate change is the move away from rendering images line-by-line to a new tile-based approach. This "bucket" rendering enables more efficient memory handling and allows each tile to be handled separately on multi-core systems. Combined with a more intelligent default Hybrid antialiasing mode, general rendering speed is greatly enhanced.

Cinema 4D 11.5's faster rendering is seen at its best in SubPolygon Displacement. This is where simple textures are used as shaders to add advanced surface detail to models - an effect commonly described as "bump mapping on steroids". With 11.5 the calculation of Subpolygon Displacement is itself given the steroid treatment and pumped up to produce results up to seven times faster.

Thanks to its new speed, SubPolygon Displacement can be used more regularly, but it remains something of a niche benefit. By contrast, Cinema 4D's new "render instancing" will help anyone producing large scenes as these almost always involve multiple copies of the same objects - think of the trees in a forest or the cars in a traffic jam, each of which are themselves made up of re-used components. In this version Cinema 4D recognises copies as instances of the original, cutting RAM requirements and boosting rendering speed.

Thanks to these advances in rendering architecture, Cinema 4D 11.5 can now efficiently handle complex scenes containing billions of polygons even on comparatively modest hardware, while those using more powerful multi-core systems gain even more. The most significant changes to Cinema 4D 11.5's rendering aren't technical, however, but are seen in practical changes made to the Picture Viewer.

Previously, rendering an image to the Picture Viewer replaced any existing render. Now, each image is stored and listed on a History tab ready for instant retrieval and review, complete with information regarding the frame in question, memory requirements and render times. You can also compare renders onscreen by dragging a slider or by highlighting changed pixels, or render just a region of the scene - handy both for proofing and for quickly correcting mistakes.

One of Cinema 4D's longstanding strengths is its ability to produce "multi-pass" renders that store information such as shadows and reflection on their own separate layers. Now, using the Picture Viewer's new Layers tab you can see each of these component layers. More importantly, you can change the opacity and blend mode of each layer to control their input into the final image - a process that's dramatically faster and more flexible than re-rendering.