Product Reviews

It's fair to say that version 10 was the biggest overhaul in Cinema 4D's history. While its successor, 10.5, isn't a major reworking, it has taken further the central idea of version 10 - to make Cinema a slicker, more intuitive program.

The first example of this is the new Head-Up Display (Hud). This allows interface elements to be embedded directly in the 3D workspace. These will generally be things like parameters for objects in a scene - the minor and major radii of a torus, for instance. But they can also be items like transport controls for scene playback or viewport display setting. In fact, anything that you can find in the Command Manager palette can be simply dragged and dropped into the workspace.

Similarly the parameters of any object can be dragged from the Attributes manager - drag multiple attributes and they'll form a single, multi-entry Hud element. The beauty of this approach is that it is document-specific so you can create command sets pertaining only to a particular project.

One problem we did encounter though is that Hud elements could sometimes pile on top of each other when changing between views. To reduce clutter, Hud elements can be general: add a Hud for a particular light, then select another light (of the same type) from the object Manager and the Hud updates to reflect the second light's attributes.

Light attributes - and how to control them - have also been given some thought in version 10.5, hence the new Lighting tool. Previously you needed to use the Move and Rotate tools to position your lighting but now you get much more flexibility.

In its basic form, the Lighting tool allows you to aim a light: selecting it will give you a yellow circle cursor that will

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crawl over the surface of any object it's placed on. Click, and this becomes the aiming point for the light, placing the light at the same time. Shift-clicking then lets you move the spotlight in and out with respect to the aiming point. Command-clicking then enables you to alter the intensity of the placed light.

Sadly, you don't get numeric feedback in the attributes editor until you've released the mouse button. If you have a spotlight, Command-shift alters the spot angle and Command-Alt enables you to re-target the light. At first these myriad key combinations can be somewhat confusing - but not for long.

Another Lighting tool bonus is its ability to act with multiple lights: as the yellow circle tracks across an object it snaps to the nearest light source (indicated by a yellow line). Thus you can switch between lights in your scene without going to the Object Browser.

On multiple selections the above key-commands will act on all the lights; they'll track along their common centre, for instance. But you can't seem to use a group to multiple-select lights at present - individual lights must be selected separately for the Lighting Tool to act on them.

There are multiple ways to control how the Lighting Tool interacts with its environment (such as targeting and selection). It's a very interesting concept - unique in 3D applications, as far as we know - and it will be interesting to see how Maxon develops it further.

The Timeline/Animation tools have been given an overhaul in 10.5, with the result that Ripple Editing (Keyframes shuffling to make way for newly-introduced examples) works much more reliably. The whole Timeline interface can now be switched into an Advanced mode, which mirrors the environment of some other industry-standard packages and among other things, offers the ability to split keyframes.

The separately-available Hair module is now also multi-processor (and multi-core) aware, which should produce some serious speed improvements for this most processor-intensive of rendering tasks. Hair can also be made to dynamically follow another object (think of a hand smoothing the pile on a rug) simply by ticking a few checkboxes.

Since the most significant upgrades are to the core package, 10.5 should be viewed as a must-have for all Cinema 4D owners.