Maxon Cinema 4D 10.5

Cinema 4D has repeatedly won PC Pro's Recommended award by offering professional 3D modelling power at an affordable price. But what really makes the program stand out from its rivals is its comparative ease of use.

This latest release brings a host of tweaks to handling, such as support for noise shaders in OpenGL mode, the ability to drag images on to 2D views as templates, and speed control for tablet users to cut down on scrolling. Cinema 4D's HUD (heads-up-display), which lets you drag object parameters to the main working view for instant access, supports objects and commands. There's also a new drop-down for quick access to the eight most recently used tools.

An autosave option and the ability to save objects polygonally to Cinema 4D's native format are welcome, with the addition of comprehensive import support for the AutoCAD DWG standard - great for architects and technical designers. The modelling capabilities have also been enhanced, with tools for handling Phong breaks and for connecting and spinning edges.

A major focus in this latest release, as it was in the last, is animation. Basic handling of keyframe sequences is much improved, with commands for inserting and deleting frames, moving keyframes with cursor keys, improved handling of ripple editing, and the ability to mark keyframes as relative. The Animation palette has also been enhanced with scalable mini-F-curves, a summary key track and an advanced mode that shows keyframes as tracks on the time slider. But, although these are steps in the right direction, there are still rough edges and Cinema 4D's core animation handling still needs simplifying.

Ironically, this simplification is exactly what's been achieved in managing complex animations. When working with motion-capture data, baked animations or using Maxon's MOCCA extension, the timeline quickly becomes a thicket of keyframes - hence the new Clean Tracks command to remove redundant ones, plus the ability to interactively and intelligently reduce keyframes algorithmically. Most impressive of all is the ability to create a new RM (reduced modification) F-curve from an existing sequence, with edits to the simplified curve then affecting the original. It's no panacea, but it's some impressive professional power.

Another extraordinary new feature to find at this price is the ability to work with XRefs - objects that cross-reference other objects in a separate, but linked file. This is particularly useful in workgroups, since multiple users can work on component models while another works on the master scene and animation. You can even save materials as XRefs, so another user can take charge of the scene's overall appearance. It can also be useful for individual users, with XRefs acting like instance objects to ensure maximum consistency and efficiency.

But for many, the real stand-out feature will be the new Lighting tool. Setting up and editing the lighting for a scene is fundamental to its end impact, but traditionally it's a complex chore, involving multiple trips to multiple lights and much repositioning and parameter fine-tuning. Not any more: use the Lighting tool to click anywhere in your scene to add a light, then click on the surfaces of your object and whichever light is the dominant influence at that point will automatically be selected. You can then drag to rotate the light around the object, shift-drag to move it in and out, and Ctrl-drag to change intensity. Working in this way, you can quickly explore and fine-tune your lighting setup, and it actually makes tremendous sense to control your lighting directly through its effect, rather than indirectly through source parameters.