Maxon Cinema 4D 11.5 review

Managing layer blending directly is a major boost to efficiency and productivity, but editing output within a dedicated bitmap application still offers more control. However with its third tab, Filters, the revamped Picture Viewer now provides access to the most important global colour corrections - brightness, saturation, contrast, exposure and so on - from directly within Cinema 4D 11.5. Even better, once you've made your adjustments you can save them as a post effect filter that you can automatically apply to future renders.

The benefits of Cinema 4D 11.5's enhanced rendering are impressive for single image renders but even more so for multi-frame animations: cut five seconds per frame, for example, and with a 720 frame animation you've saved yourself an hour. Again, however, the improved implementation proves even more significant than the increased speed.

In particular, Cinema 4D 11.5's Picture Viewer now offers RAM-based playback of animations, which means you can start previewing animations while they're still rendering. If you spot a problem, you can immediately abort the render to fix it - a huge time saver - and with in-built sound scrubbing you can even spot audio sync problems while rendering.

Once a render has finished, you can take advantage of Cinema 4D 11.5's improved file handling options, with new support for the PNG and DPX bitmap standards, QuickTime and AVI audio-only export/import, and QuickTime support on 64-bit systems. You also get enhanced import and export of FBX 2010 models, but the biggest change is to Cinema 4D's integration with 3D compositing applications, in particular Adobe After Effects. Highlights include support for multiple 3D cameras, clones, xRefs and native 3D objects.

In addition, Cinema 4D 11.5 provides a number of apparently minor improvements to its interface, which together make a surprisingly large impact. Advances include the ability to temporarily switch any panel to fullscreen mode, to modify numeric entry fields with the cursor keys, to replace materials through drag-and-drop and the ability to filter parameters in the Attributes panel.

These tweaks are welcome, but ultimately what makes Cinema 4D 11.5 stand out is the complete overhaul - both technical and practical - of its rendering capabilities. As rendering is the major factor in determining both a project's end quality and how long it takes to produce, this makes Cinema 4D 11.5 a must-have.

Author: Tom Arah