Maxon Cinema 4D 9

Maxon Cinema 4D has been making a name for itself in the world of 3D recently. Not only does it offer a powerful, excellent-value main application, but there's also the option to add further dedicated modules - the Advanced Render and MOCCA character animation modules have both been updated as part of this release. Further flexibility comes through some unique features, such as multipass Photoshop PSD rendering and the ability to work hand-in-hand with Adobe's After Effects and now Apple's Final Cut and Discreet Combustion.

What really makes the program stand out, however, is its ease of use. Where other high-end 3D modellers rely on complicated stacks of modifiers, Cinema 4D takes a simple object-based approach. Drag a spline object onto an extrusion object and it's projected into 3D space; drag this onto a HyperNURBS object and the results are automatically subdivided and smoothed; drag this onto an array object and the results are automatically repeated and distributed. Working in this way, it's simple to quickly build advanced models and, because each object in the hierarchy remains editable, you remain in complete control.

Alongside its object-based approach, Cinema 4D provides a working environment that is both transparent and powerful, and that's true more than ever with this latest release. Visually, the most noticeable changes are the slightly darker interface (designed to be less distracting), and the proliferation of command icons. The menus have also been tweaked, and can now be floated off as palettes for easy access, though you can also now access all menus via a general pop-up. Further streamlining comes from the former Function menu dialogs, which are now non-modal and accessible via the main Attribute Manager panel.

Maxon has also improved feedback. When rotating an object, its axes are now represented as bands, and the angle rotated appears onscreen both numerically and as a slice. There's a new Measure and Construction tool to take readings from your model to ensure accuracy. You can also drag and drop more elements, including named items such as polygon selections, as fields into the Attribute Manager.

By far the biggest change in this area is the introduction of the new Heads Up Display (HUD) - named after the projection of cockpit dials onto the windscreen of planes. Using the viewport's Configure command you can set a number of options to appear onscreen, such as the active object and its hierarchy, and the current number of selected polygons, edges and vertices. But this is only the beginning. Right-click on just about any parameter in the Attribute Manager, including material settings, and you can also add it to the HUD. Moreover, the parameter remains live so that you can simply drag the onscreen setting to update your object directly. You can even take advantage of the new ability to automatically create animation keyframes, making the HUD ideal for collecting together all those parameters that you want to animate.

Apart from the improved interface, the main focus of this latest release is a major reworking of Cinema 4D's mesh-editing capabilities. Key to this is selecting the right elements to manipulate in the first place, and this is now much easier. First up is the new automatic switching between Polygon, Vertex and Point mode, and the clearer highlighting of selections. You can also now create selections across multiple objects, and there are new modes for automatically selecting rings and loops of points, polygons and edges - a huge time-saver - while the new Soft Selection mode automatically smooths the changes between selected and unselected polygons. Finally, there's a new Isoline mode that projects the underlying polygonal cage onto the smoothed HyperNURBS object. This makes edits that would be complicated in other programs even more intuitive.