Cinema 4D R10 debuts

Maxon today announced Cinema 4D Release 10, an update to its flagship 3D modeling, animation and rendering software that bring additional ease-of-use enhancements along with several workflow improvements, interface improvements, and new functionality to aid in character animation. Release 10 features enhanced object and animation managers, which have been optimized for quicker workflow. The company said that objects can now be easily filtered, searched, bookmarked and arranged in layers to aid in dealing with large scenes. It also features a completely rewritten timeline that can be organized in the same way as the Object Manager, and now offers ripple and region editing tools as well as improved automatic and manual controls over keyframe interpolation. The company did not provide details on the release date or pricing.

R10 also features new PowerSlider, which allows extensive control over animation without the need to open the timeline; brings enhanced support for the OpenGL features of newer graphics cards, and adds a new interactive render region that helps users in visualizing the final results of their work prior to the final render.

The latest release also delivers advances in scene management to help with character animation, the major focus of Release 10. The update delivers a new comprehensive toolset in the MOCCA module, offering joint-based skeletons with improved IK setup and solutions. It also features skin deformations, which allow the user to apply the entire animation from one skeleton to virtually any mesh. Automatic weighting saves time while binding joints to the mesh, and new weighting tools make it easy to adjust or manually weight each joint to the mesh, Maxon said.

"An extensive morph management system makes lip-syncing and facial animation simple, and the new MOCCA toolset also provides muscular deformation based on the animation of joints," the company said. "Finally, the VAMP tool simply transfers morphs, UV coordinates, weighting, selections and vertex maps between objects of different topologies."

Every license of CINEMA 4D Release 10 now includes the functionality formerly available as the optional BodyPaint 3D module, which provides artists with UV editing and 3D painting tools.

by MacNN Staff