Cinema 4D has actually been around for a number of years on the Amiga and has been ported to the PC and the Mac only recently. Having heard a lot of good comments about its fast raytracing and great volumetrics I was interested in seeing for myself how well it stacked up to other modelers.

Installation wasn't entirely painless, it required the use of an 'enabler' floppy disk which appears to patch the installed version. This caused some confusion when the patch program failed to find it on my system. The instructions on how to use the enabler are also incorrect. Having fudged my way through that (use the file requester to direct the patch software to the installed C4D executable on your hard drive), I was asked for a serial number and some personal info, warned the software will only work for 6 months if I didn't register, and finally the software loaded.

Note the clutter on the task bar. Otherwise, a nice interface. Cinema 4DXL is a great choice for product and industrial visualisation, though it won't import spline-based file formats like IGES.

INTERFACE
My first impression of the interface was not a good one. As C4D loads, each part of the interface gets its own window, rather than one program screen with multiple windows, so your task bar is immediately cluttered with up to 11 different buttons, one for each window or toolbar. Clicking back from another application results in only some of the toolbars coming to the front. Trying to alt-tab becomes a nightmare.

That aside the interface is, as suggested, made up of a collection of toolbars and windows or 'managers'. There are configurable toolbars, and windows for the scene hierarchy, a scrub bar, time and space graphs, coordinates and the main editing window. This window can be configured as a single x,y,z, light or camera view as well as having an option for a 'quad' view - which, as a Lightwave user denied that pleasure, is nice to see.

Controls are easy to find, the button icons are easy to learn and relatively obvious, and if you forget pop-up names remind you, though they don't include the keyboard shortcut. Don't expect to work efficiently in anything less than 1024 x 768 resolution, with all those windows and toolbars. It's also possible to lose a window, if you start working in a lower resolution than you normally do and the window is outside the visible area.

MODELING
C4D uses an integrated modeling approach, rather than a separate modeling tool. I'm more accustomed to a separate modeler, but it's very much something you get used to. I still find it best to model in a clean window, saving all your objects as you go, then load them into a new project for animation. All the expected modeling tools are present - Boolean, magnet, loft, extrude, lathe. Also included is good support for splines and nurbs, which is a surprise in a program in this price range. Objects can be edited on a point, edge or polygon basis - good to see that edges can be pulled around.

The menus offer an excellent range of 2D, 3D and spline based primitives, including a CSG (perfect) sphere and the ability to plug in your own equations to generate spline objects. Don't expect such fancy additions as filleting, but what's there is a good start. I'd like to see some of the animation effects such as taper and twist available when modeling. It is possible to save an animation-effect deformed object, but a more direct route would be preferable. Layers are also not supported.

There is room for improvement in the modeling section, in terms of the breadth of tools available, but all the basic tools are there.

TEXTURING
The texture editor is a treasure trove. Textures are created in a 'bin' then dragged onto the object they need to be applied to. Altering a texture in the texture manager results in all objects using that texture changing to the new settings. C4D comes with a range of useful 2D and 3D algorithmic textures. There's a great fractal planet texturing tool which will look familiar to Corel Draw users.

All the objects in this (hastily composed!) image are algorithmic textures included with C4D, including the starfield and the galaxies. Note the meteor trail, made by simply making a visible light the child of a particle emmiter.

Mapping types supported include UV and a 'shrink-wrap' option which wraps a circle of the image around a sphere, leaving it distorted only at the 'south' pole. I was a little disappointed at the range of image types supported (no PSD or PNG support at this stage) but all the other common ones are there. The ability to use an alpha channel to define an images' application would be a useful addition. As to actual surface attributes, C4D misses little.

All attributes can have an RGB color mix assigned, highlights can be customized by changing the shape of a 'bell' curve, and an image or sequence can be mapped to any attribute (except Glow, annoyingly). Image sequences can be set to ping-pong, loop and a rate and usage range can be set. Multiple textures can be assigned to one object, and they can be blended, or areas of a map can be cut away using the genlock attribute. Custom shaders can be easily written in the C.O.F.F.E.E. programming language provided with C4D, if programming is your thing. Textures are not supported in the OpenGL preview mode, which also seems to display incorrectly at times. Other than that, there is little missing here.

ANIMATING
Free-form deformation. morphing, spline paths with editable keyframe handles, independent rotation, position and scale keyframes, particle effects, bones, interactive IK, - C4D covers a lot of ground.

One impressive ability is it's import feature. C4D successfully loads scene files from 3D Studio 4 and Lightwave - I loaded a Lightwave file which included bones, IK and morphing with no problems other than understandable Lighting and texturing differences. Not too surprising as C4D's bones are virtually identical in function to those of Lightwave. The ability to interactively adjust the influence range of the bones with the mouse is great. Both bones and objects can be used as IK chains, and IK responded well, though I'm testing them on a PPro200, so it should. Setup a hierarchy, click the IK button, and away you go. For more control, IK can be applied as a property to a hierarchy, for full time IK. I found the IK behaved erratically at times unless tight constraints were set up for the objects, but this is a good habit to get into anyway.

Objects can be animated along b-spline paths created using the modeling tools, or a spline path will be created when you create 2 or more keyframes for the objects. As mentioned earlier, C4D allows independent channel keyframes, a must for sophisticated animation. The timeline window follows the traditional layout of scene components running vertically and time horizontally. Keyframes and objects can be dragged and dropped, and copied and pasted. The view is hierarchical, allowing you to collapse the object trees to only see what you need to. A reasonable selection of effects can be applied to objects here, including Shatter, Formula, which lets you apply an equation to deform an object, and Boolean for animated Boolean effects.

Lightwave users will be envious of such a great Timeline editor. The Space Control window allows you to play with the actual graph of the objects motion, using the mouse to alter keyframes and the shape of the path between them. The Time Control window does a similar thing for the temporal movement of the object - it's acceleration and deceleration along it's path. The combination of independent keyframes, and the Time and Space controllers results in excellent control of an objects animation.

Particle effects are a little limited, though not too badly. The major limitation I noticed was the inability to use an object as an emitter - you're restricted to planes and cones. Collision detection can be faked using deflectors, but these are planes so complex geometry will be tricky to deflect from convincingly. Making water flow down a pipe would be difficult, to say the least. That said, particle effectors include wind, gravity, turbulence and more, so some pretty sophisticated effects are still possible. And particles can be replaced by objects, even multiple different objects which are randomly selected, for schools of fish and the like.

CAMERA AND LIGHTNING
One of the first features to grab me here was the ability to define multiple cameras in one scene, which you can cut between during a scene. Great! Again, I can find little missing in the camera and lighting options. Multiple lens types can be selected from a pull-down list, or dial in your own lens size. Focal lengths and depth of field can be interactively adjusted with the mouse, though the depth of field is a post-processed blur rather than a calculated one, so it's not as effective as I'd like.

Lighting options are extensive with most light types covered, other than area lights for true soft raytraced shadows. Soft shadows are available via a shadow mapping option, however. Their size and position can be configured to work efficiently with your current scene. A good range of fog and volumetric lighting effects can be created. And where would we be without the now ubiquitous lens flares? C4D has a great lens flare designer, which lets you define the number of elements in camera flares, their position, and their shape from the many presets. Lights, objects and particles can have glow applied.

OUTPUT
Cinema4D promotes itself as a fast raytracer, and it doesn't disappoint. That is to say, it seems to be no slower than other efficient packages such as Lightwave. They both seem to use a similar method to cut ray-tracing times, and that is to only use raytracing when the renderer comes across an object which requires it. One thing it does do correctly is multithread - the image is divided into as many strips as there are processors, if one CPU finishes its strip ahead of another, it is given a proportion of the remaining part of the picture, resulting in efficient CPU usage.

Reflections, shadows and refractions can be turned off partially and independently, allowing the rendering of only environmental reflections, for example. A large range of default image format sizes are available, from both the PC, film and television world. Images can be output as file sequences, AVI's, QuickTime movies and QuickTime panoramas as well as alpha and depth channels, where appropriate to the file type, or saved as a separate sequence. Effects such as glow and flares can be turned off globally. A variety of render modes are available, from rendering using the current display settings - wireframe, gourad shaded etc., through a surface color mode, with black outlines for a cel animation look, to full raytracing. The cel animation mode is useful, though it lacks flexibility in shading options.

MISCELLANEOUS
C4D has some nice general features which are worth touching on. Any area where a numeric value can be entered can instead have a mathematical formula entered. This allows for some excellent effects, and great flexibility. What it doesn't have is expressions, which seems a shame given the implementation of a math system already - equations for one object can't refer to another objects values. In fact, I can't find anywhere in the manual that tells me which constants (time, x position etc.) can be referenced at all.

Included in the package is C.O.F.F.E.E, a full object-oriented programming language, claimed by the manufacturer to be similar to C or Java. It appears to be extensive and pretty easy to use - programs can be written as ASCII scripts by the user, then called by C4D as a plug-in. Textures, animation effects, 3D shaders can all be written thus. A valuable tool in a production environment, where special needs often arise that need custom programming.

The manual which comes with C4D is very good. It's extensive, yet easy to read. More tutorials would be a good addition, but the software comes with many demo scenes for you to pull apart. The logical and visual manner in which the software does most things makes it easy to learn this way, with reference to the manual when you get stuck.

SUMMARY

Lightwave vs Cinema4DXL The LW benchmark raytrace scene, loaded into C4D, albeit without textures. The LW render had textures stripped, and no attempt was made to fix the obvious colour differences. LW 1022s C4DXL 980s. Incidentally, on it's z-buffer sort benchmark, LW was over twice as fast.

I'm very impressed with Cinema4DXL. It is an excellent package that the beginner and the seasoned professional will find useful. Output image quality is excellent and as mentioned, not slow. C4D is definitely suitable for production use, though it doesn't support any kind of network rendering and the license excludes loading the software onto multiple machines for network rendering (there is no dongle to actually prevent this, however). Only five scenes can be batch rendered. I'd like to see the interface reduced to one program under Windows, rather than the menagerie that currently appears on the Task Bar. In a production environment it's common to be working in multiple programs, and having to alt-tab through 10 C4D icons to get to Photoshop would get annoying very quickly!

The more time I spent in the software, the more it felt like they'd taken Lightwave, fixed most of it's weak points, then thrown in my favorite bits from Imagine. I won't be switching from Lightwave yet - C4D just doesn't have the range of third party plugins for things like character animation and particle effects, the image quality wasn't quite as good, (but that's pretty subjective!) and the modeling tools are a little clumsy - but I'll be watching it closely.


Bill Boyce is a freelance animator living in New Zealand. Bill enjoys windsurfing, touch rugby and movies, is 5'9", and looks lousy in a swimsuit. You can contact Bill by email at bilboyce@ihug.co.nz and he has a homepage at homepages.ihug.co.nz/~bilboyce.

Visual Magic Magazine homepage Subscribe to our free newsletter Next month in Visual Magic Visual Magic Magazine PDF edition Animation World Network