Maxon One’s end of 2023 updates improve Cinema 4D’s integration with Adobe Substance 3D materials and increase users’ control in Redshift, and Cineware For Unreal has a new plug-in.
Image: Zachary Corzine
The Maxon One subscription for the end of 2023 updates Cinema 4D’s integration with Adobe Substance 3D materials, adds faster, easier file exchange with Unreal and the introduces glTF animation import. This December Release also brings performance and image quality enhancements for Redshift RT, and many new assets for Capsules including a new Spline Modifier by Rocket Lasso.
Simulations and Animation – Cinema 4D
Cinema 4D 2024.2 features the ability to art-direct simulations with more precision and take advantage of Adobe Substance 3D – artists can drag and drop Adobe Substance 3D materials directly into Cinema 4D to create new Redshift materials.
The glTF exchange format import now includes support for TRS attributes, allowing artists to incorporate glTF animated objects. The Project Asset Inspector will now warn artists when opening projects if fonts are missing. Any of the affected Text objects can be found quickly.
Cinema 4D simulations have received a number of changes. Rigid Body simulations now feature enhanced collision detection, with many new settings. The new deactivation option, for example, allows you to define how an object should rest when nothing is interrupting or colliding with it. New damping behaviours for rigid body, cloth, soft body, balloon and rope tags allow artists to override the global damping settings, giving better control over simulated objects. Rigid bodies can now also be scaled when animated by effectors, producing more realistic simulations within a scene. Various enhancements to Pyro make it possible to emit Pyro directly on deforming meshes while art directing and controlling the flames’ behaviour.
Substance 3D (Image: Peter Tarka)
With the new Key Reducer, artists can clean up timelines that have too many keyframes, while preserving the shape of the animation f-curve, the interpolation over time between two animated properties.
Asset Version Pinning has made node-based workflows feel more controllable by assuring artists that they are always working in the same version of an asset throughout their pipeline, even if a newer version exists. Scene nodes have also become more capable. Symmetry and Thicken Nodes have been added for modelling with a Resampling Spline Node to adjust spline resolutions.
Redshift Rendering
Stability and performance are improved in this version of Redshift, 3.5.22. As mentioned, new workflows featuring faster, easier imports of Adobe Substance 3D materials in Redshift for Cinema 4D are also included. The updated Substance node in Cinema 4D allows artists to create a Substance material in the Redshift Material Manager, import a .sbsar Substance material through the Substance node, and render.
Pyro
Among many updates for Redshift RT, Preview Rendering visualises for artists what is happening during initialising and scene pre-processing, enhancing interactivity and clarity on operations in progress. Redshift RT users can now select their preferred level of texture compression in five steps to optimize their scene for higher quality, performance or a balance of quality and speed.
Redshift RT includes a new option to render frames at a lower resolution and automatically up sample them using NVIDIA DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) for image enhancement and upscaling. Artists can also choose how much denoising they would like to apply to frames in Redshift RT to quickly achieve cleaner rendered frames by working with lower quality sampling settings. The new RT Russian Roulette option enhances performance by randomly skipping certain rays that have been determined to have a minimal effect on the scene.
Finally, when a user makes a change, Bounding Volume Optimizations result in further performance gains by only recalculating the affected meshes, instead of the entire scene.
Cineware for Unreal
Sending Cinema 4D projects to Unreal has become easier and faster. Cineware For Unreal now comes with a Datasmith Direct Link plugin for Cinema 4D, which means immediate saving and loading of C4D scenes is no longer necessary. Data is transferred to Unreal Engine directly using the local cache, allowing artists to see the changes nearly instantly.
Simulations
Capsules – Plants, Concrete
The latest additions to Capsules, Maxon's collection of custom-made assets to help artists start off projects, include a new Organic Branch Spline Modifier by Rocket Lasso that adds a series of new branches to a spline that can be used to create plants, electrical effects, neurons and other elements.
A new collection of Redshift Concrete materials range in looks from poured concrete sculptures to the polished floors and textured walls for apartment interiors, and a fresh set of plants from the team at Laubwerk feature flowering plants from Magnolias to Forsythia. A group of retopologized and modernized home office and stationery models, including laptops, phones and pens, is also added. www.maxon.net
