The Mac hosts only a few professional-level 3D animation apps — four, to be exact — and one of the most capable is Maxon’s Cinema 4D XL. Like its main rival, NewTek’s LightWave..., Cinema 4D XL is designed for serious artists and productions. Like LightWave, it has a topflight polygonal modeler with subdivision surfaces and excels at producing extremely high-quality images. But unlike LightWave, Cinema 4D is easy to learn and has a Mac-like interface.
Version 7 includes a couple of outstanding new features — the best is its unusually fast radiosity rendering. This complex and potentially time-consuming technique closely reproduces the reflection and diffusion of light bouncing interactively between surfaces. Cinema 4D already has the fastest ray tracer on the Mac, and its radiosity implementation is also extremely speedy — plus the tool yields beautiful results and offers advanced features like multipass rendering, caustics, and blurry transparencies and reflections.
Another welcome addition is network rendering, which enables multiple machines to render a project simultaneously. We found it easy to set up a TCP/IP-based “render farm” in our mixed Mac-and-PC environment (the program ships with support for three render clients).
Game-graphics animators will get excited about Cinema 4D’s new polygon-reduction tool, which shaves polygons from models. For example, you can reduce a dense polygon mesh — say, for a game character — to the minimum number of polygons needed to render the object. Even better, the reduction is a hierarchical, dynamically defined process; you could, for example, compose a character with more polygons when it appears closer to the viewer, and with fewer when if s further away.
Like to blow stuff up? Maxon has thoughtfully added a new polygon-based explosion tool called Explosion Gizmo. You can shatter a model into polygons, polygon clusters, or user-defined clusters. When an object explodes, Cinema 4D extrudes each cluster a bit to give each piece an appearance of depth.
We found Cinema 4D’s inverse-kinematics (IK) and skeletal-deformation tools disappointing. Given our proclivity for character animation, we hoped to see a significant improvement over the IK features of the last version we reviewed (5). But the current IK system lacks the range of relationships and constraint types that make advanced skeletal-control systems possible. Some IK setups yield unpredictable results. We found it impossible to make a muscle bulge accurately when we bent our character's limb. This is not to say you can’t do character animation with Cinema 4D XL 7, but these tools aren’t on par with the rest of the application’s features.
Cinema 4D XL 7 is one of the strongest 3D programs on the Mac, and version 7 is a worthwhile upgrade. We recommend it to any game artist or illustrator looking to create 3D images of the highest caliber.
Anzovin, Steve, Young, William. (October 2001). Cinema 4D XL 7. MacAddict. (pg. 61).
MAXON Computer Inc.
Applications
out of 10 (2 votes)
208 / 
2014-08-12 / 
2023-04-15 / 
a353ce76c58ab43e008cd34443b157d62ad666db / 
/ 
updater_all_73_os9_us.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
Please sign in!