• 3D Painting – gives you the ultimate control over your textures with complete layers, filters, and tablet support. The Projection Painting tool makes distortion-free painting very easy even when painting textures onto complex geometries. No longer do you have to put up with visible seams. The Raybrush Technology allows you to paint directly onto a raytraced image and eliminates the need to switch applications or perform test renders.
• Material System – brings you a comprehensive material system which is key for creating realistic and convincing 3D images. Regardless of whether it is artificial or natural materials that you need, CINEMA 4D provides the control over the properties of your 3D objects. It also handles Normal Maps, which until now have been primarily used in game development. They let you create more realistic surfaces and lighting with low-poly objects that result in more realistic surfaces and lighting. With the CINEMA 4D baker, you can even create Normal maps from displacements.
• Lighting – as with any other image, it is critical for the believability of your 3D render. In CINEMA 4D you have a complete array of gaffer's tools at your disposal to get the lighting just right. You can adjust the density and color of each light's shadows and create visible or volumetric lights with noise patterns that appear in the light cone.
• Rendering – CINEMA 4D is considered one of the best in the business here. It can support almost any broadcast or film application with a maximum image size of 16,000 pixels square, as well as support for QuickTime, PSD, TIF, and other formats. It also supports rendering in 32-bits per color channel for images in HDRI or OpenEXR format.
• Animation – places you now into the 4th dimension. Just about any object, material or tag parameter can be keyframed, and, with non-linear animation, it is easy to build and loop discreet motions into complex hierarchies to create professional animations. You can even import sound to sync with your video.
• Custom Scripts and Plugins – these let you program it yourself. If there is a specific task the CINEMA 4D doesn’t already do, then you can do it yourself using the imbedded programming language C.O.F.F.E.E. to create a script to use over and over.
Article comments
1 - Marcus
Contrary to the information in the review, Cinema 4D was available to the U.S. market several years before 1998. It was available for the Amiga platform (in the US) as early as 1994 (if not actually 1993).