Cinema 4D R20 is the latest release of MAXON’s high-end 3D motion graphics, visual effects, painting, and rendering software application. Professional 3D animators and motion graphics artists widely adopted it. Professional 3D animators and motion graphics artists extensively use the high-end 3D motion graphics, visual effects, painting, and rendering software application from MAXON for film and television productions such as Doctor Strange, Blade Runner 2049, Black Panther, Avengers: Infinity War, Ghost in The Shell, The Martian, and many others. It also has its use in other fields, such as graphic design, science, engineering, product, and architectural visualization and AR/VR/MR.

Cinema 4D R20 integrates with various other commercial products, including Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects, Final Cut Pro, and more. Users can use Cinema 4D for modeling, as it offers a complete set of spline primitives and spline drawing tools, eliminating the need to switch to an external tool. Many improvements in this version to make 3D modeling much easier. With these improvements, you will have better performance and usability

While there are a lot of new features in this release 20 of Cinema 4D, let me go into some ones that I appreciate. Here I will break them out by area.

New in MoGraph

Cinema 4D R20 -Fields

• Fields were first introduced in MoGraph’s falloff system. They have now elevated it to the next level. Layering and tweaking your fields now offer you much more flexibility. You are not limited to using fields only in MoGraph, which is another excellent thing. You can use them to control the strength of deformation and volumes to define vertex maps and selection sets. Like before, you can control this effect from the falloff tab, but now field objects implement them. In the remapping field, you have more control over the shape of the falloff. In fact, your control is almost unlimited. You have more control over the color, opacity, and gradient. You can also layer the fields and use common blending modes to combine them.

There is also a new falloff shape in R20, which is the Radial Field. This will let you control a falloff based on an angle around the center of the field. Another feature is the ability to set multiple iterations to get a pinwheel or spoked type of effect. You also have subfields on some fields that other fields can change. For something like offsets, there is a tab that will allow you to control that attribute. You can also combine multiple fields for even more dramatic effects.

An additional field type is the spline, where you can define the falloff along the length of the spline as well as based on the radius from spline or even combine both together. Used with something like the curves effect to make more adjustments to the actual shape of the falloff. You can also use them as a mask, allowing you to combine them with elements like text to create something extraordinary.

Cinema 4D R20 – Built-in Assets

• Another use of the spline field is to control deformations. Because you have so much control, you can use it to create many new objects, such as the manipulation of type. For example, you want to create something like a chiseled type object. The first thing you would want to do is use spline text instead of MoGraph text, as you need to have access to the spline. Then, you will need to select ‘create a single object.’ This will connect all the individual pieces, such as the extrusion and the cap, and then perform the deformation on one piece. You will also want to set the type to quadrangles as you enjoy a dense mesh. Finally, it would be best to turn on the regular grid option. You also want to get a grid that is dense to work with. From there, you can choose what deformer you wish to use to create your effect.

• Using the MoGraph Multi-Instance mode, you can work with millions of clone objects, and it is much easier and more efficient to work with all those millions of objects. Before R20, when working with so many objects, it would navigate slowly, and sometimes it would drop into a bounding box, which is impractical. Now, when you activate multi-instance mode, you find it moves fluidly, and the motion is smooth. It also provides easier control over the viewport representation of the clone. This will become more apparent as the number of clone instances increases. Another benefit is that Multi-Instances use much less RAM, and preparing time is much shorter. This is because, instead of creating a clone object for every object in your scene, you are now creating one object and creating an instance representation of the position, color, and other pertinent data for the rest of the objects.

New in Modeling

Cinema 4D R20 – Modeling

• < UNK> A new volumetric workflow is used for modeling and data transfer. Based on the Open VDB library from DreamWorks Animation, it is fully compatible with other Cinema 4D core technologies. One note is it cannot render effects like smoke and fire, but it can let you create very organic modules. You can combine multiple objects seamlessly, do fast volumetric operations, and mesh everything together quickly. Finally, you can also load VDB files and sequences from outside applications and use them within Cinema 4D R20.

• This new workflow also lets you create complex organic models based on simple shapes using volume modeling. You do this by adding a volume builder object. You can drag the objects into the objects list or make the objects a child of the volume builder. By using Boolean operations, you can meld one object into another.

• With R20, you now have a native import of Catia, STEP, IGES, SolidWorks and JT CAD files. This means that you can use CAD data that is provided by your clients when working with Cinema 4D. Although there are many CAD files that don’t include built-in materials, you still can choose to create materials based on the display colors.

New in Materials and Rendering

• With the release of Cinema 4D R20 is the introduction of a node-based materials system and a new nodal editor. It provides the ability for you to build complex shaders for both the standard and the physical render engine, giving you endless possibilities to combine over 150 different basic nodes. Using the diagram flow layout, connecting nodes is easier than ever. When you click on a node material, the system shows you the node editor instead of the materials editor, which is one big difference here. There is also a new node attribute dot – sometimes called a ‘squircle’, that allows you to insert any node, including shaders, textures, layer stacks, gradients and other things into the specific input. In other words, it gives you the ability to see the different options for connecting textures or various nodes. The complexity that you can build into your creations is almost mind-boggling.

• The new ProRender now supports Subsurface Scattering (SSS), Multi-pass, and Motion Blur, and lets you use the native power of your GPU to handle these tasks. You can use SSS for rendering wax, skin, and fluids. You can also now use the MoGraph Color shader within ProRender to do things like specifying the strength of an effect and the scatter color. The Display Color shader is available with this release as well. With Multi-pass, there are several different passes that are available to you as well for compositing. These include several data passes, an object id pass, a materials id pass, and many others. Finally, R20 supports both linear and sub-frame motion blur. Just enable motion blur in the settings and adjust the shutter speed of your camera and/or angle. You can even render multiple iterations with different seed values and blend them together for better effects.

This release also includes a set of much more powerful gradient enhancements. You will notice the difference from the moment you open it. There are three predefined sizes–small, medium, and large, with medium being the default. By utilizing your navigation tools, you can pan around or zoom in on your gradient, granting you the capacity to reach extremely precise areas of your gradient. By adding multiple knots to your gradient, you have the option to select certain knots and work with them as a group within your gradient. Alternatively, you can zoom in to focus solely on the selected area. You can also multi-edit the knots as a group. You also can select several colors from a swatch list and just drag them on to a gradient and the colors will appear. There is also a dedicated node in the nodal editor and in the new Fields Technology that includes these features, but here you also get an alpha channel control as well. There are also a lot of new context menu features and key-stroke features to make your life easier.

Cinema 4D R20 – Node Based Materials

• Another great upgrade is the Motion Tracker. It has received many enhancements in Release 20 in the areas of aesthetics, workflow, and performance. First, there is now a dedicated tracking mode for 2D. In this mode, it is possible to use the normal selection tools and common viewport and navigation shortcuts. Next, there is 2D camera navigation mode. This unifies the film move and film zoom functionality, as well as allowing them to work with the usual navigation shortcuts. Users can also use it outside the motion tracking workflow. The 2D manual tracklist has also received some enhancements in that it now follows all of Cinema 4D’s list conventions, such as drag-and-drop movements, renaming, sizing and more. The team has included virtual keyframes in the 2D tracking algorithm, which autogenerate new keys. You now can set the tracking direction on a per-keyframe basis and you can now see this direction in the graph view.

• Additional Alembic features – the item that allows you to exchange 3D data with other 3D programs now has added features, such as in the Nuke exporter. You have an option to save all 3D data as Alembic. Using a variety of parameters in the attribute manager, it is possible to control several aspects of Alembic. You can disable or choose the animation for a specific frame or subframe. You can offset the animation or change the play mode to loop, straight, or ping-pong. It is possible to adjust the speed and re-time it is using a spline interface. There are two added commands–Bake as Alembic and Bake as Alembic and delete. This lets you export any selected objects as Alembic files quickly and easily. Last, Alembic also allows for the caching of complex animations and simulations. This way, they don’t need to be calculated on the fly, and this means you will have smoother playback and scrubbing within the timeline.

Overall, Cinema 4D R20 may be one of the most impressive releases in recent years. The new Volume Builder and Mesher toolset lets you create models by adding one model to another. The node-based materials system, a new nodal editor, the much more powerful gradient enhancements, and the updated motion tracker. That, and the whole host of additional features.

If you are wondering about upgrading from a prior release or purchasing a new one, I would say this is the one to upgrade to. If you are considering investing in Cinema 4D, now is a great time to come on board. I highly recommend this product.

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