Cinema 4D Release 11 by Maxon
A Look Back at Macintosh 3D Software
Back in the days of Mac OS 8.5/9, my 3D application of choice was Strata Studio, the 3D program that gave us Myst. Looking for extra features and stability, I evaluated the state of 3D software for game asset creation. The games industry was heavily into the early versions of Max at that time, and programs such as Cinema 4D and NewTek’s LightWave appealed to me because of their Amiga roots. Maya was yet to appear in the industry as a mainstream application for developing 3D game art, yet when it did appear, it was a pretty massive impact with a lot of studios switching over. I settled on Maxon’s Cinema 4D and have been using the program for several years now. Most recently, for Strange Flavour’s iPhone games Flick Fishing and SlotZ Racer.
For me, the biggest selling point of Cinema 4D at the time was the user interface and rendering engine. As with Strata 3D, it was very intuitive and Mac-like. Useful little features like being able to set up materials and drag-and-drop them in windows and onto objects was all there from very early on. This approach to 3D creation has become default in most modelers these days, but at the time, it allowed for a real improvement in workflow.
Not all 3D applications excel at the various areas of 3D animation. With Cinema 4D however, not only did it have a great GUI, for the rendering engine, it also offered the level of quality that helped me make things stand out at the time — awesome color output and antialiasing. It was far better than anything else, which made doing any 2D work snap. As a comparison, 3D Max always had a very grey lifeless output. This might have been related though to the gama level of PC Artists setup and some pretty horrid graphics card outputs. Still, this ’3D Max look’ appeared right down to the finished games and artwork. Interesting enough, the only place I didn’t see this happening was on game consoles, where they had to do quite a lot of correction for color to match TV gamma.
Cinema 4D’s competitor’s at the time had more advanced methods for 3D modeling, especially in the low-poly world of games. However, Cinema 4D had a great subset of tools that was very easy to use, not to mention numerous 3rd party plug-ins that could expand all the modeling tools into what we have equivalent in Cinema 4D as standard today. With its toolset covering almost all my needs, I’ve been able to utilize Cinema 4D for 2D game asset work, as well as our latest releases which are 3D based games. This review will provide a general overview of what new users to Maxon Cinema 4D may expect, what it adds for existing users, and how useful it is from the perspective of game development.
