Cinema 4D Review

by Hunter Ross

Description

Cinema 4D is a software tool designed for animation, 3D modelling and rendering.  In its toolkit, it has modules for a variety of modeling types, animating the models, arranging lighting, texturing, as well as other tools found in most modelling applications.  It has a variety of different versions: Prime, Broadcast, Visualize, Studio and Lite.

Access

The full software suite (The Studio version) costs $3700, and an upgrade from the previous version of the software costs $1000, so the full suite of software can be extraordinarily expensive.  Each version is slightly cheaper than the more complete version, with the cheapest version being Prime.  One exception worth noting is the Lite version, which is included in the Adobe After Effects Creative Cloud application.  This can be accessed for a $20 monthly subscription to Adobe after including the student discount, which allows access to a basic segment of the tools from Cinema 4D while relying on After Effects for a large part of the lighting and other aspects of the program.  To find more information about the independent versions, look at http://www.maxon.net/en/home.html, and for the Lite version, look at https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/how-to/introducing-cinema4d-lite-aftereffects.html.

Tips, tricks, and tutorials

When using Cinema 4D, especially as a beginner, you need to remember that it is designed with industry use in mind, so it is fully fleshed out and most of the tools you see you won't actually need or use.  Be careful not to be overwhelmed by the huge amount of information and options you're given.  I would suggest looking up tutorials on Youtube to find someone doing something similar to what you want to accomplish, because it is very easy to become lost at first.

Another thing that I found very helpful was when I am modeling objects to keep them as parametric objects until I'm essentially satisfied with how they look before converting them into polygonal objects, it made it a lot easier to manipulate them.  This, along with the ability to save selections for easier editing later on the process makes actually creating objects much simpler.

If you want to work on modelling at all, review your geometry - I hadn't taken a math course in years when I started using it and 30 minutes of refreshing made a huge difference.  Using four sided shapes (NOT TRIANGLES) makes everything so much easier.

What the Tool Does Well

Cinema 4D is great at modelling and lighting.  The precision control you have over lighting in particular makes animating and making models look realistic easier than in similar applications.  The ability to manipulate a group selection all at once grants you a huge degree of power and flexibility.

What it Does Poorly

I found dealing with keyframes and the animation tools a little more cumbersome than other applications.  It's certainly not terrible or unpleasant to use, but coming from another modelling tool you might find yourself a bit disappointed.

What happens when you...

So, I decided to take this question a little literally and decided to see if I could break up a model into different parts.  Of course, there are videos of people much better at this software than me accomplishing this in a much more elegant way, but their way also involves creating different objects that creates an illusion of something breaking apart.

When I got to it, I found that it was something that seemed simple but was less than easy in practice.  While separating each polygon to be independent is the task of clicking into only three menus, doing it in a way that seems dynamic and fluid is not as easy. Because of the fact that the tool allows you to control each polygon independently, I found myself having to duplicate a lot of my work over and over again to create something that looked even vaguely realistic.  While there are macro tools in the software, the method that would actually involve breaking an object apart is not one that is easily macro-able simply due to the nature of the task.

Additional Resources

If you decide to do modelling in Cinema 4D, you'll probably need some textures in order to make your models look interesting, there are tons of websites with tons of textures online, but here is one that I like. http://textures.motionsquared.net/

The same can be said for tutorials, but one that I found had a lot of tutorials that were simple enough for me to work with is http://greyscalegorilla.com/tutorials/

If you're looking for something similar to Cinema 4D, check out Blender, Maya, or ZBrush.  Blender is FOSS, if that plays a factor in your choice.