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Another Look at CINEMA 4D XL Bundle - Release 9.5 |
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By Ed Wright First off, I’d like to thank MAXON for giving me the opportunity to review the CINEMA 4D XL Bundle. I guess I should say a little about myself. In the real world, I’m a heavy equipment operator. In the construction world, I’m what’s called a “finish blade operator”. What that actually means is I do the final grading of the base rock on a parking lot or road before the asphalt is laid down. I’ve been working in the construction industry for over thirty years. I’m also a big sports junkie. If I’m not working on some modeling or animating project, I’m usually watching or at some sporting event. I really have no formal art training, although I do have a lot of training in technical drawing which made understanding how to visualize an object in 3D pretty easy to me. I’ve been using C4D since R7, which is some where around three years ago. I was looking for a modeling program that would make creation of props, scenes and clothing for Poser easier. The fact that there was a plug-in to host Poser animations inside of C4D didn’t hurt when I was looking at it. I’ve tried a lot of modeling programs and C4D was the first one that I actually made sense to me. Now on to the good stuff. I opened the box and looked to make sure everything was there, so on to the installation. I put the CD in the drive and proceeded with the installation. The program installed without a hitch. I have this habit of rebooting the computer before I run a new program. I doubt that this is necessary, but it’s just something I do. On first look, I didn’t see much that was different from the C4D R8.5 interface. I decided to open one of my bigger projects. In R8.5, I had to turn off OpenGL display so the textures would display and it took a couple of minutes for it to load. It definitely loaded quicker and I was able to leave OpenGL on. In fact I was able to leave the display on gouraud shading. I received a few plug-in error messages; these were plug-ins that have been incorporated into the base program. I spent a few minutes adjusting some settings on the plug-ins. I decided to try a render. This is the view rendered in R8.5:
And the R9.5 render: I didn’t change any of the settings. As you can see there is a huge difference in the images. I decided to try a few renders of the interior of this model. So I switched to one of the interior cameras. In this view, the refraction on the windows is much better in R9.5.
These are two renders of a different view. One has just the sunlight and a few omni lights lighting the scene and the second render makes use of Global Illumination in the Advanced Render module.
Since most of my modeling is for use inside of Poser, I decided to try to model a few clothing items to try out the MOCCA’s Clothilde plug-in. I had already modeled a golf cart to use in Poser. I rigged it for use in C4D as well as Poser. This is the C4D version:
And the Poser version: I decided to model some clothing that is suitable for a golf excursion. Rather than use my normal approach which is box modeling, I decided to try the Clothilde plug-in to get the clothing shaped without having to do it point by point. I started with a simple pair of shorts to see how the plug-in actually worked. The first couple of attempts were pretty bad. I finally decided that maybe I should actually look at the manual. After a few minutes of reading, I knew exactly what was wrong. The Poser figure’s obj files are really tiny in scale. I normally work with a scale of 100 which still makes them small, but workable for me. The default settings of the plug-in were too big for the size of my objects. I changed the setting to reflect the smaller figures and hit the Dress O Matic button. A few minutes later I had something I could actually work with. I tackled the polo top next. I created a simple poly object, cloned it and moved the clone to the back of the figure and bridged the sides. I subdivided the mesh a little more to have a few more polygons to work with, clicked the Dress O Matic button and waited a minute or two while the plug-in worked its magic. This is what I started with and next image is my finished polo shirt. I managed to lose the in between screen caps from a little problem called PEBKAC (problem exists between keyboard and chair).
I was thinking this is way too easy, so I decided to try to make some shoes using the plug-in. I started with a simple cube, subdivided it a few times and tried it out. As with my first attempts with the plug-in, the first attempt was pretty bad. So back on the drawing board, I ended up with a mesh that was open at the toes.
When I hit the Dress-O-Matic button, the plug-in pulled the mesh around the foot pretty well. I decided that this was the best I was going to get using the plug-in. I closed the center points with Stitch and Sew and bridged the toes. I really didn’t have to do much in the line of point pushing and pulling to clean up the mesh. I built the sole of the shoes, added the laces. This is a picture of the shoes before I exported them from C4D:
This is the set after they were taken into Poser: My next idea was to try a long dress to use in Poser’s Cloth room. These are the before and after results.
The more I use this release, the more things I find that I like. The additional enhancements to the modeling tools have really sped up my work flow. Probably the two I like and use the most are the additions to the Knife and Edge Cut tools. The Weld tool is another one of the tools that got a huge overhaul from C4D R8.5. It’s much handier and easier to use. The addition of Stitch and Sew, the changes to the Weld and Knife tools along with the Slide tool makes it very easy to make small or major changes to your mesh. The Iron tool, which was a plug-in in R8.5, is much more reliable than it was for me as a plug-in in R8.5. The clothing examples I modeled were done in one afternoon session about 5 hours total. I have found a few things I wish were more like the previous version… mainly the Clone tool. I think it’s cumbersome and slower than R8.5 version of the tool.
The one area where I feel C4D is still lacking is the
rigging and animation of a character and animation in general. It’s still right
on par with going to the dentist in my opinion. Nothing is really straight
forward or intuitive to me. One thing I found is that the bones will unpin
themselves if you change from the live select tool to one of the others. As a
note here, an update to R9.52 has fixed this problem. After spending the better
part of three days working on rigging a character, I was sure I was doing
something wrong. The more I worked the worse things got. I finally got a
workable character, but it still has problems. I will revisit this figure some
time in the future. Comments: Anonymous: Maxon have made 3d so easy. I am off trying to to find that Dress-O-Matic button. Nice review Ed Anonymous: verygood Jean-Luc_Ajrarn: Thank you for this review, Ed. :) Glad that you used the Clothilde plugin, so we can have an idea of how well and easily it works. :) Anonymous: Anonymous: Very interesting and worth pursuing. Anonymous: GOOOOOOOOOOD Anonymous: fuck swich me!!! Anonymous: supperrrrrrrrrrrrrr Anonymous: It's a giant leap from My old days with 3D Studio Max R3... Did you cry, too, when your C4D model imported into Poser perfectly on the first try? I still weep everytime I witness this miracle... Anonymous: Welcome to my site:
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