The downsides are that it doesn't work well if you expect self shadowing or ambient occlusion to work, as it doesn't actually move the geometry. While the parallax shader doesn't quite measure up to displacement at finer detail levels, it really is an excellent shader and will speed up a lot of people's work, negating the need to wait on lengthy test renders.
#Maxon cinema 4d studio r18 full
This does some kind of visual trickery that boosts a standard bump map, giving it the appearance of a full on displacement map but without the extra memory overhead. More shader goodness in R18 comes in the form of the parallax shader. Physically accurate bubbles, oils and glass are quickly achievable with the thin film shader Variances are key to good CG and the thin film shader lets you define this for color and thickness, using any of the standard other shaders or a texture, giving ultimate control. There is also a new thin film shader which is great for doing camera lenses and bubbles, with nice hue variances. Use this as a masking method for a dirt texture and you have instant scuffed edges or worn paint. Some new tricks have been added in R18, the most useful being the new reverse AO shader which does as you'd expect, applying whatever you need to the outermost edges of your mesh. Its shader system is powerful and flexible and now is even better. The knife tool viewport slider makes precision cuts easy Shader heavenĬ4D has its own special approach to materials, compared to other apps, but it's one that works. The new interactive knife tool is a huge improvement. The UI for this is slick and accurate, as are the new cuts. You can choose from a number of cutting styles, from plane to line, and not only can you cut in the viewport you can now use a pop-up slider or enter values numerically. The knife was one but that's had a complete overhaul and now works like a dream. Getting control of distribution is easy Cutting EdgeĪlthough the modeling tools have always been pretty good in CINEMA 4D, there have been a few that didn't quite keep up with the times. Viewport tweaks make light and shadow easy to work with Getting a good representation of how a final render will look can be a huge deal to a 3D artist, and Maxon have realized this and R18 now gives a much better preview of the light and shadow in a scene, including reflections of sky objects, better shadow falloff and much more. There are a number of workflow improvements as well. Needless to say, fragging a sphere and running a quick bullet dynamics sim is huge fun and shows just quite how useful this tool is. Voronoi fracture to makes the simplest job of breaking meshes, including parametricįracture amounts, distribution and a number of helpers all exist in a clean interface, along with options for using mograph selections. Maxon have deeply integrated the tool into the software, where it sits as part of the mograph toolset. The new voronoi fracture object is a one-click solution to splitting geometry apart, using the popular voronoi noise algorithm. R18 is a definite crowd pleaser in this respect. The sources section allows for exponential distribution, as well as even and normal based FanfareĮvery CG artist takes a certain amount of enjoyment out of blowing things up and destroying them digitally, and until now CINEAM 4D users had to either manually fragment meshes, or use a plug-in. Certain features aren't fun toys but in daily use prove themselves to be excellent, such as the addition of ‘Takes'. These have been mixed in terms of wow features, but usually gain a fair amount of favor from the user community, even if they are vocal about their disappointment at first. Lead upĮver since Maxon did away with the module system in favor of focused complete editions (for broadcast, visualization and so on) they have been pretty consistent at bringing out a yearly upgrade.
#Maxon cinema 4d studio r18 upgrade
All images credit Rob Redman Maxon have announced their latest upgrade to CINEMA 4D, but does it warrant the new number, or should it be a point level update.