April
17
Maxon Ships Cinema 4D XL 6.0
Completely
revamped timeline among numerous new features
by
David Nagel
Senior Producer
Maxon
has started shipping version 6.0 of Cinema 4D XL.
The new version, which was available for preorder last week, includes
several enhancements, including a whole new lighting system with more
than 50 new light and illumination modes with new features like radiosity-like
area lights and shadows; raytraced soft shadows; volumetric noise (noise,
soft, wavy, hard); new shadow maps; new shadow bias controls; colored
shadows; inner and outer cone control; and near and far clipping.
Also new is the timeline, which, says Maxon, has been completely redesigned from the ground up. It offers multiple selection of keys and sequences, motion sequencing/motion synthesizing, a layering concept, inclusion and exclusion sets, autokeying, an incorporated Time Manager, new fast key controls, new 3D sound tracks and 3D sound rendering. Other enhancements include:
New
deformation regions, including Bend, Bulge, Magnet, Rail, Shear, Taper,
Twist and Wave.- HyperNURBS for building organic models with quick switching between cage and mesh modes, with support for modeling with real-time textures.
- Hierarchical instancing, which allows for instancing of models, groups of models and animated models.
- Metaballs and MetaSplines, which can be animated and edited in realtime with textures. Includes unlimited number of meta objects. Splines can also be animated or used as animation motion paths.
- Motion sequencing/motion synthesizing, which allows for an unlimited number of the Position, Scale and Rotation tracks for a hierarchical model that can be grouped into one functional track. Several can be grouped and applied to a model. Users can also mix the motion of the tracks and control the amount of influence each track has over the object.
- Point-level animation for animating everything down to the mesh of a model, the points of a spline or even a spline motion path. Splines used to define NURBS objects can also be animated.
Cinema 4D XL 6.0 is available for the Macintosh for $2,195. The upgrade from 5.x is $495, while a competitive upgrade (from Maya, Softimage, Lightwave, 3DS Max, Electricimage, Strata, Raydream, Infini-D, Carrera or Pixel3D) runs for $1,295. For more information, visit http://www.maxoncomputer.com.
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