On the eve of its 20th anniversary, MAXON announced the upcoming availability of CINEMA 4D Release 10 and BodyPaint 3D Release 3. With these landmark releases, MAXON has enhanced its modeling, animation and painting softwares to build upon a reputation for ease of use with countless workflow improvements.
CINEMA 4D R10 features enhanced object and animation managers, which have been optimized for quicker workflow. Objects can now be easily filtered, searched, bookmarked and arranged in layers to aid in dealing with large scenes. A completely rewritten timeline can be organized in the same way as the Object Manager, and now offers ripple and region editing tools as well as improved automatic and manual controls over keyframe interpolation.
The advances in scene management will be especially helpful in character animation, the major focus of CINEMA 4D R10. Character animators will enjoy a new comprehensive toolset in the MOCCA module, offering joint-based skeletons with improved IK setup and solutions. Skin deformations allow the user to apply the entire animation from one skeleton to virtually any mesh. Automatic weighting saves time while binding joints to the mesh, and new weighting tools make it easy to adjust or manually weight each joint to the mesh. An extensive morph management system makes lip-syncing and facial animation simple, and the new MOCCA toolset also provides muscular deformation based on the animation of joints. Finally, the VAMP tool simply transfers morphs, UV coordinates, weighting, selections and vertex maps between objects of different topologies.
With the powerful new release of BodyPaint 3D, MAXON expands its multi award-winning 3D painting and UV editing software to include breathtaking 16 and 32-bit image manipulation capabilities, as well as UV LSCM Pelt mapping and several other key advancements. Improved features and continued integration with Maya, 3ds Max, SOFTIMAGE |XSI, and LightWave converge to push BodyPaint 3D forward as an indispensable tool for artists everywhere.
Improved Relax UV algorithms elegantly interpret the full range of geometric object curvatures into UV maps that are ready to paint on. Added tools such as path selection make it possible to select seams and refine a UV mesh with ease.
The interface of both applications has been given a facelift as well, with the inclusion of new schemes and icons for easier recognition and a faster workflow.
MAXON Computer (www.maxon.de) is the developer of professional 3D modeling, painting, animation and rendering solutions. Its award-winning products have been used extensively in the film, television, science, architecture, engineering and other industries. MAXON products have been used for and in THE POLAR EXPRESS, THE FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX, HERO, VAN HELSING, KING ARTHUR, SPIDER-MAN, SPIDER-MAN 2, HAUNTED MANSION, CAT IN THE HAT, CHARLIE'S ANGELS FULL THROTTLE, STAR WARS: EPISODE 11 THE ATTACK OF THE CLONES, THE MUMMY RETURNS, GLADIATOR, TOMB RAIDER, the new Columbia-TriStar Film Logo, the On-Air Packages for Comedy Central, MONDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL and more. MAXON has offices in Friedrichsdorf, Germany, Newbury Park, California, Bedford, U.K. and Tokyo.
Bill Desowitz, former editor of VFXWorld, is currently the Crafts Editor of IndieWire.
