Creating HDRI images

A very cool and useful addition to CINEMA is the ability to create hdri images (High Dynamic Range Images). This gives users a way of making their own hdri's using the new sky object, a sphere and the bake texture option. By using the new sky object you can customize the sky to just about anyway you want from the time of day, the amount of clouds and more to create your own custom hdr that you can use to light your scene using a image based lighting.

 

 

Click here to download a quick tutorial. (34meg file)

 

Sky

The new sky object is an awesome new feature in 9.5. This is part of the Advanced Render Module. You can create skies from day to night for your scenes with ease with 50 presets. You can customize them to your liking with features like, beginner. Beginner allows you to chose things like, weather, time, date, year and city.

 

Weather allows you to choose from a few presets to apply to your scene, like partly cloudy, over cast, midday and a few others. You can set the time to any time of the day, date you can set it to any day and month and year. City lets you pick certain cities for your sky. So say you are in New York you can switch your city to Roma, Italy and you will notice your sky will change. You can choose cities in the Americas, Canada, Asia and Europe. You can also customize things like cloud color,density, coverage, thickness, transparency as well as other things.

Click here for a render using the new sky.

 

In the content browser you are provided with sky presets. There are 50 in the sky folder. You can merge one into your scene then you can leave it as is or you can customize certain things like the cloud pattern, enable fog, and a rainbow and more. Another great option is the cloud tool. This gives you the ability to paint volumetric clouds on your sky that you added to your scene.

 

Overall, the sky object is a very deep feature that will allow you to either toss in a pre-made sky or experiment with advanced 3D clouds, cartoon skies, or whatever type of sky that comes to mind.

Video Tutorials

You get 2 CD's when you upgrade to 9.5 if you're a 9.1 user. The first is the program update and manual update pdf. The second CD has 3 video tutorials and project files to accompany them.

Introduction - 2min 33 seconds. Note: There's an error in the video where it says to copy the video tutorials cat file to your browser folder. Doing this as per the video so that you can open the projects from the content browser leaves you with an empty tutorial catalogue. Just delete the cat file and then from the Content Browser menu, create a new Catalgue called Video Tutorials or whatever. In the base folder field, browse to where the tutorial files are e.g. D:/Projects This creates new empty catalogue. Then in the file manager part, navigate to this folder and select the 3 project folders and either right click and add them to your catalogue or drag and drop them into the catalogue. This doesn't copy the files from the CD but creates previews of them and since these are recognised files you can open them directlty from your new catalogue.

Tutorial 1. 17 minutes. New lighting enhancements
Tutorial 2 - 14 minutes. Bake texture, normal mapping and ambient occlusion.
Tutorial 3 - 24 minutes. Sky (Advanced Render Module)

Conclusion

9.5 and the minor point upgrade to 9.52 is a worth while upgrade to CINEMA 4D. If you were expecting enhancements to Character animating you would be disappointed. However .5 upgrades don't usually deliver sweeping changes or improvements. The new enhancements in 9.52 like the rendering improvements to the Advanced Render module have been well received within the CINEMA 4D community. During the review process, MAXON announced the new Hair Module which the Cafe Staff will review at a later date. From looking at the demo version and sample videos at the MAXON site, MAXON has come up with an outstanding new module for CINEMA 4D. We had hair before in the form of Shave & Haircut but the new Hair module looks to render hair and fur incredibly fast and the tools are easy to use.

The 9.521 minor point upgrade brought in a few bug fixes along with a new Chanlum shader. The 3 C4D Cafe reviewers all run PC versions and no stability or other hardware related problems were encountered since upgrading to 9.5 and 9.521.

MAXON should now focus on rel 10 and this needs to deliver big time in the animation departments. While great looking character animation is possible with Mocca 2, other 3D applications do it a lot better and more easily. The dynamics module is capable of some great results but needs updating and making easier to use. The timeline needs a major overhaul to include collapsable tracks amongst other things. Still lacking and often requested by those coming from other 3D applications is Object Manager layers. This is where you are able to organise objects by layer rather than by hierarchy. Whilst a 3rd party plugin is under development this should really be built in. Rel 9.0 was big on modelling tool enhancements. There's still a few of the modelling tools that need a bit more refinement and development. Plus can we please have an extrude by spline option.