• Introduction
• Interface
• Bodypaint 3
• Animation Controls
• Timeline
• Enhanced OpenGL
• Interactive Render Region (IRR)
• Character Animation / Mocca 3
• Layers / Layer Manager
• Object Manager
• Documentation
• Tutorials & Goodies
• Miscellaneous
• Conclusion

Conclusion

For people into animation and character animation Release 10 was a great upgrade. The enhancements are significant and extremely well implemented. If you’re not into animation then Release 10 was a little less of a major upgrade. However there’s still plenty in it to make it an essential upgrade. If you didn’t have BodyPaint before then it’s a total no brainer that you should upgrade to Release 10. Core version owners upgrading from Release 9 to 10 are really getting a lot for there money with the CINEMA 4D enhancements and BodyPaint 3 as well.

In Release 10 and Mocca 3, MAXON clearly listened to what users were asking for and that was improved Character Animation tools and the Timeline. In both cases MAXON has delivered and rather than upgrade the tools that we had, they’ve bit the bullet and essentially rewritten both from scratch.

For all users, things like the Timeline, Enhanced OpenGL display, Layers and IRR (Interactive Render Regions) are excellent enhancements. Layers and the Object Manager improvements are great work flow enhancements whether you’re into creating still images or animations.

You either like the new schemes or you hate them. Fortunately if you hate the new schemes you can revert back to the familiar “Classic” scheme. Interface enhancements like folding menus are superb and probably make CINEMA 4D have one of the best interfaces out there of any graphics application.

BodyPaint 3 didn’t have many new enhancements but the LSCM UV unwrapping was a biggie and makes UV mapping / unwrapping things like characters so much easier. Other applications had started to include this so it good to see BodyPaint keeping pace. As mentioned in the review, there’s still room for improvement and few things that need tidying up with the Content Browser and presets.

Missing from Release 10 were modeling tool and rendering enhancements and while some people were expecting these to be enhanced one has to be realistic. It has been just over 2 years since 9.0 was released. In that time we’ve had 9.1, 9.5 and 9.6, Bodypaint 2.5, HAIR module and the MoGraph module, so MAXON have delivered us a lot in those 2 years. The focus now for a year or two probably should be to finish the Timeline i.e. motion blending and non linear animation, modeling tool enhancements and the Dynamics module either needs a serious update or rewriting from scratch. Preferably the latter.

It was very clear that the major focus of Release 10 was on animation and character animation and I’m sure everyone applauds this. Improving C4D's Character Animation tools and the Timeline had been at the top of many people’s wish lists. There’s still room for improvement in both of these areas but things are much improved from before. There are things that Cactus Dan’s plugins do better or more easily than what C4D's rigging tools give us now. Hand rigging for example. As mentioned the Timeline doesn’t feel quite finished as there is no motion blending. I have the feeling that there’s more to come in the way of enhancements for the Timeline but since everything else was pretty much completed, MAXON chose to announce and release Release 10 when they did.

I found Release 10 very stable running on different PC's and even on my new HP Laptop running Vista 32 bit it was very stable. Release 10 was a lot more stable than Release 9.0 was when first released, however there were a couple of annoying bugs in the initial 10.008 release and most were addressed in the 10.1 update but some like the Ripple editing problem and using presets from the Content Browser with BodyPaint were not addressed which is a bit disappointing. R10 is however a very good update and I can thoroughly recommend that people get it.

Review by Nigel Doyle / 3DKiwi
Review coding by Travis Clancy / jtClancy