• 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

Miscellaneous

A new Path Selection tool is a welcome addition to the tool set. It works in point and edge mode and is much easier for selecting paths than say using the live selection tool or any other selection tool. This tool really shows it worth when defining edge selections prior to LSCM unwrapping in BodyPaint. Below is a quick animation showing selecting edges in preparation for LSCM unwrapping.

Another new tool is the Phong Break selection tool. This looks to be an enhanced version of the “Select Broken Phong Edges” command. This new tool does the same but highlights the broken phong edges in blue in both edge and polygon mode. In polygon mode you can move the mouse over the object and make selections. The tool has options for creating a selection tag. I guess this is useful but I think MAXON’s time may have been better spent on saying giving the Bridge options to subdivide and scale when creating geometry like the equivalent tool does in 3DMax.

The Axis Center plugin is now built into Release 10 on the Structure menu.

Pyrocluster now comes bundled with the Advanced Render Module. I think perhaps this may have been better bundled with Thinking Particles. At some point MAXON probably needs to look at integrating the AR module into the core version. I can’t think of any other 3D application where you have to pay extra to make the built in render engine be capable of GI, DOF etc.

The HAIR module is now included in the Studio Bundle. The only problem here for English speakers is that MAXON omitted or forgot to include the 3 very good video tutorials on the DVD’s. The same also applies to the MoGraph module where the 7 short video tutorials haven’t been included. I gather that these tutorials were on the German version discs. The installation DVD actually includes all modules but you can’t install them without first paying for them and receiving the serial number to activate it. For example MoGraph is not included in the Studio Bundle. For me I had to first install the Studio bundle and load in the serial numbers then load the MoGraph module from the same install DVD and then load in the serial number. This makes very good sense and saves MAXON having to have lots of different DVD's or CD's.

There are no major enhancements with materials. However MAXON has slipped a few goodies in. The texture preview size options on the Material Manager’s Illumination tab now have a new higher value of 4096 x 4096 for ultra high resolution previews of materials. Be careful with this one as it uses a whopping 64mb of video memory and even on a powerful computer things can slow things down big time. Adding materials to objects just got easier. No longer do you need to manually name selections and drag the selection tag into the selection field of a texture tag. Just make a polygon selection and drag and drop the material on to the object in the viewport and C4D will create the selection tag and add it to the texture tag. The Illumination tab now has options to disable the various channels in the viewport. Handy if there's a specific channel bogging down Enhanced OpenGL. There's now 2 new material preview options pictured below. Handy to see your materia applied to a real object rather than a primitive.

Object 1 Material Preview	Object 2 Material Preview

User Data has been improved with min / max parameters for sliders. Think of the intensity slider for a light where the maximum value for the slider is 100% but you can go beyond 100% using the small spinner or by manually typing values into the edit field. That's what you can do now with User Data sliders.

The "Basics" materials are now found in the Content Browser. Unfortunately MAXON forgot to include most of the textures in the installation. You can either get them off the tutorial DVD that for most of us came several months after we received Release 10, download them from MAXON's site (7mb) or copy them from your Release 9 installation. The 10.1 update will install these missing textures so all you need to do is install the 10.1 update and you'll be fine.

There’s other little enhancements and you can see the full list here.

10.1 Update

The 10.1 update is mainly a bug fix update and I've been fortunate to see lists of the fixed bugs. It addresses many bugs that were present in 10.008 and I would urge anyone running 10.008 to install the free update available from here. Vista support is improved as well under 10.1. Unfortunately fix as many things as they did, the weighting tool now no longer works in top, side and front views anymore. Just the perspective view. I picked this bug up just as 10.1 was being readied for download and passed it on to MAXON so the bug will have to be fixed in the next version or in another update.

Don't forget to download the updated 10.1 documentation as well from here.

Release 10 and Windows Vista

CINEMA 4D Release 10 runs on both Vista 32 bit and 64 bit. Some members will have read about my experiences in the Cafe forums. After loading updated Vista drivers and disabling the Aero scheme and tweaking the driver settings I was pretty much able to achieve the same results with Cinebench for OpenGL eventually. With Cinebench 64 bit I achieved an improved rendering result with the 2 cores of my Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz CPU than compared to running the 32 bit version. So I can confirm that there is a rendering speed enhancement running a 64 bit Operating system. The problem for me running Vista 64 is trying to get other programs to run. Some work and some don't. I should add that some programs don't work under Vista 32 bit as well but more work. I couldn't get sound despite loading the Vista 64 bit audio drivers supplied by Motherboard maker. In the end I've gone back to running Vista 32 bit on my desktop which I dual boot with Windows XP. I think in time as hardware and software makers update their software to run properly on Vista I'll move completely over to it and in time maybe Vista 64 bit but the time isn't now. I am however working exclusively with Vista 32 bit on my new HP Laptop and generally everything is fine although at the time of writing the review there are a few programs that I use that don't run on Vista yet. I couldn't get the Flash Plugin to work with Firefox on it so I'm forced to view some sites with IE7.

Oh yes, totally irrelavent but the 10.1 update on Vista gives you a large desktop icon if you want one. Here it is full size. Cute eh!!