New tools

Brush

The brush tool is, in my opinion, an under-celebrated new tool in R9. With this new versatile brush tool, you can modify geometry using intuitive brush strokes. Some of the paint modes feel like the magnet tool but it is deeper than that. Geometry can be pushed, pulled, twisted, stretch all with the stroke of the mouse or tablet pen if you have one.

Two of my favorite features in this new tool are the smoothing brush and the vertex painter. The smoothing brush is like the iron on steroids. With it, you can take a model of a human face and melt it down to a withered alien in seconds. It appears to melts the model and is really a lot of fun to play with. The end result of even the coarsest model is a nice smooth shape.

Vertex maps are great for controlling the effect of bones and other deformers on a model among other things. The vertex painter prior to R9 produced vertex maps by setting the vertex weight on a point-by-point basis. Yes, you could paint the points but the end result had a hard edge that fell off from 100% to 0% unless you really worked at it and played with the weights. The new vertex painter makes the creation of smooth-edged vertex maps a breeze. The edges have a controllable falloff and you can even use the bleed brush to smooth out the edges or extend a smooth vertex map further. This translates into more believable joints on your characters as the bend and twist.

N-Gons

When I first started using R8.0 having come from elsewhere in 3D-land, I couldn't understand why my models had so many extra polygons. The knife tool was great but using it on anything less than a full slice through the model produced lots of triangles. You can learn to work with that but in R9, you can disregard it. Normally, polygons are either 3 sided triangles or four sided quads. With N-gons, you can create n-sided polygons. The polygons are there but hidden. What you see and work with are the N-gons which can be as complex as you need them to be without having to look at or work with extra polygons. To view the hidden polygons, there is a filter option that will unhide them.

A word of caution here for those using BodyPaint and N-Gons. At the time of writing BodyPaint treats N-gons as separate polygons as you might well expect. The end result if you're not careful is UV polygons that in some cases can appear to be missing edges depending on how you mapped your UV polygons. All you need to do is have the hidden edges displayed using the N-Gon filter.

Enabling and disabling the N-Gon filter. This is the same sphere after the polygons had the Melt tool applied to below.

Melt

This tool is provided to melt polygons together into N-gons. It is simple to use and effective. Simply select the polygons that you would like to see converted to N-gons, apply the tool, and it's done. In practice this tool now allows you use the Matrix extrude tool on multiple polygons whereas previously each selected polygon was extruded separately.

Knife Improvements

Like other tools the knife tool in Release 9 has been enhanced but in the case of the knife, MAXON have really given it the works. Previously the knife was restricted to just cutting lines. Now the Knife tool boasts 5 cutting modes: Line, hole, loop, plane and path modes in addition to various other options. All these new modes combined with N-gons make modeling far easier. In several of the modes you can press the shift key down. This locks the cut in place without applying it. You can then adjust the various parameters and then click back in the workspace to apply. Not to be forgotten is the knife tool also cuts splines this has the effect of adding additional points.

At C4D Cafe we have a full video tutorial demonstrating the various uses of the knife tool.