Overview

MAXON announced a free upgrade from 9.52 to 9.6 on May 8th 2006.  This point upgrade was announced at the same time as the new MoGraph module was announced.  Many of the enhancements are to work in conjunction with the MoGraph module and for users with MoGraph to work with external applications.  However even without MoGraph many of the enhancements work well and have been requested by many users so they are very welcome.  We’ll go through the major enhancements in detail.

First off, I don’t think many of us were expecting the point upgrade to 9.6 or the MoGraph module to be announced.  The fabulous HAIR module hadn’t been out that long so MAXON surprised many by bringing out another new module and 9.6 upgrade.

As you would expect with a .1 upgrade there won’t be truck loads of new tools or enhancements but those that there are, are really quite useful.

Mac Users

MAXON claims that OpenGL Acceleration has been dramatically improved due to OpenGL optimizations. They claim that you will be able to navigate your real-world projects 50%, or in some cases even 150% faster.  Since I’m running a PC I can’t verify this. I assume that Mac users now enjoy the same level of performance that PC users have enjoyed for a while.

Reworked Text Engine

MAXON say in the 9.6 pdf update that the text engine has been completely overhauled.  Text created on a PC will now not differ from text created on a Mac provided the same font is used.  This is probably of most use to production houses / business that are transferring files around as previously there would have been noticeable differences in the rendered output.

Font’s built in “kerning” is now honoured across all platforms.  This is something for all users to note as there could be minor variations in text spacing / size between 9.6 and earlier versions.  For example on a PC the default font is usually Arial.  With the default letters running 9.5 the size of the spline is X = 342.578 m & Y = 130.176 m.  However load up a default text spline in 9.6 and the sizes are X = 360.645 m & Y = 145.508 m.  In both cases all settings are defaults.

Here’s a simple graphic explaining what kerning is (Courtesy Wikipedia)

Configuration

For PC (Windows) users, you can now set environment variables.  Those who remember MS Dos and writing a line like “Set temp C:\temp” in the autoexec.bat file, well environment variables is Windows XP’s version of setting up paths.  In the case of C4D the environment variables are user definable paths to your content browser libraries.  This is similar to setting up texture paths in the preferences.  This begs the question – why set up the path in the system variables?  Wouldn’t a preference option be easier for those not game to edit their environment variables?

Windows XP Environment Variables

Anyway, what all this means in practice is that you’re no longer limited (on a PC) to having to load libraries into your “library/browser” folder.  You can have libraries stored anywhere on your PC.  If you’re like me with several versions of Cinema 4D installed, I can now have all of my content browser libraries in just the one directory.  Therefore only one copy of each required.

Click here to download a short tutorial on setting up environment variables.

Maxon recently made a new set of Thinking Particles presets available.  Along with these presets comes documentation and example scene files and QT movies.

Click here to go to the download page at MAXON'S SITE.

The video tutorial above on setting up environment variables includes adding the new Thinking Particles preset library to the content browser.

New Preference option “Allow bug reports” – New in the preference is an option to send bug reports to MAXON.  While this may not appeal to everyone what we do get now in addition to the bug reports is C4D doing its best to recover the scene file.  You won’t be able to recover the scene file in every case but I can confirm that when I was playing around with MoGraph and overloading things by using high values I did end up with my scene file being recovered a few times.  It’s refreshing to see a software company interested in making its product more stable by these bug reports.  I think the benefit here is that bug reports where users are doing similar things will greatly help MAXON identify what’s causing the crash.

Just on this.  A few users have reported problems getting 9.6 to run correctly or not at all.  I have to say I’ve not encountered any problems.  What members need to ensure is that they are running the correct exe file and their plugins are compatible.  In my case the 9.6 update installs a new cinema4d.exe file along with a 64 bit version.  The 64 bit version can be deleted since I’m running XP home.  For Mac users they have the choice of a Universal binary version or the PPC version.

You should ensure that you’re running the correct exe file and that your plugins are the correct format for your system.  For more information click on this link

http://www.bonkers.de/cinema/cinema.html

New Spline Type – Subdivided

Another really handy addition to 9.6.  Again this new spline type was probably introduced to better support some of the new things in MoGraph but users without MoGraph still get to take advantage of it.  The sub-divided spline type is a similar spline type to the adaptive spline type.  Where they differ is the sub-divided type gives even sub-division and you have a distance option that defines the maximum distance before another segment appears as well as the angle option that both the sub-divided and the adaptive splines have.  As you can see by the animated gif below, the subdivided type gives very smooth curves.  Of course the downside of this is that it is more CPU intensive.

New Subdivided Spline type compared to other spline types (Sketch & Toon render)

Enhanced Sweepnurbs object

For me this is the best new addition / enhancement in 9.6.  Many people have wanted the ability to animate the growth of a sweepnurbs object in both directions and now we have it.  Not only do we have that but we now have function graphs to give lots of control of rotation and scaling throughout the length or sweep of the sweepnurbs object. In fact, you can animate the shape of the scale over time as in this little animation below.

We’ve put together an in 65 minute (in 3 parts) in depth video tutorial that goes through all of these new enhancements as well as explaining the other options here:

Click here for the tutorial on sweepnurbs

Combined with the “Tracer” effect in the MoGraph module some wonderful effects can be achieved.  Here the scale of the sweepnurbs object has been adjusted so that the sweep is pointed at both ends.  You will be able to read more about the Tracer effect and MoGraph in our MoGraph review.

Sweepnurbs and the MoGraph Tracer effect

Click here for a tutorial that walks you through how to create this animation.

Animated Texture Preview

Animated texture preview – Noise in the colour channel with the colorizer

This is one of the other big new enhancements that has been requested for a while.  Again, no doubt to support MoGraph but a really useful option.  So materials with animated textures can now be previewed in the viewport.  Not only can materials with imported avi’s, QT or images sequences be previewed but things like noise shaders with animation can be previewed as well.  There’s some limitation to this as you’ll find you can’t preview an animated texture at high resolution as defined on the Illumination tab.  I found on my PC that 256 x 256 was the highest setting that would preview.  I’m picking those with more powerful computers and graphics cards can use higher settings.

Enable animated texture on the Illumination tab.  It is off by default.

Attribute Manager

User Data functionality has been tidied up.  There’s now the option to manage user data with a floating window.  This gives more power than the previous options to edit user data.  You can now rearrange the order of user data entries which is a welcome addition.  Another clever addition is an option window when defining user data to give names to numerical data.

Click here for a mini tutorial on the user data enhancements. 4min 35sec 2.8mb Flash format (It will load and play):

XPresso Sound Node

The sound node has been enhanced.   A new “Band” input port allows for the loaded sound file to be analysed and the sound file to broken down into bands of frequency.  And the result will be output via a “Left mag” and “Right mag” output port.  The MAXON site refers to this as FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) analysis.  This FFT analysis is total geek stuff and beyond me.  I gather it’s a mathematical algorithm that optimizes the analysis of the sound file.   There’s no mention of this FFT analysis in the pdf update.  In fact the documentation for the sound node is very vague in both the rel 9 manual and the 9.6 pdf update.  From what I’ve figured out the new enhancements allow you to divide the sound file up into frequency bands.  The sound node now has a “Bands” parameter where you can define how many frequency bands you want from 4 up to 8192 in a logarithmic scale i.e. 4, 8, 16, 32 etc up to 8192.  The band port allows you to specify which frequency band you want data output from with the left or right mag output ports.  If the sound file is mono then the left and right mag ports output value is the same.  The values output from the left or right mag ports range between 0 and 1 which I assume correspond to a percentage and is a measure of the frequency spectrum.

One thing I couldn’t figure out is why the Band parameter allows negative values or bands higher than the number specified e.g. 128 bands and you’re allowed to select band 500 for example.  In my opinion the minimum and maximum should be defined by the band quantity option. Another puzzling one was where I had a stereo wav file with vastly different left and right channels, the data output from the left and right mag ports was very similar which I don't think is right.  Of course I could just be doing things wrong!!.

If you really want to drive animations by sound / music the new MoGraph module has a Sound Effector that is easier to use and produces better and more predictable results.

However you can generate some fun animations using either the new left and right mag ouput options or the old left and right amplitude output as shown below.

To get all of this data out of the sound node you have to hook up a time node to the time input port on the sound node.  I think this is where a few people come unstuck as not much happens until you do this. It’s easy enough to make the sound node play the sound file.  Just pass a Boolean true value or a value of 1 to the play input port and the node plays the file.  With the time ports hooked up, as the animation is played the left and right ports output the amplitude of the sound file like in the animated gif below or in the second animation where I used left and right mag output ports to show the frequency spectrum.

The probe option for the sound node has a dampening effect on the values output from the left or right ports as these values can be in the thousands.  The pdf manual gives the impression that the actual sound itself is dampened.  For me this isn’t the case.  Increasing the probe value reduces / dampens the values output from the left and right output ports.

I should also mention that Cinema 4D will also load AIFF files in addition to WAV files. The other thing is that when you save a scene file with sound nodes, the scene file includes any wav or aiff files so can become very large.

Anyway let’s look at some animations using the sound node.

The first one is playing a 1 second 440hz mono constant pitch note that fades away.  This uses the left output port of the sound node.

Animated gif – No audio

Click here to play animation with audio. 149kb QT

The next one uses the new left and right mag ouput ports.  What you’re seeing here is the frequency spectrum of the sound file as it plays.  This is similar to a very basic MoGraph setup in linear mode but MoGraph is much easier to setup and does a lot more.  What I found interesting here was that having a time input port on the sound node was essential if I wanted to render the animation.  Without it, the line rendered flat, despite the lines being animated in the viewport.

Still image from the FFT animation.

Click here to play animation with audio. 4mb QT

Here's the scene file in case anyone is interested. (The wav file I used in the animation is 5mb in size and too big to include).  You will need to load in a wav or aiif file in the sound node. The range mapper nodes may need slight adjustment depending on what sound file you use.  Apart from demonstrating the new sound node features, the XPresso makes use of an iteration node.  This is one very powerful node and this example demonstrates it's ability to perform the equivalent of program loops in conventional programming.

Click here to download the 17kb example scene file.

Miscellaneous

The create polygon tool now has a new option to only select visible elements.  The pdf says this is to prevent hidden points being selected.  I’d never had an issue with hidden points being selected when using this tool but heck it’s there so I won’t complain.  That reminds me.  The small bug where the bridge tool couldn’t create a polygon when there wasn’t at least one polygon to begin with has been fixed.

Support for the SpaceMouse has been enhanced with a new interface and settings.  I don’t have one of these so can’t elaborate any more.

The render settings now has a step option.  Say you want to make a render preview but only render every 10th frame you set up a step of 10.

The compositing program “Digital Fusion” is now supported in the composting project file settings.  Cinema 4D now supports After Effects, Combustion, Motion, Shake and Digital Fusion.

A new Motion Vector option has been added to the multi pass render settings.  This outputs colour coded motion vectors.  Useful in 3rd party motion blur programs like “ReelSmart Motion Blur”.

A new “Matte” option has been added to the compositing tag.  MAXON refers to this tag as the “Render tag” and even the tag itself says Render Tag but has “Compositing” in brackets.  Maybe in a later version the term “Compositing tag” will be dropped?  Anyway the Matte option is very useful when you’re going to be compositing your work in another application.  All it does is render the object with constant shading like in this image here where I’ve given the cube a Compositing tag and enabled the Matte option and chosen orange as the colour.  Note that any post process effects like Scene Ambient Occlusion will be applied to the object over the top of the constant shading.

Render Tag (Compositing) with Matte option enabled for the cube

A new “External Compositing” tag has been introduced.  Any object with this tag will be placed under a null object in a compositing project file.  It includes position and rotation animation data.  The tag has no options.

The content browser has been given a number of enhancements.  Several are: Results can be sorted as the browser is searching.  Navigating can be done with the cursor keys.

I suspect many people aren’t using the Content Browser as it can be a bit daunting to start with but it’s well worth persevering with especially as MAXON brings out new libraries of content.  MoGraph for example comes with a whole heap of example scene files and materials.  You get access to these via the Content Browser.

The new Quicktime H.264 compression codec is now supported. 

Mocca Clothilde – The cached solution can be offset i.e. a saved solution can be made to play later via an offset option.

Bodypaint Presets – When you install the 9.6 update and have the Bodypaint 2.5 module installed you are asked whether you want to convert the presets to Content Browser presets.  I had no complaints about this as I can get nice large previews of brush presets for example.

The Bodypaint Maya exchange plugin now supports Maya 7.

A new filter “Hue, Saturation / Colorize “ has been added to the filters in Bodypaint.

A new blending mode “Additive” has been added to Bodypaint on the layers blending mode options.  It’s slightly confusing as in Bodypaint it is called “Add”.  All this does is add colours from one layer to another e.g. a layer of red is over a layer of green.  If the blend mode on the top layer is set to “Add” the resulting colour is yellow.

Conclusion

As stated at the outset, point upgrades don’t bring huge changes or new toys.  However the 9.6 free update to 9.5 brings some most welcome enhancements.  The Sweepnurbs enhancements are superb and really make a big difference to work flow and animations.  No doubt the Mac Opengl performance enhancements will be most welcome by Mac users.  The sound node can be used to create some interesting animations but I would like to see more documention about it.  There are quite a few minor but very handy enhancements or new things that make CINEMA 4D even better than it was before.

Some users have reported problems with upgrading to 9.6.  I encountered no problems whatsoever and I suspect some problems are caused by incompatible plugins.  For me the 9.6 update continues MAXON’s tradition for stability and is a great point upgrade.

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