So should you upgrade to Release 11? Yes definitely. CINEMA 4D Release 11 sees big improvements to GI rendering, normal rendering speed, more accurate and faster glass rendering, Non-Linear animation and BodyPaint painting enhancements, Doodle, Collada support, Projection Man and Mac 64 bit support. Toss in a whole heap of smaller enhancements and like usual you get big bag of goodies. Probably the problem MAXON has is some of the non headline enhancements are really very good like User Data and HUD enhancements etc but are easily overlooked. It´s not until you start delving under the hood that you start finding these little treasures.
GI rendering is much improved over the previous GI engine however often the render time is slower. I guess one pays the price for much better quality. Is AR3 better than V-Ray? Probably not but it costs less than half and likely has a much smaller development team. For most people AR3 will cover their rendering needs. Still to do however is DOF (Depth of field) and Motion Blur enhancements. Glass rendering is miles better than previously both in terms of quality and speed.
Release 11 saw the continuation of Timeline and animation enhancements with the introduction of Animation Layers and Motion Clips. Both are very good except Motion Clips are let down by a couple of annoying bugs. Hopefully these will be addressed in the not too distant future.
The new annotation tool Doodle and the inclusion of Projection Man for managing camera mapping and digital mattes are sure to be a hit with many people. The Advanced Render module now includes Cineman which gives access to Renderman compliant renderers.
BodyPaint is now at version 4. The painting enhancements are great improvement however UV editing is now showing its age compared to other applications. There is still no easy way to do symmetry painting.
If you were hoping for modelling enhancements and or a revamped Dynamics module then you may be disappointed. One would hope that we see these enhancements in the next 1 - 2 years. Other modules like Thinking Particles are starting to look a little dated as well.
Release 11 maintains CINEMA 4D´s reputation for being very stable. All 3 cafe reviewers had no issues with stability. Release 11 saw the introduction of on-line / automatic updating and so far at the time this review was published in January 2009 there have been 2 updates / bugfixes.
Release 11 if you are new to CINEMA 4D comes with the Wipix advanced rigging tutorial DVD that came with 10.5. It´s a pity that there was no general tutorial DVD or CD like previous versions have had. The inclusion of some basic navigation videos is a step however in the right direction.
You can get pricing information from MAXON´s site here.
Review by Nigel Doyle / 3DKiwi, Alan Harris / Rantin Al and Kathie Berry / Damsel
Review by C4D Cafe © 2009