The Picture Viewer has seen some major changes and additions in Release 11.5. Some of these will make an animator's job faster and easier, while others will be very useful for comparing still images. I'll take a look at the improvements and new features that will be useful in both situations first.
When working on lighting and texturing a scene it's very common to make many renders of the same scene while checking and comparing the effects of changes that have been made each time. This is where the History and A/B Compare features of the new Picture Viewer will come in really handy. Each time the scene is rendered the image or image sequence gets added to the History list. By clicking on each one in the list they will display in the viewer for quick comparisons.
A/B Compare takes this a step further as you can choose one image to be the A image and another to be the B image and then view them both simultaneously with a line dividing them. This line can be set to horizontal or vertical and can also dragged around with the mouse to reveal more of one image or the other (if preferred this line can also be hidden for clarity). There is also an additional Difference mode that hides the dividing line and highlights the areas of the two images that are different.
New Picture Viewer - History and A/B Compare
When rendering stills or image sequences for animations it's very common to use CINEMA 4D's excellent Multi-Pass rendering system so that the different components of the final images can be manipulated in an external program like Photoshop or After Effects without having to re-render. Now in the Picture Viewer we have the option to view these different layers and adjust their blending modes and opacity to see the effect on the final image right away without having to start up and load the images in an external program.
Picture Viewer Layers
Another task that's very common is to take final rendered images and adjust them in an external image editor to change the brightness or contrast or even the Saturation and Exposure settings. Now in Release 11.5 these tasks can be performed right in the Picture Viewer. This can be kept live and switched on and off at will or the effect of the filter can also be baked into the images by saving the images out of the Picture Viewer with the Use Filter checkbox enabled. Another handy option is the Create Post Effect function, this allows you to save the current Filter settings as a preset in the render settings to apply to future renders without having to set it up each time.
Picture Viewer Filter Controls
I have included a short screen capture video showing me playing around with some blending of the different components of a multi-pass render and adjusting the image using the Filters.
Click here to watch movie (QT 1.1mb)
This is where things get very interesting for animators working in CINEMA 4D. Prior to R11.5, the best method for testing animations was to render a preview to a Quicktime or AVI clip so that it would play in whatever media player you have installed on your system. This worked fine but was a bit cumbersome and could break the flow of your work when making frequent tests of an animation. Now in R11.5 we have the new RAM player built into the Picture Viewer which means that animations (either video clips or image sequences) can be played back, scrubbed and compared very quickly with previous versions of the animation right inside of CINEMA 4D.
Picture Viewer Animation Menu
Having used a comparable function in other animation programs I have to say the way it's been implemented in CINEMA 4D is really well done. The user interface is simple, uncluttered but also very powerful. Directly below the rendered image's window is a time slider similar to the main windows Power Slider, while the mouse is over this it can be clicked on and dragged to scrub through the animation, or the mouse wheel can also be used to step forward or back through frames. Pressing the space bar starts and stops the playback, or alternatively the transport-style buttons below the frame slider can be used. To the right of the frame slider is a reading of the current frame, to the left is the current playback frames per second value. This can be raised or lowered to see the animation playback at different speeds and the audio, if included in the render, will time-stretch to stay in time with the images.
A really cool thing about the RAM Player is that you don't have to wait for your render to finish before you can scrub through the frames or play back the ones that have already been rendered, I have included a screen capture video showing me doing this while the render is still in progress. There is also a handy visual indicator that the sequence is playing back at the right speed, if it isn't the numbers showing the FPS value turn red. As you'll see in the screen capture though this isn't the case here as the RAM player has no problems playing my preview back at full speed even though it's still rendering.
Click here to watch movie (QT 2.4mb)
As mentioned, audio is supported in the RAM Player, and in general works very well, but there are a couple of quirks with it currently. One is that by default the All Frames option is enabled in the RAM Player and when this is on the audio does not play back when you preview an animation by pressing play in the RAM Player, although it does if you scrub the frame slider. It's a quick task to switch All Frames off so that the audio can be heard during playback but you have to remember to do this each time you restart Cinema as it's not stored in the project file.
The other thing that could be improved is the responsiveness of the audio when scrubbing the frame slider. As it works now it's not as accurate as scrubbing the main window's Power Slider and often when scrubbing back and forth between 2 or 3 frames no audio is heard. An improvement here would be to make the RAM Player more accurate and useful for checking the synchronization between the images and the sound, particularly useful for motion graphics artists working with music or character animators doing lip-sync as scrubbing in the main window's Power Slider is not always very responsive when the scene file gets heavy.
Saving animations out of the RAM Player is straightforward and very similar to doing it for still images. There are options to bake in the effects of the filters and include the audio with the animation. All of the same options for file type are available here as there are for the standard render output settings. One thing that would be nice to see in a future update would be the option to save output templates, as you can for the render settings. As it stands CINEMA 4D defaults to outputting a single image from the RAM Player and this has to be changed again on each start-up if you want to output animations.
Picture Viewer Save Menu
On the right of the top bar of the Picture Viewer window is the RAM Players' Animation menu. Along with the usual transport buttons to play the animation forwards or backwards and a handy one called Play from start, this is where you can cache the frames for better playback speed or switch on or off sound playback and the Link Time function. This last option makes it possible to have the Power Slider playback and scrub in sync with the RAM Player. There are also a couple of handy commands here called Set as Preview Start and Set as Preview End that allow you to very quickly set just a section of the rendered sequence as the range the RAM player will playback and loop. You can also do this by grabbing and scaling the bar below the frame slider, much like you can do with the standard Power Slider in the main window.
One less obvious trick that the RAM Player can do is also work as a means of working with a reference video while working on an animation. By opening a movie in the RAM Player (you can do this very quickly by just dragging the file onto the Power Slider or the frame slider) and enabling the Link Time function you can scrub through the reference while seeing the animation update in the viewport in sync with it. If you have a large monitor or work with dual displays this can be a nice alternative to adding an image plane in the viewport as your animation reference.
With the new Picture Viewer in Release 11.5, MAXON have made great improvements in work flow that will help people working with still images or animations considerably. It simply makes a lot of common tasks easier and quicker and removes the need to start up an external program in many cases. Apart from the couple of issues mentioned with audio playback, the RAM Player is extremely responsive and loads and saves image sequences very quickly. All of this translates to time saved and getting work completed more quickly, a really great improvement in CINEMA 4D.
Review by C4D Cafe © 2009