Release 11.5 doesn't have a whole lot of new features when it comes to the Timeline but it has seen some general improvements to some of the commands and interface elements. The biggest news though for animators is that R11.5 has seen some significant improvements to overall Timeline responsiveness which will make animated scenes play back quicker in the Viewport. I'm going to carry out a few tests to get an idea of how much improvement has been made in this area, but first I'll take a look at the general features.
The first thing you are likely to notice when you start animating in Release 11.5 is that when you change a value in the Attributes Manager of a property that has been animated the keyframe circle beside the value will turn from red to yellow. This indicates that the value is not at the keyframed value and will change back when the scene updates unless a new keyframe is set. Creating a new keyframe will turn the circle red again. There is also a change in the Hotkeys for recording keyframes - Ctrl+Click on the circle to create a new key, Shift+Click to delete a key and Shift+Ctrl+Click to delete the entire animation track.
New keyframe behaviour
Another handy new option when working in the Timeline, is the Use Pref Color option, this is a fast way of switching the F-Curves colors from being freely defined or using the colors defined in the Preferences menu. Speaking of F-Curves, another nice change to the interface is that the zero line is now darker than the other lines which can help make things clearer when adjusting animation cycles using F-Curves. Many commands that relate to keys and F-Curves have also had icons created for them whereas in older versions they didn't have any. This is great for users who take advantage of CINEMA 4D's easily customizable interface and want to add commands and functions they use a lot as icons to their animation layout.
Apart from those enhancements, F-Curve editing didn't really get an update in this release. In future versions it would be great to see a proper insert key command that would respect the shape of the existing curve, and also a simple way of interactively scaling the values of a curve uniformly in the Timeline. Another option that would make editing curves more intuitive would be the ability to have the Viewport update as a curve is manipulated rather than having to release the mouse button each time to see it update. These might seem like minor features but when I use them in other programs and then come back to animating in CINEMA 4D I really miss them.
The Bake command in the Timeline has had a small but useful addition - it can now be cancelled by pressing the Escape key, very handy if you've just started baking a long animation sequence and realize you need to change something.
A new feature of use to animators using Motion Layers is the new Rotation Mixing option when blending layers. Now when doing so you can switch between HPB and Quaternion rotations. This gets a little complex in how it works, but is well explained in the Help system.
FBX Import / Export has also been updated to the 2010.0 standard. This now supports Joints, multiple UV tags and will evaluate expressions on exporting and is great news for people working between Cinema and other animation applications such as MotionBuilder.
Release 11.5 has seen some significant improvements to Timeline and Viewport responsiveness when it comes to animation. This results in both MOCCA-based character rigs, and in the 11.528 update, rigs built using Cactus Dan's character plugins, play back faster and more smoothly when animating in CINEMA 4D.
I carried out some speed comparisons between R11 and R11.5 using both a MOCCA rig of a cartoon crow called Fred, kindly donated by Cafe member Merry Hodgkinson (aka Mala), and a character rig I built based on the Lowman model using Cactus Dans' plugins. Both of these rigs have quite a bit going on under the hood with stretchy limbs, secondary deformers and a full set of morphs so they should give a good indication of the performance improvements.
With both characters I created a simple 16 frame run-cycle animation at 24 frames per second and then measured the frames per second response in the Viewport. I did this using an XPresso setup rather than the HUD FPS as the built in FPS refers to the screen refresh rate rather than the Viewport playback speed. To give an idea of the screen refresh rate differences, I have a light version of my Lowman rig that will run at 24 FPS in both R11 and R11.5 because that's what I have the project set to, but the HUD FPS goes from 30 in R11 to over 50 in R11.5. Since I'm more concerned with how fast the rigs can playback in the Viewport though I'll focus on the results I got from the XPresso setup.
My hardware specs on the machine I used for these tests were as follows:
So, first I had a look at how the keyframed cycles played back.
I started with the Fred run-cycle and right away saw a very significant difference between R11 and R11.5. In R11 I got an average of 8 FPS while in R11.5 I averaged roughly double that at around 16 FPS. I've made a screen capture video to show the difference in smoothness this gives while working in the Viewport. The screen capture software records at a low frame-rate so it doesn't give a completely accurate representation, but even so I think it's pretty easy to see the improvement. At the end of the clip you can see the rendered animation playing at the true frame rate of 24 FPS.
R11 / R11.5 Speed Test Comparison. Click here to download and play the animation (QT 4.3mb)
Then I went on to my Lowman rig, which uses Cactus Dans' plugins. The run-cycle in this case plays back at an average 15 FPS in R11 and 22 FPS in R11.5. A really nice improvement again, and it means this rig, even with a lot of extra controls and deformers, is very nearly real-time. I believe Dan has an update to his plugins in development at the moment which will improve this even more.
One thing I noticed while doing the tests that might be useful to consider when building character rigs, with the Lowman rig I have a FFD deformer as part of the rig which can deform the shape of the characters' head. I noticed that if I switched this off I instantly got a speed boost of around 3 FPS. So for faster rigs it seems it's best to avoid deformers where possible, or at least make them switchable.
The last test I did for standard keyframed animation was with the Lowman rig again, this time with an animation of some dialogue, so rather than IK calculations and the like, this one is more focused on Morphs and deformers. I also made a screen capture of this so that you can see R11 and R11.5 side by side. I left the FFD on in this case to get a idea of a heavier rig in action. Again there were significant improvements, the average in R11 is about 13.5 FPS while it's about 20 FPS in R11.5.
R11 / R11.5 Speed Test Comparison. Click here to download and play animation (QT 1.6mb)
While doing this test I had both R11 and R11.5 open at the same time at one point, and I noticed that having one playing back while the other was also playing back had little to no effect on the performance of either. This suggests to me that most of the processes must not be using all cores of my processor, perhaps optimizations in this area will be the way to get even better Viewport performance in future versions of CINEMA 4D.
So, it seems MAXON have made big improvements for standard keyframe animation, my next question was can they do the same thing for the NLA system? I baked the two run-cycles to Motion Clips and had a look, and the short answer is a resounding yes! In R11 the Fred run-cycle plays at 7 FPS while in R11.5 it runs at over twice that at 16 FPS. I tested Lowman next and again saw a nice improvement - from 12 FPS in R11 to 19 FPS in R11.5. This makes the NLA system a lot more usable in my opinion, a common complaint about it in R11 was that it caused too much slowdown to be practical in many cases.
From my findings it definitely seems that R11.5 lives up to MAXON's promise of a faster, more responsive Viewport and Timeline. While there is still room for improvement, particularly in the area of Multi-Threading, R11.5 really does see a very positive step in the right direction to making CINEMA 4D a more attractive package for character animators.
Review by C4D Cafe © 2009