Through The Motion Show, Maxon’s regular series of free training and news sessions, Maxon has been demoing new features and tricks for its suite of products. This week, the company has brought it all together in the latest Maxon One update. The company has announced new features to all of the products included in the Maxon One package, including Cinema 4D, Trapcode Suite, VFX Suite 2, and now Redshift RT. In addition, Maxon has updated their products for the new Macs with Apple’s processors, and Adobe’s After Affects with Multi-Frame Rendering.
The latest Motion Show footage can be found here.
Cinema 4D 25
The headline for Cinema 4D is the updated interface.
As they were building this updated version of Cinema 4D, Maxon says they were thinking about beginners as well as the program’s community of experts. The company claims this new interface is more intuitive, and tools are more accessible on several levels. The company has increased the number of presets available and it has updated menus so people can find and use them. Just about any process can be saved as preset and reused. Maxon has implemented sliders through the menus to make it easier to experiment and fine tune effects.
Developers have moved frequently used tools sets to Hot Corners in the program window so there’s more room for artists to work. Document and layout tabs enable users to move between their work.
Text handling has been significantly improved in Cinema 4D.
And, significantly, to my mind anyway, the new Cinema 4D has a spine import tool that enables artwork from Adobe Illustrator, PDF, and SVG files to be imported. Automated extrusion of paths and strokes enable the fast creation of models. The feature supports gradients and symbols.
Cinema 4D developers have also been working on improvements to its Scene Node tools and has enabled interaction between the Scene Node interface and the Cinema 4D’s classic Object Manager through Capsules. Processes developed through Scene Nodes can be used to create Capsules for fast access and reuse. And, Capsules can be accessed directly in the Object Manager.
The new feature in Scene Nodes that was most interesting personally was the addition of data support to enable the creation of dynamic graphs and charts. Your boring corporate data could be made to sing and dance with the few particle effects thrown in.
Red Giant Complete
The Red Giant Complete compilation includes several modules including Trapcode, VFX, Magic Bullet, and Universe.
Trapcode Suite 17 enables users to work with particles and geometric forms in the same 3D space. To accomplish that, developers have brought Form behaviors to the Particular workspace.
The Magic Bullet Suite has been updated for new Macs built on the Apple processor. It has also added support for Multi-Frame Rendering (MFR) in Adobe After Effects. Also, Magic Bullet tools Cosmo, Mojo, Film, and Renoiser now take advantage of Apple’s Metal API for GPU acceleration.
Universe is also part of the Red Giant package. It includes video transition and effects plugins for editors and motion graphics artists. With this update, Universe takes advantage of Multi-Frame Rendering in Adobe After Effects.
Redshift
Maxon’s powerful renderer has gone to subscription. In addition, this month, Nemetschek’s Graphisoft division has announced that its flagship product Archicad is now supporting Redshift. Archicad users have been asking for this for a while.
As is consistent with this Maxon One update, Redshift now runs on the new M1-powered Macs and is also taking advantage of Apple’s Metal Graphics API. The program supports OpenColorIO v2, which provides access to the industry standard ACES color profile as well as to custom color profiles.
The Redshift renderer is a biased renderer, which is an interesting distinction that you rarely hear about. Unbiased renderers are basically machine driven, they just go pretty much forever tracing rays. A biased renderer, like Redshift, allows the users to tweak the render to get good performance and the look they want. In addition, the company says Redshift supports complex, advanced shading networks, and texturing capabilities as required for production-quality rendering.
Redshift also supports the major 3D modeling and animation products including Autodesk’s Max and Maya, Blender, Cinema 4D, Foundry Katana, SideFX Houdini.
The new products have been available since their announcement on September 14, 2021.
Maxon One subscribers can immediately download all product updates via Maxon App, while subscribers to Cinema 4D, Red Giant Complete, Universe, and Redshift also have immediate access to upgrades for each respective product.
Maxon offers a 14-day trial of Maxon One from the Maxon App—good luck learning all those tools in 14 days. But, if you do attempt it, you’ll want to lean heavily on the teaching resources made available by Maxon. There is a wealth of free content and the regular multi-day Motion Show sessions feature the stars of Maxon showing their stuff.
What do we think?
Maxon is becoming much more powerful through the integration of its parts: Cinema 4D, RedGiant, and RedShift. Cinema 4D has been valued for its ease of use and the company has leaned into this aspect of the product as a point of differentiation in the market. The company has also done a great job of community building by celebrating its users and turning them into teachers and ambassadors. With the integration of powerful effects tools and rendering via Red Giant and Redshift, the company is expanding that community and opening up its boundaries.
On a specific level, I think some people using Adobe Illustrator and Cinema 4D, might well opt to take their splines and their data into C4D instead of messing with Illustrator’s interface, which can be gruesome for non-native Illustrator speaker.
There’s already plenty of crossover between Adobe’s After Effects and the Maxon tools. They compete, but they complement as well.
