No Keyframes by Manuel Casasola-Merkle, AixSponza

It’s been out for a few months now and I’ve been really itching to play around with 11.5. Unfortunatly I haven’t found the funds yet. The new release is loaded with new features, provides improved workflow and productivity, enabling professionals to create high-quality stills and animations quicker and easier than ever before.
So today I would like to go over a few of my favorite new features in R11.5 …

Picture Viewer

The Picture Viewer has undergone a revolution and is now a time-saving powerhouse. Its new features include tools for comparing your test renders so that you can easily see which changes to lighting, materials, render settings, etc. Your renders and render times are stored automatically to the Picture Viewer’s History list where they can be viewed with a single click. This and more can be done with the new AB Compare tool.  (video 5.1MB)

Now you can also color correct images directly in Cinema 4D. Such as adjusting contrast, brightness, saturation, exposure, etc. And it’s all made possible thanks to the new Filter tool’s image correction controls. This can save you lots of time by cutting the need to re-render when the filter does the trick in seconds. (video 3.8MB)

Render Engine

In CINEMA 4D Release 11.5, memory handling has been vastly improved for object copies (i.e. instances, arrays, clones or duplicates). So much so that you can now render billions of polygons with less RAM. And it doesn’t render your scenes in lines anymore. It renders them in tiles called “buckets”. The advantages are improved memory handling and faster rendering. And on the subject of faster rendering – a new hybrid antialiasing mode greatly speeds up the rendering of highly-detailed surfaces. (video 8.7MB)

Kai Pedersen, a freelance 3D artist, did some tests regarding render instances. He set up 10 different scenes and rendered each scene with Cinema 4D R10.5, R11 and R11.5. It appears that R11.5 renders 2 to 3 times faster than R11. And compared to R10.5, 5 to 6 times faster. Except for his Mini Cooper scene, wich rendered out 16 times faster! You can view the full results on Kai Pedersens blog.

MoDynamics

MoDynamics is based on the proven Bullet physics library and gives you an amazingly simple way to create jaw-droppingly realistic motion. Imagine having to use keyframes to get objects to look like they are naturally bumping into each other as they fall, then getting them to bounce realistically off the floor, bounce into each other again, then eventually come to a stop somewhere along the floor. It’s extremely difficult to get natural-looking results in cases like this when you use keyframes.

MoDynamics Basics

Trigger Velocity Peak

Trigger Collision

With MoDynamics it’s much easier. Set simple parameters like Mass, Bounce, Gravity, Friction and more and let MoDynamics do the work. Create breathtaking, realistic motion every time. All you have to do is simply add two tags – one to the cloner and one to the object with which the clones should collide – and you already have a working dynamics system!

Wind Effects

Dynamic Transition

Keyframes & Dynamics

MoSpline

One of the most popular effects in motion graphics today is the animation of organic lines. The new MoSpline tool makes these beautiful and elegant lines easier and quicker to create. Create organic motion for your lines simply by changing a few MoSpline parameters.

You can also animate the lines using MoGraph’s powerful Effectors, such as the Formula Effector to create a wave-type effect or the Delay Effector to create interesting trail effects. (video 22.1MB)

Camera Shader

The new Camera Shader lets you put what the 3D camera sees directly onto an object’s surface as a texture. Previously, to create these types of effects in CINEMA 4D, you had to first render out the CCTV camera’s view, then apply the rendered movie as a texture to the display object. This additional rendering is no longer necessary. (video 11.1MB)

New Features List

There’s also many smaller tweaks and enhancements to CINEMA 4D Release 11.5 – here’s a complete list.

MAXON is committed to providing powerful enhancements to CINEMA 4D that really improve the productivity of users across various disciplines, including film, broadcast, architecture, product visualization, games, multimedia and more,” states Harald Egel, MAXON co-founder and CEO. “The many improvements in the new Release 11.5 will help all customers gain even better results, save valuable time and resources.”

CINEMA 4D gives my design team the ability to make miracles happen within ridiculously tight deadlines,” said John LePore, associate creative director for Perception NYC. “The new features and enhancements in Release 11.5, especially those in MoGraph 2, truly augment an already mind-blowing arsenal of creative tools.”

So yeah.. More than reason enough for me to buy the new release. But untill then, I’ll be happily working with R11.
Cheers!