Everyone is excited about Release 11.5 and I have to say other than some concerns about pricing, which varies from region to region and user to user depending on when, what and how they bought, I’ve been really impressed by the reaction. This is the first release since the twitter explosion, and MAXON and myself have been trying to make good use of it, NAB was a fun experiment posting about each presenter, and with release I posted immediately after release and can’t believe the number of retweets and how fast they went out. Finally, Cineversity has taken a new leap as we slowly begin to rebrand ourselves we revealed our new logo to the world along with a test of a new service, Cinversity Live Q&A, via LiveStream.

Anyways, To lighten things up I thought I’d look at my favorite new features in 11.5 since a lot of the things that make the most difference to people are the things that oddly enough are toughest to market, since really at the end of the day we use and love the apps we do because of the small things that make the workflows so good, right?

So here it is my Top Ten NOT talked about features in no particular order:

1) The entire group window can be switched to fullscreen mode & Palettes and managers can be opened in Fullscreen mode.

Fullscreen functionality has been tidied up and improved all over. Its faster and smoother now, and it doesn’t hide quite so much, the dock/start bar, and the title bar now stay in the fullscreen mode which makes it a little less jumpy and feels a little more integrated with the OS. That’s all nice but whats really cool is the more intelligent handling of group windows where you can fullscreen either separate window in the group window or expand the entire group window, making it more beneficial now to utilize group windows in C4D layouts. More importantly though now are the sticky managers and palettes, you can have it so that when you go fullscreen the powerslider doesn’t disappear, or maybe an important tool bar. This is a big deal IMO.

2) The Connect command correctly joins Texture tags and polygon selections & New Connect+Delete command.

Okay so this is two on the MAXON site but directly related, The improvements to how connect works are huge, before when connecting first you had to select only polygon objects, and then when connecting materials on texture selections and such would break often you’d end up with an entirely black model, but now it looks just as good after as it did before. This not only benefits connecting using the modeling command but also the quality of the connecting in the connect object make it much more useful now too. Now not only does connect do a better result, but they added a new Connect and Delete command that will save you time and hassle by deleting all the selected objects automatically when you connect leaving you with a simple cleaner Object manager and no extra steps.

3) Higher samples possible for Scene Motion Blur.

Okay so not everyone uses scene motion blur and I’m sure a lot feel its added rendertime makes it totally useless, but the fact is even with the new GI sometimes the old trick of super low quality QMC (originally stochastic in earlier versions) with SMB gives you great GI with the best possible motionblur option for C4D at comparable times to what you’d get with GI full animation mode and trying to get decent looking motion blur in post. Not to mention you can also drop quality of things like area shadows, blurry reflections and refractions and AA, and soon the scene motion blur trick takes the lead in overall quality to speed.
That said sometimes the quality isn’t enough, be it in this kind of trick or in regular scenes too. So now Scene motion blur can also do 36 and 49 samples, that’s right 49 renders per frame, pretty insane to use it but the motionblur is absolutely fantastic looking. Check this example out, this is the timetable preset form the broadcast edition, but for it to look really good it needs motion blur, so we rendered it with 49 to see what it would be like:

4) QuickTime can now be used by Windows 64-bit users.

This is a big one for a lot of users, personally I think it encourages a bad habit as I think people should always use images sequences both for textures and for final output. That said one cool thing with the new picture viewer is you can render as an image sequence but stills ave out of the picture viewer history as a movie when finished too so I see a little benefit. Its also a little less important for me now though in that I can preview animation tests right in the picture viewer with its ram player. It feels good to have it back and I know for a lot of users this will be huge.

5) Overall speed optimization in various areas.

Now we are talking a lot of minor optimizations in every little nook and cranny of the application that involves viewport speed so many won’t make significant differences, but a few can. Having the timeline open while scrubbing or playing animation shouldn’t be as much of a speed hit, Hypernurbs, driver tag, xpresso, thinking particles, the motion system all so notable updates. The Taquito rig from Cineversity went from 29fps on my system to 50 fps.

Oh and Mac users, MAXON added a notable OpenGL speed up for you too, it won’t be significant in all scenes but many.

6) Objects are numbered incrementally on creation or duplication.

Some may remember we once had much of this functionality before, why it went I was never quite sure but users made an outcry moaned for a few years and they listened and brought it back thankfully Nothing else to really add it appends a number onto the ends of names so you don’t have 50 cubes called cube you have 50 cubes called cube, cube.1 cube.2 cube.3 etc.

7) Particle turbulence modifier with expanded noise turbulence & Particle wind modifier with expanded noise turbulence.

I’m sure some didn’t even get why as the standard particle doesn’t get used a lot, maybe it does, I still like it for simpler particles, but the more important thing is that wind and turbulence affect other objects too, the new MoSpline, cloth, hair, the new MoDynamics, so now anything that uses wind or turbulence gets a much cooler wind and turbulence to use.

8) Render settings now include region specification to render a portion of the view.

ever needed or wanted to rerender that one little spot in a time consuming render? We’ve all done some sort of masking trick to render that small little region but now you can actually specify a border area to crop out and it even allows you to derive these borders from the Interactive Render Region. This will save a lot of people days in rerender time.

9) Environment variables for external plugin directories.

Okay this might not be the easiest to understand for some its a little more technical and really for studio environments and the likes but basically this environment variable allows cinema to recognize a plugin folder not only in the application directory or user prefs folder but anywhere they want on a computer or better yet network. Imagine one plugin folder for a whole studio. all copies have the same plugins, no one ever getting a missing plugin error or not being able to render. Its a big deal.

10) The New Installer.

Why is this a handy feature you ask?

1) User now enters temporary serials prior to installation.

• This means users can’t accidentally install modules they don’t have serials for.
• This offers an option to enter license server info or even simply choose a license.ini file.
• This can immediately tell you if your serials are any good.

2) Installation of modules and bundles is semi automated.

• Since serials are entered first cinema only offers you the application and modules you have licenses for. For most you’ll want everything it checks so you just move onto the next step, if needed you can choose not to include certain modules.
• Language packs can be chosen in the installer, including multiple language packs, this saves an extra step later on.

3) Can install serials for entire system or just user.

• This eliminates the problem for multi user environments having to enter serials every time a new user logs in.
• This also means an option later in the installer can choose whether to add icon to start bar, desktop, dock etc.

4) Documentation is installed by the installer.

• No secondary step later on, help is ready to go.

5) Net Server and Client are separate.

• One can install the client software on a computer without the need to install C4D or NET Server on that computer.
• Server and client install in a separate directory from the C4D install so no license server conflicts.

6) It looks nicer.

For a full feature list for release 11.5 check the MAXON site.