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.

Back from NAB it was a very fun show, slower than previous years of course with the Econmy where it is at, but the people that were there were very serious dedicated people which meant if you were talking to someone it was business it wasn’t just curiosity or passing by, or because we have some comfy chairs at our booth.

The real cool thing about this show imo was for the the first time we tried to cover a bit of the show using the MAXON3D Twitter account http://twitter.com/maxon3d. It was also nice to see a retweet from our sister product VectorWorks regarding ISD’s presentation. There were however, questions regarding where users could see video of the presentations. To be honest while we had discussed this a bit for SIGGRAPH last year and again early on for NAB, we simply had too many other things goig on with the new booth to add on a proper filming pipeline for the show.

We’ll continue to consider filming presenters for future shows but what I did try on the last day since we has such cool presenters, was to film a few of the sessions with my Panasonic LX2 which is actually a still camera. Being back home now I can see the quality just isn’t there really, particularly audio wise. I’ll look into whether I can clean up the audio enough, but I can’t promise anything.

Thanks to our good ol buddy Adam and Sebastien for some really great nights of Black Jack too. Distractions from AM assignments have never been so profitable before.

First thing I did in working on my Character walk was film myself doing all sorts of walks good and bad. Initially I tried using the PlayStation Eye create software so I could just click the controller each time I walked to film a new clip instead of recording one long video, and the whole time I was doing it Moka sat on his chair off to one side being angry and hissing, I have no clue why. After recording several clips i put them on a flash drive and took them over to my PC to discover the Sony writes some messed up mp4 that Quicktime doesn’t read. Anyone know how to fix that and read Eye Create movies on the computer?

Anyways, this of course meant I’d need to do the whole process again (okay I wasn’t that disappointed, I do love walking like a goof in my house) Well after 6 walks I guess Moka got a little fed up with the whole process. Watch him in the lower right corner, you can’t see but he jumped off a chair off screen right, then over the coffee table and you can see him come under the chair as I’m walking away. The funny part is his swing misses so he decides to hiss at me in frustration of his utter failure.

Anyways Enjoy

Absolutely stunning. I’ve been studying F.A.C.S a fair bit as recommended by several other TD’s, but this method of utilizing and implementing it into a workflow is simply stunning.

Cartoon Network Rebrand by Capacity

I’m a cartoon-a-holic if I do say so myself, so despite being 26 years of age, my first favorite button on the remote is assigned to Cartoon Network. With that said I’ve been a big fan of their recent rebranding, focused around the recent popularity over the last few years for Graphic style Vinyl toys often painted but now also more and more becoming available in solid white that one can purchase and paint their own design on.

Now I’ve known that Turner themselves uses CINEMA 4D, so I’d had my suspicions that these spots had at least a little CINEMA 4D here and there particularly as there’s some notable MoGraph type effects in there, but as an animation fan, what I really wanted to know was whether the character and cool material effects stuff was done in CINEMA 4D. Recently at the AENY meeting and then later on a Creative Cow Podcast I discovered the it was actually Capacity, a really kick ass studio that also uses CINEMA 4D, that did the rebranding for them. Well sure enough, despite Capacity being in the middle of a website redesign, (the old one is still here) they’ve posted a new landing page with the Cartoon Network Rebranding reel, and sure enough the characters and everything else is done in CINEMA 4D. Check their site and the new rebranding out and lets hear what everyone thinks.