Is out.
Read more and watch examples about what it’s been added, here:
and here:
Is Cinema 4D free? No.
Is Blender more than enough for what I need? Yes.
Good for you, that doesn’t mean that taking a look at other software couldn’t be a good idea. The perfect software doesn’t exists.
P.S. Is Cinema free? No. Is Blender more than enough for what somebody else might need? maybe yes, maybe not… Is this the “Other Software” section? YES 
Thanks for the post phoenixart! I don’t use Cinema, but I have a friend who does, so I’m sure he’ll be all over this new release 
i envy cinema’s renderer, i want them volumetric lights cinema 4d has, i’ll be checkin the video out
Actually the thing I do envy more is the Mograph module, it’s incredibly easy to set up, powerful and the results can be really fun. I don’t like the speed of the view port (dunno if this new release fixes that though). Working in Blender’s view port compared to Cinema’s view port is light years faster.
I have found that if you map the ALT mouse button feature to SHIFT mouse button in the Command Manager of Cinema 4D the viewports begin to work just like Blenders.
Yeah, $4,000.00 bucks seems like a lot. I am glad some of my clients have the software (although not R12) so I can play around with it.
I guess you’re talking about the shortcuts and how to navigate the view port, isn’t it Atom? I was talking about the speed of the view port, I never found a way to improve it in Cinema 4D. Talked with the Maxon guys too about this problem, hopefully they’ll do something in the next releases.
There seems to be some consternation from some users at the pricing. Maxon have dropped the use of additional modules so if you’d bought Andvanced Render module for example with an earlier release, you’ll have to upgrade to the highest version of C4D12 just to keep the same functionality you already have.
Yes! and many of them already said they would even switch to Modo. I’ve no doubt that if Blender would have more mograph tools, a lot of Cinema users could switch to Blender. C4D lacks a good modelling workflow imho, whereas Blender rocks. Also other C4D users are complain about the view port speed, needless to say that Blender is instead much much faster.
I’ve been using Cinema form the day I started, that’s about 3 years ago and learned it in school. It’s still a great program, but with R12 becoming so expensive, many hobbyist feel left out. The viewport speed has significantly increased in R12 so that’s not so much the issue. It’s just that many users wanted modeling tools and an update for BodyPaint. It just didn’t happen.
I was planning to learn Blender for a very long time, and my recent switch to Ubuntu made Blender a very natural choice. I still love C4D, but I don’t think I will be using it for some time. Time to learn Blender 
@Snow_covered: get VRay if you enjoy AR3, that one works with blender :). Technically it has more functionality over AR3 and should render faster. It’s not that expensive either. Definitely worth it!
C4D lacks a good modelling workflow imho, whereas Blender rocks.
I thought it was just me. I can’t understand why I have to click to select every point in a spline, even when I have the move tool selected, then click again to move it. Drives me crazy to make splines in C4D.
I thought it was just me. I can’t understand why I have to click to select every point in a spline, even when I have the move tool selected, then click again to move it. Drives me crazy to make splines in C4D.
You don’t, you can use the move tool to select too. Making splines however is something different, that I agree is rather clunky. In the end I gave up on curved splines, I let SUBD do the handle the curves or did it all with polygons. What was terrible in C4D was smoothing. Basically the only way to get a good curve on a surface without creating triangles, is doing the curve manually or letting Subd handle it. There was no good fillet or bevel option
I thought you could control smoothing with materials? Isn’t that what Phong Angle TAG is all about?
I thought you could control smoothing with materials? Isn’t that what Phong Angle TAG is all about?
Yes and no. Phong will not smooth edges as Subd does, the only thing that phong does is create a gradient between 2 polygons based on their edges. It creates the illusion that the light is not directed in the normal direction of the polygon while in fact it is. Subd subdivides a poygon by a specific amount. 1 polygon with a subd level of 1 will give you 4 polygons, and those levels can go up.
These extra polygons are then used to create a curved edge.
It’s more complex, so if you like to have more insight I suggest you look at these videos. Number 3 is how the phong angle works. SUBD is how the Hypernurbs work, these are in videos 8 & 9
If you look at number 9 you will see what the problem is. Because there is no real bevel tool in C4D you have to rely on hypernurbs to do your smoothing (unless you do it the polygon way and spend a lot of time doing these bevels by moving vertexes) , but there are a lot of things you need to take into account when working with that.
The phong is not a material btw, it’s just a tag as there are many in C4D
You’re right anyhow there are still a lot of clicks here and there to do though. To switch from edges to faces or vertices, so easy in Blender. Using the Knife, there are a lot of options in C4D each of them needs a click and that simply drives me nuts, I hate it.
I’ve been using C4D since 2000 now after having tried Max for a few months at the very beginning.
What I really loved at first was the easy interface. What I loved after that were two great set of plugins, Jenna from Darf (corearsenal) and DiTools from Remotion - this guy is a genius, let’s have a look at his web site: http://www.remotion4d.net/index_main_2.0.html
I felt bad when Maxon “invented” MoGraph, literally stealing ideas from those guys without giving a credit to them, at least from what I know… But they deserve thumbs up for having added other great stuff to MoGraph and to be honest the effectors are simply amazing.
What would make me completely forget about Cinema 4D would be having a set of tools like those in Blender, I could finally throw out Cinema and don’t have to fight with its view port, strange marketing moves and gigabytes of space wasted on my computer
That 's true, I know the remotion guys are pretty smart. In fact the new dynamic system is actually just a good implementation of silverbullet. Add the Phy4D that they also added from a third party developer and they really didn’t do that much in r12.
About the clicks, I didn’t feel very bad about them. I memorized pretty much all the shortcuts so it didn’t really hurt me. I hardly had to make a click in that app outside laying points for modeling. In the end I found myself thinking more about how to lay out my topology that the actual model, as everything I did was with HN.
The thing I miss the most is probably the hierarchy manager. It’s so easy to keep track of everything. In other apps, especially Max the only option you have is to parent it or child it (or link as it is called I believe). But for the rest there’s no visual representation of what is linked with what. I’m very new to Blender to be honest, in fact I’m only getting used to how to navigate. The interface, well, let’s say it’s not C4D I believe I can get used to this however, there are a lot of things under the hood and as I slowly get more aware of it, it feels like I could develop a faster work flow than in C4D.
And to be very honest, I never cared much for MoGraph either. I’m really more of a modeler and prefer to do still images.
i’m actually interested in learning c4d as a secondary 3d app but how does the character rigging tools compare to blender? so far from what i’ve seen blender’s winning it for me.
@whoever it was that was suggesting vray, how’s vray handle the animation side of things? i’ve looked into the octane renderer a little bit not seriously tho and that looks like it has some impressive rendering capabilities but i get a little weary about commercial beta software
@ snowcovered: I cannot speak about the ca because I don’t do ca, but every time I’ve looked at the tutorials on both app, I always found Blender from my very little knowledge about that stuff much easier.
About Vray it seems it handles the animation very well, it should be flickering free and quite fast, but again I don’t use it just saw something around.