MAXON CINEMA 4D
Get started with dynamics in Cinema 4D R26
Cinema 4D R26 ships with a new dynamics system for artists to learn. Get ahead of the pack with these tips
GET STARTED WITH DYNAMICS IN CINEMA 4D R26
AUTHOR
Mike Griggs www.creativebloke.com Mike Griggs is a veteran creator who has a passion for explaining the process of digital content creation to new artists.
Cinema 4D has long been the mainstay of motion design since its inception. Artists use Cinema 4D’s MoGraph system to easily create work that would be difficult in other 3D applications. Cinema 4D also comes with a full-featured dynamics system, allowing hard and soft body dynamics to be applied to geometry and react as if they would in real life.
The dynamics system in Cinema 4D, while comprehensive with the range of features it came with, always had a couple of caveats compared to simulation systems in other applications. For a start, there were a lot of controls, and during simulation iteration, when developing, incremental changes on one of the (many) sliders could yield a completely unexpected result.
Second, the simulation system was slow and did not leverage the full potential of modern computers with their multiple cores and powerful GPUs.
However, the team at Maxon has been hard at work rewriting the Cinema 4D code under the hood. With the advent of Cinema 4D R26, Maxon has introduced a new dynamics system, which intends to be both more straightforward and more predictable for artists to implement, while at the same time using the power of the GPU to help accelerate the simulations, allowing artists the ability to create more complex simulations.
This is not to say that the legacy dynamic system was terrible. Many artists have (and still do) create amazing simulations with it daily, thankfully though the Maxon team has been their typical wise selves and left the old system accessible within the Simulate and Tag menus.
The new dynamics system is also more flexible regarding what Cinema 4D objects can be made part of a simulation. An artist no longer has to use a Cloth Object or convert a generator object to a polygonal object. With the new dynamics system, an artist has the freedom to work with simulations within Cinema 4D exactly how they would expect with no workarounds.