Maxon has announced the launch of Release 17 (R17) of Cinema 4D, its cornerstone 3D animation, graphics, VFX, visualisation, and rendering software.

The R17 makes the software more efficient and easy-to-use, while delivering exceptional performance.

Some of the features of the software have been expanded and completely reworked allowing artists to more easily and efficiently manage and create content.

Below are some of the new features the R17 brings to the software:
• The new 'Take System' provides complete and flexible scene handling to manage render layers and animation variations. Artists can now create numerous independent takes of a scene and change almost any parameter for variations – all saved in a single scene file, eliminating file management hassles and wasted disk space. The ability to maintain complete versioning and variation control also saves valuable production time.
• The Lens Distortion support allows one to easily generate a distortion profile for any image, e.g., for curved and plunging lines when integrating 3D elements into videos or photos. The intuitive interface also improves functionality to remove distortion for tracking and scene creation, re-apply distortion at render time and offers the option of saving lens settings for future use.
• R17’s motion tracking feature now has a new Graph View tool that lets users easily remove problem track points from the calculation for improved efficiency.
• R17 now comes with a complete splines toolkit. Artists can easily create and modify splines with Cinema 4D's new Pen tool, sketching, smoothing, arc tool, and boolean commands.
• R17 makes animation faster and more precise. Artists can now control F-Curves with weighted tangents with the option of automatically removing overshoot, eliminate Gimbal lock with Euler filtering, and define animation regions using range markers and master animation workflow with new Timeline preferences.
• The R17 comes with a range of new sculpting features such as the PoseMorph which speeds up character animation and edge detection which allows artists to sculpt hard-surface models.
• The new release is seamlessly integrated with Side Effect Software’s Houdini Engine which lets users load Houdini Digital Assets (HDA) such as parametric objects, simulations, etc., into Cinema 4D and manipulate them like standard Cinema 4D generators.
• R17 is also more tightly integrated with SketchUp, a 3D modelling program, which lets users quickly populate scenes by accessing free, ready-to-use objects created and made available by the SketchUp user community.

“Maxon is committed to enriching user experience and productivity,” said Harald Egel, managing partner at Maxon Computer. “The robust new features and subtle refinements throughout Cinema 4D R17 make this a must-have release.”  – TradeArabia News Service