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CINEMA 4D

3D computer animation, modeling, simulation, and rendering software

Artist: Mario Tran Phuc

CINEMA 4D

WHAT’S NEW?


Continuing an ongoing effort to make simulation and particle effects fast and easy, Cinema 4D users can create advanced particles using the new Follow Spline modifier, which makes it easy to flow particles along a vector shape. Every new subscription of Cinema 4D 2025 now includes access to the full power of Redshift rendering, enabling any Cinema 4D user to fully utilize GPU or CPU, which is ideal for rendering high-end 3D animations fast. Applying weights and forces to objects in rigid body simulations is now easy, while enhancements to Pyro also provide users more options to dial in a specific look. The new Field Driver tag will help with adding procedural animations to objects, a new Object Profiling Manager helps optimize viewport performance, and improved OCIO color management will ensure consistent color. Optimized exchange format support enables more integrated workflows, thanks to the possibility to export instances and skeletal animations to USD and work with presets stored in Substance 3D materials.

Cinema 4D + Redshift
All new Cinema 4D subscriptions now include Redshift GPU, our powerful, GPU accelerated renderer. Benefit from the seamless integration between creativity and performance and create stunning 3D images, animations, motion graphics, VFX, product and architectural visualizations, and more.

WHAT IS CINEMA 4D?
Cinema 4D is a professional 3D modeling, animation, simulation and rendering software solution. Its fast, powerful, flexible and stable toolset make 3D workflows more accessible and efficient for design, motion graphics, VFX, AR/MR/VR, game development and all types of visualization professionals. Cinema 4D produces stunning results, whether working on your own or in a team.

AWARD-WINNING MOGRAPH
MoGraph is a procedural modeling and animation toolset that gives motion designers the ability to quickly and easily create complex and abstract animations. At the heart of MoGraph is the Cloner object which allows you to duplicate objects in a variety of ways. Add MoGraph’s powerful collection of Effectors to the mix and you can put everything in limitless motion using sound, fracturing, fields, and so much more – often without creating a single keyframe! MoGraph is the go-to system for professional broadcast graphics designers and was recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with a Technical Achievement Award in 2019.

UNMATCHED SPEED AND PERFORMANCE
Thanks to its new core, Cinema 4D is numerous times faster than previous versions and offers unparalleled power for your most demanding scenes. We have optimized all areas of the software, making it even more responsive, while keeping the intuitive workflows that you have come to love over the years. You will especially notice incredible speed gains when playing back your complex motion graphics and simulation scenes in the editor.

EASY TO LEARN – EASY TO USE
Cinema 4D is widely recognized as one of the easiest and most accessible 3D packages to learn and use. To soften that learning curve Maxon offers thousands of tutorials on Cineversity and hundreds of Quick Tips. Maxon’s Training team also hosts weekly and monthly live webinars to help new and existing users succeed – check out our archives and events schedule for more information.

GET INSPIRED
Check out some of the amazing work from our talented community of filmmakers, VFX artists, and motion designers.

REQUIREMENTS
Cinema 4D is available in the following languages: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Czech, Polish.
Looking for information regarding operating system requirements and compatibility?

Features

Polygonal Modeling

Polygons are the building blocks of 3D. With Cinema 4D’s complete polygonal modeling toolset, it’s easy to craft everything from cars to creatures.

Parametric Modeling

Cinema 4D offers a wide range of parametric objects that give you structure to build from and offer the ability to make changes at any time.

Volume Modeling

Cinema 4D’s OpenVDB-based Volume Modeling offers a procedural way to create complex objects by combining basic shapes in Boolean-type operations.

Sculpting

Create organic models with Cinema 4D’s intuitive sculpting tools. Pull, smooth, flatten, cut, pinch, etc. your meshes like digital clay.

Poly Pen

This is in fact the Swiss Army Knife of 3D modeling. Create, select, move or delete points, edges and surfaces comfortably without changing the tool.

Polygon Reduction

Polygon Reduction quickly reduces the amount of polygons in models while preserving smooth UVs, vertex maps and selections, for lightweight meshes.

Texturing

Cinema 4D’s material system lets you create photorealistic materials with multi-layered material channels, reflectance, procedural shaders and more.

Node-Based Materials

Create complex materials for Maxon’s Physical Renderer. Intuitive, flexible and powerful, as you would expect from a node-based system.

BodyPaint 3D

BodyPaint 3D has a comprehensive set of tools for painting detailed textures directly on your 3D objects – turning models into beautiful works of art.

UVs

Cinema 4D provides everything you need to make the painstaking work on UVs enjoyable – whether it’s for hard surfaces or organic shapes.

Thicken Generator

Adding extra dimension to models in Cinema 4D is easy thanks to the new Thicken Generator and modeling tool.

Modeling

Introducing ZRemesher for retopology, new interactive modeling tools, advanced spline nodes, modeling with symmetry and improved vector import.

Capture 3D Models with Moves by Maxon

Quickly turn a series of pictures into a 3D model inside of Cinema 4D.

Magic Bullet Looks

Easily apply one of over 200 preset film looks, import LUTs, or work with custom color correction tools – directly in C4D.

Lighting in C4D

Lighting controls including color, brightness, falloff, visible or volumetric light, noise, and Lumen or Candela brightness offer real-world results.

Rendering System

Realistic and stylized renderings as well as convenient infrastructure management – Cinema 4D offers everything for a smooth rendering workflow.

Take System

Change and save almost any parameter in Cinema 4D – object properties, animations, lights, cameras, materials, textures, and more.

Network Rendering

Flexible administration is the key to render efficiently. With C4D network rendering solutions, administration of render clients becomes a breeze.

nRedering with Chaos® V-Ray®

V-Ray® is an award-winning renderer for artists, architects, designers, and generalists, empowering you to visualize anything you can imagine.

Rendering with Arnold

Arnold for Cinema 4D provides a bridge to Autodesk’s powerful CPU based renderer Arnold from within the standard Cinema 4D interface.

Rendering with Corona

A high-performance (un)biased photorealistic renderer with a focus on realism, ease of use and affordability, with no compromise in quality or power.

Rendering with Octane

OctaneRender® is an unbiased and spectrally correct GPU renderer with high output quality and speed, highly appreciated by C4D artists.

Redshift Everywhere

Redshift for Cinema 4D now supports CPU rendering and includes high-quality previews in the viewport and import/export of Redshift materials.

Fields System

By far the most powerful MoGraph feature and much more than just falloffs. A whole new way of controlling, layering and linking effects to eachother.

Voronoi Fracturing

Voronoi Fracture lets you shatter any object into procedural fragments using virtually anything to control the distribution of the shattered pieces.

MoGraph Basics

MoGraph is our unique, award-winning procedural modeling and animation tool, making C4D the first choice for motion designers.

Animation Basics

Virtually any object, material or parameter can be animated. Keyframing can be done manually, with auto-keyframing or parametrically.

Character Animation

Cinema 4D offers a wide range of easy-to-use and reliable animation tools to help you create and animate life-like characters and creatures.

Car Rig

Whether you’re animating cars for commercials or VFX this powerful and intuitive Car Rig preset makes it easy to prep a car for power-sliding action.

Bullet Dynamics

Create dynamic relationships between objects, generate hair and cloth, or use springs, motors, and aerodynamics to generate spectacular simulations.

Tracking

Tracking of objects or camera positions is crucial for the integration of 3D elements into footage. C4D offers on-board tools to accomplish this.

Character Object

Allows you to easily build flexible rigs for any type of character, based on presets for bipeds, quadrupeds and more, all crafted by top animators.

Mixamo Control Rig

Easily apply motion clips from Adobe’s Mixamo library to your Cinema 4D characters and modify or retarget them in just a few simple steps.

Toon Rig

Animate like in Looney Toons. This versatile character rig offers all the features you need to animate cartoon-style.

Moves by Maxon

Capture facial and body movements with our iPhone and iPad app and instantly apply them to your characters in Cinema 4D.

Pyro

Emit fire, smoke and explosions from any object or Spline from Cinema 4D – bring up the heat!

Simulation

With the new Unified Simulation System you can achieve more realistic-looking simulations on either the CPU or GPU that are highly multi-threaded.

Adobe Substance 3D

The free Substances 3D plugin for Cinema 4D offers 3D content creators native support for Adobe’s procedural workflow within Cinema 4D.

After Effects Integration

Maxon’s Cineware lets you drop native C4D projects right into After Effects, manipulate 3D elements and render directly from within After Effects.

Adobe Illustrator

Integration with Adobe’s industry-leading vector graphics software allows native import of paths, type, and vector graphics into Cinema 4D.

Adobe Photoshop

Tight integration to Adobe’s industry standard for image processing allows the import of multi-layered PSD files, e.g. for the easy material creation.

Supported File Formats

Production environments are rarely homogeneous and smooth exchange between tools is essential. C4D supports all common exchange formats.

SDK / Development Community

In studio environments it is often necessary to create own tools to integrate C4D into the pipeline. Our well-developed SDKs simplify this process.

X-Particles Integration

X-Particles is a simulation tool for C4D used to create particle simulations like Smoke, Fire, Fluids, Grains & Dynamics from within a unified system.

Unreal Integration

With the release of Unreal Engine 4.23, Epic Games introduced support for Cinema 4D enabled via the Datasmith plugin.

Unity Integration

The Unity plug-in (available from the Unity Asset Store) is compatible with Cinema 4D R21+ and Unity 2019.3.0+.

Vectorworks Integration

Vectorworks develops all-in-one design and BIM software for the architecture, landscape and entertainment industries.

Archicad Integration

ARCHICAD is an industry-leading Building Information Modeling (BIM) software solution provider for the architecture and design industry.

Allplan Integration

ALLPLAN is a global developer of open solutions for Building Information Modeling (BIM).

Sketchfab Integration

With the free Sketchfab plug-in you can upload 3D objects and animations directly from Cinema 4D to the Sketchfab platform.

Environment

Modeling landscapes from scratch is hard work, but there are tools that specialize in this and allow you to create worlds in a snap.

Apple Final Cut Pro & Motion

Cinema 4D can generate multi-layered Final Cut Pro 7 project files with just a few clicks.

Nuke Integration

Cinema 4D can render a NUKE project file completely with proper node structure.

Blackmagic Fusion Integration

Instantly render Fusion compositions with Cinema 4D.

Simulation Partners

Whether it’s a spectacular simulation of smoke, water, fire or abstract particle streams for motion graphics, there’s software to facilitate this.

Rendering with Chaos® V-Ray®

V-Ray® is an award-winning renderer for artists, architects, designers, and generalists, empowering you to visualize anything you can imagine.

Rendering with Arnold

Arnold for Cinema 4D provides a bridge to Autodesk’s powerful CPU based renderer Arnold from within the standard Cinema 4D interface.

Rendering with Corona

A high-performance (un)biased photorealistic renderer with a focus on realism, ease of use and affordability, with no compromise in quality or power.

Real-Time Graphics

Especially in broadcast production, it is key to be able to quickly add up-to-date graphics. C4D brings 3D objects live into leading applications.

Motion Capture

Motion capture is an easy way to animate characters quickly and realistically. Cinema 4D supports leading manufacturers of mocap devices.

Cineware for After Effects

Since 2013, Cineware has provided seamless integration of Cinema 4D assets into After Effects.

Cineware for Illustrator

Add and edit 3D objects directly within Adobe Illustrator CC 2020 using the new Cineware for Illustrator plug-in.

Rendering with Octane

OctaneRender® is an unbiased and spectrally correct GPU renderer with high output quality and speed, highly appreciated by C4D artists.

Placement Tools

It’s never been so easy and intuitive to place objects in a scene, whether you’re building out a complex environment or adding greebles to a logo.

Asset Browser

Easy to find and use models, materials and other assets. This incredible library of resources to power your creativity are always close at hand.

Scene Manager

The power of Cinema 4D’s new node-based core allows you to use flexible node-based assets to enable procedural geometry creation, cloning and more.

Commander

Cinema 4D’s Commander offers quick access to tools and commands. Easily add Redshift materials, and use the power of Maxon’s Node-Based Capsules.

OCIO Color Management

OCIO provides comprehensive color management for studio pipelines and makes it easy to achieve cinematic results via the ACES color space.

Track Modifier Tag

Allows you to modify animation tracks on objects or tags in a super-fast way.

User Interface Enhancements

The most intuitive 3D application just got better. A modern spin on C4D’s interface shows what’s important and puts more focus on your artwork.

Spline Import

Import vector art from Illustrator, PDF and SVG files to use in your 3D scenes. Advanced features like symbols and gradient-filled shapes supported.

Orther versions

What's New in Cinema 4D 2024

Cinema 4D 2024 provides unmatched speed and performance for the most sophisticated creative scenes. Rigid Body Simulations can now interact with all existing forces, pyro, cloth and soft bodies. Pyro shines with a hot new feature that allows fire to be emitted from particles and matrices. And the new Vertex Normal tools offer artists unparalleled precision to perfect surfaces.
Highlights include:
– Twice as fast as previous versions – through the power of Maxon’s brand new core that optimizes speed and performance.
– The addition of Rigid Body Simulations allow solid objects to interact with all simulation types in the scene – be it soft bodies, cloth, ropes or Pyro.
– Pyro now offers more precise controls for artists to art direct their simulation and ensure it matches their vision.
– New vertex normal controls that give artists full control over adjusting vertex and polygon normals to remove shading artifacts.
– The new modeling tools in Cinema 4D 2024 will make handling complex tasks a breeze.
– The Node UI in Cinema 4D 2024 has been revamped.
What's New in Cinema 4D 2023

Cinema 4D 2023 introduces new features, including Symmetry modeling as well as enhancements to the Unified Simulation System.

Highlights include:
– Cinema 4D’s Unified Simulation System now includes Soft Bodies and new stickiness and mixed animation options.
– Vertex Maps and Vertex Color tags controlled by Fields now work on most generators, which allows artists use procedural elements when creating eye-catching effects.
– Modeling with Symmetry allows mirrored changes on the model. Users can define the symmetry using the world grid, the object axis, a custom workplane, or even the topology of the model.
– OpenColorIO enables artists to take full advantage of cinematic ACEScg color space and a unified color pipeline across all Maxon tools. Redshift OCIO support seamlessly integrates with Cinema 4D’s settings.
– Watch Folders in the asset browser allows the storage of assets anywhere on the file system.
– The improved GoZ bridge lets artists easily transfer models between C4D and ZBrush, making it simpler than ever to render sculptures with photorealism.

 

What's New in Cinema 4D S26 and Maxon One

– Added ZBrush’s powerful automatic retopology tools to create beautiful optimized meshes
– Initial release of Redshift CPU
– Great enhancements across the entire 3D Workflow – Modeling, Animation, Simulation and Rendering
What's New in Cinema 4D R25

– User Interface Enhancements
– Capsules
– Spline Import
– Presets System
– Scene Nodes System
– Track Modifier Tag

The most intuitive 3D application interface just got evenbetter with a new modern skin, user interface enhancements and an expansivepreset system for optimizing your workflow. Capsules allow anyone to tap intothe power and flexibility of Cinema 4D’s Scene Node system, with plugin-likefeatures directly in the Classic Object Manager, while Data Import and Splinefeatures within Scene Nodes power unique and useful toolsets via Scene Nodes,the Scene Manager and Capsules.

REQUIREMENTS

What's New in Cinema 4D 2024

Operating System

  • Windows:
    Windows 10 Version 20H2 or higher – or Windows 11
    Intel 64-bit CPU or AMD 64-bit CPU with AVX2 support
    16 GB RAM, recommended 24 GB or more
  • macOS:
    macOS 11.7.7+ (Big Sur), 12.6+ (Monterey) or 13.3+ (Ventura)
    Intel-based Apple Macintosh with SSE4.2 support or Apple M1/M2-powered Mac
    16 GB RAM, recommended 24 GB or more
  • Linux Command-Line Rendering:
    64-bit Linux distribution with glibc 2.17 or later
  • Online connection required for Licensing and Online Content Access

Recommended minimum resolution 1920×1080

Graphics Cards

  • Windows:
    Minimum: NVIDIA Maxwell GPU, AMD Polaris (AMD GCN 4), Intel Kaby Lake or newer supporting DirectX 12 with feature level 11.0
    Minimum GPU Driver: NVIDIA 461.40, AMD 21.3.2, Intel 27.20.100.9168
  • macOS:
    Metal: v2 (Mac2) or higher or Apple 7 (M1) or higher (see about this Mac → System report → Graphics/Displays)
    GPU: only official supported hardware by Apple (with Metal v2 or higher)
    e-GPU: only official supported hardware (please refer to https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208544)

 

Although Cinema 4D supports all DirectX 12 feature level 11.0 compatible graphics cards, we recommend using a dedicated 3D graphics card with an AMD or NVIDIA chip set with at least 4 GB VRAM (8 GB or more recommended). For Intel or AMD machines with integrated GPUs we recommend 16 GB of RAM or more due to integrated GPUs using up to the half of the computer’s available RAM.

On macOS machines prior to Apple Silicon a discrete Metal 2-capable GPU is recommended.

Maxon is not responsible for the compatibility of individual graphics cards with the DirectX 12 or Metal mode. Due to the large number and types of available chip sets, operating systems and driver versions we cannot guarantee the compatibility of all systems.

Please make sure that you always use the most current official graphics card driver (no beta versions).

Important Notice

We test the compatibility of our products with the driver and OS versions available at the time of the announcement of a new Cinema 4D release and focus on typical mid-range to high-end systems and basic coverage on low-end (min. requirements) systems. Additionally, we try to keep up with hardware, driver, and OS updates as soon as they are released.

Nevertheless, please understand that we cannot guarantee support of new hardware and operating systems shipped after the announcement of this Cinema 4D version.

The technical specifications of Maxon products are constantly changing. Please use the most current version of the software to test its compatibility on your computer (especially if you have a more elaborate configuration).