by David
Nagel
Executive Producer
dnagel@digitalmedianet.com
Maxon has announced the soon to be released version 7.0 of Cinema
4D XL, its flagship modeling and animation package. The company
says release 7 will focus on render quality and that "both the
advanced lighting technology and the render engine have been improved
almost beyond recognition."
The new render engine uses an adaptive oversampling that's designed
to produce brilliant still images and remove any kind of flickering
in animations. In addition, the company says the improved rendering
has also gained in speed.
The new global illumination and radiosity features simulate the
natural distribution of light, such as color-bleed between adjacent
surfaces. Regions that would normally receive no light when raytraced
are lit indirectly with global illumination. Maxon claims that
its new radiosity engine is "probably the world’s fastest." (We'll
test this when version 7 is released.)
Version 7 will also add new caustics and volume caustics that
allow the user to apply caustics from one or more light sources
onto any object surface using Volume Caustics, including fog,
smoke and water.
Finally, the new version will offer multipass rendering so that
you can render out illumination, specularity and transparency
as separate layers for post-editing. CINEMA 4D XL Release 7 saves
all the layers during a single render pass as a single file in
PSD, RLA or RPF formats.
The expected release date for version 7.0 is June 2001. Those
who purchase 6 now will receive a free upgrade when it does become
available. For more information, visit http://www.maxoncomputer.com.
