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Maxon Cinema 4D Studio: How to Upgrade from Previous Versions



There are some significant limitations when it comes to rendering in the lite version. One example is that the ability to use Physical Render Engine (PBR) is not available with Cinema 4D Lite, which is very important if you're looking to use GPU rendering. In fact, ProRender is natively available in the studio version, but not in the lite version. Lite versions will be sticking with their CPU's for rendering out scenes.




Maxon Cinema 4D Studio




EJ Hassenfratz (00:00): Hey, I'm EJ Hassenfratz for school of motion in today's video, I'm going to be covering the main differences between the light and studio versions of cinema 4d. There's lot of confusion out there as to what version does, what, what version you need. And that's what we're going to be covering in this video today.


EJ Hassenfratz (00:29): One of the things a lot of people don't know is that if you own a subscription to creative cloud, you actually own a copy of cinema 4d and it's that cinema 4d light version. The thing is, is it's a little hard to get to. And the reason for that is, is you actually have to open cinema 4d light through after effects. I know it's a little weird, but here's how you open up cinema 4d light. You just go in after effects, go to file new max on cinema 40 file. And once you jump on that, it will then prompt you to save an entitled default file. I'm just going to save this to desktop and I'll, I've done this before, so I'm just going to replace that. And what's going to happen is that's going to launch cinema 4d light. So, boom, you now have a copy of cinema 4d that you have full access to as long as you have your creative cloud subscription access, which is pretty cool.


EJ Hassenfratz (01:23): So you might be thinking, all right, I'm all set here. I have a version of cinema 4d. Why would I need to shell out my cold hard cash for the full studio version when I have cinema 4d already? So that's what we're going to be talking about in this video and talking about the differences between light and studio. So let's go ahead and begin by talking about what is included in the light version of cinema 4d. All right. So the first thing you're going to notice is we have the full blown cinema 4d interface, and mostly this is the same as what you would see in cinema 4d studio version. So in this regard, light is really great for getting used to how cinema 4d works in where everything is as well as just kind of navigating around in 3d space. So we have most of the menus that we have in studio.


EJ Hassenfratz (02:11): We have our primitives menu where you can create basic 3d shapes. We have the pen tool where you can actually draw spline shapes, and we have all these different spline shape objects here as well. And basically spines are the cinema 4d equivalent of like aftereffects path. So we can get the Bentall here. Just kind of draw a little blobby here in Walla. There you go. Actually, I like the pen tools in cinema four D a little bit better than I like in after effects. Actually it's pretty, uh, intuitive, but, uh, so once you create splines, uh, outside of, you know, great, uh, creating these basic 3d shapes using splines in what's called generator objects, and light has a small selection of some of the generator objects that studio has. Um, basically what gener generator objects do is allows you to create geometry based on splines.


EJ Hassenfratz (03:05): So I have like an extrude here. We all know what extrude is. You have it in aftereffects, but basically you can place a spline as a child of the extrude object and boom. We have some 3d geometry that if I hit this button that renders the current active view, you can see, Hey, we got some geometry. You look, mom 3d in a, but basically like creating these basic shapes, creating splines, and then creating geometry based off those splines using generators is two of the only ways you can create a geometry in cinema 4d lay, unless you actually import in a model, uh, the modeling tools are not available inside of cinema 4d light. So that's, that's a thing. We have a lot of other generator objects like an array or a ball or an instance with basically makes a copy or an instance of a single object.


EJ Hassenfratz (03:56): A ball can have you subtract your combined different, uh, pieces of geometry. So generating geometry while we can't actually model anything, we have a lot of control and ability to create a lot of different types of geometry to build up your scene. So once you build geometry, you can then deformed it using a selection of deformers. And it's just a select group of performers that you'll find in studio. It's a lot of the most used ones. So like Ben bald shear taper wins a really cool one. If you want to create like a wavy flag or something like that, or animate a little fishy, uh, doing its thing, twist, if you want to blow stuff up, get the TNT. There have a lot of stuff. And as far as, you know, seeing objects, we have the floor, we have like a fog environment, sky foreground, uh, stage object, which allows you to kind of animate between different camera views.


EJ Hassenfratz (04:51): And speaking of cameras, there's a selection of the type of cameras you can use. Again, most people use the basic camera, so that's really cool. You can look through it, you can change the focal length, all that good stuff, just like, you know, an after effects camera. And then we have all of our lights. So this is pretty incredible that the free version that comes with after effects of cinema 4d, uh, has all of this stuff. I mean, it, it, you have no excuses to not learn 3d. And if you want to learn cinema 4d, get used to the workflow again, get used to the menus, all that good stuff. This is a really great, a great way to remove that, that barrier of like, well, I can't afford the full studio version, right? You have no excuse. This is, this is what you get with a creative cloud subscription.


EJ Hassenfratz (05:38): And it is pretty substantial. It's pretty robust. So let me go ahead. And I have another project here that I made completely inside of the light version, and you can see what kind of scenes you can build up. I have all the lights here. Uh, we have area lights, which is one of the most accurate lights, cinema 4d, uh, outside of the PBR light. You can see here physically, uh, based light. And we have, there's an instance there. I got all these different objects and basically what, what I've done in this scene is I've used either your basic primitive, 3d shapes, okay? Like your cubes, your tourists, all that stuff. And then basically created different shapes using splines, and then use all these different generator objects to then build out the scene. So let's see this little cactus guy, this, uh, this little pot is a lave and a lave basically takes a spline and sweeps it around.


EJ Hassenfratz (06:36): So you can create this little pot shape there. Same thing with this cup. If I just open that up, that is basically just a, a tube. And then to create the steam, I just made a sweep object with the circle as the profile spline. One of the cool things you can do with the sweep spline is you can adjust the scale of the sphere as it sweeps along that main spline here. Okay. Now I have a wind object here that if I scrubbed through, you can see creates this nice little wavy motion. So tons of ability of, you know, building up scenes and lighting scenes inside of cinema 4d light. Okay. So, uh, lighting is such a huge aspect of 3d. And guess what? This has all of the lighting tools that you have, or need to build up that fundamental skill of lighting, which I feel like for newcomers to 3d lighting is one of the weakest points for, uh, 3d artists, newcomers to 3d artists.


EJ Hassenfratz (07:43): Just because you really don't have to think about that aspect of, uh, of, of a scene when you're working in 2d, right? You're, you're basically dealing with 2d shapes and you don't need to learn, uh, about real-world kind of lighting techniques and photography lighting and all that stuff, or F you know, photo studio lighting. So this has the ability to create all these objects. It also has the ability to animate stuff. So we've got a full timeline here. You can set key frames, any key frameable animation is possible inside of cinema four D light, which is really, really amazing. Uh, you can see, we have all different types of textures here. I have a gold texture. So the material system is pretty robust. It has a lot of the same material creation, uh, functionality as the full studio version. We can get reflect and see if you like your shiny, shiny materials.


EJ Hassenfratz (08:40): Guess what? This has that in there, we can utilize bump channels. We can use noise shaders. We have, uh, a wide selection of different effects you can use here. So you can use tiles, which is cut off at the bottom there, but tiles is something I use a lot. You can see that for the cactus stripes here. That's basically I loaded a tile shader in the alpha. And if I go in, just grab this render region here and just click and drag, just to render my little cactus guy can see those little lines right there. So a lot of material options here, a lot of the most basic, most often used materials and material functions are inside of light. So again, if you want to get used to how a material system works in 3d light is great for that. So back to animation, uh, one of the most common features, or one of the most widely used features by motion designers in cinema 4d is a little thing called MoGraph.


EJ Hassenfratz (09:45): Now MoGraph basically, you can see the little, uh, menu here. MoGraph allows you, uh, in the studio version at least to clone and create an animate loads and loads of objects very easily using what's called effectors. So factors basically can allow you to do a multitude of things inside of cinema 4d light. You have access to the plane and random effectors, uh, and you only have access to this if you register your cinema 4d light version. So be sure you do that, and you can have access to the plane and random effector and this fracture object. And basically what the fracture object allows you to do is make objects, be able to be used by the, or be manipulated by these plan and random effectors. So, for example, I have these little cube objects here. Let me just go into my scene. There's my plane effector. 2ff7e9595c


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