3D Rendering and Animation With Cinema 4D Release 11.5 and ...

B4 Technology

The Epoch Times

October 20, 2009

3D Rendering and Animation With Cinema 4D Release 11.5 and MoGraph 2 A hands-on review of Cinema 4D release 11.5 from Maxon By JOSHUA PHILIPP Epoch Times Staff

Software development company Maxon has released Cinema 4D Release 11.5, bringing with it new tools to the world of 3D animation and imaging. The software allows users to render photo realistic 3D environments, create characters and objects, and bring them to life though animation. Cinema 4D has grown a strong reputation among professionals and hobbyists through its use in movies, video games, and TV commercials. The software has played a role in the creation of films including Polar Express, Beowulf, and Open Season. Among the new features in Release11.5 are some impressive additions to MoGraph 2, which include much faster render times and a few changes that simply make the program easier to use. using cinema 4d Maxon has done a great job in making the creation of of complex 3D animations an easy to learn process through Cinema 4D. Most users who have experience in programs such as Adobe Flash, After Effects, or other 3D animation software should be able to figure out the software rather quickly. For new users, an easy-to-follow quick-

start manual that comes bundled with the software offers plenty of photo examples, and teaches the fundamentals needed to begin working on more complex projects. The software also comes with a tutorial DVD on how to rig a 3D character (which can be compared to building an armature) as well as a free trial account to Maxon’s tutorial Web site, Cineversity.com. After reviewing the manual, I found most of the features in Cinema 4D easy to figure out. After learning the basics of the program, it soon felt as if just about anything could be accomplished with enough time. The software offers a wide range of features and Maxon offers some additional modules that bring even more to the mix. new release 11.5 As the much-anticipated addition to Cinema 4D Release 11, the new version brings some outstanding features to an already great product. Among the most useful are the updates to the render engine. Render Instances, which can be turned on by simply checking a box, allows mid-range computers to render billions of polygons at a much faster pace than before. This comes in useful when rendering multiple high-polygon images in a single scene. SubPolygon Displacement is also up to seven times faster in the new version. The feature allows for detailed textures to be rendered onto images at a much more reasonable pace. Several new additions have been added to the project preview feature, Picture Viewer. These new features now allow users to com-

ANIMATION: Provided images of a donkey and Mexican town are rendered in Maxon Cinema 4D Release 11.5. The software allows for advanced 3D rendering and animation. the epoch times

pare two different renders to decide which is better. Users can also edit image elements such as saturation, contrast, and gamma directly in Cinema 4D, as well as adjust multi-pass layers rather than export images to separate applications. Other new features include better syncing with Adobe After Effects and full support for Apple Motion. In addition, the Project Settings panel now displays check boxes for commonly used functions and features several new settings. fun with mograph 2 The optional MoGraph module has also been upgraded to allow for some amazing motions, physics, and various effects to be applied to objects. The MoDynamics feature helps create some incredible animations, and it’s easy to create and use. After making a few simple adjustments, you can, for example, make a

large number of cloned orbs, place them in the air, drop them on another object, and watch as they bounce, roll, and affect one another. The ability to add different forces and effectors, such as wind, adds even greater dimensions to this feature. MoSpline, a new animation tool for the creation of organic lines, offers an elegant looking organization of lines that can wrap around objects or have their own unique animations which can be affected by elements such as turbulence. The possibilities are nearly endless with MoSpline, and the feature is rather easy to use at that. Other cool features in MoGraph 2 include effectors that can be added to the surface of an individual object’s polygons. The effectors can create some impressive animations, such as the reshaping an object, for example. There are also new camera effects, settings, and other enhancements. To help you get started, Release 11.5 comes with a bonus DVD filled with textures, plugins, and stock images. These can come in handy when you want to use a real world texture to map onto your created object—such as mapping an image of real bricks onto a 3D building, or leaves onto a tree. There is also the optional Cinema 4D Broadcast Edition, which comes packed full of pre-rendered 3D objects, lighting setups, videos, images, and just about everything else you could use.

creative environment Cinema 4D provides are a pleasure to use. Cinema 4D offers tools to create nearly anything on a digital canvas, while animating it in ways that are difficult to discern from real images. At the same time, it manages to keep an interface simple enough for most users to be able to pick up and use relatively quickly. The release of Cinema 4D Release 11.5 has only added to this well-earned reputation. The most creative new features are without a doubt the additions to MoGraph, yet the increased rendering speeds and several extra tools are certainly welcomed additions. price: Cinema 4D Core: $995.00 MoGraph: $595.00 website www.maxon.net

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in a nutshell Maxon has won a respected position in the field of 3D motion graphics and rendering with its creation of Cinema 4D—and with good reason. The wide range of tools and the

Will Solar Speed Up Emerging Cell Phone Revolution? Goby.com Helps to ‘Create KAMPALA/HONG KONG (Reuters)—Watching his sons kick around a makeshift ball made from tightly bound plastic bags, Ugandan handyman Jackson Mawa marvels at the way business has improved since he bought a solar-powered mobile phone . “I am self-employed. Sometimes people call me and they find my [cell] phone is off. I have been having that problem a lot due to battery charging. So when [Uganda Telecom] brought out the solar phones, since I got it, that very day, I have never had any problem with my phone,” said Mawa, clutching the device. It might not sound like much, but for Mawa and millions of people in Africa and Asia, with no connection to electricity grids or unreliable and expensive power access, these little solar-powered gadgets are proving to be revolutionary. Farmers can check market prices before deciding which crop seeds to sow, speak to buyers from their fields, and get weather forecasts. And unlike with standard mobile phones, they don’t have to worry about their phone battery losing power. Solar cell phones could build on the economic advantages that mobile phones have already brought to far-flung regions of Africa and the Indian subcontinent, including price transparency and more accurate and timely information. Mobile phone penetration in these regions has been held back by a lack of electricity: there is simply no way to charge a cell phone in many rural areas of developing countries. An estimated 1.6 billion people have no access to electricity at all, while another 1 billion people have no electricity for much of the day, according to estimates by development groups. Fortuitously, perhaps, most of these people live in sunny climates. And this is where solar mobile phones come in. “If you look at the map of countries with low tele-density—there is plenty of sunshine everywhere,” says Rajiv Mehrotra, chairman of VNL, a company making solarpowered mobile network base stations in India. Take Uganda as a case in point: Just eight percent of the country’s 32 million plus population have electric grid access. Even when the grid is there, like where Mawa lives in Mulago, a poor suburb of Kampala, the power is costly and the service is intermittent. “In our area, electricity is expensive so at six o’clock in the morning, we turn our power off until six in the evening,” said Mawa, 29, sitting on a step outside his house. Until solar cell phones were in-

troduced, charging a phone in remote areas, off the electricity grid, entailed a bone-jarring journey to the nearest town, where the phone battery could be charged at kiosks run on generators for relatively hefty fees. The journey might take all day and the battery charge fee might cost more than that day’s lost wages.

ing offers around 5-10 minutes of talk time. Selling at around $60, Samsung Solar Guru features FM radio, MP3 ring tones, embedded games, and a torch light. If demand for such phones really takes off, it is a risk for Nokia, who likely cannot watch for long from aside as its market share in India and in Africa is 60-70 percent.

market penetration There are more than 3 billion people using mobile phones around the world and most of the next billion users will come from emerging markets, particularly in the countrysides of these markets. “There is a significant opportunity within developing markets where there is limited access to grid electricity,” said Windsor Holden, principal analyst at telecoms research firm Juniper Research. The makers of solar cell phones such as Nokia, Samsung and ZTE see the rural poor in these emerging markets as their main customer base rather than carbon-conscious consumers in the West. “People’s need to communicate is so high. It’s running miles ahead of the power grids expansions,” says Anne Larilahti, head of environmentally sustainable business at network equipment maker Nokia Siemens Networks. Across the ocean, in India’s remote Orissa state, farmers living off the power grid are generating electricity with solar power which is making inroads in rural India and Bangladesh. For them, solarpowered cellphones are a natural extension. The potential in rural India for cell phone makers and operators is huge. Consider this: India had nearly 500 million wireless users, and some 10 million new users are signing up each month. That doesn’t count the millions in India’s remote villages where electricity is rare or non-existent. Tapping this new market as well as earning green points, is attracting mobile phone companies such as South Korea’s Samsung which released its first solar-powered phone model, Solar Guru, in India in June. “We contact doctors for healthrelated advice. We seek information on weather from local official. We speak to local agriculture officials and discuss with them problem related to crops,” said Indian farmer Jhasketan Pradhan. Solar phones are not new: The top phone maker Nokia sold a model a dozen years ago, but with technology development their usability and prices are starting to reach masses. About an hour of solar charg-

big opportunity With proper positioning and pricing, solar-powered cell phones could reach about two billion people across the globe who have no access to electricity. Aside from the commercial opportunities, there are very real economic benefits. “Nowadays, farmers use mobile phones to know about the market situation ... so that the middlemen cannot exploit them and this is happening in Bangladesh, this is happening in Uganda, this is also happening in India,” said Abdul Bayes, an economics professor from Bangladesh’s Jahangirnagar University. Bayes, who has studied the impact of mobile phones on developing economies, estimates that GDP increases by one or two percent for every 10 percent increase in mobile phone access. Savings, he said, come not just with improved market knowledge but by increasing productivity as farmers can call for information rather than leave their fields to travel to the city to speak to buyers and suppliers. A major appeal of solar-powered cell phones is the growing consumer demand for environmentally sustainable mobile phone devices, and annual sales of greener phones could grow to 105 million handsets by 2014, said Holden, of Juniper Research. The world’s largest consumer electronics sector by volume, the cell phone industry is keen to tap consumers’ increasing interest in more environmentally friendly phones. The sector is closely followed by environmental organizations due to its large scale. More than 1 billion phones are sold globally each year, which requires the use of sales boxes, add-ons, and tons of raw materials including rare metals. Solar phones still have a long way to go in terms of offering sophisticated features already existing in conventional handsets, and some doubt if its green features help reduce carbon emissions in a significant way. “If you think about it, mobile handsets on the grid uses comparatively little electricity and chargers are becoming increasingly efficient in the amount of power

they use,” said Holden. An average mobile user is responsible for around 55 lbs of C02 emissions per year, said Holden, a collective total of 93 megatons of CO2 globally as of the end of 2008. Electricity consumed by charging mobile phones contributes to just a fraction of such emissions. Sony Ericsson and Nokia are rolling out phones with greener features such as lower energy consumption, use of recycled materials, smaller packages, and electronic user manuals. Meanwhile, Samsung and ZTE are pushing ahead with solar phones and Sharp is releasing its own model in Japan this year. It’s not clear what Nokia’s plans are in the solar phone department as it keeps a tight lid on its future product lines. In Africa, Kenya’s Safaricom has already sold out its first batch of solar-powered mobile phones made by ZTE since the phones were launched in August. “It’s selling pretty good because if we compare with other phones that (are also new to the market), they were not doing as well as we are having this one do,” said Gladwell Mbugua, a Safaricom sales agent in Nairobi. Michael Joseph, Safaricom’s chief executive, said the phone was popular in rural areas where there might be no electricity, but also with young people who are always on the move like his 20-yearold daughter and her friends. “From coffee to lunch to parties, they don’t have time to charge their phones,” Joseph said.

Your Own Adventure’ By FRANK YU

Epoch Times Staff

Looking for something to do? A new Web site helps users find events, activities, and even places to eat in almost every U.S. locale. At Goby.com (pronounced “GO be”), users can enter the type of activity they’re looking for, their preferred location, and time, and the site scours the Web, searching everything from blogs, calendars and press releases to find attractions, restaurants, and events across the United States. The site uses a proprietary search engine technology developed by experts from MIT and is surprisingly thorough. Although one could start using Goby as soon as they find the site, their home page offers a helpful tutorial on how to get the most out of Goby. Want to go rock climbing near Vegas, or skydiving in California? Perhaps you’re seeking live music in Detroit. Whatever your city, Goby.com can help you get there. For certain large cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, Goby.com separates listings down to the neighborhoods. But with any search on Goby, you also have access to an interactive map to find other activities near the event you’re looking for. I tested the site by searching for “history museums” in Manhattan, New York. The search returned some obvious results, such as the American Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side and the Museum of the City of New York on the Upper East Side, but it also returned some not-so-common points of interest such as the Jewish Museum on

5th Avenue and the American Museum of the Moving Image in nearby Astoria, Queens. “Our mission at Goby is to allow users to spend less time searching and more time doing the things they want to do,” said Mark Watkins, co-founder of Goby. com in a statement. “Goby enables you to turn ordinary weekends or weeklong getaways into something memorable or extraordinary, by eliminating the need to hop around from site to site and wade through information that’s often incomplete or irrelevant.” The Web site’s tagline is “create your own adventure,” and it certainly lives up to its billing. It instantly finds events and activities that might otherwise elude you. So what’s your adventure? Just ask Goby.

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