Cinema 4D's interface doesn't look Mac-like on the surface, but it does have a Mac-like feel.

Veteran 3D animators love Maxon's Cinema 4D, and Release 10 of this 3D modeling, animation, and rendering application rewards the devoted - it makes big strides in character animation and also offers a much-improved interface.

Cinema 4D's new features already build on an impressive foundation. For starters, it's a very fast modeler, letting you use a few parametric primitives to quickly establish a model's basic shape and then sculpt that shape to perfection using various polygonal editing tools, splines, and more. You spend your time creating instead of tinkering with tools.

Cinema 4D is especially good at creating all kinds of visual elements for motion graphics projects (provided you're using the MoGraph module - more on modules in a moment). It's easy to extrude 3D text for logos and banners and then animate the text by letter, word, line, or block. You can clone any object, arrange the live copies along almost any path, and use different "effectors" to animate objects with real-time behavior. You can composite multiple layers together within Cinema 4D or export entire compositions to applications such as Adobe's After Effects, maintaining each distinct layer and even carrying over data for 3D cameras, lights, and more.

Release 10 updates Cinema 4D's massive character animation module, called Mocca 3. Mocca streamlines your skeleton and rigging process by letting you place your joints first, and then it automatically creates the bones around those joints. It also knows how to limit the bones' movement based on your joints' parameters. Mocca can weigh your skeleton automatically, connecting mesh, bones, and deformers and allowing you to fine-tune the results. You can also easily pin muscles to your skeleton, leaving Mocca to flex them and deform skin based on how you animate your character. Together, these and other new tricks make Cinema 4D the easiest, quickest way we know of to create expressive characters.

Cinema 4D's intuitive, streamlined interface has actually gotten better. The whole interface now defaults to a neutral gray color scheme (similar to that of After Effects 7), and it sports redesigned tool icons and better-organized groupings of tools and objects. A bigger deal is the introduction of layers into the software's Object Manager, letting you organize tons of objects and tags into groups. Likewise, Cinema 4D's Timeline can single out objects and specific animation parameters, so you can focus on them without distractions. Some forms of keyframe editing also require a step or two fewer than before.

Now, about those modules. Cinema 4D's design lets you add new features by adding independent modules. The standard edition ($895) already includes powerful modeling, animation, 3D paint, and rendering tools, which can handle plenty of meat-and-potatoes projects. Maxon's add-on modules include one that creates realistic hair and fur, another that creates interactive particles (water, dust, and much more), and still others that add gravity, friction, wind, and other physics to your 3D worlds.

The bottom line. Cinema 4D is in prime shape, with a great blend of powerful features, ease of use, and a relatively low price.

COMPANY: Maxon
CONTACT: www.maxon.net
PRICE: $895 to $3,495; upgrades begin at $295
REQUIREMENTS: 1GHz processor or faster, Mac OS 10.3 or later, 512MB RAM, OpenGL-compatible video card
Powerful, intuitive, and affordable. Fast on Intel-based Macs and multiple-core processors. Universal binary.
Not the best choice for superrealistic rendering. Expect to want to buy an extra module or two