Friday, January 29th, 2016 Posted by Jim Thacker

Adobe ships After Effects CC 2015.2

Adobe has released After Effects CC 2015.2 (aka CC 2015 13.7), updating Cineware, the bridging technology that links the compositor with Maxon’s Cinema 4D, to version 3.0.

Introduced in the original After Effects CC, the Cineware plugin enables After Effects users to import Cinema 4D scene files directly, preserving geometry, materials, lighting and camera settings.

Cineware 3.0: new rendering modes and Live Link capabilities
One major change in Cineware 3.0 is the new rendering modes available: imported scene files that use Cinema 4D’s Physical, Hardware and Sketch and Toon renderers will now render as expected in After Effects.

(The change only applies to Cineware: Cinema 4D Lite, the cut-down version of Cinema 4D bundled free with After Effects still does not include the Physical or Sketch and Toon renderers.)

In addition, the Cineware renderer itself can now be set to OpenGL for quick previews; and multi-pass render layers are now created with an alpha channel.

The other key change in Cineware 3.0 is the new Live Link system, which enables the timelines of After Effects and Cinema 4D to be synchronised – if you’re using the latest version of Cinema 4D R17, at least.

Timeline markers from imported .c4d files can also be extracted to Cinema 4D layers in an After Effects scene.

Cineware also now supports R17’s Take system, enabling users to switch between different versions of a Cinema 4D scene or animation within After Effects.

In addition, there is a new option to synchronise changes made to a Cinema 4D layer with all instances of that layer within an After Effects composition.

Few other changes to After Effects itself
Aside from Cineware 3.0, there aren’t many changes to After Effects itself in the CC 2015.2 update, although there are tweaks to the way auto-save and Cache Before Playback previews work.

You can read a full list of changes on Adobe’s blog post via the link below.

Pricing and availability
After Effects 2015.2 is available on a rental-only basis via Adobe’s Creative Cloud subscriptions. Single-product subscriptions start at $19.99/month. The update is free to current subscribers.

Read more about the new features in After Effects CC 2015.2 (CC 2015 13.7) on Adobe’s blog