Cycles 4D gets principled shading, Cryptomatte support
Insydium has updated Cycles 4D, its implementation of Blender’s Cycles renderer for Cinema 4D, adding new ambient occlusion, principled shading and motion blur nodes, and Cryptomatte support.
Build 321, released publicly to coincide with NAB 2019, also rewrites the software’s node editor to improve interactive rendering performance.
Blender’s powerful Cycles renderer – directly inside Cinema 4D
First released in 2016, Cycles 4D implements Blender’s Cycles render engine inside Cinema 4D.
It’s capable of a range of rendering effects, including SSS, microdisplacement, motion blur and depth of field, and is compatible with Cinema 4D’s native hair and Mograph systems, and with XPresso visual scripting.
Support for principled shading and Cryptomatte, plus a redesigned node editor
To that, Build 321 adds a range of rendering features, including new Simple Motion Blur, Ambient Occlusion, and Principled Hair and Principled Volume nodes, the latter based on Disney’s principled shading model.
Cycles 4D also now supports Crytomatte: Psyop’s popular open-source matte ID generation system.
Other changes include a new IES node for IES lights, and a new Bevel node.
In addition, the node editor has been rewritten for “increased speed and efficiency”, although Insydium doesn’t put a figure on the performance improvement.
But no GPU support on macOS unless you have a Nvidia card
The update also follows Blender’s lead in dropping support for OpenCL on macOS after Apple deprecated the API in macOS 10.14.
That means that Cycles 4D no longer renders natively on the GPU on Macs, unless the machine has a Nvidia card: as well as OpenCL, Cycles 4D supports CUDA, Nvidia’s proprietary GPU computing API.
Pricing and availability
Cycles 4D is available now for Cinema 4D R16 and above, running on Windows 7+ or Mac OSX 10.10+.
Full licences of Cycles 4D cost £185 (around $240), including one year’s support and updates and three render nodes; additional nodes cost £60 ($78). Both prices exclude tax.