Press Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
  US: Diana Lee  
  UK: Perry Stacy  
  JAPAN: Toshihide Miyata  
  Germany and all other countries:  Joachim Heller  

LET'S GET PHYSICAL

MAXON announces DYNAMICS plugin for CINEMA 4D XL

MAXON Computer, August 14, 2001 - New Fully Integrated Module Allows CINEMA 4D XL Users to Simulate Real-World Dynamic Forces

MAXON Computer, developer of multi-award winning 3D solutions, is pleased to announce CINEMA 4D Dynamics - a fully integrated physics module for CINEMA 4D XL. CINEMA 4D Dynamics is breakthrough technology for recreating natural forces to achieve startlingly realistic visual effects. This exciting new plugin allows CINEMA 4D XL users to easily simulate real-world dynamic forces including friction, gravity, collisions, springs, wind and more. MAXON will be presenting the first ever demos of the product in their booth (#1430) at SIGGRAPH, August 14-16 at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

MAXON Computer has earned a reputation for making the industry's most advanced 3D production tools more affordable, faster, more stable, and easier to use. CINEMA 4D Dynamics, the newest addition to their arsenal of award-winning tools proves that true. The plugin's rich feature set offers a high degree of control - dynamics are applied to existing objects or the points of an object as a modifiers. Solver objects complete the calculation and make the interaction more responsive in the editor. In addition, baking can be used to bring dynamics projects over to machines that don't have the plugin but need to render it (such as NET clients).

CINEMA 4D Dynamics is slated for a September 2001 release and will retail for only $495.


General Features

- Preview the dynamic behavior of your scene in real-time.
- Fully integrated in CINEMA 4D XL R7.
- Flexible 'baking' methods for real-time forward and backward playback, as well as keyframed export to rendering nodes.
- HyperNURBs offers smoothing of coarse meshes for faster previews in the editor.

Rigid Body Dynamics
- Generate natural forces like gravity and wind.
- Static and dynamic friction ensure realistic behavior.
- Fast, robust collision detection and reaction.
- Display proxies can be used to simplify the geometry used in simulation.
- Collision detection settings on a per-object basis, from bounding box, bounding sphere, or actual geometry
- Keyframed objects can interact with dynamically controlled objects.
- Select from multiple ODE solvers (Midpoint, Runge-Kutta, Adaptive)

Soft Body Dynamics
- Create soft bodies from any mesh
- Any polygon object can be identified as soft with full control over its mass, friction and deformation properties. Selected vertices may be tagged as non-soft.
- Stiffness, damping and friction parameters for fine-tuning the soft body behavior.
- Easy generation of secondary motion with soft bodies.
- Two core methods for simulating soft objects; SBD modifiers and FFD modifiers.
- Soft Body Dynamics' modifiers work directly on the objectÕs geometry with full polygon accurate collision detection.
- FFD modifiers use bounding soft cubes which act as modifiers using mesh deformation techniques.
- Ropes and Chains: any spline can behave like rope to create effects such as hair, ribbon or tassels etc.

Springs
- Complex spring system with stiffness, damping, plastic (more then 40 individual parameters per spring)
- Angular springs.
- Springs can even break under stress.
- Visual tools for drawing, selecting and deleting springs.
- Visual manager for organizing springs.

Constraints and Keyframe Systems
- Mix any keyframed object with simulated objects for physically realistic and controllable effects.
- Constrain cloth, soft bodies or rope to other simulated bodies or keyframed objects.
- Objects in the system can be attached to one another, to fixed points or even follow paths in space.
- Connect objects via springs, with full control over the springÕs rest length, compression / extension and damping.
- A motor with arbitrary rotation can be attached to an object, allowing the creation of automated machinery.

Cloth Simulations
- Create cloth from any mesh
- Choose stiffness and damping parameters to simulate anything from wool to plastic.
- Wind can be applied with control over speed, magnitude, and variance as well as specific ripple parameters. Cloth fully interacts with wind dynamics including cloth air impact, drag and lift resistance for floating effects.
- Access the individual settings of each spring of a cloth object or edit as a complete set.
- Unlimited number of cloth layers for organizing seams, pockets, etc.
- Control the mass of object points with vertex maps and restriction tags.
- Visual manager for organizing spring sets (layers) and changing them easily.
- Physically correct interaction with all other Dynamics objects in the environment.
- Complete self-intersection avoidance.
- Cloth object can be applied to arbitrary geometry, or even a subset of faces using the vertex selection methods.
- Full control over common cloth parameters to control stretchiness, bend flexibility, shear flexibility, cloth motion damping, friction, mass and density.
- Cloth may be attached via constraints to any object in the scene.


(click one of the images above to view quicktime animation)