The Value of User Feedback in Maxon’s Product Development How direct collaboration inspires our products and drives innovation.

At Maxon, our mission is simple: Make superior tools for artists that empower them to create without limits. But great tools are never truly finished — they need to evolve. And the most valuable drivers of that evolution are the artists, studios, and creatives who use our products every day.

While we regularly gather feedback through interviews, beta testing, and community forums, nothing quite compares to seeing our tools in action within real-life production environments. That’s why we sent a small team — a product manager and our lead developer — to spend a full week at Fuchs & Vogel, a Munich-based animation studio known for its high standards and exceptional work in animation, visualization, and VR. If you would like to learn more about their work, check out the arch-viz project they did for a real estate company. Additionally, users of Cinema 4D might be familiar with the starter scenes for visualization projects or the countless material packs that Fuchs & Vogel produce for the Maxon community.  

Our objective was straightforward but crucial: We wanted to gain first-hand insights into the studio’s production processes and challenges to get a grasp of their workflow and identify any pain points or roadblocks. Second, we wanted to address as many technical issues on site as possible and directly validate our solutions with the customer.

Fuchs & Vogel are experts who use our tools every day and maintain rigorous creative and technical standards. That’s what makes their production know-how from working on industry-leading projects for high-profile clients such as BMW, Lego, and Samsung incredibly valuable.

Collaborating with them offers us a clear view of how Cinema 4D, Redshift, and other Maxon tools perform in demanding scenarios — and where they can be improved.

This hands-on approach allows us to see exactly how our software interacts with complex workflows, identify bottlenecks, and refine features in context.

Production realities often reveal the subtle but impactful issues that might not surface in beta testing. A small usability hiccup can ripple through an entire workflow, causing frustration or even sidelining otherwise powerful features. What might seem minor to a developer can be major to a production artist working under tight deadlines. Some issues are also just hard to describe and document in a bug report ticket. That’s why directly communicating with users on-site is so valuable to us.

Another benefit of being on-site is speed. Instead of making a fix and waiting for the next release cycle to see if the problem is truly solved, our engineers can iterate multiple times in a single day, with immediate feedback from the people who matter most — the users.

During the week at Fuchs & Vogel, our team was able to resolve a significant number of bugs and improve workflows in areas such as the Cinema 4D Take System, MoGraph, and Redshift. The refinements from this collaboration will be included in our upcoming release, bringing benefits to every Cinema 4D user worldwide. 

User feedback is at the heart of our development process because our users know best what their needs are. By listening closely and embedding ourselves in production environments, we’re able to: 

• Deliver efficient tools that keep up with modern workflows.

• Ensure that great features are easy to adopt and truly enhance productivity.

• Reduce friction so artists can focus on their vision, not their software. 

This visit to Fuchs & Vogel is just one example of how Maxon’s product and engineering teams work closely with creatives to shape the future of our tools. Whether it’s through site visits, beta builds, or user interviews, these collaborations give us direct insight into how our software is used — and how it can be made better.

In the end, great software is the result of a partnership between its creators and its users. We’re grateful to studios like Fuchs & Vogel for opening their doors, sharing their processes, and helping us make our products better serve the entire creative community.