Maxon has unveiled Project: Neutron, a new node-based architecture for Cinema 4D, promising to enable users to do anything from procedural modelling to motion graphics via a visual programming workflow.
Create anything from models to motion graphics by wiring nodes together
Described by Maxon CEO David McGavran as the “future of Cinema 4D”, Project: Neutron is an ongoing project to implement a node-based core architecture for the software.
It forms part of a series of updates to Cinema 4D’s core, which also resulted in the node-based material system introduced in Cinema 4D R20.
Project: Neutron takes the same visual programming paradigm – author complex systems by wiring nodes together – and extends it to a much wider range of tasks.
The livestream showed a range of potential use cases, including creating a motion graphics effect consisting of an array of animated spheres and scattering a forest of procedural trees across a landscape.
It can even be used for procedural modelling: one demo showed it in use to create the scales on a 3D fish.
In a tweet, motion designer and Cinema 4D trainer EJ Hassenfratz described the system as “Houdini4D?”, in reference to the similar node-based workfoows available in SideFX’s procedural 3D software.
‘Blazingly fast’ – but completely optional
McGavran described the Neutron Engine as “blazingly fast”, commenting that Maxon was testing it with scenes containing multiple millions of objects.
However, Project: Neutron will “enable node-based workflows, not enforce them” with an implementation similar to the Cinema 4D Object Manager, which creates nodes invisibly in the background of a scene.
“If you’re not interested in digging into nodes, you’re not going to have to,” said Paul Babb, Maxon’s global head of community. “You’re going to have the same playful creative workflow [as before].
Project: Neutron will be available as a preview in the next version of Cinema 4D, although it isn’t clear how much you will be able to do with it: Maxon says the the first release won’t provide an “end-to-end workflow”.
The toolset will be fleshed out over subsequent releases.
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