MAXON Computer, a leading developer of professional 3D modeling, painting, animation and rendering solutions, today announced that MAXON CINEMA 4D continues to be the 3D digital content creation software of choice for the broadcast industry’s most widely recognized networks and production facilities. CINEMA 4D’s motion graphics module, MoGraph, is noted by customers as being particularly essential due to its quick workflow, fast rendering and easy export to compositing applications. Entities of note who count CINEMA 4D as a key part of their creative toolkits include : The Weather Channel, MTV, CMT, Comedy Central, TMZ, NBC, FOX, NFL, TRU TV, TNT, TBS, HGTV, Capacity, Cosmocyte, MSNBC, ESPN, HBO, CNN, USA Network, Troika Design Group, National Geographic Channel, Univision, ABC, E!, Telefutura, Third Eye Design Group, Al Jazeera, Red Car, d.inc design, Innovative Show Design (ISD), The Mill, NHK (Japan), NTV (Japan), SAT (Germany), RTL (Germany), Protokulture, Perception, the BBC and more. Overall, customers cite efficiency, cost savings, ease-of-use, and a significant boost in workflow productivity as the primary benefits for adopting CINEMA 4D into production pipelines.

“Broadcast designers are challenged to produce highly complex, technically perfect and over-the-top creative content every day; and they require a reliable, fast and flexible production workflow to meet those expectations,” said Paul Babb, president and CEO, MAXON USA. “The fact that so many broadcast customers have placed CINEMA 4D at the heart of their production pipelines and count on it to help them meet real world motion graphics goals is extremely gratifying and very clearly demonstrates the value that CINEMA 4D can bring to any graphics production environment.”

MAXON broadcast design customers currently finding success with CINEMA 4D, include :

Studio: Capacity

Project: Cartoon Network Rebrand

Capacity is a motion design studio / strategic agency focused on concept, branding, and visual storytelling. For the past five-plus years, the studio has relied on CINEMA 4D as a cornerstone application; using it on a daily basis for nearly all of its 3D work. Most recently Capacity tapped CINEMA 4D to model, rig, texture and animate characters for its multi-faceted and complex rebrand of Cartoon Network. Other Capacity projects of note developed with the help of CINEMA 4D include their award-winning rebrand of NBC, packages for NFL Network, HGTV, CMT and MTV, commercials for Target, VH1 and Honda, and imagery for their short film, Upgrade + Mobilize.

“CINEMA 4D has been our weapon of choice for years. We’re extremely pleased with its performance, stability and seamless integration with other applications and find its interface and workflow to be amazingly intuitive. We also like that it’s a very stable and flexible environment for building, rigging, texturing, and animating characters; capabilities which definitely came in handy during our recent rebrand of Cartoon Network, which is practically all character animation, and for our latest short film, “Upgrade + Mobilize”. We’re also huge fans of Net Render and BodyPaint 3D, and consider both to be key elements in our pipeline.”

– Ellerey Gave, Creative Director

Capacity

Studio: The Mill

Project: Award-Winning Episode of TV’s Doctor Who

The Mill, a world-leading visual effects company based in the U.K., was recently recognized by the Visual Effects Society (VES) with a coveted award for ‘Outstanding Matte Paintings in a Broadcast Program or Commercial’ associated with the Doctor Who episode entitled ‘Silence in the Library’. The centerpiece of The Mill’s award-winning effects, a library the size of an entire planet, was created in CINEMA 4D, MAXON’s 3D modeling, rendering and animation program. This element of the project proved particularly challenging due to its immense size and scale coupled with the limited timeframes available for television production. To meet this challenge and achieve the realism required, The Mill turned to CINEMA 4D and its new Global Illumination (GI) render engine; which made short work of rendering scenes that could contain up to six million polygons; and resulted in the creation of superior, flicker-free animation in a fraction of the usual time.

“The results [achieved with the new GI render engine] were amazing. I could render a 175 frame camera animation at widescreen PAL resolution overnight on a Mac Pro without a trace of GI flicker. Without that, these shots would never have been completed on time…I have used several 3D apps and CINEMA 4D is like the 3D equivalent of just pulling out your sketchpad and pencil and being creative.”

– Simon Wicker, Lead Matte Painter

The Mill

Company: Innovative Show Design (ISD)

Projects: On-Air Commentator Sets for Super Bowl XLIII, Daytona 500 Speed Week, Poker After Dark, NBC’s National Heads-Up Poker Championship and High Stakes Poker

Florida-based ISD is an Emmy Award-winning design firm specializing in scenic and lighting services for television productions, corporate events, and live theater. Recent projects of note have included on-air set design and build-outs for Super Bowl XLIII on NBC, 2009 Speed Week at the Daytona 500, Poker After Dark, NBC’s National Heads-Up Poker Championship and High Stakes Poker. CINEMA 4D, and Xpresso in particular, are used for all of ISD’s previsualization work; enabling the designers to create the most accurate depictions possible of what the final sets will look like-both live and on-air; including color schemes, lighting, video screens, camera sweeps, animations, etc.

“CINEMA 4D always plays a critical role in our set design; most especially when it comes to textures, color and lighting. To configure lighting in particular, we first take a look at the ‘real’ methods a show will use and move forward to build imagery showing lighting that uses the same color temperatures, intensities, directions, etc. Using CINEMA 4D Xpresso, we’re able to show lighting as it would look from the same lighting instrument that will be on the final set using a library of lights controlled in the software; so anything that particular light does in the rendering will be what the light can really do. All of this takes place prior to the actual physical set being manufactured which is an incredible boost to our workflow.”

– Nate Mitchell, Graphics Supervisor

Innovative Show Design

Studio: Perception

Project: Super Bowl XLIII
Perception’s client roster reads like a veritable laundry-list of heavy hitters; including Fortune 500 companies, powerful brands and major networks like ABC, Bravo, SpikeTV, ESPN, Playboy Entertainment, HBO/Cinemax and many others. For the last five years, Perception’s designers, animators, art directors and editors have relied on CINEMA 4D for the bulk of the studio’s 3D work and have implemented it into the workflow in a myriad of ways. Most recently, Perception turned to CINEMA 4D when tasked to create a series of extraordinarily sophisticated promos on behalf of NBC for Super Bowl XLIII with very little lead time; and the additional requirement that each scene of the promo could be adjusted as necessary once the final line-up of teams, announcers, and musical acts had been determined; information that wouldn’t be known until the very last moment.

“The Super Bowl pitch to NBC involved creating an infinite field of confetti appearing to flow freely and at a moments notice swarm together to form personalities, a task usually assigned to a particle system. Because of our tight turnaround, we opted to avoid the sometimes unpredictable process of wrangling free-roaming particles with the more predictable controls of CINEMA 4D’s MoGraph module and its various cloner effectors. The software’s ease-of-use has given us the ability to make miracles happen in the face of laughably tight timeframes; especially during the pitch process. We’re able to blow clients’ minds with original style-frames that have a distinctly ‘epic’ scope to them, while our competition only has time to write a carefully worded paragraph.”

– John LePore, Associate Creative Director

Perception

Studio: Protokulture

Project: Gillette “Gameface” TV Commercial

Protokulture is a Chicago-based design and motion graphics studio geared to creating high-end visuals for the commercial broadcast industry. For the past 8 years, MAXON CINEMA 4D has played a major role in helping Protokulture create memorable campaigns for a spectrum of high profile agencies and national brands, including Leo Burnett, Young and Rubicam, McDonald’s, Gillette, Nokia, Kellogg’s, Pepsi and many others. Most recently, the Protokulture creative team relied on CINEMA 4D to help them create a 30-second TV commercial for Gillette entitled “Gameface”; tapping the MoGraph module to populate an entire football stadium with random crowds in a matter of minutes and using the cloth functionality to create visually dynamic streamers and confetti.

“CINEMA 4D is an essential part of our pipeline. Its efficient scalability and simplistic network rendering allows us to take advantage of our idle machines processing power to create visual complexity using a simple toolset, which is a godsend when working under tight deadlines. Currently, CINEMA 4D is used in every department to create titles, liquids, characters and more; and is so critical to our work that having a solid working knowledge of the software suite is considered mandatory for all designers and animators creating digital content at the studio. The MoGraph module in particular has been invaluable to our creation process and has even replaced helpful plug-ins that we relied on in the past.”

– John Michaels, Creative Director

Protokulture

Studio: Cosmocyte, Inc.

Project: World’s Toughest Fixes; National Geographic TV

Cosmocyte is a high-end 3D scientific and medical animation studio dedicated to creating visual representations that provide impact and increase understanding of any scientific topic. CINEMA 4D has been an essential part of Cosmocyte’s pipeline for years, and is currently used to help Cosmocyte artists deliver on one of the largest single projects they’d ever undertaken: creating 3D graphics for The World’s Toughest Fixes on National Geographic Television. MAXON CINEMA 4D is used exclusively as Cosmocyte’s 3D toolset to animate each “fix”; creating imagery that helps immerse the audience and clarify what is being done. CINEMA 4D modules, including MoGraph and Sketch and Toon, are considered essential for modeling and animating scenes, as well as for developing the blueprint style of the animations.

“All scenes we produce for this series are 3D, and as a result there is no part of the project to which CINEMA 4D hasn’t contributed. Because of its easy-to-use farm rendering, comprehensive multi-pass capability and streamlined integration with Adobe After Effects, CINEMA 4D was the natural choice for producing High Definition broadcast animation where accuracy, beauty and clarity of the final product is essential and the deadlines are written in stone. As a practical company we frequently check to see if there are other software packages that will better suit our production pipeline needs, but always conclude that CINEMA 4D equips us with everything we need to produce solid animations of the highly technical and detailed nature that are Cosmocyte’s specialty. We always look forward to the next release of the software and will undoubtedly be CINEMA 4D users for life.”

– Cameron Slayden, M.S., CEO

Cosmocyte, Inc.

About CINEMA 4D

CINEMA 4D is a robust 3D animation software application. Its core application contains everything needed to quickly and easily create high-end 3D images and animations. Additional modules provide added functionality and customization to suit a wide array of industries. Modules can be purchased individually or in bundles. CINEMA 4D renders scene files directly to popular editing and compositing applications including After Effects, Final Cut, Shake, Combustion, etc., and is completely cross-platform for Windows and Mac.