Cineware makes Cinema 4D part of the upcoming after effects

Maxon and Adobe hits hard with the release of this new effect : Cineware. A name that doesn't ring many bells for the moment, although, I'm pretty sure that soon enough you won't be able to live without it. It makes it possible to open, edit and render .c4d files directly within the upcoming version of After Effects.

Cineware for After Effects presentation

This new Cineware effect allows you to import a .c4d file directly within After Effects, without requiring any intermediate render process, Think of it as a more powerful kind of  Dynamic Link (just like actually with Premiere Pro), between After Effects and Cinema 4D. Need to change a texture? Update your file in Cinema 4D, and upon saving it, your composition will update automatically.

You can extract data included in .c4d files towards After Effects. In a single click, you can, not only, transfer your cameras, lights and layers that have an external compositing tag, but also make this work the other way around : for instance, import an After Effects camera towards cinema 4D (much convenient for 3D tracking).

At last, you'll be able to take advantage of multi-passes settings, to dynamically create independent layers in After Effects, each one including the desired pass (Shadows, Reflections, Ambient Occlusion, ect...) You can even transfer track mattes that were defined in the .c4d project. 

The great advantage if you compare that to the actual workflow (which consists of rendering each passes and importing them as .aec format) is that every modifications you apply  in C4D will automatically be taken into account by After Effects. That means : intermediate render time is over.

What artists think of it

This new way of working will translate to important time saving, and make it even easier to integrate 3D animations within motion design projects. This video right here shows different artists and their opinion on this new integration system. 

Some examples

Right beneath, different renders produced with Cineware in After Effects, presented by Maxon:

Personally, that's something I was dreaming about, I think this new way of integration is totally awesome. I have only one thing to say, monitor your Creative Cloud updates, because these new features will be available as soon as they are ready, even before CS7 comes out. Many thanks to the Maxon and Adobe team who definitely made a good choice shaking hands and agreeing to this new partnership.