[Originally posted on 09/28/18 by Rob Jamieson]
Few people push MAXON Cinema 4D™ harder than Günter Nikodim. Over the past five years, the freelance CG artist has worked on a series of ambitious visual effects sequences for Austrian movies and TV series, ranging from simulating floods and landslides to recreating the city of Vienna in 3D.
“Cinema 4D is the perfect tool for smaller businesses,” says Nikodim. “In most jobs, my highest priority is to deliver things quickly. Cinema 4D has a very streamlined workflow, and good connections to compositing software like Nuke.”
That makes Cinema 4D ideal for Cybertime, the boutique VFX house with which Nikodim often works. For 2016 TV mini-series Das Sacher: In Bester Gesellschaft, set around Vienna’s famous Hotel Sacher, Nikodim and four other artists turned around 200 VFX shots in two months, including a full CG sequence showing the city of Vienna in the background (see the title image): again, created entirely in Cinema 4D.
Created by Günter Nikodim using Radeon ProRender for Cinema R20
Recently, Nikodim has been pushing the stability of AMD Radeon™ ProRender, AMD’s physically correct GPU renderer, to its limits. In his work as a beta tester, he has been trialing the new Radeon ProRender features in Cinema 4D R20 on his own personal test scene: a production-quality model of a T-Rex dinosaur. Again, the asset was modeled, painted, rigged and animated entirely in Cinema 4D: Nikodim originally created it to test the sculpting tools in Cinema 4D R14 and has been updating it steadily ever since.
Created by Günter Nikodim to demonstrate the new Subsurface Scattering shader inRadeon ProRender for Cinema 4D R20
“The beauty of a GPU renderer like Radeon ProRender is that you have beautiful lighting immediately,” he says. “I could just change the HDRI file to experiment with how the model would look in different environments. You get a first impression extremely quickly.”
MAXON Cinema 4D R20 is available now, and you can learn more at the links below.
Learn more about Cinema 4D R20 ProRender
Learn more about AMD and Cinema 4D
Learn more about AMD Radeon ProRender
Title image created by Günter Nikodim using MAXON Cinema 4D™
