BAD HAMBURG, Germany—Maxon, a maker of 2D and 3D design and motion graphics software, has tapped Steve Forde as chief product officer.

Forde will lead Maxon’s global product organization, working closely with Chief Technology and AI Officer Philip Losch to drive product strategy, execution and long-term innovation, Maxon said.

Forde has held senior leadership roles at such companies as Adobe and Amazon, where he led product, engineering and design teams for such large-scale platforms as Adobe After Effects and Prime Video, Maxon said. Earlier in his career, he founded and led two successful startups, including Gridiron Software, where he oversaw the development of Adobe After Effects plug-ins, where he first worked closely with the Maxson team, the company said.

“What drew me to Maxon was the convergence of people, technology and a fundamental shift in how creative content is made,” Forde said. “The proliferation of games, advertising and social media is driving 3D from niche skill set to mainstream job requirement. With the right combination of product innovation and intelligent workflows, it can become accessible to an even broader audience. Maxon is uniquely positioned to lead that transformation, not just by building powerful tools, but by delivering experiences that scale with creators as their needs evolve. I didn’t want to sit on the sidelines while it happens.”

As Maxon’s CPO, Forde will focus on establishing a clear, long-term product vision while scaling its product organization to support global teams, increasingly complex customer needs and sustained enterprise growth, ensuring teams can deliver cohesive, high-quality experiences without losing the creative spirit that has defined the company, it said.

“Steve brings a deep understanding of both where Maxon comes from and where the market is heading,” Maxon CEO David McGavran said. “His ability to connect long-term vision with practical execution makes him an ideal partner as we continue to grow. This appointment strengthens our leadership team and positions Maxon to lead the industry through the next phase of creative evolution.”

A key component of Forde’s mandate is to guide the integration of emerging technologies into Maxon’s products in ways that respect artistic craft and amplify human creativity, the company said. He’ll focus on using technology to remove friction and expand possibilities, the company said, allowing artists to spend more time creating and less time navigating complexity.

Maxon’s products include the Maxon One ecosystem, a comprehensive suite of solutions.

BAD HOMBURG, Germany—Maxon has released an update of its Maxon One Toolset, including new features, enhanced performance and various fixes.

The company has updated Cinema 4D to enable pairing with Redshift development and has added important improvements and compatibility updates to Red Giant tools. All updates are available immediately to subscribers of individual tools and Maxon One.

Cinema 4D 26.1 includes an enhanced Node UI and improvements to Simulation, Fields and Volume Modeling. It also offers several fixes and workflow enhancements. Maxon’s “Redshift Everywhere” initiative brings performance improvements for CPU, along with enhancements to Redshift RT and Volume Rendering. Red Giant includes new Trapcode features and improved compatibility with Apple silicon and AMD GPUs as well as several host applications. Other updates address general stability improvements and bug fixes, the company said.

Cinema 4D 26.1 introduces new features, including a curvature option for fields and smooth bevels in Volume Modeling. The Node UI in Cinema 4D 26.1 offers a major upgrade in appearance and interaction, making it easy to create and explore Redshift materials and Node Capsules.

Usability enhancements include the ability to organize graphs for better readability and easy addition of nodes in an existing network. It’s now possible to explore and edit existing Capsules directly from the Object Manager with the new “Edit Asset as Group” command. With Maxon delivering powerful Node Capsules on a regular basis, users can now learn from the work of others or easily tweak capsules to match your needs. 

The Capsules library adds valuable assets for photorealistic rendering, including Surface Imperfections, HDRIs and Redshift Materials. A pack of high-end Redshift ArchViz Materials created by design Studio Fuchs und Vogel has been added to the Maxon Capsules collection, it said.

A set of 12 interior and exterior HDR images from Jorgen HDRI are available for all subscribers to create realistic lighting and reflections, it said.

Recent updates to Redshift include bokeh depth-of-field in Redshift RT and blackbody temperature controls for volume shading. When rendering using the CPU, Redshift artists can now benefit from improved performance. With the addition of Round Corners, they can now access full feature-compatibility with the GPU, it said.

Red Giant Trapcode Suite 18.1 includes time-based mapping to complete the Layer Maps feature-set in Particular. Additionally, the Grow Bounds utility now runs natively on M1 machines, and this service pack includes several bug fixes for Particular, it said.

More information is available on the company’s website.

FRIEDRICHSDORF, Germany—OTOY and Maxon today announced GPU-accelerated 3D rendering software Redshift will come to the Render Network in the first half of 2022, giving Redshift users a way to scale GPU rendering jobs to millions of distributed GPUs on the network.

The Render Network is a blockchain, peer-to-peer GPU rendering network and 3D marketplace. The integration of Redshift allows the platform to support a longer list of production workflows, including motion graphics and VFX, gaming, design and scientific visualization. 

OTOY and Maxon will develop a native integration of Cinema 4D on the Render Network, bypassing the need for scene conversion and the export process, the companies said.

With Redshift on the Render Network, users will be able to move without friction between render engines, providing a toolchain-agnostic platform for scaling GPU rendering tasks across millions of decentralized GPUs. Its usage-based licensing options for cloud GPU rendering workflows will empower Redshift artists to scale GPU rendering tasks on-demand without the need to pay large upfront licensing costs, they said.

“Cinema 4D on the Render Network will dramatically accelerate artist workflows,” said Maxon CEO David McGavran. “It will enable our community to leverage the scale and efficiency of millions of decentralized GPUs in the cloud without the barriers of cumbersome scene conversion and exporting.”

The integration of Cinema 4D, Redshift and the Render Network represents “a significant milestone” in OTOY’s mission to “democratize high-end 3D content creation,” said OTOY CEO and founder Jules Urbach. 

“Artists can now create boundary pushing motion graphics, visual effects and cryptoart, frictionlessly mixing and matching rendering pipelines while leveraging the unprecedented scale of millions of decentralized GPUs,” said Urbach.

Redshift support on the Render Network will be available via render.x.io.

More information is available from Maxon and OTOY. 

FRIEDRICHSDORF, Germany—Maxon has announced that the latest release of Adobe After Effects includes an updated version of Cinema 4D Lite. Based on Maxon’s Cinema 4D Release S24, the software is available immediately for download to Adobe Creative Cloud members.

This latest update symbolizes the ongoing collaboration between Maxon and Adobe to deliver improved integration and performance between Maxon’s powerful 3D application, Cinema 4D, and Adobe After Effects, motion graphics and visual effects software. 

Along with compatibility and workflow enhancements, this latest version includes the Asset Browser that features ready-to-use and animate 3D models, materials and other assets, Maxon said.  

A library of assets has been specifically curated and made available to Cinema 4D Lite users. Assets are organized with rich metadata and keywords and are downloaded and cached locally on demand.

Artists can use Cinema 4D Lite to create and import 3D content into their After Effects projects. Cinema 4D content can be added to After Effects projects just like footage, and artists can extract scene data, like cameras, 3D objects, object masks, etc., that can be manipulated inside of After Effects, the companies said.

Cinema 4D Lite can be launched within After Effects and independently as a standalone application. 

FRIEDRICHSDORF, Germany—Maxon has announced Cinema 4D was used to support the creation of several fantasy user interfaces (FUI) on the hit Disney+ series, “WandaVision,” a part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). 

For the production, 3D motion design artist Robyn Haddow was tasked with bringing the fantasy technology to life for viewers. A FUI expert with a superhero resume, Haddow’s portfolio includes television series such as “The Flash,” “Arrow” and “Legends of Tomorrow,” as well as such feature films as “The Suicide Squad,” “Black Widow,” “Ant-Man and the Wasp,” “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2,” “Spider-Man Homecoming” and many more.

For WandaVision, Haddow worked with Los Angeles design and visual effects studio Cantina Creative for the concept and execution of several plot-critical pieces of fantasy technology: specifically, technology used by the ominous organization S.W.O.R.D. (Sentient World Observation and Response Department). 

“WandaVision” is set chronologically after the havoc and tragedy that occurred during “Avengers: Endgame.” So the tech seen in “WandaVision” needed to reflect the cinematic universe’s rebirth. This meant looking to past MCU films to draw inspiration for this next phase, as well as to maintain continuity by including elements relevant to the fictional world.

When it came to developing the technology seen in the S.W.O.R.D. headquarters, Haddow wanted to make sure it showed off the unique combination of human and alien technology that was available to the characters. 

“The tech was all based on a mashup of Kree (alien), Skrull (alien), and human militaristic-style graphics,” Haddow explained. “Under the creative direction of Stephen Lawes, co-owner at Cantina Creative, part of the design was to draw influence within the context of the whole Marvel Cinematic Universe to include callbacks to different technologies seen in other Marvel works without being overly intrusive or irrelevant.” 

The technology used in the S.W.O.R.D. headquarters included a multitude of interfaces, the centerpiece of which was the multi-purpose light table the organization used to visualize data pulled from the town of Westview. 

“The main technological challenge was this three-layered glass table that during the concept phase, had a hologram on the top that was the centerpiece of the S.W.O.R.D. command center,” Haddow says. “Glass has such unique properties and we were working with three stacked layers, we had to be sure that our design would clearly give prominence to key data points that were important to the plot while displaying other, less plot-critical information simultaneously.” 

With Cinema 4D, Haddow was able to craft a visual that illustrates complex fantasy tech, built in a production-ready manner as well as being flexible for art direction optioning along the way. 

“The shape of Westview is a hexagon as it’s displayed on the table so I used the tiles inside of the procedural noise system to create hexagonal textures and then layered them at different scales to create a sense of depth and complexity. Getting creative with shader layer masks allowed me to pull important details and give them emphasis based on the plot for viewers.” 

Haddow added that “what’s great about Cinema 4D is that it’s easy to hash out ideas quickly to figure out what works and doesn't work in a given scenario. Additionally, the ease with which it speaks to After Effects is hugely beneficial; I was able to easily pull specific 3D null data to place 2D and 3D assets directly on the timeline, which is important when calling out tracking beacons and location markers. The result is a host of dynamic assets that tie back to the whole Marvel Cinematic Universe.”

Maxon’s Spot Clone Tracker software tool is an integral part of its Red Giant product line. Created for easily removing objects and/or blemishes by cloning the color, light and texture while tracking the moving shot, software such as this is necessary in filmmaking. Although a very overly simplified description, Spot Clone Tracker does exactly what the name implies in a few, simple steps. 

FEATURES 

If you’re anything like me, after every shoot you notice things in the frame that really shouldn’t be there. It could have been an oversight or something that couldn’t be avoided during production that must be corrected in post. Enter Maxon’s Red Giant product line, one of the premiere software packages that allows users to enhance the recorded image. Having used many of their tools in the past, I will just focus on the Spot Clone Tracker.

Spot Clone Tracker lets you select an item, whether it’s a marker on a green screen background, a flaw or blemish on someone’s skin or an object you would rather not be visible in the frame. Then, through the software, remove the offending item as the person or object moves. An oversimplification? Not really, it is that easy to select the wrong element, set up your color-coded circles (one for the object to remove and the other to act as a clone tool), choose forward or backward tracking—and let the software do the work.

While in a program like Adobe After Effects, select RG VFX under Effects and Presets and drag Spot Clone Tracker onto your Timeline.

There are numerous menu selections to cater to your specific application such as: Wireframes and Tracking Preview, or just Wireframes Only if you need faster tracking in Overlay. You then can select the spot’s center, size, rotation and shape. With the offending “spot” itself, you can choose Position; Position & Scale; or Position, Scale & Rotation. The method of correction may be: Repair, Clone, Texture Repair, Texture Clone, Fill and Custom. Here you can set keyframes for things like: Match Spot Color, Texture and Spot Opacity.

Position the orange circle over the item to be removed and move the blue circle over the area from which to clone. The final step is to activate the tracking. Essentially, this is what the software does without you tediously moving frame by frame and erasing the object.

IN USE

I had two specific issues with two of my film projects that required Maxon’s Spot Clone Tracker. The first instance was a wireless lavalier microphone that needed to be removed from an actor as he walked toward the camera. The other problem was a nose piercing that needed to disappear. Each could not have been avoided during the production process and had to be corrected in post.

In my 12K comedy, “Cats and Mouse,” the actors are having a heated discussion while walking toward the camera. We initially shot the scene in a MCU with the camera operator hand holding the camera and walking backwards, allowing the audio to be recorded by an overhead boom. Upon playback, the shot was too shaky to be usable. With a wireless lavalier microphone clipped to the actor’s collar, we were able to utilize a tripod and a telephoto lens. The microphone was positioned directly behind the actor’s head, but on certain movements the windscreen became visible.

The windscreen was too prevalent in the frame, looking like a small growth on the actor’s collar. The Wireframe Worm feature in Adobe After Effects (used for removing wires in films) was too broad and I couldn’t make the selection small enough. With Spot Clone Tracker, I put the orange circle over the microphone’s windscreen and the blue circle over the wooded area behind him. Setting the screen size in After Effects to 200%, I had to use the small white dots in the orange circle to shrink it to cover the windscreen without touching the back lapel of his sport jacket. This took a little finessing not to clone too much or a portion of his sport jacket would disappear.

Luckily, having shot with a telephoto lens, the background was a blurry mass of foliage. Extending the blue circle to one of the blurred leaves immediately gave me the desired result. Keeping the Overlay on Wireframes and Tracking Preview and selecting the backwards arrow, the shot tracked as I watched the path. Because of the closeness to his sport jacket, I had to make the orange circle extremely small and by the third attempt it looked great. The end result is visible in the image below. If the object to be removed had been a stationary microphone or a light stand, I would have used Wireframes Only and had the object removed very quickly. 

The second instance from the film “Blending” involved an android from the distant future who arrives in the present day to change the path of history. Since androids from the future don’t have nose studs, hers had to be removed. 

Because the spot on her nose was so tiny, the orange circle above her nostril was so miniscule, I had to enlarge the image to 300%. The blue portion of the tracker was placed on her cheek very close to her nose to avoid any possible deviation in skin tone. Using the faster tracking method (Wireframes Only), it took several attempts to remove the diamond stud without the clone portion being too obvious. I admit, this was really putting Spot Clone Tracker to the test because of the object’s size. I believe a larger object would have been much easier to remove successfully on my first attempt. Softening the end result with a slight blur made the stud nearly invisible.

SUMMARY

I don’t remember when I’ve used an easier software tool. Just about any object may be “erased” and tracked just by putting the orange end on the item to be removed and the blue end over the area where you’ll be gathering your cloning background. The tutorial on Red Giant’s website is brief but explains several instances of how to remove and clone and is worth watching. 

APPLICATION

Anytime you want something removed from your shot, I can’t think of a more user-friendly software. 

Chuck Gloman is an associate professor of the TV/Film Department at DeSales University. He may be reached chuck.gloman@desales.edu. 

PORTLAND, Ore. & FRIEDRICHSDORF, Germany—Maxon, which develops 3D software solutions, and Red Giant, a designer of tools for editors, VFX artists and motion designers, have come to terms on a merger, with the combined company falling under the media and entertainment division of Nemetschek Group.

The two companies have been providers of equipment and technologies to a wide range of production houses, and as a single entity will aim to serve the post-production and content creation industries.

“This merger is a major milestone, not only for Maxon and Red Giant but also for the design industry as a whole,” said David McGavran, CEO of Maxon. “Our combined technology and knowhow have the potential to progressively reshape the content creation landscape for years to come.”

“The combination of our companies is an exceptional fit of people, culture and technology,” said Chad Bechert, CEO of Red Giant. “We look forward to working together under a shared vision of how to design powerful and approachable software to serve creative artists around the world.”

The merger is expected to be completed in January 2020, subject to regulatory approval and other customary closing conditions.

LAS VEGAS—Maxon announced its acquisition of Redshift Rendering Technologies during an NAB Show press conference on Monday. Financial details of the deal, which closed April 5, were not available.

David McGavran, who was appointed Maxon CEO last summer, said that when he began looking to acquire GPU technology for the company’s Cinema 4D modeling, animation and rendering software, he found RedShift to be “a natural fit.”

“I think both sides felt these two companies fit so well together that it was obviously a case of better together than apart,” he said.

The two companies are “a great cultural match,” said Redshift CEO Nicolas Burtnyk. The acquisition allows Redshift—which he said is made up of engineers, not sales or marketing people—“to leverage the infrastructure of Maxon.”

Redshift will continue its development of Redshift 3.0, with a targeted soft launch in May, and accelerate work on RedShift RT, a new GPU-accelerated renderer promising millisecond-per-frame rendering speeds that leverages game rendering technologies for more traditional pipelines.

“I think in the next year the plug-in for Cinema from Redshift will get better and better. We are working closely together on that,” added McGavran.

No changes are planned for the workforces of either company, he said

LAS VEGAS—Monday’s MAXON press conference, which doubled as a luncheon at the Renaissance Hotel, was the first opportunity for NAB Show attendees to see Release 18 of MAXON’s Cinema 4D 3D animation, graphics, VFX and rendering software. Release 18, announced last year, offers tools tailored to the needs of creative professionals to help master the challenges of digital production for television, film, games, advertising and design.

From left, Lorcan O’Shanahan, Jayse Hansen, John LePore and Robyn Haddow

At the briefing, MAXON President Paul Babb was joined by 3D artists John LePore, Russ Gautier, Robyn Haddow and Lorcan O’Shanahan to showcase fictional user interface, graphical user interface and heads-up display motion graphics and 3D content for film, television and real-world digital interfaces.

The artists participated in a lively discussion of the art of designing UIs of the kind seen in Marvel movies, as when Tony Stark designed his Iron Man suit by manipulating holographic icons in mid-air. Additionally, they discussed the trends they were seeing using Cinema 4D for motion graphics in these kinds of environments.

Copyright NAB 2017 

FRIEDRICHSDORF, GERMANY—The latest version of Maxon’s 3D animation, graphics, VFX and visualization and rendering software system has been unveiled, the Cinema 4D Release 18. The company will preview the Cinema 4D R18 at Siggraph 2016 in Anaheim, Calif.

Among the new features for the R18 is the Voronoi Fracture Obejct, a native feature in the MoGraph toolset that works with Dynamics and allows users to create procedural geometry using spline or polygon objects to define fractured shapes. The system also has the Interactive Knife Tools that enables users to draw lines across the model and offers an interactive preview. Additional features include Object Motion Tracking, Shaders and Surface Effects, and Substance Engine Integration.

Maxon is planning to begin shipping the Cinema 4D R18 in September and will be available for Mac OS X and Windows; Linux nodes for rendering.

LAS VEGAS—Maxon will highlight the new features and tools of its Cinema 4D Release 17 (R17) 3D software at the 2016 NAB Show. Designed to streamline the 3D visual effects and motion graphics and design workflow, R17 includes new Lens Distortion tools for improved motion tracking.

Cinema 4D Release 17

R17 also features a new Take System that provides complete and flexible scene handling to manage render layers and animation variations, as well as reworked Spline Tools for manipulating points, lines, tangents, arcs, and more.

For creating compelling virtual reality content, Maxon will also showcase CV-VR Cam, a new Cinema 4D plugin for rendering VR content, and a companion tutorial series that helps CG artists learn the technical aspects of creating pre-rendered or interactive VR video content.

The 2016 NAB Show takes place in Las Vegas, April 18-21. Maxon will be in booth SL9110. For more information, visit www.nabshow.com