Maxon Announces Cinema 4D R21, Overhauled Version And Pricing Structure

SIGGRAPH is like a treasure trove for ProViz announcements. In fact, if you use a piece of design software that’s overdue for an update, chances are an announcement will happen at SIGGRAPH. We’ve already talked about NVIDIA RTX support coming to both Blender and KeyShot, NVIDIA’s enabling of 30-bit color support in OpenGL applications for modern GeForce and TITAN, and also AMD’s latest Radeon ProRender adventures. Next up? None other than Cinema 4D developer Maxon, with some rather major updates.

Maxon has long offered four editions of Cinema 4D, with three targeting different segments of the market, and a big Studio version encompassing it all. Like all tiered software, needs and budgets have ultimately dictated which version you’d wind up with. With R21, however, users will no longer have to think about the version they’re using, because every C4D user will have the access to the exact same feature set.

Cinema 4D becomes the latest design suite to go the subscription route, but will still offer a Studio-equivalent perpetual release for those who want it. In the end, most users are going to start saving money by moving to a subscription, and if you recently purchased a Maxon Service Agreement, it should upgrade you to a perpetual license of R21 as soon as it’s released.

“Rainbow Bridge” – Cinema 4D + ProRender Scene (Credit: Yan Ge)

Here’s the official pricing for R21 (in USD):

• Annual (C4D, Cineversity, Team Render): $59.99/mo
• Annual (C4D, Cineversity, Team Render, Redshift): $81.99/mo
• Monthly (C4D, Cineversity, Team Render): $94.99/mo
• Monthly (C4D, Cineversity, Team Render, Redshift): $116.99/mo
• Perpetual (C4D, Team Render): $3,495

We can already see that Maxon’s acquisition of Redshift has resulted in some immediate changes, with a perk of a discount being offered to those who subscribe to C4D. Fortunately, along with this new license structure is a new global online shop, as well as an online portal for customers to manage their licenses.

Oh, right… there’s more to R21 than licenses, isn’t there?

Some key features of R21 include a new caps and bevels system that gives you far greater control over your final look, and allows you create 3D text that can be easily manipulated to pop out on the screen. For greater flexibility over dynamic forces, a new Field Forces option has been added to the MoGraph toolset, while rigging improvements for animation come by way of added Mixamo support.

Credit: Marjin Raeven

Performance was clearly a topic Maxon focused on a lot with the development of R21, since both rendering and usage performance is said to have been improved. On the rendering side, AI denoising has been brought in thanks to Intel’s Open Image denoiser library. For design, the performance while working with heavier projects should be noticeably better. Because only one version of C4D will exist after R21, users can expect to see some UI changes, but the core easy-to-use nature of the software will not be changing.

You can head on over to the full R21 features page for a deep-dive look at all that’s coming with the update. Maxon says the new version is expected to launch in early September. We’ll integrate it into our benchmarking suites soon after.