Maxon has announced a comprehensive, multi-year technical collaboration with Nvidia that will extend Cinema 4D's rendering reach beyond the new Iray for Cinema 4D plug-in, which Nvidia released at NAB 2016. Through the deal, Maxon will also have collaborative access to Nvidia’s Quasi-Monte Carlo rendering with adaptive sampling patent family and its Material Definition Language (MDL), which lets artists share physically based materials and lights between supporting applications.
Iray’s interactive, GPU-driven physically based rendering — photoreal shading technology that treats light the way it behaves in the real world — gives C4D artists instant visual lighting and shading feedback during the look-development cycle. It also lets them combine C4D’s material nodes and shaders or, through MDL, their own designed materials and procedural functions. Using Iray for C4D's Live Render window, users preview results while editing light parameters and position and adjusting a scene.
Although the full R&D roadmap for the two companies has not been made public, Maxon says a future version of Cinema 4D will let users download and purchase the NVIDIA Iray plug-in directly from within C4D.
