Last September, MAXON, the creators of Cinema 4D modeling, animation, painting and rendering software announced a multi-year collaboration with NVIDIA, the originators of GPU-accelerated computing. A month later, they teamed up with chip supplier AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) to incorporate AMD’s Radeon ProRender unbiased path tracing renderer technology, formerly known as AMD FireRender.

As Paul Babb, president and CEO of MAXON of the Americas explained to The Broadcast Bridge, “Our goal is to make sure we integrate with everything that is out there, so to that end we are partnering with both NVIDIA and AMD to be certain our customers will be getting access to the most powerful hardware and software for their 3D graphics production.”

One of the key lures NVIDIA had that tempted MAXON was its Quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) sampling patent family, a wonderfully techno-wonky term that Babb was good enough to untangle for us.

“The ‘quasi’ is because the algorithms are related to Monte Carlo methods,” he said. “QMC are computational algorithms for sampling when calculating global illumination. In more rudimentary terms, it is instrumental for the elimination of the flicker problems that can occur when rendering using GI.”

In addition, this collaboration will mean that Cinema 4D graphic artists and designers will get their talented fingers on NVIDIA’s Iray technology for scalable, intuitive, physically-based rendering for lighting and designing a scene.

With NVIDIA Iray for Cinema 4D graphic specialists can get a whole new visual feedback experience using its unique live rendering feature.

And they will benefit from NVIDIA’s Material Definition Language (MDL), which Babb tells us, “is a programming language for defining physically-based materials for rendering. In layman’s terms, the advantage is a consistent look between all application using the Iray rendering engine. So if you create an MDL material in Cinema 4D and save it to your library, when transferred to any other application that supports MDL (like McNeel North America’s Rhino or Autodesk’s Maya), the materials will maintain their appearance.”