Students and educators have the same Maxon One 14-day free trial as anyone, but are also entitled to a heavily discounted license of Cinema 4D as part of the Maxon One for Students, Faculty and Schools package.

The Maxon One license applies to all Maxon products including ZBrush and Redshift, its powerful 3D rendering software. For students and educators, the license suite costs just $9.99 for 6 months. Verification takes place through Kivuto’s On the Hub platform, where you can find your educational institution and, if eligible, purchase the discounted Maxon One suite.

Getting Maxon One and Cinema 4D with a Student & Teacher license is easy, just follow these steps:

1. Go to the Maxon Educational Licensing page.
2. Click on “Get started at Kivuto”.
3. Hit “Add to Cart” for the Maxon One 6-Month Subscription Promo Code.
4. Log in to your Kivuto account or register. Be sure to use your institutional email address!
5. Once you have registered, your account will be pending verification. This should only take a few moments but can take up to a few days.
6. Once confirmed, a verification email will be sent to your provided email address. Click on the link to verify your account. Then, click on “Get Started” in the browser pop-up.
7. Once again click “Add to Cart” for the Maxon One 6-Month Subscription Promo Code. This time you will be able to check out.
8. Accept the General Terms of Agreement by clicking “Continue”.
9. Review your purchase and click “Proceed with Order”.
10. The next page will show your order details including your Promo Code and a link to the Maxon online store.
11. In Maxon’s online store, apply the Kivuto code to reduce Maxon One’s price to the student rate.
12. If you haven’t already, you’ll need to sign in or create an account for the Maxon website.
13. Add your details, review the order and complete the purchase.
14. Download the Maxon One App Manager and install it.
15. Your Maxon One license will be automatically linked to your account, so log in and install the software you want to use.

If you are a student or educator, this is a phenomenal deal on software that usually costs several hundred dollars a year alone. Not to mention all the additional Maxon software you’ll have access to with Maxon One. This is not a one-time offer either, you can request a new student license as long as you are enrolled and your institution continues to be eligible for the promotion. Note that the educational use of Cinema 4D and other Maxon apps is for non-commercial purposes (direct or indirect) only.

If you are not an individual student or educator but a school or university looking to work with the software in your curriculum, reach out to Maxon to check on eligibility for the reduced-cost license.

For absolute beginners, students, and those migrating from other software, some tutorial content might be helpful to get familiar with the advanced animation software that is Cinema 4D. Fortunately, Maxon has all its users covered with Cineversity: a tutorial website maintained by Maxon that hosts a massive library of videos available completely free of charge.

Cineversity has an extremely robust tutorial library that’s helpful for both Cinema 4D beginners and animation veterans. Total newbies might want to start off in Cineversity’s “Learn” section, however, which contains a dozen tutorials to get you familiar with Cinema 4D, accompanying programs, and a few workflows. Or, try “Getting Started with Cinema 4D” for a 20-part series comprised of videos between five and 20 minutes in length that covers everything from getting comfortable with Cinema 4D’s interface to using multipass rendering.

As is typical of learning new software, YouTube is your friend. Aside from Cineversity, Maxon actively uploads tutorials and shows to its YouTube channel, enriching users’ knowledge and demonstrating what Cinema 4D is capable of in the familiar platform.

Cinema 4D is a powerful software with a variety of tools for 3D model creation, animation, simulation, and rendering. It has powerful modeling tools with features you’d expect like polygonal or volume modeling and parametric modifiers. It also boasts an impressive list of presets, architectural objects, and textures to create anything from video games, VR and AR, as well as VFX and motion graphics.

The software surely keeps up with the best in the business, but below is a selection of features that make the program stand out, and may help you in making up your mind on whether to make the purchase:

Simulation

Cinema 4D boasts a list of comprehensive simulation tools that make it very popular with big-budget Hollywood productions. Its been used to produce blockbuster films such as Blade Runner 2049, Ghost in the Shell, Doctor Strange, and the Iron Man movies, to name a few. The program has managed to position itself as a mainstay in the animation and VFX industry for two reasons.

First, its variety of high-quality simulation tools that include Rigid and Soft Body Dynamics, Aerodynamics, Thinking Particles, Voronoi Fracturing, and since the latest release, cloth and rope dynamics — which gets more detail itself below.

The second reason for Cinema 4D’s success in some of the highest echelons of video production is the seamlessly integrated 3rd party plugins. For Simulation, VFX artists often rely on extremely sophisticated simulation engines like Xparticles, RealFlow, or Nitroblast to render anything from smoke, fire, fluids, and explosions, and need it all to function in one software. Be aware, however, that because of their highly specialized area of application, some of these plugins can end up costing more than Cinema4D itself.

Cloth and Rope Dynamics

Cloth and rope dynamics is a feature that enables realistic-looking multi-threaded simulation of cloth and rope. The new unified solver lets you choose between CPU or GPU simulation and even a mix of both to create organic and free-flowing fabrics for your model and animation. The simulation tag can incorporate multiple objects with varying simulation characteristics including ropes, cloth, and even soft bodies. You can simulate ballooning, plastic deformations, and even the tearing of both rope and cloth.

Sculpting

Organic surfaces with high levels of detail can be achieved with the fully integrated Sculpt system inside Cinema 4D. Often referred to as digital clay, object meshes can be shaped by pulling, smoothening, flattening, cutting, and pinching the surfaces just like one would do with a physical lump of clay using the software’s sculpting tools. The finished model can then be handled like any other geometry and set up for rendering and animation.

At the beginning of 2022, Maxon acquired Pixologic, the creator of the Academy Award-winning digital sculpting program, ZBrush. So, we can expect Cinema 4D’s sculpting capabilities will improve further as the newly added in-house expertise sinks its teeth in.

Moves by Maxon App

With Apple’s latest macOS Monterey release that includes their exclusive Object Capture API, the mobile app Moves by Maxon enables advanced photogrammetry scanning capabilities for model creation inside of Cinema 4D via iPhone and iPad Pro running iOS 15.0 and later.

The app also enables real-life capture of facial and body movements that will be analyzed and transferred onto a “skeleton” in the resulting video for movement verification. These movements can then be seamlessly integrated into Cinema 4D to add real-life movements or facial expressions to a 3D character.

Keep in mind that in addition to the mobile device and Monterey iOS, a powerful Apple Silicon or Intel-based Mac with a minimum of 4 GB video RAM is required. If you are an Android user, you will have to sit tight for a bit longer until you can make use of these scanning and motion graphic features.

New Features in Cinema 4D

The latest Cinema 4D release (2023) introduces highly anticipated features like modeling symmetry tools, in-place asset management, and native OCIO (OpenColorIO) support. In addition, the new Unified Simulation System enables more realistic and artist-friendly simulation that lets the user concentrate on the art of modeling, rather than the technical process. Update to the Move app make it even easier to capture full-body or facial movements with iPhone and iPad Pro and offers workflow improvements to the asset browser.

But there’s more where that came from. Be sure to check the Cinema 4D 2023 changelog to get every detail on recent changes to the software.

The current release of Cinema 4D is 2023, and has the following minimum system requirements:

• OS: 64-bit Windows 10 Version 1809 or later / macOS Catalina 10.15.7 or later / 64-bit Linux CentOS7, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS or later.
• CPU: 64-bit CPU with AVX support or Apple M series
• RAM: Windows 8 GB or higher or macOS 4 GB or higher
• Graphics Card: Nvidia Maxwell, AMD Polaris, Intel Kaby Lake or later, DirectX 12 with feature level 11.0, or macOS GPUFamily 1 v3 or higher (officially supported e-GPU possible)
• Disk Space: ~15 GB of free disk space required
• Pointing Device: Three-button mouse

The full hardware requirements can be viewed on the Maxon website.

Commercial licenses of Cinema 4D have a pretty varied pricing structure depending on your situation, available on monthly and annual recurring plans. Alternatively, a perpetual license can be purchased for the older R25 release (the latest, 2023, is only available under subscription.)

• Individuals: $94/month, $719/year
• Teams (per seat, three min.): $949/year
• Schools & Universities: $75/year
• Perpetual (R25 only): $3,495

Or, you can use Maxon One to get a license for all of Maxon’s software, including Cinema 4D, which is also the best value for students:

• Individuals: $149/month, $1,199/year
• Students & Teachers: $9.99/6 months
• Teams (per seat, three min.): $1,399/year
• Schools & Universities: $199/year
• Annual institutional license (for teaching): $199/year

Blender is a professional, open-source, and free 3D modeling software that can be adapted to create virtually anything: animated films, visual effects, art, interactive applications, video games – even CAM workflows. Blender’s dizzying array of features includes 3D modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing, raster graphics editing, rigging, and skinning, fluid and smoke simulation, particle simulation, soft body simulation, sculpting, animating, match moving, camera tracking, rendering, video editing, and compositing. In addition, this free 3D modeling software features an integrated game engine.

In terms of modeling, it is noteworthy that Blender includes sculpting capabilities similar to that of Mudbox or ZBrush. This free 3D modeling software provides a number of tools and modifiers that ease the creation of meshes intended for 3D printing – including a solution to repair meshes.

While you are presented with an intimidating array of options, the beauty of Blender is that its thriving community has answered every question, and generated enough materials and forum threads to give even a complete novice a solid grounding. It may not have a native beginner-friendly onboarding, but go-getters will take plenty away from Blender.

Clara.io is an impressive browser-based free 3D modeling software. It includes all the common modeling tools for polygon modeling, like extrusion, beveling, slicing, cutting, and looping. In terms of texture maps, you get UV mapping. Pretty much everything you need for basic 3D modeling purposes.

But Clara.io goes beyond the functionality you would expect from a browser 3D modeling software. For instance, the rendering does not need to shy away from many desktop programs. It includes V-Ray, which allows you to light your meshes using an HDR image, and many other nifty tricks. And, if you want to create computer-animated movies, Clara.io supports keyframe animation for it.

One of the many useful features of this free 3D modeling software is collaboratively working on projects. Similar to how Google Docs allows multiple users to work on the same document, Clara.io grants multiple users access to the scene — each able to modify the file. Every change is automatically synced between the accounts, meaning other users can see the scene transform before their eyes.

An unlimited use “lite” version of SideFX’s Houdini 3D modeling and visual effects software, Houdini Apprentice lets users get to grips with Houdini’s 3D modeling and animation tools and workflow, and even render work out — albeit watermarked. You can’t use it for commercial purposes but, otherwise, can do mostly everything the full version of Houdini can.

Aimed at hobbyists, students, and startups, Houdini Apprentice uses a node-based workflow and has generative building tools that let artists quickly and efficiently build out worlds according to design rules, textures, and other variables. You can also engage in direct modeling, and use powerful lighting and shaders to set up cinematic shots.