Viewport Hardware

Tip:For best Viewport display results you should always use state-of-the-art graphics cards. Note also that several of these settings depend on your graphics hardware and the GPU framework (see also here), which means that for Anti-Aliasing, for example, different options will be made available, depending on the hardware being used. Furthermore, it’s relatively useless if you set Maximum Shadows to 64 if your system only supports 12 - only 12 shadows will be shown.

Texture Mode

Texture Interpolation controls which method is used to interpolate the textures when you zoom objects in the viewport: Nearest or Linear. Nearest uses the color of the nearest pixel in the texture, causing hard transitions in the zoomed texture. Linear uses linear gradients (i.e. linear interpolation) to create smooth or blurry transitions in the zoomed texture.

Texture Interpolation set to Nearest (top right) and Linear (bottom right).

Linear Mip Map

This method, which transitions between consecutively, internally "stockpiled" effigies of the texture that are continuously reduced in size, offers the best image quality:

Various settings and their effects.

Anti-Aliasing

Use this selection menu to define the degree of antialiasing that will be displayed while working in the Viewport and the UV editor(not when rendering).

Cinema 4D can work with the following four types of anti-aliasing:

The type of anti-aliasing you should select depends on your personal preference. The differences are often only nominal so experiment a little to see what suits your needs best.

Maximum Transparency[0..10]

This value defines the number of transparency layers that will be drawn correctly. It can be increased if faulty displays occur for several consecutive objects in a row that have different transparent materials:

At left a value that is too small, at right a larger Maximum Transparency value.

A value of 0 will disable the correct rendering and will display the transparency as a raster effect.

Maximum Lights[1..1000]

Use this setting to define the maximum number of light sources will calculate (in the order in which they appear in the Object Manager). Higher values will lead to slower display times.

UV Editor Anti-Aliasing

The texture view can also be smoothed using the UV meshes displayed there (the anti-aliasing settings descrobed above will be useds). . However, this is not always desired when working with UV components. Non-smoothed displayed components can sometimes be positioned more precisely - if snapping isn’t used.

Maximum Shadows[0..100]

Use this setting to define how the shadows of light sources are displayed (in the order in which they appear in the Object Manager). A value of 0 will result in no shadow being displayed. The presence of very many shadows can slow down the display. Shadows are one of the most render-intensive GPU framework features, which is why this option can be used to define a maximum number.

Use Shader Cache

If enabled, the compiled Shaders in the Project will be saved. In rare cases, enabling this option can cause the graphics card’s driver to crash the application. If this occurs, disable this option.

Enable Dithering in Viewport

Note the marked brightness gradations at the left (don’t be irritated by the JPEG artefacting).

Banding can occur when you have gradual gradations in brightness (in the example above it occurs on the transition from RGB 69, 69, 69 to RGB 70, 70, 70). Dithering can visually resolve hard color transitions.

R25

Enable HDR

Cinema 4D now also supports HDR output in the Viewport - and only in the Viewport (this does not apply to the Picture Viewer. You can only benefit from this if you have an HDR montitor (usually with 10-bit or 12-bit defined). The advantage of an HDR monitor is that it can display more colors without banding and can also display these brighter.

If you enable this option on an 8-bit monitor, for example, the output colors will be restricted to 1, regardless of how bright a material or surface light is (represents the behavior prior to R25 for very bright elements. This also applies to the render output in the Viewport for th eStandard and Physical REnderers if the Depth is set to<TEXT_CYCLE_ID RDATA_FORMATDEPTH_32> 32-bits per channel</TEXT_CYCLE_ID>.

Tip:If this option is enabled on Windows, the <TEXT_ID PREFSVIEW-PREF_VIEW_COLORPROFILE> Display: Color Profile</TEXT_ID> option will be ignored for HDR monitors and the monitor's color profile will be used.

Information

Here you will find a range of information about the hardware used by Cinema 4D for displaying in the Viewport. This is only for informational purposes and will adapt accordingly if, for example, a new graphics card is installed.

These days, graphics cards have the ability to display quite a bit in the Viewport, which was previously the exclusive realm of renderers. Thanks to the computer games industry, high-end 3D graphics can now be displayed fluidly, i.e., with a high frame rate. This is something that Cinema 4D also profits from. Maxon is constantly improving the display quality in the Viewport without the need for rendering. Cinema 4D S22 in particular has taken another major step towards supplying render quality in the Viewport (see below). In conjunction with this, note the Viewport Renderer , with which you can output the scene as it is displayed in the Viewport.

Complex reflections, shadows, hair (with limitations) and other effects can be displayed unrendered in the Viewport.

Nevertheless, you shouldn’t expect any miracles: Not all special lighting material properties in Cinema 4D can be displayed by the GPU Framework. Of course there is no guarantee that the Viewport display will be even close to the rendered result (depending on the effects used). Furthermore the GPU Framework and the Cinema 4D renderers are simply too different. However, for many applications, the GPU Framework can delivery good results, including for animations.

A lot was done in Cinema 4D S22 to improve the Viewport display. Describing each and every one of these improvements would be to exhaustive, which is why we will briefly explain the most important ones below:

... and many more minor improvements.

Also take a look at the Viewport Preferences’ Effects tab where you will find numerous additional new settings for the Viewport.

Cinema 4D on MacOS only uses the forward-oriented GPU Framework Metal. This has the following limitations: