🖥️Cinema4D

Cinema4D is a 3D computer animation, modeling, simulation, and rendering software that is very popular with motion graphics designers in particular.

Cinema4D natively supports with the export of GLTF and makes it very easy to export and bake complex animations into a form that a GLTF can render. For edge cases the third-party plugin Nitrobake can bake animations into unique frames.

You can read all about GLTF in Cinema4D here.

https://help.maxon.net/c4d/en-us/#html/FGLTFEXPORTER.html?TocPath=Configuration%257CPreferences%257CImport%252FExport%257CglTF%2520Export%2520Settings%257C_____0

GLTF Export Tutorial

Cinema 4D S22 offers a new export functionality to GLTF which allows for easy export of 3D models to applications like Foveate, Unity, Unreal, Adobe Aero and more.

Export Settings Explained

Transform

Enable this option if you want to export animations that were made using position, scale or rotation tracks. Note that if you want to export Step keyframe interpolations, all X, Y and Z keys for this type must be included. Otherwise it will be interpolated as a spline (this also applies to the Pose Morph keyframes).

Morph

These are morph animations, i.e., shape animations that are created using Pose Morph or PLA.

The following options are available:

• None: Neither Pose Morph nor PLA animations will be exported.
• Pose Morph: Only Pose Morph animations will be exported.
• PLA: Only PLA animations will be exported.

For Pose Morphs: only Points Pose Morphs are supported.

Skin

Use this option to export animations based on PSR joint animations, i.e., character animations.

Note that glTF can process a maximum of 4 joint weightings per point. If the Cinema 4D scene contains more, only the 4 strongest weightings will be used.

Note also that the joint hierarchy is not a Child object of the object to be deformed and only joints in the joint list of the respective Weighting tag are included.

Bake Animation

If this option is enabled, object movements in a scene that, for example, are created using Dynamics or Expressions (e.g., Vibrations-Tag), i.e., have no PSR tracks in the Timeline, can be baked so that these movements can also be exported. Internally, tracks and keyframes will be generated for each frame.

Generally speaking, you should also bake animations if they look differently from the way they look in Cinema 4D.

Further Learning