After Effects CC 2017 adds a new 3D renderer for compositions which uses the Maxon CINEMA 4D standard renderer for 3D layers, including extruded text and shapes and curved 2D planes.

This renderer is designed to make it fast and easy to animate 3D text and logos in After Effects.

The 3D functionality of the CINEMA 4D renderer is similar to the Ray-traced 3D renderer: when enabled, 3D text and shape layers can be extruded, and other 3D layers (solids, footage, etc.) can be bent into curved planes. Because the two renderers work very differently, the rendered results will be different, and there are differences in 3D layer material options and other layer behaviors.

The performance of the CINEMA 4D renderer is much faster than the CPU-only performance of the Ray-traced 3D renderer.

In association with this new renderer, the composition 3D renderer settings have been moved from the Advanced tab of the Composition Settings dialog to a new 3D Renderer tab. Clicking the name of the renderer in the upper-right corner of the Composition panel will now bring you to this tab. In addition to choosing the 3D renderer, the 3D Renderer tab displays helpful information about the different 3D renderers, including which layer behaviors are enabled and disabled.

Click the Options button to set the options for the current renderer. You can also now access the renderer options for a 3D composition by clicking the Options button (wrench icon) in the upper-right corner of the Composition panel.

After-Effects-Tutorial-2017
After Effects Tutorial 2017 – Tutorial After Effects Magic Glass

The CINEMA 4D renderer options include a single Quality slider, which affects multiple parameters of how the CINEMA 4D renderer will draw the 3D layers. The resulting renderer parameters are shown in the Options, Anti-aliasing, and Reflectance boxes. The single Quality setting makes it easy to choose a balanced combination of rendering speed and acceptable 3D rendering quality without requiring you to understand and modify the many contributing parameters to rendering quality.

IMPORTANT: You will receive a warning about using an older installation of CINEMA 4D if you have changed the CINEMA 4D Installation Options (via either the CINEWARE effect options or the CINEMA 4D renderer options) to use a full installation of CINEMA 4D R18 SP1 or earlier, instead of the renderer engine installed with After Effects.

The CINEMA 4D renderer includes improvements to the CINEMA 4D engine, which are required to render certain cases correctly. (The CINEMA 4D renderer and CINEWARE share the same engine, however these improvements are not applicable to CINEWARE.)

After Effects Tutorial 2017 – Tutorial After Effects Magic Glass