The real-time engine U-Render can now run in the Cinema 4D viewport. Just released, U-Render 2020.07.6 is a “really real-time” WYSIWYG render engine for Cinema 4D and runs on OpenGL. It costs around $350.
With 2020.07.6… “it is no longer necessary to install the Windows-only standalone renderer” as everything is integrated into Cinema 4D as “a viewport renderer, making it possible to see a live render directly within Cinema 4D”.
This change apparently also makes U-Render accessible to Mac users, at least for now — Apple is widely said to be set to ditch OpenGL entirely from Macs. However, Windows users should also note a problem — U-Render only appears to work on the toxic tangle that is Windows 10. Which means I can’t test it, even though there’s a demo available. But I wonder if the viewport integration has now solved this Windows problem for Windows 8.1 users?
All this is theoretically interesting to me as there’s still a way to get Poser 11 scenes to Cinema 4D, via the free PoserFusion plugin. That still works fine, for those who have the required bits to hand. The other question is, will the latest U-Render run in the older version of Cinema 4D required by PoserFusion (which was R19, when last heard about).
The other question is… how much extra the U-Render’s OpenGL real-time would actually add to an imported Poser scene… who knows? By that time the materials would have been through two conversion processes: Poser to C4D (automatic) and then C4D to U-Render (automatic). It might then be more trouble and cost than it’s worth to fiddle about for hours fixing skin and eyes and the like.
Still, if we could get a direct Poser 12 to U-Render plugin, ideally at a sub $100 price, that could be an interesting thing to have in terms of making Poser 12 work more like iClone. I haven’t heard anything about that happening, it’s just my complete guess. The less expensive route to WYSIWYG full-viewport real-time might be to plug some sort of stable ‘Eevee port’ from Blender into Poser 12. It would presumably be no use to ‘send Poser scene to Blender, for real-time display in Eevee’, since Blender is such a fast-moving target and the UI is still very daunting even now.
But judging by the recent call for Poser 12 beta-testers, it’s Unity that’ll be the real-time destination, not Blender. Unity is also free. It remains to be seen if Poser 12 users will be sent into a full “OMG, I have to learn to drive yet another nuclear submarine!” Unity UI, or into a “we’ve cunningly hidden all the complex bits” Poser-friendly Unity viewport.