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Maxed-out, high-end, current-generation products will not go to waste in powering your digital creation tools. However, as with most professional 3D software, the bigger the numbers on your hardware, the happier Cinema 4D will be. It can run on most CPUs and GPUs made in the last decade combined with at least 8GB of RAM.
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Like most professional 3D software, Cinema 4D is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. We don't recommend that, however, because you don't get updates, which Maxon releases twice per year at least. If you prefer a perpetual license rather than a subscription, you can buy Cinema 4D R25 (two versions old) for $3,495 at the time of writing. On its own, Cinema 4D costs $94 per month or $719 per year. You can license Cinema 4D in a number of ways. As it stands, we recommend it most for anyone working in motion graphics specifically.
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If not for the relatively high price tag, it would be our recommended 3D modeling software to most beginners. While certain areas of Cinema 4D like BodyPaint and Thinking Particles have felt stagnant, the software as a whole does not, and Cinema 4D still embraces the joy of creation. Cinema 4D is spending its efforts wisely-adding more proceduralism, quicker iteration, and dynamic remeshing. The two releases this year, S, provide significant improvements in a number of key areas, which seems to be part of a larger-scale reworking of the software as a whole.
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