Maxon Computer GmbH is a German software acquisition company that produces the 3D software

Cinema 4D Cinema 4D is a 3D software suite developed by the German company Maxon. Overview As of R21, only one version of Cinema 4D is available. It replaces all previous variants, including BodyPaint 3D, and includes all features of the past 'Studio' ...

History

Maxon was founded in 1985 by three college students, Harald Egel, Uwe Bärtels and Harald Schneider. They had purchased their first computer, an

Atari ST The Atari ST is a line of personal computers from Atari Corporation and the successor to the Atari 8-bit family. The initial model, the Atari 520ST, had limited release in April–June 1985 and was widely available in July. It was the first pers ...

, and agreed to write a book about the basic programming language that ran on the ATARI ST, the GFA-BASIC Buch. The first issue of ST-Computer was released in January 1986. In 1991, after two years of development, the first version of Cinema 4D was launched in December 1993. This was followed in May 1994 with an upgrade to Cinema 4D V1.5, with improvements in rendering quality. Cinema 4D became Maxon Computer's flagship product. In January 2000,

Nemetschek Nemetschek Group is a vendor of Computer software, software for architects, engineers and the construction industry. The company develops and distributes software for planning, designing, building and managing buildings and real estate, as well as ...

, a leader in architectural CAD Software, bought a 70% stake in Maxon in order to acquire a high-quality renderer for their CAD models, as well as to enter the multimedia market and later introduced version 6 of Cinema 4D XL Cinema 4D Release 10 was presented in 2006. Announcement of

Release 11 at

Siggraph SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques) is an annual conference on computer graphics (CG) organized by the ACM SIGGRAPH, starting in 1974. The main conference is held in North America; SIGGRAPH Asia ...

show, Los Angeles, in 2008. The company's program

Cinebench Cinema 4D is a 3D software suite developed by the German company Maxon. Overview As of R21, only one version of Cinema 4D is available. It replaces all previous variants, including BodyPaint 3D, and includes all features of the past 'Studio' ...

is used to test computer hardware capabilities. The most recent version is R23 released in 2020. Maxon is considered one of the major companies in 3D animation and graphics. Maxon acquired

Redshift In physics, a redshift is an increase in the wavelength, and corresponding decrease in the frequency and photon energy, of electromagnetic radiation (such as light). The opposite change, a decrease in wavelength and simultaneous increase in f ...

in mid-2019, merged with Red Giant Software later that year, and acquired Pixologic in 2021

References

{{Authority control 3D graphics software 3D animation software Film and video technology