9.5.2

OBJECTS MENU • SOUND • 465
Sound
CINEMA 4D provides sound rendering within your scenes. Two different options are available: 2D
Sound Rendering and 3D Sound Rendering.
With 2D sound rendering you use the Timeline like a multi-track audio mixer (as in many video editing
programs). You can create any number of sound tracks, assign WAV les to them and adjust the
timing, the volume and the balance, depending upon your requirements. This procedure is suitable
for synchronization (e.g. lip-synch, footsteps, a slamming door, an explosion, etc.).
3D sound rendering takes a quite different approach. With this you work with virtual acoustic sources
(loudspeakers) and pickups (microphones) as objects. These virtual objects can be positioned freely
within the 3D space and also can be animated. CINEMA 4D calculates the appropriate sound data on
the basis of the spatial position of these objects, their speed and the preset sound parameters. You
can merge this data afterwards with surround sound data in an external program.
3D sound rendering is a most versatile method of sound production and offers many, almost innite,
applications. From a car driving from left to right to an enormous space ship battle with laser beams
and explosions in Dolby surround sound, everything is feasible.
Playing and scrubbing sound
CINEMA 4D enables you to play sound tracks in realtime — backwards as well as forwards. You can
also drag the time slider manually to ‘scrub’ the sound. To switch on sound, enable the Play Sound
During Animation icon in the animation toolbar.
Loudspeaker
This command creates a Loudspeaker object, which is required for the calculation of 3D sound
rendering. You can assign a WAV sound le to a loudspeaker object in the Timeline and later record
the sound information emitted by the loudspeaker with one or more microphones.
Loudspeaker objects are displayed in the viewport as 3D objects (simple loudspeaker shapes), but they
are hidden when rendered so that they will not interfere with your scene.
Like light sources, the loudspeaker object has handles that you can drag in the viewport to adjust
parameter values. For the loudspeaker, these handles enable you to change the playback characteristics
of the acoustic source (adjustment, range, etc.).