Maxon, maker of powerful, approachable software solutions for creators working in 2D and 3D design, motion graphics, visual effects and visualization, today announced its Fall 2026 ecosystem release, which introduces the 2027.0 releases of Cinema 4D, ZBrush, Redshift, Red Giant and Autograph, bringing substantial new creative capabilities and workflow improvements across the Maxon toolset. In the 2027.0 release, Maxon is delivering new ways to populate and simulate complex 3D worlds, more complete production workflows inside ZBrush, faster rendering feedback in Redshift, new art-directable VFX capabilities, and deeper creative automation and cross-application workflows in Autograph through Model Context Protocol (MCP) support and first direct connection with Cinema 4D.We're continuing to do what we've always done: listen to our artists and bring the best tools we can to them, said David McGavran, CEO of Maxon. Everything we build adds to what came before it, so the possibilities keep getting bigger. A few years ago, you couldn't simulate a beer in Cinema 4D. Now you can pour it, foam it, spray it and make it look almost as satisfying as the real thing. That's the kind of progress we want artists to feel: faster workflows, fewer barriers and more of the real world available to create.
Build Bigger, Richer Worlds in Cinema 4D
Cinema 4D 2027.0 delivers an all new Scatter System, one of the product's most requested capabilities, giving artists a procedural way to populate environments with vegetation, rocks, debris, crowds and other objects while maintaining precise creative control.
The new Scatter Generator and Scatter Tag support distribution, filtering, clustering and transform controls, while integration with Cinema 4D's MoGraph toolset lets artists use familiar Fields and Effectors to shape, animate and influence scattered objects. The updates give artists a more approachable path to building dense, believable environments without relying on complex workarounds or separate scattering tools.
Cinema 4D's unified simulation system now also includes Liquid FX, adding automatically generated foam, spray and bubbles to liquid simulations. These secondary effects respond to the underlying liquid behavior, adding the visual detail that makes pours, splashes, waterfalls and other fluid effects feel more convincing without requiring artists to construct separate complex simulations.
The release also deepens the connection between Cinema 4D and Redshift including ACES 2.0 alignment improvements streamlines everyday workflows, and introduces a range of quality-of-life upgrades designed to make routine production work faster and less prone to error.
An End-to-End Sculpting Pipeline in ZBrush, from iPad to Desktop
Artists have been asking for ways to do more of their production workflow without needing to leave the ZBrush environment and now they can.
A new UV Editor lets artists create, edit and refine UVs directly inside ZBrush, with professional workflow support including UDIMs and texel density controls. Built using proven Maxon technology from Cinema 4D, the editor reduces the back-and-forth between applications while artists are still iterating on a sculpt, helping them move more quickly from sculpting and painting into texturing and downstream production.
New Selection Sets tackle another everyday pain point by allowing artists to save and recall Polygroups, masks, Polypaint, morph targets and UV configurations rather than repeatedly rebuilding them by hand. For complex iterative work, that means less time recreating selections and more freedom to explore different ideas.
ZBrush for iPad continues to become a more complete professional sculpting environment with Spotlight, bringing reference, projection, painting and image-driven sculpting workflows to iPad. New non-destructive 3D Layers enable artists to experiment freely on the iPad with sculpting, polypaint and masking on a layer, giving more control over sculpting changes, detail blending, and creative iteration.
Rendering in Redshift Means Less Time Waiting, More Time Creating
Cinema 4D and Redshift 2027.0 give artists speed where it matters most: while the creativity is flowing.
A reworked memory architecture uses available memory more efficiently across an increasingly wide range of hardware, while major interactivity improvements shorten the time between making a change and seeing the rendered result. For artists, that means less lag time between an idea and the visual feedback needed to refine it. Change a light, material or scene element and understand its impact on the environment more quickly for a more fluid creative experience.
Redshift also continues to feel more native inside Cinema 4D. Artists can more easily drag Cinema 4D objects, Cloners and particle systems directly into material workflows and access their properties in the Node Editor, simplifying tasks that previously required more steps. Creative flexibility is further enhanced through a new procedural system for generating fur, fibers, textiles, and knitted materials directly at render time, while support for NVIDIA RTX Spark brings Redshift workflows to a wider range of power-efficient mobile devices and production environments.
Red Giant Introduces Art-Directable Visual Effects
Red Giant 2027.0 brings powerful updates to VFX artists, motion designers, and content creators, making visual effects faster, more intuitive, and more art-directable across creative workflows.
Scene Light, a new AI-powered, depth-aware relighting tool, lets artists place lights into existing live-action footage and CG imagery directly in After Effects. Artists can add realistic interactive light from effects such as muzzle flashes, explosions, and environmental sources, or make broader changes such as day-for-night treatments, withou
