HISTORY
Maxon was founded in 1986 in Germany by students Harald Egel, Uwe Bärtels and Harald Schneider as a publisher of computer magazines for Amiga and Atari users. The three students were given an opportunity to write a book about the Atari ST computer in 1986 but decided that magazine publishing was a more lucrative endeavor.
So, they quit their studies and founded Maxon. Maxon’s early publications included the magazines Amiga Kickstart and Atari ST Computer, in which they hosted monthly programming contests. Brothers Christian and Philip Losch from Germany decided to enter the monthly programming contest in 1989 but couldn’t decide whether to create a spreadsheet program or a raytracer.
On a coin flip, they decided to develop a raytracer for Commodore Amiga, then entered and won Kickstart magazine’s monthly programming contest for Amiga Computers. The raytracer had no graphical user interface yet and scenes to be rendered had to be entered as text files. This early raytracer eventually became the product, FastRay. Maxon expanded its software offerings by the year 1991, developing different solutions like compilers for Basic and Pascal, Maxon CAD and a variety of other tools.
FastRay was released during this same year, which was the early beginning of Cinema 4D. It featured a GUI but still no 3D Editor View. The industry was blown away by Fastray’s rendering speed.
With Atari and Amiga on the decline the development team looked for long-term platform solutions in 1996. It was this year that Cinema 4D was ported from Amiga to a new, modern cross-platform architecture.
Version 4 was released for Amiga, Windows and Mac OS. Cinema 4D V4 included the introduction of the Object Manager - a key component of Cinema 4D’s workflow to this day. Join our friend and former employee Dimitris Katsafouros for a tour of Cinema 4D V4.
In 2000, Maxon became a subsidiary of Nemetschek. It is during this same year that BodyPaint 3D was launched as an innovative 3D painting application available as an integrated part of Cinema 4D or as a standalone product for use with other 3D applications.
Maxon also introduced Cinebench for the first time, its benchmarking tool based on Cinema 4D’s rendering technology. Today, Cinebench is still an industry standard benchmark used by journalists, hardware manufacturers and computer users worldwide to measure hardware performance.
In 2006, Maxon released MoGraph with Cinema 4D R9.6. The MoGraph toolset innovated and defined 3D motion graphics and created a whole new world of possibilities in procedural modeling and animation. MoGraph quickly established Cinema 4D as the industry standard for motion graphics and broadcast design.
The MoGraph module in Cinema 4D was honored by the Acadamy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with a Technical Achievement Award in 2018. The Academy recognized Maxon developer, Per-Anders Edwards, for the initial design and development of the MoGraph toolset that "provides a fast, non-destructive and intuitive workflow for motion designers to create animated 3D graphics, as used for title design and fictional user interfaces in motion pictures."
Maxon entered a strategic alliance with Adobe in 2013 to further collaborate on technology that provides creatives in the motion graphics and visual effects industry with new levels of digital media content creation. As a result, Maxon introduced Cineware for After Effects, a new live 3D pipeline between Cinema 4D and Adobe After Effects enabling users to natively import and edit Cinema 4D scenes in After Effects.
Today, the seamless integration with Cinema 4D is also available for industry leading DCC applications like Unreal, Adobe Illustrator and BIM/AEC packages Vectorworks, Archicad and Allplan. In 2018, Nemetschek took a majority ownership position and Maxon’s three original founders - Uwe Bärtels, Harald Egel and Harald Schneider, retired after 32 years of serving the company. David McGavran joined Maxon as its new CEO bringing two decades of international expertise in Media and Entertainment.
Under his new leadership, Maxon initiated efforts to expand its product offerings and strengthen its position in current and new markets.
Redshift Rendering Technologies, developers of the world’s first, fully GPU-accelerated, biased renderer Redshift, was acquired by Maxon in 2019. Redshift Rendering Technologies Inc was founded in 2012 by video game and software veterans Panos Zompolas, Rob Slater and Nic Burtnyk. In 2013, Redshift’s first alpha version was released, with support for Softimage XSI and Maya.
The first beta version was released in Fall 2013 with the first licenses sold. The release of version 1.0 followed in Spring 2014 and in Fall, support for 3ds Max was added. In 2016, support for Houdini and Cinema 4D was added, Katana in Spring 2017 and Blender in 2019.
In 2020, Maxon merged with Red Giant, creators of unique tools for editors, VFX artists, and motion designers. Founded in 2002, Red Giant’s first products were Knoll Light Factory, built by ILM’s Chief Creative Officer, John Knoll, and post-production color correction toolkit Magic Bullet Looks, developed at The Orphanage by Stu Maschwitz (co-founder and chief technology officer of The Orphanage, now Chief Creative Officer at Maxon), and author of The DV Rebel's Guide.
Red Giant built its brand through award-winning products such as Trapcode, Universe, Supercomp, InstantHD, PluralEyes, Magic Bullet additions Colorista, Cosmo, Film, Mojo, Renoiser, and Denoiser. Their unique, production-friendly tools are staples in the fields of film, broadcast, and advertising.
Red Giant has differentiated itself in the industry through its artist-driven approach to software creation and its popular training content. Red Giant also cultivated a reputation for innovative filmmaking through a series of short films that also served as a great medium for showing off its product line in action. The first film was the visually remarkable, high-concept, Plot Device directed by filmmaker Seth Worley.
Maxon acquired Forger, the intuitive, desktop-class mobile sculpting app for iOS in 2021. Forger offers an enticing entry into 3D sculpting as well as insights into portable workflows to expand the creative freedom of Maxon’s artistic community. Forger developer, Javier Edo, who started out creating visual effects and pipeline tools for award-winning production companies became a permanent member of the Maxon family.
That same year, Maxon also acquired Bang, a fully procedural 3D muzzle flare generator that enables the quick and easy inclusion of muzzle flashes to footage. Bang was immediately incorporated into the VFX Suite of products with several improvements from the previous public version, enhancing both the visual quality and user experience.
ZBrush is used by respected film studios, game developers, designers, advertisers, illustrators, and scientists around the world. In 2014, Ofer Alon, founder of Pixologic and creator of ZBrush received an academy award for technical achievement.
In 2022, Maxon acquired ZBrush, the Academy Award-winning sculpting and painting software. Developed by Pixologic, ZBrush has been a game changer since its debut at Siggraph in 1999. Thanks to its team working tirelessly and passionately for two decades, Subsequently, it subsequently transformed countless careers and the industry itself.
The industry’s top creatives have employed ZBrush for nearly every major franchise including Dune, Star Wars, Avatar, the Marvel Universe, Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings/Hobbit and more. Its versatility has also made it an integral part of animated features such as Frozen, Tangled, Zootopia, Moana, Raya and the Last Dragon, and Encanto. ZBrush has also been used extensively in Triple A games including Fortnite, the God of War Franchise, Uncharted Franchise, Assassin's Creed Franchise, Far Cry Franchise, The Division Franchise, and more.
LEADERSHIP TEAM
EXECUTIVE LEADERSHIP
Maxon creates professional 2D and 3D solutions for the CG industry. Our dynamic and passionate leadership team is dedicated to steering operational initiatives to best serve global customers and partners, anticipate the ever-changing needs of the digital design community, and maintain Maxon’s standing as a market leader in digital content creation industry.
DAVID MCGAVRAN
Chief Executive Officer
David McGavran joined Maxon in July, 2018. The internationally experienced executive comes with extensive expertise and a large network in the Media and Entertainment industry, having worked 20 years in different roles at Adobe. His last position at Adobe Systems was Director of Engineering – Professional Audio and Video. David has considerable experience working with broadcasters, post production houses and film editors around the world.
CHAD BECHERT
Chief Strategy Officer and Member of Advisory Board
Chad was the CEO of Red Giant prior to its merger with Maxon in January of 2020. He will partner with the CEO and executive leadership team to drive the overall strategic direction and culture of the company. He has extensive experience leading and growing companies and is passionate about people. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Management and Doctor of Jurisprudence from Indiana University. He is married to his college sweetheart and has three children.
PHILIP LOSCH
Chief Technology Officer
Philip is one of the creative forces behind Cinema 4D, which he invented back in 1989 together with his brother, Christian. In his new role as chief technology officer he will guide, direct and drive all technical aspects of development.
ENRIQUE GLAS
Chief Financial Officer
Enrique is a senior finance leader with over 20 years of experience in innovative and fast-paced environments in multinational companies (among others e.g. Siemens and Microsoft) with deep knowledge in driving change, performance management, and operational efficiencies. In his role as Chief Financial Officer he is the strategic global business partner to the CEO and the leadership team, focused on the creation of value and optimization of performance.
GESA HÄFNER
Chief Human Resources Officer and General Counsel
Gesa joined Maxon in 2014 with more than 12 years of professional experience in the HR sector and as corporate lawyer. She is responsible for worldwide HR, Legal and employee experience. Gesa is leading the staffing and hiring needs of the company through this exciting time of globalization and considerable expansion of the Maxon family.
PAUL BABB
Chief Marketing Officer
In 1998, Paul founded the US subsidiary for Maxon and introduced Cinema 4D to the North and South American markets. His strategic planning and marketing expertise are widely credited for taking Cinema 4D from a virtual unknown to one of the most widely-used 3D products for digital content creation and the leader in 3D motion graphics. In his new role, he will expand his focus to serve and support the global Cinema 4D community.
RICHARD STEINHART
Head of Sales
Richard is a senior sales leader with over 20 years of experience in Silicon Valley B2B technology companies ranging from startup to $1B annual revenue. He has had success building and leading high-performance global teams in fast-growth environments across various software categories. In his role as Head of Sales Richard is responsible for scaling Maxon sales efforts through our global direct sales team and worldwide channel partner network.
NICOLAS BURTNYK
Executive Vice President, Rendering
Nicolas is an expert in human-computer interaction, with a specialization in 3D tools for the film, television, video game and industrial design industries. Nicolas’ career began as part of the prestigious research group at Alias (now Autodesk). Following this, Nicolas also worked as studio technical director at Double Helix Games (now Amazon Games). During this time, Nicolas lead the studio's central technology group, overseeing the development of two generations of a proprietary game engine, renderer and associated tools.
STU MASCHWITZ
Chief Creative Officer
Stu Maschwitz is a director, photographer, writer, visual effects artist, and designer of filmmaking software. A graduate of CalArts, Maschwitz spent four years at Industrial Light & Magic, before co-founding the legendary visual effects firm The Orphanage in 1999. Despite his unique command of filmmaking technologies, Maschwitz places an emphasis on performance, emotion, and story.
A champion of accessible filmmaking, Maschwitz wrote The DV Rebel’s Guide: An All-Digital Approach to Making Killer Action Movies on the Cheap, co-created the Fountain screenplay format and the screenwriting app Slugline, and maintains a filmmaking and photography blog at prolost.com.
GARRETT RICE
Global Head of Product Management and Strategic Alliances
Garrett has spent a substantial part of his career at NeXT and Apple, where he helped build products like the Apple Protection Plan, Final Cut Pro, Motion and Aperture. He also managed strategic alliances with companies like Adobe and Microsoft and built global marketing programs tailored for creative professionals and the Enterprise. He has been a filmmaker, a writer and a founder of three entrepreneurial ventures.
At Maxon, Garrett is focused on building great products, surprising and delighting customers and building strong relationships with Maxon’s allies. He manages all of this while being under continual assault by his two teenagers and a slightly touchy McNabb dog.
BEATRICE BILLARD
Senior Director of Program Management
Beatrice joined Maxon in 2020. A native of France, she lived extensively in the US where she held various roles leading internationally distributed initiatives and teams at Microsoft and Adobe. She brings over 20 years of experience delivering results in large-scale projects and complex software ecosystems.
Her diverse range of experience includes managing shared technologies; bringing new creative products to market; and managing large product portfolios including desktop, mobile and web. A firm believer in collaboration and inclusiveness, she achieves results by building strong relationships across disciplines, organizational boundaries and time zones. Her organization helps Maxon scale processes and operate efficiently as the product family and ecosystem grow.
