10 Things You Didn't Know in Cinema 4D

hey it's dave from cg shortcuts today we're going to do this we're looking at 10 things you didn't know in cinema 4d [Music] this video was brought to you by skillshare where you can get unlimited access to more than 22 000 full courses on a huge range of subjects the courses are project-based and teachers take you through all the steps in creating everything from motion graphics to photography and when you're done you can share your work with teachers and the student community for feedback and support we've actually got four cg shortcuts courses on there now covering a bunch of stuff beyond what we normally go into on youtube and we're releasing new courses all the time so if you want to give skillshare a try the first 1000 to click the link in the description will get a free trial of skillshare's premium membership giving you instant access to the entire catalog of courses including the courses from cg shortcuts so you can see if it's right for you now let's get back to the tutorial and we'll start our countdown as you probably already know the units in cinema 4d default to centimeters as you can see here but if you hit control d on the keyboard and bring up the project settings you can easily change the units to whatever you want and you can see here we've got loads to choose from but did you know if we go back to our cube here if you're in america for example and you're used to using the imperial measurements say you wanted this y-axis to be 6 foot instead of 200 centimeters all you actually need to do is type 6 ft for foot and if we hit enter that will automatically calculate how many centimeters six foot is and you can see it's just over 182 centimeters so it's done that conversion for you automatically and we can also use inches so if we type 200 i n for inches that's automatically recalculated to be 508 centimeters so if your mine works in feet or inches this might be a bit of a time saver you can always just type in whatever unit of measurement you like and have it automatically calculate and here's a list on screen of all the other units of measurement that cinema 4d supports and that even includes huge distances like kilometers and miles as well and you can use these units in almost every setting in cinema 4d so for example if we switch on the fillet again we can make this three inches which automatically translates to 7.62 centimeters so it's a handy little trick for all those using the imperial system as you probably already know the default color options we have here are set to hsv so hue saturation and value and you probably also know that you can easily change that to rgb for example by clicking here and this might be something you're more used to using if you're coming from photoshop or illustrator or if we come over here and click on this little hash icon you can also enter a hexidecimal value so maybe if you're trying to match web colors or something like that and of course we've also got the color dropper here so we could grab that and select any color we like on the screen this green for example and that updates pretty simple stuff but did you know we've also got an option here to select colors from an image and if we click on this icon here all we need to do is grab an image and i've got one just off screen here if we drag that into this box here we're now able to hold ctrl and sample different colors from within this image so if we hold ctrl and click here we can select that blue color and we can quickly and easily create a color palette from the selection and there's also a cool little feature if we click here the mosaic mode and this is going to allow us to crush this image down or decrease the detail until we're just left with the basic colors within our image and that's going to make selecting a color palette nice and easy so again we'll just hold ctrl and click on a few of these and if we want to save our palette for future use all we need to do is click on this plus icon and give our palette a name let's just call it colors okay and then we can access that over here in the color swatches section and there's our new color palette right there so this could be quite handy if you're trying to match brand colors from an image that your client has supplied or something like that but there's also another really handy feature hidden away in here and that is this one here the color wheel and this is a great little tool to help you select color palettes for your scene i personally use the complementary color wheel all the time so this is just going to let you pick a complementary color from a color that you've already chosen so if we go with something close to red here the other end of this tells us that the complementary color is going to be in the greeny blue area here and if we click on that that's going to give us that exact complementary color so you'll be able to get some really nice color harmonies in your color palettes and another one of these i use quite often is the split complementary here and that's going to give us two complementary colors that are going to work very nicely with our primary color here and this is a great little tool to have directly here in cinema 4d so you don't need to pop into photoshop to pick your colors you can do everything straight in the interface here okay so we've got a rigged up safe here and you'll see if we click on that we've got options to open and close the door and we can also rotate the wheel and the little dial on the top there and if you're planning to do some pretty intricate animation on this it might be nice to have easy access to these settings because you will notice if we click off this at any point and maybe midway through animating we decided we wanted to tweak the light a bit we've now lost access to those controls so we have to go back into the object and back down here again and over a long period of time that is going to be pretty annoying and of course we could just duplicate this window and move that over here and if we lock that and switch over to another object and fiddle around with that we do still have access to this in this floating window here so that's one option but another way we can do this is if we close this and go back to our safe we can actually grab these controls and drag them straight into the viewport here and we can tweak these directly in the display like so so let's bring all of these guys in okay and obviously that white on yellow is a little bit hard to read so we've got some options for these if we right click on one of these controls we've got some display settings here and if we come down here we can change the color of these and we'll change the text color let's just make that black and that's nice and easy to see so very customizable we could also come back in there and choose to display an icon and that's bringing in our null icon here because that's what our controls are applied to but we can make this icon bigger if we right click again and back under display right at the bottom here we can make the icon size large and now that's giving us a bit more space for our control here let's see what else we've got in here there's also this pretty handy auto fold option and that's just going to tuck your controller out of the way until you mouse over it again so that can also help you save a bit of screen real estate there you can also hold ctrl and click on any of these and drag them wherever you like on the heads-up display here so maybe this particular slider is best accessed to the left over here so that's pretty handy but one thing you will notice is that if we click away from this again all of those controls disappear which kind of defeats the purpose of setting them up in the first place but this just means we can set different controllers for every object in our scene if we want to say for example we wanted a controller on this light as well so maybe we wanted access to the intensity whenever we click on this light we can just drag that setting up here as well and you can see that's going to allow us to adjust the brightness of that light but if we switch back to the safe again we again get access to the safe controls so that's tied to the object but if we wanted any of these to stay permanently we can right click and under the show menu we can set this to always and now if we switch back over to the light we get our light control back but we also still have access to that particular setting from our safe so we can carry on with our animation and we can also adjust the lights all in the same screen and you can also remove these easy enough by right clicking again and just coming down here to remove and one last thing if we go back to our safe we can also bring a set of settings in together so if we hit control a down here to select all of these options and right click we just need to add them to the hud and now we've got a single self-contained box with all of those settings in there and we can hold ctrl and drag this wherever we like and this might be a nice little feature to use if you do find yourself doing a lot of animation so you've probably added the figure to your scene which is this little mannequin kind of guy and let's just give him some color we'll duplicate this and put that on there and inside that material let's use the color wheel that we've just discovered and we'll give him a complimentary color to that blue which in this case is going to be orange and the figure can be quite useful when you're mocking up your scenes but it would be nice if we were able to pose this guy as well but you'll see if we click on the object itself we don't have a whole lot of features to play with just the height and the segments and you can make that nice and low res if you wanted to but did you know there is actually a way we can pose our figure very easily all we need to do is right click on our figure and if we make it editable we can see now if we pop this open we've got all the different parts of our model broken out into a nice hierarchy here so to pose this if we were to grab the left thigh for example we can go in here and simply rotate that on the excess there and then if we drill down another level we could grab the shin and just move that down here then we can take a look in the upper body and grab the left arm and just move that up here and again we'll drill down to the lower arm and let's just point that up there and we can also pose the head let's just grab that and we can make him look up in that direction like so so fairly quickly and easily you can pose your figure and use him as a stand-in maybe for a character that you plan to import later on into your scene another option if you've got cinema 4d s24 or above is to use the new asset browser and just do a search for puppet and bring in the male puppet here and if we close that you'll probably find that using this guy is even easier than using the mannequin so we can grab these joints and move them around nice and easy and quickly repose this character so it's a nice little feature if you want to quickly mock up a character scene okay so our next feature is pretty handy if you're doing architectural visualization in cinema 4d so you've spent loads of time building a really cool scene and you want to show it off one option would simply be to animate a camera through your scene but that can be a little tricky and time consuming but there's a pretty hidden little feature in cinema 4d that we could also try if we hit shift c on the keyboard to bring up the command window here and start typing in virtual that should bring up our virtual walkthrough tool so let's click on that to activate it and it might just think for a second while that's loading up then we'll know we're in walk through mode when we get our little finger pointer like that and we've also got our green compass up in the top right corner here and that's going to indicate the direction that we're facing in our scene and just like the name suggests the virtual walkthrough tool is going to allow us to walk through our scene just like we would if this was kind of a video game and even the keyboard controls for this function the same way as a computer game and we can even pan left and right and you can see all the shortcut keys for this over here under the shortcuts tab and these are all the controls for the movement another cool thing we can do is click and drag with our mouse to pan around our scene quite freely like that so we can very easily frame up a cool looking shot and we can even combine this mouse movement with our walking so we're pretty free to walk around and explore our scene and what's also really cool is that we can record what we're seeing here so over in the record tab here we just need to hit start recording and we'll see if we can capture a cool camera move as we walk down the aisle here and we'll just pan up a bit and i'm really digging the ceiling here so we'll get that in the shot and we'll just end it back down here and now if we stop the recording we can now access the movement progress here and we can use the slider to scroll through the animation we've just recorded like so and if we're happy with the movement we've just created we can also bake this into a camera so if we pop this down and hit create the camera it's now created a new camera in our scene here so if we activate that and just extend that timeline out of it and play that back here's that exact move we've just made now baked into our camera so we can also use this to get some pretty organic looking camera moves okay let's go back to our other camera and another thing we can do is if we find our walkthrough speed to be a bit fast we can slow it down over here in the speed tab so we'll just bring the movement speed ratio down to 60. our pace should be a bit more slow and steady so that might help with getting smoother camera moves another cool thing we can do is walk upstairs and we've got some at the end of the aisle here at first we're just bumping into it and collisions are another feature of this tool but if we want to walk up the stairs we need to head over to the scale and threshold tab here and firstly we can set our eye height here which is how high the camera is from the ground so we'll go close to six foot uh 180 centimeters and let's see if we can walk up the stairs yet not quite we might also need to adjust the stairs threshold here so let's bring this right up and see if we can go up there now nope we're still colliding in that case i find that setting the camera to eye level or the ground plane should help with that and now we should be able to walk up those stairs like so and that's about the gist of this feature you can get some really cool shots with it so it might be worth playing around or it might give you some ideas for different camera angles within your scene one thing to keep in mind though is that this particular feature only exists in older versions of cinema 4d i'm currently using release 21 to demonstrate this but maxon decided to remove this feature from version s22 and beyond but if you've got the subscription you can easily go back to older versions of cinema 4d so you could easily record your walkthrough and export the animated camera and that's about it for the virtual walkthrough tool okay so this next one's a bit of a simple one if we come up here and bring in a sphere or any geometry really and just hit nb to bring up the lines on this object did you know that we can set the default settings for pretty much anything say for example you were doing a lot of simulation work with spheres and you didn't want the default sphere the one with this nasty pole at the top here that often breaks your sims you might prefer to have your standard sphere actually not standard but set to octahedron which has a lot more evenly spaced geometry and maybe you also wanted less segments so we wanted this to default to 12 instead or a larger radius let's make this 200 centimeters and if you find yourself having to input this over and over again you can actually save this as the default values and to do that what we have to do is go to the edit menu here and set these settings as the default and we'll say yes to that and now if we make a new scene and we head up here again and bring in a fresh sphere and turn our lines on again here is our new preset octahedron sphere and all of those settings are now the default values so that can be a bit of a time saver and you can set the default values for pretty much any tool in cinema 4d so if there's anything in particular that you find yourself using over and over again and having to change the values why not try setting the default values and save yourself a little bit of time so let's take a look at some things that you might not know about the noise shader if we open the white material down here we've got applied to our van and move this over to the side in the color channel let's add a noise to the texture slot here which gives us our little preview over here and if we go inside that noise the usual way to try out the different noise types is to just click on here and pick one randomly from the list let's go with poxo but finding the right noise for your material can be a little bit hit and miss doing it this way so did you know there's a little secret arrow over here next to the noise type and if we click that we can see all those noises all laid out with little previews so no need to guess anymore we can just pick the noise that looks best in the thumbnails here so if we wanted a spotty noise maybe we try this one and that's looking cool and we'll try another one maybe this cool looking voronoi noise here so that's definitely a bit of a time saver and you might also know that you can animate your noise by adding a value to the animation speed here let's just give this a speed of one but if we try to play this in the viewport we don't actually get a preview of that animation by default but to see that in here all we need to do is go to the viewport settings of our material itself and up here we just need to enable the animate preview and now if we go back to the start and play that we are getting a preview of that animated noise but it's playing back extremely slow in this particular scene and that's even with the texture preview size set to default so we're not using any high resolutions or anything here and if we were to set this at 1k for example and try to play that back that preview is going to be extremely slow and it doesn't even look like it's actually going to let us do that so let's just put that back on the default and what we can do is go back to the color channel here and into that noise we can actually preview our noise animation up here in the noise thumbnail and all we need to do is right click on that and choosing animate and very quickly that's going to give us a good idea of how that animated noise is going to look and we can even go and increase the animation speed and that will also update very quickly in our thumbnail view here so let's just go and try another one from our list here let's give this one a go and there's our animated preview of that noise as well and we can easily disable this as well by disabling that animation so a pretty simple feature but one that you're probably going to find yourself using a lot of the time especially if you're making a lot of materials that are driven by the noise shader okay we're back to our little mannequin tool here and i wanted to quickly show you the naming tool if we pop open our figure to reveal the hierarchy again you can see we've got all the pieces of our model named quite nicely here but what happens if we had loads of these figures in our scene and all of the objects had the exact same name it could probably get pretty confusing so maybe it'd be a good idea to put the character's name at the front of each of these and that way we can distinguish which part belongs to which character and we can easily do this with the naming tool which we can find up here in the tools menu there it is right there and we actually need to grab all of the objects that we want affected by the naming tool so all of these then we can just click up here again to reactivate that tool and here's our tool options down here so firstly if we wanted to put the character's name in front of all of these names we can do that by adding a prefix so let's give this guy a really creative name and call him guy and i might just put an underscore there so we've got something between our name and the actual name of the part and now if we hit replace name the name of our character has now been added to the start of all of those objects so another example might be if our character didn't actually have hands but had claws instead in that case we'd want to change the word hand as it is here into claw and for that let's come down here and we can just clear this out for now we can actually use the replace feature here so we'll type in the word that we want to replace and at the moment this is case sensitive so we'll make sure we've got a capital there and we want to replace the word hand with the word claw and we'll run that and just like that wherever the word hand appeared within those objects has now been replaced with the word claw nice and simple right and just so we're sticking to our underscore naming convention if we want to replace these spaces with an underscore all we need to do is go back to our replace tool and we'll type in a single space to replace that space with an underscore and we'll run that and it's as easy as that and that's all self-explanatory but there's another little thing i wanted to show you here if we collapse our figure and pop this camera null here open you can see that we've got loads and loads of cameras in our scene and many of them have the same name and number and to be honest it's all looking like a bit of a mess right now so is there a way to quickly renumber all of these and make things a bit more organized there is actually all we need to do is grab all of them from top to bottom here and to remove the numbers that we've already got in here we just need to come down to name in the basic tab here where we've currently got multiple values and we're just going to rename all of these cameras let's rename them to render cam and obviously they've all got the exact same name now so how do we add numbers to the end of this super easy we just need to grab our naming tool again and this time we just want to make sure we clear out what we've put in here before and we want to add that number to the end of all of our names so we need to use the suffix this time so that'll be appended right at the end here so back down here again we want to add an underscore so there's a space between our name and number and to automatically generate a number for each of these we need to type dollar n for number and if we apply that our render cams have now been numbered from 0 all the way down to 26 and with this feature it is important to note that the numbering will always go from the top to bottom like this so you just want to make sure all of your objects are in the right order before you run this and you'll see if we just undo that and select a bunch of these randomly and back to our naming tool if we run that again you can see that's numbered them from top to bottom so 0 to 2 here and if we undo that and grab all of these guys again one final thing we can do if we grab that naming tool again if instead of using a number at the end of each word you prefer to use a letter and have them all alphabetically ordered you can actually replace this n with a capital a and run that we've now added a letter alphabetically to the end of each one of these cameras and you'll see when we get to the end of the alphabet this just resets back to a and if we undo that one last time we can also change this from an uppercase a to a lowercase a and run that as well and now all of those letters are lowercase so just use any method you prefer and that's about all there is to the naming tool it's definitely a tool that you'll find yourself using more and more i think okay so we've got a load of random boxes in our scene here and just continuing from what we looked at before when we were adding different units of measurement to our values here we can also add mathematical functions in the same way so to demonstrate that an example might be this box here which is currently 101 centimeters in the x-axis we could do a little addition calculation here by typing 101 centimeters plus four and when we hit enter that's done the calculation for us and given us 105 centimeters or we could undo that and do a multiplication calculation instead so 101 centimeters times two and let's move our box off screen here but it's now doubled that value and we can even divide this number as well so we'll divide it by two and now we've halved that position and our cube is over there okay so we can do some pretty basic mass directly in the inputs here but we can also do something a bit more advanced let's select all of our gift boxes here and what if we wanted to give them all a random rotation let's first figure out which rotation we need and i think it's going to be the heading here let's just reset that to zero and what we can do here is type rnd for random then we need to open bracket and we need to pick a value so a maximum number for our rotation so a full rotation is going to be 360 degrees so let's go with that value so it's going to be able to rotate a maximum of 360 degrees so some value between 0 and 360. then all we need to do is close the bracket and hit enter and you can see it's now given us that random value between 0 and 360. in this case it's picked 61.8 so if we undo that and try that function again and this time we use 10 instead of 360. you can see it's now given us a value between 0 and 10 in this case six degrees and you've probably noticed that that one random value has been applied to all of our boxes here so what do we do if we want each box to have a different random rotation let's give it a try so we'll type r d again open bracket again we want a random value between 0 and 360 degrees so we'll type 360 again and this time we need to add a comma and each one of our objects has a different index value or id number so to access that in our function here we need to type n-u-m which basically means each object is going to have a different random value assigned to it from 0 to 360. so we'll end the bracket and hit enter and now all of our boxes have that random rotation so this can be handy if you've got loads of objects in your scene and you just want to add a bit of randomization without having to come up here and add a random effector or a cloner and there's actually a load of other functions you can use in cinema 4d there's a list just on screen here now so you might want to take a look at the manual and start trying those out and while we've got this setup i'll just show you one more quick thing as kind of a bonus the distribution of our boxes here aren't quite as random as i'd like and maybe if we had a few more of these blue boxes over here it might help break up that pattern a bit so i'll just show you a quick way to replace different objects in your scene so if we decide we want to switch these out with the blue boxes instead we just need to grab them and head up to the tools menu we've got an option to replace with and we've got some settings here and in this window we want to replace the object with this object but we want to do so with a copy of our blue box we don't want to remove the original one here so let's disable that and when we replace our objects we also want to keep our material tags so we need to make sure tags is enabled then i think all of our objects have different access points so we'll disable the keep center here and we also don't want our replacement blue boxes to take the dimensions of those yellow and red boxes so we need to disable keep dimensions as well and we can probably turn parameters off as well okay so now that we've got that set up and we've already got our two boxes that we want to replace we just need to pick a box to replace them with and we're going to use this blue one here so all we need to do is double click it and instantly those two boxes have been replaced with our blue box so that's a quick look at the different functions we can use in cinema 4d and the replacement tool and finally on our list we've got a bit of a fun one if we hit shift c on the keyboard to bring up our command window and just type chess we can access the hidden chess feature built into cinema 4d and not only does this give us a bunch of chess models that we could light texture and make a scene out of in the usual way but you can also play a real game of chess directly here in cinema 4d so if we were to click on this pawn for example and make the opening move up to here there's actual real ai happening so it'll think for a while and make a move so you could totally hop into cinema 4d and play chess all day and still look like you're working but you've got to be careful because cinema 4d is actually pretty good at playing chess and he's beaten me a few times now luckily there's an undo button up here if you make a stupid move like i did and if he kicks your butt super fast like you did with me you can always go back through the moves that are recorded down here and just reset that so have fun with this and hopefully you'll do better than me so that brings us to the end of our 10 things you didn't know in cinema 4d let us know if you learned anything new in the comments down below or if there's any hidden or handy features in cinema 4d that you think we should know about big thanks to this month's patrons and cg insiders you guys are the best and there's no way we could keep making these videos without your support cheers guys and finally don't forget our three day summer sale starts today where you can get 20 off all of our courses over on cgshortcuts.com and i'll leave a link to that down below okay that's it for now i'll catch you next time thanks for watching let me know what you want to see in the comment section down below or you can leave a like or dislike and don't forget to subscribe and click on that little bell icon for more videos and free stuff there's loads of extra resources on our website and you can win epic cg prizes in our monthly challenges check out cgshortcuts.com for more details catch you next time you

Channel: CG Shortcuts

Views: 16,722

Rating: 4.9681458 out of 5

Keywords: c4d, cinema 4d, tutorial, mograph, tutorial animation, motion graphics, octane, cg shortcuts, cg, free project, template, cinema4d, animation, 3d, motiongraphics, motiondesign, 3d animation, cgi, rendering, design, graphics, dave bergin, c4d tut, cinema 4d tutorial, c4d tutorial, maxon, cgshortcuts, animated, render, intros, 4d, cinema, blender, effects, 3dsmax, 3dmax, model, models, animate, c4d tips, top 10 c4d, top 10 cinema 4d, c4d tricks, name tool, chess, walkthrough, cloner, c4d quick tip, c4d tools

Id: _TDbxAFZ4co

Length: 29min 56sec (1796 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 02 2021