C4D Fundamentals | 01 - The User-Interface Basics - A Cinema4D Quick Start

hey and welcome to the first session of my cinema 4d fundamentals series we are beginning with the user interface today and this is really meant to be a QuickStart guide for everyone who's new to cinema 4d will pretty much jump right into it and attach to this video you will also find a little PDF document with all the images you see right here this is just an overview for you so that you can better remember and understand the basic layout layout of cinema 4d I also attached on a few rather important shortcuts for you there are of course a lot of more shortcuts are for you to find out that those are the most important ones I think ok so let's jump into cinema 4d we will pretty much go over every detail right here in the user interface and we do this in a clockwise kind of way so we start off with the I'm sorry we start off with the with the menu bar up here this is pretty much like a menu bar you would expect from it any kind of software you find kind of everything in here and we don't want to do bother too much with this for for right now in the beginning you will pretty much find your way around cinema 4d without going into detail up here so right beneath your menu bar you have your I would like to call it the control bar with the most important elements to work with in your everyday life of cinema 4d I just skip over to this little button over here so that we have something to work with in our viewport so by clicking you are just adding a cube to the scene and now you also see when you have a look right to the top left again that now this back button appears so right here you can like undo and redo kind of things you do in cinema okay the next thing is in the live selection tool and the live selection tool is basically the default tool you use in cinema 4d with the tool you can select your objects in your scene there are a couple of different arm possibilities to select here so whenever you see this little black arrow and some of those those buttons you can click and hold your mouse and select another mode for that tool we'll just stay with the live selection to the other tools are pretty much self-explanatory I think so the next one of those yellow ones here is the move tool with the move tool you can pretty much move the objects around in your scene we also have a scaling possibility and of course we can also rotate around different axis in our scene right next to that we have like history of tools we have selected so whenever I want to come back to a tool I selected previously I can just use this menu to exit it quickly now these three buttons right here are used to disable certain axis so if the move 2 is selected and when I now go ahead and deactivate for example the X and z axis and I now click anywhere in my viewport and move my mouse around you see that the cube is only moved in the Y direction now we set that back to default now when I activate all the other X's and I click anywhere in my scene you see that I can move the cube on all exits so sometimes it's used for to only use one of those X's whenever you like to move things around but on the other hand you've also free to use just the handles as well the next thing is the coordinate system switch when you're working in that 3d software you basically have two different kind of working modes concerning your coordinate system so what you see right here is now the local coordinate system and if I go ahead and have to activate those buttons again if I go ahead and rotate my cube a little bit and then go back to my move tool you see that the X's of my cube are rotated as well this is of course useful because now I can move the cube in for example this third direction and it's called the local coordinate system of the cube but sometimes it's useful to switch back to the world coordinate system so if I click here this is what cinema does it's now in the world coordinate system and I now can move the cube in the world coordinate system so the world coordinate system will never change it will always stay the same like this but my local coordinate system depends on the parameters of my object for example right now I have rotated it and again it just reset my cube to the default now let's have a look at the next three buttons right here the first one is used to render your current view just into the viewport if I click it you see now my view is a rendered there a couple of different ways to render your image one of the most important ones is to render your image to the picture viewer and this is what this button right here does so Aaron is my picture right to the picture view the picture viewer is basically a place where all your rendered images are placed you have like a history overview of all your renderings and from there on you can save your rendered images to your hard drive we'll go into detail again on the picture viewer NL in the later session you can also use the render region arm function and you doing that by clicking and holding your mouse and define an area in your viewport which you like to be rendered you can also add an interactive render region and the interactive render region is pretty much the same than the the normal render region but it has the advantage of that you can choose the quality of your rendering so whenever you have a more like harm sophisticated scene to render and it takes too long to render the by using the render region you can use the interactive render region and just use this little arrow right here to define in which quality your render region should be rendered so in the next button is the render settings right here you can change the settings for your enterings for example we could change the size of the renderings which are outputted by the picture of Europe we can add a number of effects to our renderings and we have a lot of different well options right here we go into in the dozin in another session you already learned about the parametric cube I added right here and arm you find a lot of more of those objects if you click and hold your mouse over this little blue cube all these objects you find here are parametric this means you have these little orange handles on your objects and you can click and hold to change the parameters of your object so on every object you you add let me add a sphere for example you have a different number of of those handles and you can change therefore the parameters of that object so let me add an pyramid right here you can see it can change the height and also the other parameters of this pyramid now the next four buttons are basically used if you want to model something we will skip this for now we will cover those in another session the button over here is for scene elements and for example you could add a floor to you scene and the special thing about the floor is that it's basically floor which is infinitive so right now you only see that it's going up to this edge right here but if I go ahead and render my image you see that it goes right up to the horizon you find a couple of other elements right here we'll also cover this in in another session let's talk a little bit about cameras before we actually go into detail about this camera settings right here you can or you have by default a camera in cinema 4d but it's not shown up right here in your object it's called the default camera you can move this camera around and different kind of ways for example you can pan around you can zoom and you can rotate and I'm just clicking holding and moving my mouse again to your do all those functions ready you can also use the keyboard shortcuts one two and three four for doing the same thing so one is panning two is zooming and three is rotating now let me actually add a camera now so whenever I add a camera we have not camera attached to to our scene and give us zoom out a little bit you can see it right here so we're still in the default camera right now but if I want to switch to my arm to my edit camera right here I have to click on this little plague icon right over here and now this behaves exactly the same like the default camera one thing though to remember is that whenever this little icon over here is white you're still in that camera so once in a while make sure to leave that camera again or if you for example if you'll help you with the perspective and if you want to capture the scene and a certain angle or form a certain position and you happy with it you just have to click again and then your camera stays at this position there are different kind of other cameras but there's also something for another session the next thing is the lighting tools you find a couple of different lights right here we have the point light which like the simplest form of light we have a spotlight this is pretty much like a spotlight you know you would you know from the theater or something like that we have a target light which always shines a decision target you define with an area light which is pretty much like it could be compared to TV light or how a TV works is light you will probably not use unless you want to go into architectural visualizations and you want to use the manufacturer data of well light manufacturers we have an infinite light which is pitching pretty much like on sunlight but if we want to add in sunlight we actually have a special sunlight but those two are pretty much the same we look going to detail in the latest session when recovering lightening lighting okay now let's have a look at our viewport you right here so you actually already know that we can move our camera around we zoom you can rotate and so on but we can do more we can for example change some settings right here of our viewport you find under the filter tab a couple of of options which are pretty much all of them are activated but for example if you want to turn out the default grid of your scene you can just deactivate it sometimes it's in your way and it's useful to to hide it take the weighted again just open it up again and activate it again now another kind of useful thing to know is that you can I change the displaying of your object or how the way of how your new objects are displayed in the viewport and the most important one is the garage shading lines and what you see right now is that every object has kind of an outline and this outline is actually displaying the the number of polygons or surfaces each of our objects has if I select the cube right here I can also change the number of of those segments or those polygons it's not important on our two important right now but something to keep in mind for working later on I just go back to the garage shading without lines another thing which you can do with your viewport is to separate it into different layouts go into different views I can just do that by I click that button over here and now you see that our viewport is separated into four different kind of views and each view shows a different active right here we have our default perspective over here we have a perspective from the top right here from the right side and this is from the front side to scale up one of those of you so you can just use the button on each of those screens and if I want to go back to my default perspective view I just click right here you can also change the perspective of your current view by open up this menu for example I can go into the top view right here I can just switch back to the perspective view the switch of views is important if you go into modeling or if you want to build up a scene and sometimes the 3d view is not really helping you it's rather in your way and therefore you want to switch perspectives sometimes now let's have a look at all the other elements right here in cinema 4d on the top right you have the object manager and basically all the other layout elements right here are called managers the object manager is as you can see on a place where all the objects which are in our scene are placed in an important feature where the object manager is his hierarchy capability so for example you can select a couple of objects like the objects right here now scene and you can go to objects group objects or use the shortcut alt G now I can move the null object or it's now called a null object I can use this to move all my objects around I don't have to select now all the three objects by itself anymore I can just select the null object if I want to move the sphere by its own for example I can just select it move it around and if I go back to my null object again now use this to move all three objects at once you can also subgroup such an object with another one so for example I can try can't drop this sphere under the cube and now the sphere is a child of the cube and whenever I move my cube this fear will also move as well so right here on the bottom you have the attributes manager and the attributes manager is actually a place where all the settings of your selected tool or objects can be changed so not right now I have the cube selected so I can change the parameters of or you can also the attributes of my cube I have selected the sphere and I can change the parameters of my sphere this attribute manager works pretty much for every tool you have selected so for example if I go back to my life selection tool you see now the attributes of that next to the attributes manager is the coordinates manager here you can basically change the position scaling and rotation of your objects but you find on those settings as well in the attributes manager if you go to the coordinates tab and I would recommend to rather use this one right here on the top left we have the materials manager and to add a new material to it we can just double click on the empty space and now we have created a new material you can open it up and then for example change the color of the material and to add your material to an object you can just drag and drop it to your viewport now because this fear is a child element of our cube the material is also applied to the sphere now if I move this fear of the cube you see that the material is now not applied to it anymore we'll cover the materials of course in another session in more detail now let's cover the last part of the cinema 4d layout right here one important thing to understand about cinema 4d is how it handles its objects so each object has basically two different kind of states we already talked about the parametric objects right here and they're still in their initial state but we can change that by hitting this button over here I now made the cube editable and by that I changed it to a polygon object so we don't have the those Orange channels anymore and we cannot change the attributes or the parameters of that cube but we have a lot of more possibilities right now to change the appearance of our cube and to do that we have a couple of different working modes we have for example the point mode and right now you see that all the the polygons and other other points of our polygons are displayed I can select each point and move it like our object before in our 3d space I can also do that in the edge mode but now I can select a couple of edges for example and move those or I can go to the surface mode and select surfaces of my cube so this is something which would not be possible on when this object was still in its parametric state all the other things right here are not so important for right now we cover them when we go into modeling a little bit more one thing to remember is that if you want to move your object again you have to go back to your modeling object mode and now semaphore D is in the model mode again and I can can change the position of my objects okay thank you that's it for the first lesson I'll be you get gotten basic understanding of the user interface of cinema 4d and see you next time

Channel: Christoph Doe

Views: 199,733

Keywords: Cinema 4D (Brand), Tutorial (Media Genre), User Interface (Speech Topic), Software (Industry), Digital Media (Industry), basics, cgi, 3d, c4d, maxon, interface, ui, lesson, instruction, Tips

Id: VqHM2HC3Z68

Length: 22min 38sec (1358 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 16 2014