Get to know the interface - CINEMA 4D Tutorial

- [Instructor] So this is the Cinema 4D interface and in my opinion looks quite friendly and approachable. Our goal here is to get to know the interface and how to navigate around the application. When you first launch Cinema 4D, you'll a see a layout just like this. It's the default start up layout or standard layout. Now if your screen doesn't look like mine, just come over here to the top right and use this drop down menu and just choose standard. And you'll get back to where I am now. So along the top here we've got the general file edit menu buttons where you can open and more importantly save your work. And in this flavor of Cinema of 4D it's the studio versions. So some of these other things might now be available in your version. But generally speaking most of them will be. Next we've got our undo buttons, very important. And redo. If you hover over anything here like I've just done you get a little bubble help. And if you look down in the bottom left here as well, in the status bar you'll see, just here, I've moved off the thing. But you'll see some information come up and it'll give you some tips. We've got our selection tools here. And I've just clicked and held down the left mouse button. And you can actually rip off these tabs if you move over to here. And this'll give you access to those tools and you can just float these panels and move them around. And you can whenever you see a black triangle in the bottom right corner. So moving on we've got the translate tools where we can move and scale and rotate. And this quite is useful because it shows the eight most recently used tools. And it can be useful just to jump to something that you were using previously. We don't really need to look at these for now in our getting started course so let's just move over to these other buttons here. These are for rendering. These ones are for creating things, creating objects. So we've got our primitives and again we can just pull off a tab. And we can see all these little pre-set objects that we can just add to our scene. So if we just click on a cube for example, we've got that instantly available to us. And all the parameters over here. We'll get over to this bit in a second. Let's just move up. We've got the object manager. And this stores all the objects in the scene. In a hierarchy that we mentioned earlier. And the object manager evaluates from top to bottom. So you can see here you've got this root and then it comes off at a pose of a branch here and this is our cube. Next, we've got the attribute manager and you can see these tabs along the side, yep they've got them up here as well. These tabs help you navigate between different managers and panels. It's the attributes of the objects. If we look at this we can see that this cube has different sizes and currently just one segment each but we can change those values here and they would update in this viewport. But to do something like segments you'd need to display the lines. Let's just move over into this tab which is a layers tab. And this is a good way of organizing your objects in the scene. And you can see that it has different functions so at the moment, this one here, I've actually hidden them from the object manager so I can un-hide and reveal in the viewport by pressing this button and all these other objects are available to view. Now this is the viewport. This is the most important section really because this is where you see all your objects. And to navigate around here, it's as easy as one, two, three. It's a very good way of remembering how to navigate because you use the one, two and three buttons on the keyboard. So if we press one and hold it down, you can move around our scene. If we press two and then hold that down and left click and drag, we can dolly into our scene as well. Move in and out. And three will just orbit around. And see it's quite handy that I've got the cube select there but I can also come over to here and then orbit around this object as well, this tube. The same with here as well. It's quite intuitive for how we can just this object to select and it be a kind of pivot point for our rotation. So you can also undo views as well which I think is very, very handy and a good thing to know when you're just starting out. Because you can get lost and you can just get back to a different view by pressing command, shift and zed or control, shift, and zed if you're on a PC. So if I press that a couple of times, I'm gonna undo all those different changes to the viewport that I made. So I'm just coming back to where I was before. And if I wanted to redo something, I'd just command shift y. So it's very similar to your standard undo shortcuts just add in the shift. Now we've got the timeline here. This is just a mini version of the timeline and you'll be able to quickly see key frames and other things like that that you set. You've got these control buttons here that play through the timeline. And just down here is a material manager where we can create new materials and store them there as well. Finally, one thing to note when we're over in the object manager is just how we can enable and disable objects. So we can do that by pressing the check boxes here. So if I disable the cube, I can then toggle again to enable it. And I'm gonna go to the attributes as well and just select the cube. And go over to the basic tab and pretty much every object has a basic tab. And just look here. Enabled and there's and there's unchecked as well. So again, you can come over to here and just enable something here. And we've been making this point throughout. There's more than one way of doing the same function in Cinema 4D. So again you've got these visible in editor and visible in render buttons. And by default they are available in both. But you can come over and there's a term that you might here quite often which is the traffic light system. And it's because when you click on one of these little buttons here, they go from gray to green. Which means there's always gonna be visible in the editor. And the bottom one is for the renderer. So green means it's always gonna be visible in the renderer. So you can also make them always invisible to the editor and renderer. And back to default again. So yep, you can use the drop downs. Or just use the traffic light system. In the next chapter we'll begin building an actual project and that's where we'll learn even more about the ins and outs of the C4D interface. But for now, I think we've covered enough key areas of this interface and how to navigate the viewport. So let's move on.