Null objects and the object hierarchy - CINEMA 4D Tutorial

- [Instructor] Cinema 4D scenes or projects are built by creating and combining objects in a hierarchy. The object hierarchy is a crucial core concept to grasp. And there are three main levels: parent, child, and peer or sibling. I'll create a few null objects to demonstrate this. And then we'll double-click to rename. Call this Parent. You can press the down arrow and jump to the next object. And we'll call this Child. And the next one will be Peer. So the child and the peer will become children of the parent and because the child and peer are on the same level of hierarchy, they're both children, they're both peers. Now this is a really simple hierarchy and it can get a bit more complex if we take the parent and then Control or Command, click and drag. And we'll put that underneath the peer. So, now this peer is also a parent. And this parent is still a parent because it has children but it's also a child. So it's important to note that in the object hierarchy, a child can also be a parent as can a peer. We can twirl these up by clicking here. And nulls are very useful for keeping the object manager neat and organized. You can think of nulls as folders. You can even change the visual representation of the null object to be a folder if you like. In the Basic tab, there's a section called Icon Settings and you can load in a preset. And there's a folder one. Nulls have other useful functions, too. We can group objects by first selecting them. We select them in the object manager here, come over to the object menu, and choose group objects. And Alt-G is a very useful keyboard shortcut to remember. A null is basically an object that doesn't render but it has an access. By grouping these objects in this null, we have made them children of the null object. The child objects inherit the values of the parent. So we could grab our scale tool and scale up this null object. And what's actually happening is the object properties will change. Let's just select our move tool and grab the null. And we'll switch over to the Coordinates tab. As we move this back, you can see the exposition change. Looking at the pyramid, for example, we don't see any change to the X coordinate. And if I move the null, once again, you can see that that value has not changed at all. A child object's coordinates are relative to the parent. So by moving the parent, we see that the child object's relative coordinates are unchanged. But if we take the child out of the group, we break the relationship between the pyramid and the null and the pyramid's coordinates are converted to world space. It's worth noting that a child still has its own object access, so it can move independently within the group. Null objects are very useful for keeping the object hierarchy organized and for forming hierarchical relationships between objects through grouping. The object hierarchy is such an important part of working in Cinema 4D. And as we continue, you will see how different object types use the hierarchy to perform their function.