Setting up C4D - CINEMA 4D Tutorial

- [Instructor] Before we dive in we're going to look at some "Settings "and Preferences to Set Up our Working Environment" in Cinema 4D. The first area we're going to look at is the project settings. You can see them over here on the right in the "Attributes Manager". If you can't see them come over to "Edit" and choose "Project Settings". In the "Project Settings" tab, we can see a few key things that we just need to look at. Don't need to look at all of this just yet but the main things are things like "Frames Per Second" and you can set up your project time and things like that. This is just the number of frames that you have to work with. Currently, we have 90 frames at 30 frames per second. So we have a three second animation here so we can adjust the maximum time by typing in here. So we could go 150 and you can see that our timeline still is showing 90 frames. That's because our "Preview Range" is set to 90. What we can do is either increase this value or come over to the slider and just drag this out. So you can see now we can drag this out to preview the whole range. You can actually adjust this value so that you just see a very small range and this can be useful if you're watching something on a loop or just wanting to focus in on a small part of the animation. If we double-click in here, you can jump that back to the full range. So I mentioned "Frame Rate" currently it's set to 30 frames per second. If we come over to our "Render Settings" we can see that the default render settings in the output have a frame rate of 30. Now, if this were to change if you were to use one of the presets that are found here or if you were to change this manually, say we were working at 25 frames per second, well, the project frames per second doesn't match. So we would be creating our animations at 30 and then rendering out at 25 and this can cause some problems. So you need to make sure that these values match. I'm going to set this back to 30. Here, you can also change the frame size so the width and height, and just be aware that this will also change the film aspect. So if you're working with a 16 by nine film aspect and then decide to change to say a square this will have an impact on what you do with cameras and things like that. Because if we create a camera quickly this is all relative to the field of view. So I'm going to change this back to 16 by nine, and you'll see that when we make these changes, the field of view changes as well. It's good to have in mind, your final output before you start to work, but by all means you can make these changes. You just have to make some adjustments to framing of the composition, for example. So we'll close this down and I'm going to just remove this camera for now and we'll come into the preferences. So "Edit" "Preferences" and on a Mac, you can actually use the normal keyboard shortcut which is "Cmd + ,". So we'll come into the preferences here and you'll notice actually that we've got this highlighting here. Some elements are in yellow so we've got some items here, some buttons. And if you're on a PC, you may see even in the top menu here, some of the menu items are yellow. Like here you'll see things like this. On a Mac using the Mac Menu those colored highlightings don't actually come through, but you can switch the Mac Menu if you don't like it to the traditional one just by disabling this "Show Mac Menu Power" option. I quite like it, so I'm going to leave it on for now, but the highlighting comes from this option here. And these are new features in S22. If you click on the list you can see highlighting for previous versions of Cinema 4D. So you can see what was new in our 21 for example. Now we are going to turn this off and keep it off for the remainder of the course just cause it can be a little bit distracting as once you click on these buttons, the features will fade and eventually the highlighting will disappear. So what I'm going to turn it off, but just know you can come and turn this on at any time you like. The "Files" section is a key one to look at because this is where we can choose to "Auto Save" our work. So if we turn this on, we'll get a copy of our work saved every five minutes and a maximum of 10 copies. It will save in the "Project Directory". So what does this mean? Ideally, what you'll do is you'll save your to begin with. And then next to that project file, there'll be a folder called "Backup" and inside the backups folder, there will be all your auto saves. So we'll close this one down. Another thing I like to do is save incrementally. If I'm making milestones, I choose to "Save Incremental". And there's a keyboard shortcut for this which is "Opt + Cmd + S" on Mac and "Alt + Cmd + S" on PC. This allows us to version up our work and so we can go back to our previous version if needed. Finally, we'll talk about layouts. If we're focusing on an animation task for example, we can switch over to that layout and we get a big timeline at the bottom here. And if you're modeling you can see all the modeling tools at the bottom. So this is just really useful to know you can customize Cinema 4D how you like it. I'm going to be using a custom version of the startup layout just so it's a bit easier to show everything on screen. So that was just a look at a few settings and preferences that will hopefully help you to set up your working environment.