Touring the Cinema 4D interface - CINEMA 4D Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this movie we're going to tour the interface and just become familiar with it. Let's briefly cover the key areas. At the top of the screen, you have the main menu and in the file menu, this is where you can create new projects, open projects, and of course save your work. You're going to want to be able to undo and redo things so if you're making a change to an object, you can quickly press the undo or redo button and in the edit menu we also have those functions. Selecting is a really important part of working with Cinema 4D. These are just a few of the tools available and for a deeper dive, you can go into the select menu. If you follow the previous movie, the move scale and rotate tools will already be familiar. As I hover over an icon and keep my mouse still, after a moment a little message appears and this is called the bubble help. You can enable and disable this option in the preferences. It gives you an idea of what the tool or object does and at the bottom of the screen, this information is also displayed. So there are two methods of getting help with the interface. It's a nice touch and very useful when learning the interface. The X, Y, and Z here are just for access lock and this is for restricting the movement in a particular access. This icon is for our coordinate system. You can switch between object and world. And for a quick example, I'm going to create a cube and just rotate it like so, and then say, I want to move this object on the Z axis but in this direction. The Z axis of the object is pointing down this way. I could quickly switch over to the world coordinate system, and then I can easily move this over like so. So knowing how to switch between these modes, is I think really, really useful. The group of three icons which look like film slates or clapperboards are for rendering. And whenever you see a black triangle in the bottom right corner of an icon, it means that there are more options underneath. To show those options, you click and hold on the icon. And it's the same if I click and hold on the cube here, it can reveal more objects which we can add to a scene. All these objects here can be found in the create menu. You can see we have splines, the green ones are generators then we have fields deformers, environment objects, cameras and lights. All objects in a 3D scene are stored in the object manager to the right of the object manager are tabs, allowing you to switch between different managers. The content browser is such a useful resource when learning Cinema 4D. You can download and install a whole load of free content and this includes models and materials, which are going to be a great starting point for any project. To simply come in and choose a model and you can load it into a scene, I think is a great resource. We come back out to the object manager, and if we have an object selected in the object manager, it's properties are displayed in the attribute manager. We can adjust properties using the up and down arrows or selecting a field and then typing in a value. We can press Tab to move between various other values. If you right click on the up and down arrows, you can return a property to its default setting. In the viewport there are handles which you can manipulate and as you manipulate the handles, you see the properties change in the attribute manager. One of the most important areas of the software is the viewport and that's why we covered it in detail in an earlier movie. To the left of the viewport, we have various modes for working with objects. Below the viewport we've got the mini timeline and playback controls. You can click onto an area of the mini timeline to jump to a particular frame and you can also scrub as well. You'd be using this a lot when animating. An animation is something that we cover extensively in the Cinema 4D motion graphics courses available on the library. Below the mini timeline we have the materials manager where we can create and store materials. A quick way of creating material is simply to double click a blank area of the material manager. And finally, it's important to know that you can really customize how the C4D layout looks. There are other windows and managers available that aren't part of the standard layout. So if you want to focus on animation, you could switch your layout to the animate layout. And then we have a really large timeline to work with at the bottom of the screen here. If your task is based around modeling, then there's a modeling layout and you have all the tools available to you at the bottom. I'm going to switch back to the standard layout and that's what we'll be working with throughout the course. So that should give you a good overview of the interface and some of the things that you can do. And I think that's enough information to digest at this stage, so let's move on.