basics tutorial in Cinema 4D

Welcome to the first tutorial in our “the basics” series. This series of tutorials is designed to teach you the extreme basics of Cinema 4D and is a great way to learn Cinema 4D for everyone that has never used Cinema 4D before.

In this tutorial we will cover the Cinema 4D interface, we will go through all basic menu’s and button explaining what they are and how to use them.

Lets start by opening Cinema 4D, depending on the version of C4D you are using the interface should look something like this:

As you can see I have devided the Cinema 4D (or C4D) screen into different sections, I will now explain what these sections are.

1 – The Cinema 4D File menu

Almost all functions and things you can do with Cinema 4D can be access from these menus. However, there are many useful shortcuts that will save more time than using these menus.

2 – The Shortcut Buttons.

These buttons will help you access the things you will often use in Cinema 4D quickly, without having to go through the huge amount of menus in the upper menu.

1. Undo
2. Redo
3. Live Selection Tool
4. Move Tool, move your object around
5. Scale Tool, used to scale the selected object in x, y and z direction
6. Rotate Tool
7. Restrict to X Axis
8. Restrict to y Axis
9. Restrict to z Axis
10. Use World/Object coordinate system
11. Render Active View, this quickly renders your scene so you can check how it looks
12. Render in Picture Viewer
13. Open Render Settings
14. Add a Cube object (Hold down to get a drop down menu where you can select more primitives)
15. Spline Drawing Tool (Hold downto get a drop down menu where you can select more Splines)
16. Add a HyperNURBS object (Hold down to get a drop down menu where you can select more NURBS)
17. Add an Array Object (Hold down to get a drop down menu where you can select more object holders)
18. Add a Light Object (Hold down to get a drop down menu where you can select more light objects)
19. Add a Bend Deformation (Hold down to get a drop down menu where you can select more Deformations)
20. Add an emitter Object (Hold down to get a drop down menu where you can select more emitters)
21. Selection Filter
22. Filter, hide and unhide things from view
23. Object browser, allows you to quickly load materials / previous projects

You will learn more about these tools as we go on. For now, just make sure you know the names of each of them.

You can also access all of these options from the Cinema 4D File Menu (1), however, these buttons are often faster.

3 – Edit and Selection

1. Click to convert back to the default layout, or hold to load alternate layouts.
2. Make the current object editable so it can be altered, you can also press “c” on your keyboard
3. Enable Model Tool, you will now be able to move both your objects and the axis in your current view
4. Enable Object Axis Tool, you can now only move your axis around, your objects will stay at there current location.
5. Point Tool, allows you to select the different points on a object, so you can edit them.
6. Edge Tool, allows you to select the different edges on a object, so you can edit them.
7. Polygon Tool, allows you to select the different polygons on a object, so you can edit them.
8. Mode Tool, changes modes, hold to select different modes. For example in Auto Switch mode C4D will switch between point, edge and polygon tools automatically.
9. Texture Tool
10. Texture Axis Tool
    
11. Object Tool

4 – View controls

These Control the current view. They are as follows:

1. Move: hold this and move the mouse to move up/down or strafe left/right.
2. Zoom: Hold the zoom button and move your mouse to zoom in or out of selected object, you can also use your mouse scrollbar for this
3. Rotate: Hold and rotate your mouse to move around the selected object
4. Window: Click this to switch from 1 view mode (for example the (x,y) plane), to the 4 way view, showing all 2d planes and the general 3d view.

You might have an hard time moving around your objects at first, but once you got these under control you will love it and use it often. Practice, practice practice!

5 – Object Manager

In the Object Manager everything in your current scene will be listed, for example objects, lights and floors.

With the object manager you can delete, nest, modify, select and do almost anything with your objects. By dragging a material onto your objects the material will be added here, so you can edit and delete it when needed.

6 – Attribute Manager

From here you can change the different attributes of your selected object.

For example when you have selected a cube, here you can change the size, name and much more.

Which attributes are available here depends strongly on the selected items.

As you can see on your left I have selected a Light Object, in the attribute manager you can change the light settings, such as do you want shadows, how strong should the light be, what color etc.

You can use the tabs on top to flip between different pages with options, don’t feel scared, you will probably never used most of them!

7 – Animation Manger

From here you can manage your animations, we won’t go into detail about this here.

8 – Material Manager

In the Material Manager you can open or create materials and shaders. All the materials you have loaded into your current project are listed here, double click on one to edit it.

You can apply the materials listed here onto your objects by dragging them onto the object inside the object viewer or the object manager.

9 – Coordinate Manager

The Coordinate manager allows you to precisely place, modify and rotate your objects. For example you want to move the center of your object to the coordinates (x=100, y=-100, z=400), you can do this in the coordinate manager!

Thats all for now, I hope you now understand the layout of Cinema 4D better, when you are just starting you will get lost looking for options many times, but don’t worry you can always go back to this tutorial to see where you can find certain tools.

My advice is to just play around with Cinema 4D, check out every option yourself to see how they work and where you can use them for, thats in my opinion the best way to quickly learn C4D.

And don’t be discouraged, you will probably never use most of the functions that Cinema 4D has anyway!

Primitives

Primitives are the basic building blocks in Cinema 4D that will allow you to create absolutly everything you can think of.

Everything can be made from the basics building blocks you see above, thats why you will use them a lot and thats also the reason they are so important.

In the first part of the tutorial you will learn how to place and move primitives into your scene, in the second part you will also learn how to edit them.

Before we start here is a quick exersise for you, take a random object (for example a pen, bottle, mouse) and think of which primitives you would use and how to create this object!

A pen for example, can be made from a cylinder and a cone for the top part.

Adding your first Primitive

Click and hold the primitives button on your quick access toolbar, select the cube primitive and let go of your mouse.

You will see that C4D has now added a cube primitive into your scene, check your coordinate manager and note the (x,y,z) location of the center and the x,y,z size of your cube.

As you can see Cinema4D placed the center (the center is the tiny white cube with the arrows coming out of it) of our cube on the coordinates (0,0,0).

Moving our cube

Now half of the cube is beneath the (x,z) plane, not that it really matters but lets move the cube so it is entirely on the (x,z) plane. Since the cube is 200m high, we will need to move the cube up by 100m. The new coordinates will be (x=0, y=100, z=0).

There are multiple ways to move your cube, I will show the 2 easiest and quickest ones:

1. Take a close look at your cube, inside of the cube you can see 3 arrows; a green, red and blue one. Click and hold (left mouse button) the green arrow. Now simply move your mouse up untill you can see in your coordinate manager that you have moved your cube onto the right spot. This technique is very fast, but less precise than the next technique.
2. You can also enter the desired coordinates directly into your coordinate manager. First make sure that you have still selected your cube object. Now go to the coordinate manager, enter the new postition and click apply:

Your cube should be in the right spot now, but just to make sure lets check it using one of the different views in the editor.

If you have a scroll wheel which you can press down, do this and your editor will load all the 4 views, these are:

• The 3D (x,y,z) plane,
• The 2D (x,y) plane
• The 2D (y,z) plane
• and of course the 2D (x,z) plane

You can use the right and front view to see that your cube is indeed located in the right place:

So now we know how to add primitives and how to move them around, so what else can we do with our cube primitive? Of course lets change the size!

Changing the size of the cube primitive

If you could easily follow the last few steps, changing the size will be easy. With Cinema4D we can minipulate our cube in every way possible, you can take one corner and move it up, increase the hight, width etc. In this tutorial we will just cover the basics which is changing the basic dimensions of our cube (width, height and lenght).

Changing the size of the cube can be done, like almost anything, in multiple ways. I will here explain the 2 most used techniques:

1. Remmeber the 3 arrows inside the cube pointing away in the x,y,z directions from the center of our cube? In the last step we used them to move our cube, but they have another purpose. We can also use them to change the size of our cube!Notice the 3 yellow tiny dots, located where the arrow meets the cube surface? Click on one with your mouse and move it around and you will see it changes the size of our cube in that direction!
2. The second way to change the size of our cube is to use the coordinates manager again, simply enter your wanted size and click apply. The second technique again gives you a more precize control, but seeing your cube change in real time using the first technique is way more fun!

What you learned

You should now be able to add, move and change the size of our cube. Now practice your just learned skills!

I would suggest to try adding some other primitives to your scene and just play around with them. For example try placing a pyramid on your cube, and on top of the pyramid add a cone, and on top of the cone a sphere!

(hint: take a good look at your coordinate manager when you want to flip your cone)

In the next tutorial I will explain how to add materials to your scene, making your scene look realistic!