9 Modelling tips in Cinema 4D

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These are some modelling tips that where being discussed on the mograph chat. I decided there should be a little summary of them.  thanks to Brasco for clarifying some of them.

  1. use the ‘.’ ( the full stop button). click and drag while holding to wheight edges of a SubD surface
    edge wheights
  2. hold ctrl while in slide edge tool to make loop
    edge loops
  3. Weld Tool (M,Q) Hold Ctrl with no points selected to weld. Or use Stitch and sew tool for same effect.
    weld Ctrl
  4. Dissolve – Melt Difference
    dissolve MEtl
  5. ctrl+shift click to select polygon paths
    ctrlshift select
  6. u,l loops selection, u,f fill selection
    loopFill
  7. split command, then hit delete to have 2 separate objects
    split
  8. top of shape with hex object
    hexCap
  9. python script to import  c4d objects from your drive. So you can for example have a c4d file with 4 or 5 of those hex discs, and you can import them all with a button to any scene. and then pick the right one. 
    def main():
  fn = 'X:\[Asset library]\Model library\Modeling Toolkit\Base Geometry\Hexahedral_Discs.c4d'
  c4d.documents.MergeDocument(doc, fn, c4d.SCENEFILTER_OBJECTS | c4d.SCENEFILTER_MATERIALS | c4d. SCENEFILTER_DIALOGSALLOWED | c4d.SCENEFILTER_MERGESCENE)
 
  c4d.EventAdd()

Tell me if i missed anything you love to use =)

Cheers,
Aleksey

Switching between projects in Cinema4D

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Cinema4D is awesome because you can have multiple projects open at the same time, and copy paste stuff between them.

The first method is just go to the “Windows” dropdown menu at the top of cinema 4D, and at the bottom there will be a list of currently open projects.

Personally that’s not my favorite method. So i’d like to share 2 methods i use to quickly jump between open projects.

First option which will work by default. Is press and hold the ‘v’ key on your keyboard and drag your mouse down.

v menu switch

The second method is to open command manager by pressing shift+F12, type in next project, and bind it to something easy. Like ctrl + ~ or ctrl+tab if you dont use the fullscreen function.  ( if you have a european keyboard its probably ctrl+0)

ctrl tilda

key photo

 

Or if you are one of those shortcut averse people you can just dock the next/previous object buttons in your interface like here. Thanks to @j_ssuarez from twitter for this tip! ( He has some awesome car shaders available)

So there is your production tip for today 🙂 Enjoy.

Want more ways to increase productivity? check out my viewport Heads up Display tutorial: https://ace5studios.com/hud/ Cheers, Aleksey

Cinema 4D in the cloud

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Many of you might have Cinema4D on more than one computer. There is a pretty simple way of syncing up all your layouts, shortcuts and plugins between multiple computers. Here i will explain the process with Dropbox.com, but you can do the same thing with copy.com or any other service (Copy link is a referral, so you and my girlfriend both get an extra 5gb of storage) Copy has been discontinued

 

Make a shortcut to cinema4D in your R17 folder.

shortcut

right click on it and click properties.

now in the Target field add:[  -g_prefspath=”E:\dropbox\c4d prefs”]

 

without the square brackets. So mine looks like this:

  • “E:\soft\CINEMA 4D R17\CINEMA 4D.exe” -g_prefspath=”E:\dropbox\Dropbox\c4d stuff\c4d prefs\prefs”

Don’t forget the space before the “g_prefspath”.

properties

Now when you open Cinema4D from that shortcut, thats where its going to get all your layouts and shortcuts and plugins from.

If you want to get your old prefs and put them there you can do that easily. By opening cinema4D from the cinema 4d.exe file. pressing ctrl+e, and clicking the “open preference folder” button in the bottom left of the window. From there you can also check where your current open instance of C4D is getting its preferences.

prefs

Now you can pin that shortcut to the start menu or copy it onto your desktop. Wherever you want 🙂

If you want an extra 5gb on top of the free 15gb you get at copy.com, click here: https://copy.com/?r=fTEbri
and help my girlfriend get an extra 5Gb too =) Copy has unfortunately been discontinued 🙁

Note: in R15 it was different, so my target path looked like this: “E:\soft\CINEMA 4D R15a\CINEMA 4D 64 Bit.exe” -homedir “E:\soft\CINEMA 4D R15a\myprefs”

cheers,
Aleksey

 

Adjusting point size in Cinema4D

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You can change the point size in cinema4D by pressing Shift+V and going to “view” and changing the point handle size

 

point size

 

You can also change the point color by pressing ctrl+E and then going to editor colors and changing active and inactive point colors.

pointColor

 

Cheers,
Aleksey

True symmetry Cinema4D – make your life easier in 1 easy step

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[update]: unfortunately this plugin is no longer developed and unavailable 🙁
Great plugin that everyone should use.

get it here: http://www.c4dcafe.com/ipb/files/file/778-true-symmetry-13/

Hope you enjoy!

R20: to get this to work with R20 you will need the insydium bridge which you can get here: https://insydium.ltd/products/bridge/

Adjusting multiple variables in increments at the same time in Cinema 4d

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This was something that i always wondered how to do, but never bothered finding, and now it appeard in slack, so i’m posting it here for memory and easy reference. And my attempt to get a blog going 🙂

Originally posted by Rick Barret from Maxon

The following variables are available:
x: Represents the parameter’s original value
num: Represents the index value. The selected elements/objects will be numbered
tot: The total number of selected elements/objects
rnd(value): A random value between 0 and “value” will be ascertained

Examples

You have three spheres at a position (parameter P.X) of 100, 200 and 300 meters, respectively. If you select all three spheres simultaneously and enter x+200 in the P.X field the spheres would be placed at 300, 400 and 500 meters, respectively.

 10 light sources: You want to increase the intensity of the light sources incrementally in steps of 20, beginning at 0. Select all light sources and enter num*20 in the Intensity field. Corresponding to the order in which they appear in the Object Manager, the first light will have an intensity of 0, the second light an intensity of 20, the third an intensity of 40, etc.

 You want to randomly disperse the intensity of ten light sources over a total value of 200: Select all light sources and enter x+rnd(200) in the Intensity field. If all light sources previously had an intensity of 0, each should now have a random intensity within a total value of 200.

 You want to set the Fillet Radius for twenty eight cubes to values ranging from 0 to 100 with equal intervals: Select all cubes and enter 100*(num/(tot-1)) into the Fillet Radius field.