Cinema 4D Essential: Keyboard Shortcuts

I am calling this an essential article because Cinema 4D gave me such a headache when I started using it I felt like my eyes were going to fall out. Most computer programs like Photoshop or After Effects use keyboard shortcuts to speed up your work flow. Cinema 4D however uses keyboard shortcuts in, what I think, a different way. You need to know them just to get around. So what are they keys you need to force your hand to memorize?
Well first off we have how to move around in our scene. This is how we move the camera around in our animation. Holding down 1 moves the camera's position, holding 2 zooms in and out and holding 3 changes it's angle. These are vital to navigating your scene and animation. When I'm working in Cinema 4D my left hand is almost always placed over the 1, 2, and 3 keys.

That's is unless it's using the other essential keys.

The other set of keys you need to hammer into your delicate little fingers are the ones that control the aspects of your object. Those keys are E, to move your objects position, R to change your objects rotation, and T to change your objects scale. Once you have your object all set before you start animating though I find I don't often use T to change it's scale though, so it's mainly an E and R game of switching back and forth. You don't have to hold these keys down so you can just hit them once.
Finally we have Command R to do a render preview of what our animation will actually look like when it's all said and done. This is important mainly when it comes to the lighting of our scene.

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You'll want to check as you go so we don't accidentally end our animation in a dimly lit area.

So since I had so much trouble remembering the keys here's a list for your viewing pleasure:
1 - Camera position
2 - Zoom in and out
3 - Camera rotation
E - Object position
R - Object rotation
T - Object scale
Command R - Render preview
It may seem silly to dedicate a whole article to the keyboard shortcuts for basic navigation in Cinema 4D, but I've seen a lot of people struggle, my included. It's a different way of using keyboard shortcuts, rather than hitting it every once in a while I find myself using these keys all the time. I'm almost always pressing one of these keys when I'm working in Cinema 4D, and if you can start to not only memorize what they do but get the muscle memory down your work flow and speed inside of Cinema 4D is gonna increase dramatically.
So those are they keys you need to know, it's not that many but your hand is gonna feel weird using them. You'll pick it up eventually though and then you'll be cruising in no time!
If you're interested in more keyboard shortcuts you can check out this handy list of shortcuts put together over at Rate My Funeral, a great site for Cinema 4D beginners as well as a place to get some nice free models to play around with.