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.

Cinema 4D Essentials: Stage Size and Movie Length

So if you've opened up Cinema 4D a few times you'll probably notice two things. One, your movie is always 90 frames long. And two, your stage is always a square aspect ratio. So how do we tweak these settings to get the desired effect? Let's dive in.
First we'll talk about the length of your movie and what that weird bar means between 0F and 90F when you open up Cinema 4D.
By default it sets your movie to be 90 frames long, so all we need to do to make it longer or short is change that second number above our materials window and beneath the stage.

That second number is the end frame for our animation, so if we change 90 F to 180 F our animation will last 180 frames rather than 90 frames. That first number is what the starting frame is, I rarely change this myself but if you are working on a project that is very precise that could come in handy.

You'll notice if you change the second number the bar between these two numbers will change. That bar is what part of your total animation is being shown in the timeline above it. If you click one of the arrows on the edge of this bar and drag, you'll see the timeline above it adjust accordingly. This bar is your zoom in and out of your timeline, much like the mountain icons and slider in Adobe After Effects.
This slider bar also determines what is played back when you watch your animation, so if you want to watch your whole animation, slide it all the way out until it won't go anymore.
Now that we've mastered that, let's make our stage 1920 by 1080 to be true HD. How do we do this? With the render settings.

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At the top of the Cinema 4D window you'll see the menu bar and a menu called "Render." That's where the render settings for the project live, and that's what controls the size of our stage.
Click that and third up from the bottom you should see Edit Render Settings.. next to an icon of a movie slate and a gear.

Click that guy.

This brings up the render settings and we can see right away that the first settings are width and height. By default they are set to 800 by 600, which is no good for our sweet HD animations. So we'll change these settings to be 1920 and 1080 respectively. You can keep the resolution at 72 DPI, and you'll notice that the Film Aspect changes to be 1.778, with the drop down bar next to it showing HDTV (16:9). That's what we're looking for.
Now when we close out of this window and head back to the regular Cinema 4D window you'll see that those greyed out vertical bars on either side of your stage are gone. Those were there to show you that when yo go to render you will not be seeing whatever is behind them, even though you can see it on the stage.
So there you have it, two quick solutions to two common issues with making a new Cinema 4D file. You can always adjust the timeline later as well without worrying about messing up your animation, as long as you don't make it shorter and start cutting stuff off. You can change the aspect ratio as well, but again, be careful to make sure you're not cutting off any of your hard work.