Focus Your Work with Cinema 4D’s Full Screen Mode and Collapsed Palettes

Photo of Rick Barrett

Instructor Rick Barrett

Share this video
  • Duration: 02:52
  • Views: 8393
  • Made with Release: 17
  • Works with Release: 17 and greater

Eliminate UI clutter in C4D and work effectively in a single-monitor layout with Full Screen Mode and Collapsed Palettes.

With Cinema 4D's Full Screen Mode and collapsible palettes and managers, you can minimize interface clutter and focus on specific managers. To activate Full Screen Mode, simply hover over the desired manager and hit Ctrl-Tab. A special version of Full Screen Mode accessible with Ctrl-Shift-Tab maximizes a group of related managers, and Ctrl-F in the Picture Viewer offers a chromeless view of your final render. Middle-clicking (or Ctrl-Left Clicking) on the grabber element at the front of each palette or in the upper left corner of each manager will collapse that element, getting it out of the way but still accessible with a simple click when you need it.

show less

Transcript

- Cinema 4D Release 18 offers a few different ways to minimize the interface clutter and focus your work. The first way is through the Full-Screen mode, and this is achieved simply by hitting CTRL+Tab over any interface element. So over the view panel here, if I hit CTRL+Tab, I can get a full-screen view of my 3D viewport. I can do a CTRL+Tab over the Material Manager if I need to edit or organize my materials, or for instance if I activate the timeline. It's really impossible in this layout to work with the timeline here. But if I hit CTRL+Tab, I can get the timeline full-screen. So the Full-Screen mode makes it really easy to focus on specific managers, even when you're working in a single-window interface like I have here. Now, this is a custom layout that I've created for my own plugin development, and I want to show an additional feature to Full-Screen mode. Here, I have a number of scripting-related managers that are all grouped together inside one of Cinema 4D's group windows, which you can create here in the Customization menu. What this does is it allows you to group a whole bunch of windows under a single tab. Well, if I hit CTRL+Tab on any individual manager here, it will full-screen just that manager. But if I hit CTRL+Shift+Tab, it will full-screen the entire group window. So that's another cool little feature of the Full-Screen mode. One other aspect of Full-Screen mode that I should cover is that within the Picture Viewer window, there is a special Full-Screen mode that you access by hitting CTRL+F. This actually gives you a full-screen view of the image without any interface chrome at all. You can hit the X there in order to get out of that Full-Screen mode. If you do this with an animation, you actually get a little animation playback bar down here at the bottom in order to control the playback of the animation. Note that the Full-Screen mode for the Picture Viewer is only available when Cinema 4D is not rendering. If you are currently rendering and want to view things that have already been rendered in Full-Screen mode, you can open up a new Picture Viewer window by hitting the + button, right here. Any element that's already been rendered, you'll be able to view in Full-Screen mode that way. One other way that you can minimize interface elements that aren't currently necessary is by collapsing pallets or managers. You do that by middle-clicking or CTRL+left clicking on the grabber area here at the top of the pallet, or in the upper-left corner of the manager. So you can see here that we can minimize these pallets or these managers here, and then to unfold them again we simply click on the grabber area again. So those are a couple of different ways that you can focus your work by cleaning up the Cinema 4D interface. If you found this Quick Tip helpful, please like, share, and visit cineversity.com for more great Cinema 4D tutorials and resources.
Resume Auto-Scroll?