Modify Take, Material and Layer Names with the Naming Tool

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Instructor Rick Barrett

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  • Duration: 03:09
  • Views: 4086
  • Made with Release: 17
  • Works with Release: 17 and greater

Quickly a Prefixes and Suffixes to names of Objects, Materials, Tags, Layers and Takes.

The Naming Tool in Cinema 4D Release 17 has been enhanced to support Takes, Materials, Layers and Tags in additon to Objects. You can use this tool to quickly add prefixes and suffixes to the names of selected elements.

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Transcript

In this quick tip, we're going to look at some great additions to the naming tool in Cinema 4D Release 17. You may not be familiar with the naming tool because it's something that the character animators have kind of been keeping to themselves. It's basically been used in the past to rename the sections of their rig from left_ to right_. But now, in Release 17, it's so much more powerful. It's not just for objects anymore. In a previous quick tip, you might have seen me create all of the various takes, here, for this sports template. And the one issue that I'm left with is when I render this out, if I use the take token name, I'm going to get a lot of overridden renders with the V_Eagles, V_Dolphins, V_Cyclone, because all of these takes have that name. What I need to do is actually prefix this name with the home team's name. So the naming tool now, which, again, you can get to just by choosing tools naming tool, now applies to not just objects, but tags, materials, layers and takes. So here with takes, we're just going to choose takes, and we're going to select these five. And we're going to prefix them with H_Eagles, and just hit replace name. And actually we want to undo that. I'm going to put an underscore after that. And now you can see that these takes are actually named H_Eagles_V_Eagles, H_Eagles _V_Dolphins, H_Eagles_V_Cyclone. And now I can get individual renders that are name specific for each match-up. So we can do this right on down the line. We'll call this H_Dolphin. Put the underscore, and hit replace name. So you get the idea. You can also do this on materials as well. So here we have the materials that relate to team one. Well, I'm going to go ahead and go into the naming tool and I'm going to switch to materials. And we're going to prefix that with T1_ and hit replace name. And now you can see that all those materials have a T1_ prefix, so I know that they relate to team one. And we can do the same thing with team two. And we'll go ahead and just change this to T2_ and hit replace name. Works with layers as well. So if I choose layers here . . .and we'll just go ahead and pop this out so that we can keep seeing it as we switch to the layers manager. Let's say I don't have these numbered. I just have team and team. And what I can do is just select both of these, and we can suffix them with _$N. And $N is a special token that will be replaced with the integer index as it loops through the layers. So now when we hit replace name, we get team_zero and team_one. It is zero-based because these are programmers after all. So this is the basis of how you can use the naming tool in Cinema 4D Release 17 to quickly wrangle the names of your objects, your materials, your tags, and your layers, as well as your takes.
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