Set Up Default Color Chooser Swatches

Photo of Rick Barrett

Instructor Rick Barrett

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  • Duration: 02:49
  • Views: 2602
  • Made with Release: 17
  • Works with Release: 17 and greater

Using new.c4d to define default Color Chooser Swatches.

Because the Color Chooser Swatches are stored within the document, you'll need to use a new.c4d file to define a default set of swatches to appear in each new document. This tutorial shows the steps for creating and applying a new.c4d file with your favorite color swatches.

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Transcript

- The color swatches shown in the Release 17 Color Chooser are stored with the document. They're not specific to your Cinema 4D installation. What is specific to your Cinema 4D installation is the swatches that are stored in the content browser presets, which you can easily recall using the load button here. But if you would like the same swatch set to always be visible each time you launch Cinema 4D and create a new document, you're going to want to use a new.c4d file. If you're unfamiliar with this, I am going to show you how to do that in this quick tip. The first thing you'll need to do is go ahead and create a new scene file, because you want to make sure that the only settings stored in this file are those that you want to be applied to each new Cinema 4D scene file. We're going to go ahead and create a new material and in any of the color chooser boxes, you want to just activate the swatches panel. And what I'm going to do is go ahead and go into the content browser and I'm going to search for all of my swatches. "I'm going to choose file type is color swatch preset" and hit search. And here I've got all of my swatches. I'm just going to go ahead and select all of them and control drag into the document. And now you can see that I've got all of those swatches available as individual groups in my swatches panel. So, I'm going to go ahead and set this as my new default swatch set in Cinema 4D, and all I need to do in order to do that is save this document. But first, I'm actually going to delete this material, because I don't want the material to be visible each time I create a new scene file. So, now all I'm going to do is go ahead and save this file as new.c4d. You can see I've already got one here already on my desktop, but you'll just go ahead and save it as new.c4d. I'm going to go ahead and save and replace the file that's there already. And one more thing before I close Cinema 4D, is I want to go ahead and choose "Edit Preferences" and open my preferences folder. Now I can go ahead and close Cinema 4D. Next, all I need to do is drag this new.c4d file right over into that preferences folder that opened up and I can relaunch Cinema 4D now. And you'll see that when I create a new material and jump into the swatches panel, I have that same set of swatches loaded by default in this document, and it will be the set of swatches loaded by default in each new document. Now, you may not want to load all of these swatches. You probably have your own set of swatches, but now you know the process, so you can optimize the Color Chooser to your own personal workflow needs.
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