Changing the default Cinema 4D file

- Are you using Cinema 4D with After Effects? If not, you should know that every copy of After Effects CC comes standard with Cinema 4D Lite. Which may sound lite but it is actually a full blown 3D application that can talk seamlessly with After Effects via the Cineware plugin. In this tape I'll show you how you can change the default Cinema 4D document every time you create a new file to better match a video workflow.

So to open Cinema 4D Lite, you need to go to File, New, and choose Maxon Cinema 4D file which will promote you to save the file. I'm going to name mine Basic and I'm going to save it on the desktop. Now depending on the version that you're working with, you will see the Cinema 4D startup screen and maybe some registration information. In my case I'm going to click Close This Dialog and then, Cinema 4D will start.

Now just so we won't look at this great interface, I'm going to create something very basic here. So let's create a cube, then a pyramid, and also a sphere. I'm going to give some colors to these objects by creating a new material. I'm going to choose a red color for the cube. And I'm going to drag and drop that material on top of the cube. And then I'm going to create a new material, this one will be a green one.

I'm going to drag it to the pyramid object. And lastly I'm going to create a blue material. And this time I'm going to drag it to the sphere. And those are the three elements that appears on the composition icon inside After Effects. So lets save this document and return to After Effects to see how it looks. So here you can see that the default size of the document that we are creating is set to 800 by 600 pixels with a duration of three seconds, 30 frames per second.

Now of course I can return to Cinema 4D and change those settings and they will update in this single instance. But I would argue that 99 percent of the cases, this is not what you want. You may want to keep your After Effects settings whatever they might be. Or just create a more suitable video document to use inside Cinema 4D. So I'm going to hide both After Effects and Cinema 4D and I'm going to locate the After Effects installation folder.

On the Mac it will be under Applications on the PC side it will be under Program Files, Adobe. And then once you locate the After Effects installation folder, look for the plugins folder inside it. And then look for the Maxon Cineware AE folder. And here in this folder you should find another one which is called Cineware Support in parenthesis. In this folder you should see the default Cinema 4D file, what you need to do here is drag this file to the After Effects project panel.

Remember that we need After Effects in order to open Cinema 4D Lite, so in this case, I'm going to select this file and choose edit, edit original. Now inside Cinema 4D you can change the settings for this file to whatever suits you. For example, I'm going to press Command or Control-D and I'm going to change the frames per seconds to 25 and also set the maximum time and maximum preview to 124 frames.

Which in this case, will yield five seconds. I'm also going to click on the Render settings button and I'm going to choose a different settings from this little arrow under Film and Video and I'm going to choose HDTV 1080 25. Now you can continue to set your project the way you like it and also choose other things to change but I'm going to settle with these changes and I'm going to close this dialog box. Now I'm going to try and save this document which as you can see is not possible due to the fact that it is protected.

So instead I'm going to save a copy on my desktop making sure to keep the same name default.c4d. Then I'm going to close this file, go back to the finder or explorer and replace it manually with the same file. Now if you want you can backup the original default file but I'm not going to do so in my case. I'm going to type my password to approve this replacement. And then I'm going to return to After Effects.

Now I'm going to delete the default.c4d file that I've imported. And I'm going to create another new c4d file using File, New, Maxon Cinema 4D file. I'm going to call this one Shapes, and I'm going to save it once again on the Desktop here. And now as you can see we have the desired frames per second, length and most importantly dimensions. So I'll switch back to the previously opened document which contains these beautiful RGB primitive shapes.

And I'm going to select them and copy them to the new document and then I'm going to once again save the file. Now let's switch back to After Effects and as you can see we have the desired settings in place. So from this point onward, this will be our default. This will be our starting point every time we are going to create a new Cinema 4D file. Now I should mention, that you can do the same thing if you're working with the full Cinema 4D application.

The only difference is that you need to name the file new.cinema4d and just place it in the main folder of your Cinema 4D release. So this is it for this tape. I hope I've helped you to save some energy each time you want to create a new Cinema 4D file from After Effects.