• Introduction
• Interface
• Bodypaint 3
• Animation Controls
• Timeline
• Enhanced OpenGL
• Interactive Render Region (IRR)
• Character Animation / Mocca 3
• Layers / Layer Manager
• Object Manager
• Documentation
• Tutorials & Goodies
• Miscellaneous
• Conclusion

Documentation

In Release 10 MAXON has revamped the documentation and made it all into a help system accessible from the Help menu. No longer do you have to go scratching around for the various pdf manuals or updates. You may recall that in Release 9 that only the CINEMA 4D and BodyPaint manuals were available from the Help menu. However if you were like me you could have loaded them all up in the Content Browser. The new help / documentation system is searchable and there's a level of detail slider that reduces the search results. Finally we get content sensitive help i.e. want some help on a particular tool or command then press CTRL + F1 (PC) or Cmd + F1 (Mac).

First the good news. The content sensitive help works extremely well as the video demonstrated. Essentially if you see some text on the status bar when your mouse is over a menu command, tool or other element then you can use the content sensitive help. The not so good news is the searchable help system appears to need more work and it feels rushed. It's great being able to do a search on say "Render" but you get results from all modules. I would like to see options to filter your search and restrict it to specific modules. Admittedly the results do say what module the result is from but you can often end up with an overwhelming list of results. The Result detail slider does help a little. You also can't do a search on the actual pages and some are quite long. We mentioned in the Bodypaint section that some of the new R10 features don't show up in a search. They're in there if you know where to look but beginners wouldn't know where to look. There's also a few minor errors relating to R10 enhancements and the text doesn't quite describe the R10 behaviour / option correctly. I'm told by MAXON that some of these issues will be addressed in the 10.1 update.

Although you can print out parts of the documentation it's not nearly so easy as printing out as a PDF manual. A pdf manual also allows you to read entire sections in a linear fashion. The new documentation requires you to click on links that correspond to Attribute Manager tabs etc. Quite handy is that you can click on images to bring up full size images as many images are too small to see what's going on properly. When R10 first came out many people were annoyed by the change away from pdf manuals. I have to say the new help / documentation system does grow on you but as mentioned there's a few things to address to make it work properly. I assume that as MAXON releases updates e.g. 10.1 and hopefully a 10.5 that the enhancements will be included in the documentation system. This will be much easier than wading your way through up to 14 pdf manuals and updates looking for what you want.