• 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

Interface

When you fire up Release 10 for the first time you’ll notice a few things. A new contemporary splash screen as the program loads and wait for it, the program loads a lot faster. No more going to put the kettle on to boil for a coffee while Cinema 4D loads!! Then finally you’re greeted with the new default "Light" scheme.

Let’s have a look at the schemes close up.

Light Scheme                        Dark Scheme                        Classic Scheme

Release 10 comes with 3 schemes (4 if you include the antique scheme of the install DVD), the new modernized default Light scheme, a darker version called “Dark” and an enhanced R9 scheme called “Classic”. Judging by the response in the forums you either like the new default scheme or you hate it. Fortunately for those that hate it the Classic scheme gives you back the familiar R9 “Blueberry” scheme slightly enhanced for Release 10. I personally don’t like some parts of the 2 new schemes. The icons themselves are actually quite nice but my eyes have trouble reading text in the various managers. Things like points when point editing are hard to see for example.

Obviously it’s easy enough to customize things the way you like. One thing that you can do and that is to load schemes and layouts from your R9 installation. Here’s one that I’ve done where I’ve copied the R9 Blueberry scheme into the R10 schemes folder. This gives me the R10 icons that I quite like but I get colours etc from the R9 Blueberry scheme. For me this is much easier to work with than using all of the new Light scheme.

Blueberry Scheme in R10

Let’s have a look at a few other Interface enhancements. Palette folding has been enhanced in R10. I always found palette folding in R9 to be quite clunky and you often messed things up. This has all changed. We still have the ability to fold and unfold palettes as before but you’ll notice around the interface and on many of the menus 2 rows of small dots. By clicking on these dots a duplicate of that particular menu is undocked. You then have those menu commands on an icon palette available for easy access. Now the really clever part is you can dock these palettes and the palette can be toggled using the middle mouse button (or Ctrl + left click on a PC or Cmd + left click on a Mac) to fold and opened by left clicking. This is very slick. Want to hide the top row of tool bar buttons? Just middle click on the dots. Below is a short video demonstrating this.

Click on the image or here to open and run a Flash format video (1.4mb)

The Command Manager now includes a Search filter much like how the Search Bar in the Object Manager and Timeline work. See the image below. This makes finding commands very easy, however you do have to have an idea of what you're looking for. I have to say I actually prefer the Release 9 system where you could filter commands by the their manager or menu title. This allowed easy browsing of commands that you may find useful. Sadly this method has gone and ideally it would have been best to have included both systems.