• 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

Object Manager

The Object Manager has always been one of CINEMA 4D's strengths and like other managers in Release 10 it has had some serious work and there's plenty of useful enhancements, some major and some small.

Below is the R10 Object Manager and I've expanded as many options as I could. The obvious new things are the Bookmarks menu and the 4 icons along the top. I'll demonstrate all of these in some short videos along with direct switching of cameras.

There are hotlinks under each letter. Just click the letter on the image above to load the video. The following is a summary:

A Search Bar and Bookmarks (3min 10sec 2.3mb)

B Path Bar (3min 55sec 4.0mb)

C Filter, Extra Object Managers & Camera Switching (4min 35 sec 8.5mb)

D Visibility Dot Painting (1min 53sec 953kb)

If you would to download and view these 4 videos as one combined video I've compiled them together and uploaded the combined video to the Cafe's tutorial section.  Click here to go to the download page (13min 38 sec 15.4mb)

I've also covered the above items with video tutorials in the Timeline section so make sure to check out these videos as well as they are more in depth.

In addition to the above major enhancements there's a few other noteworthy minor enhancements:

View Menu - Icon Size

We now have 3 options for icon size. The smallest size means that you can show a lot more objects and tags without having to scroll so much.

View Menu - Flat Tree

This option displays objects out of their hierarchy in a vertical list. The "Sort by name" option in the menu organizes the elements alphabetically.

View Menu - Layers

This display contents of the Object Manager organized into their layers. The "Sort by name" option in the menu organizes the elements within the layers alphabetically.

View Menu - Set As Root

This makes the selected object the top level object in the Object Manager. The effect is that only child objects are now visible in the Object Manager. Refer Path Bar video.

Selecting

You can now multi select elements by using the shift key just like selecting files in Windows. i.e. select the first the first item in a list and then shift click the last item in the list. everything in between is now selected. To manually add one element to your selection you now use the CTRL key. Again similar to how things work in Windows and different than the previous shift click method to add to the selection.

Lights - Enabling

Lights now have a check mark to enable / disable them. This is a welcome enhancement as the top visibility dot only hides the the light in the viewport for editing purposes. The output from the light is still rendered.

I'm pretty happy about the enhancements for the Object Manager and they make working with complex scenes much easier. However like a few other Release 10 enhancements they do take a little time to get used to but once you're familiar with using them they are very easy to use. We'll cover layers in a separate section