Cinema 4D Essentials
2 January 2023
74 lessons · 18h 49m
Cinema 4D Essentials is a curated reference course designed to help you master the most important and widely used tools in Cinema 4D—the ones you’ll turn to every day as a motion graphics artist.
Originally released as a PDF guide, this updated version brings everything together in a streamlined, video-based course experience right here on the CG Shortcuts site. Instead of recreating content that has been covered extensively online, this course pulls in the best explainer videos from around the web, carefully selected for clarity and relevance.
Organized by category—Modeling, Mograph, Animation, Materials, Rendering, and more—it’s your go-to reference when you need a quick refresher or want to explore a tool in more depth. Plus, each lesson includes links to Maxon’s official manual and other trusted resources for further learning.
Whether you're just getting started or brushing up on your workflow, this course is the perfect companion to the Ultimate Cinema 4D Guide.
Lessons
Lesson 1 is always free to preview.
- 1
Custom Layouts and Palettes7m - 2
Customizing Keyboard Shortcuts in Cinema 4D2m - 3
Asset Browser11m - 4
Place & Dynamic Placement7m - 5
Primitives14m - 6
Scene Organization With Layers3m - 7
Texture Projection25m - 8
Project Asset Inspector5m - 9
UV Unwrapping2h 2m - 10
Material/Texture Stacking & Mixing7m - 11
RS Standard Material25m - 12
Displacement2m - 13Bump6m
- 14
TriPlanar2m - 15
Color User Data16m - 16
Ramp7m - 17Maxon Noise3m
- 18
Color Layer10m - 19Material Blender12m
- 20Jitter17m
- 21
Light Types11m - 22
Dome Light & HDRI Lighting11m - 23
Redshift Camera Types7m - 24Choosing The Right Lens15m
- 25Bokeh and Depth of Field40m
- 26
Render Settings45m - 27
Render Queue8m - 28
Motion Blur5m - 29
Render Faster16m - 30
Axis Center1m - 31
Selection Tools15m - 32
Modeling Tools29m - 33
Deformers— - 34
Boole35m - 35
Cloth Surface8m - 36
Extrude1m - 37
Lathe6m - 38
Loft4m - 39
Sweep16m - 40
Connect3m - 41
Thicken21m - 42
Symmetry3m - 43
Vector Import13m - 44
Remesh10m - 45
Volume Builder34m - 46
Subdivision Surface22m - 47
Splines21m - 48
Animation Timeline16m - 49
Alembic2m - 50
Baking1m - 51
Track Modifier15m - 52
Vibrate Tag1m - 53
Cloner35m - 54
Mograph Cache1m - 55
Voronoi Fracture59m - 56
Plain Effector14m - 57
Random Effector13m - 58
Shader Effector11m - 59
Step Effector4m - 60
Inheritance Effector9m - 61
Push Apart Effector4m - 62
Delay Effector7m - 63
Morph Deformer + Pose Morph3m - 64
Constraints10m - 65
Tension Tag22m - 66
Rigid Body Dynamics39m - 67
Cloth & Softbody Dynamics32m - 68
Rope Dynamics22m - 69
Field Force32m - 70
Turbulence Force3m - 71
Wind Force7m - 72
Friction Force4m - 73
Rotation Force4m - 74
Connectors18m
