shortcuts: POP-UP MENUS
Make life easier for yourself with pop-up menus
T hese Shortcuts pages are all about giving you bite-sized chunks of useful info to help you speed up your workflow and explore your software’s options.
Software like Maxon’s Cinema 4D are massive. They provide a great number of tools, options and customisation, but that can make for a steeper learning curve than you are comfortable with. With that in mind the developers often create quick-access menus, which can be hugely beneficial, especially for tasks you do less frequently where the mental muscle memory hasn’t been solidly created yet. Maxon have added a few of these to Cinema 4D and, although they are great for quickly finding a nested command, they also serve to allow users to create more working room for their viewports and managers. You could conceivably have an interface set up that has no buttons at all, simply relying on keyboard shortcuts and a couple of really useful and powerful pop-up menus to navigate almost everything the software has to offer.
So, if in doubt press the V key or hit Shift+c and you’ll get where you need.
01 what’s the problem?
Memorising commands is hard unless you use them all day. Hitting Shift+c opens up a text field. Start typing the command you want and a list will appear for you to choose from, opening up the entire application.
02 popups for the win
Much of the time spent in Cinema 4D will be used making various selections, navigating between projects and working with plugins or snapping settings. If you hit the V key a radial popup will open, with these common menu sets nested inside. These are the most useful menus.