Content Database

This tip focuses on setting up a template folder structure, so that with any new project you can automatically create your hierarchy of folders with a custom name, directory and date with just a click.

Using a few lines of html code, I will show you how to start using MP4’s instead of GIFs to showcase the animations in your websites and portfolio. And the advantages it brings.

The latest Cinema 4D R25 has a cool animated splashscreen! And the best part? You can customize it however you want... kind of. Read up on this neat trick and spice up your splash screen every time you have to restart C4D after a crash.

Windirstat is a utility that will scan your chosen hard drives or folders, and display the files inside as a neat chart divided in sections, where bigger files occupy a bigger space. The colors also signal the file extension. It's a very useful tool to identify files taking a huge space, at a glance.

Eagle is an app that lets you create a media and asset library, then organize and browse it easily using filters and categories. I use it daily to store and grab textures, materials, and assets, and bring them into C4D or Houdini with a quick click and drag. It also serves me as a bank for inspiration in and out of 3D

Folder shortcuts are sometimes not powerful enough. Symbolic Links are more powerful shortcuts to folders, that allow you to 'cheat' programs into thinking they're accessing their intended folder and not a link, which is very useful when used in combination with a program like Dropbox or Google Drive. Junctions are a slightly different version of this, but with different pros and cons.

PangoBright is a very simple utility that allows you to dim your monitors. I find this very useful when I leave a render on, or when it's late at night and I'm just cleaning up files or doing non-color related work. In combination with AutoHotKey, we can make an extremely useful shortcut to dim and undim out monitors with the click of a key.

With the introduction of R25, many interface buttons have changed. The Active/Inactive buttons in the object manager now display in Red for inactive and Grey for active. This can be sometimes hard to glance at, so here I tell you how to change it back.

This utility enables you to pin any window to be Always on Top, so that it won’t disappear behind any other active windows. This is especially useful when you’re working with references, moving files around, or you just want to keep a window on top or a maximized application.

FastPictureViewer Codec is a utility that helps your PC identify a broader range of codecs and file extensions. Particularly, the reason we’re going to install this is because it will create icon previews for .exr files.

In this mini-tip, I cover how to use User Data to swap between different colors and/or materials for the same object with a click of a button. Extremely useful if working with multiple variations of the same object. As a bonus, it can be easily animated!

This utility will allow you to create a .bat file that scans a desired location, and deletes every empty folder. Especially useful when you have tons of folders that don't get used at the end of a project, or just want to tidy up.

This small batch script will use ffmpeg to crop our 1:1 video into vertical and horizontal formats.

This is a very simple Color Picker that you can bring up with a keyboard shortcut, at any point in time. It saves a picked color history and can display values in a variety of ways.

This tool will allow us to set and customize different aspect ratios and areas inside our screen that we can snap our windows to. Especially useful for those of us recording or streaming 16:9 on an Ultrawide monitor.

This little script uses ffmpeg to add colored borders to any image or video. The border pixel width gets added to the video or image size. There’s a prompt to pick both thickness and color.

Learn how to setup a quick way of automatically converting MP4 files to GIF format. You can also adjust the settings with different presets.