Cinema 4D Custom UI-Schemes

#1

I’ve always modified my C4D UI colours and layouts.

This is of course a highly subjective area and I’m not saying my UI is better. But I’ve always appreciated how customizable C4D UI can be and love to make changes to better suit my idea of a clean functional UI.

When i upgraded from R20 to S26 I was not a big fan of the UI. So I decided to modify it slightly. I tend to keep making changes based on findings as I work…but here is my first attempt at improving the new UI to better suit how I like to use C4D.

Here’s a screenshot showing the differences. Personally I do not like the purple accents or the overly dark UI…some of it appears to be hardcoded such as the purple accents on the layout tabs and the nasty looking purple shading to the selection drag box. The layout/icon/plugin placement is of course down to individual usage and requirements.

You can be the judge as to whether you prefer it or not.

S26:

Original

s26_old
s26_old.jpg2560x1392 795 KB

Custom

s26_new
s26_new.jpg2560x1392 809 KB

Here is my R20 Scheme for anyone who is interested to see:

Original

r20_old
r20_old.jpg2560x1392 914 KB

Custom

r20_new
r20_new.jpg2560x1392 784 KB

Considering it can take quite a long time to customize the UI. I figured why not share my findings and if anyone is interested I’d be happy to share my files/settings.

Some of the UI requires manual editing of Tiff files in the C4D directory.

#2

I’ve never understood why it’s such a chore to modify the C4D UI and move the customisations to newer versions of C4D. I found to my cost it’s very easy to make a real mess of the C4D UI.

I made a Blender UI Theme to match Houdini and a plethora of custom layouts which I can easily update automatically when a new release arrives. In contrast whenever a new C4D was released it usually meant building UI presets from scratch again because if new icons or menu items were added they wouldn’t appear in custom UI layouts.

It’s odd to offer the user an atomic level of UI customisation like C4D does then make it a complete headache to pass it on to future versions. Maybe that’s changed with the new UI system?

I find the contrast of the new C4D UI too great, I like the darker scheme but I’d knock back the brightness and saturation of the standard UI elements as they stick out like neon tubes in the dark. In the examples above you’ve gone the other way to reduce the contrast which is just as effective.

#3

Yeah I’m with you on this. The Icons are much less readable in this newer version too. They have opted for style/minimalism over function here.

The easiest way to make the UI nicer for me…is to balance the contrast by changing the overall colours to balance out the garish contrast as I don’t know how to edit the icons.

Now that you mention it…It is weird that there is no convenient way to store custom UIs/Schemes as themes to share with other users/computers.

Blender does this very elegantly.

The only way I know how to make my UI portable is to save (Cinema 4D.prf & dark.col) Not to mention any of the tiff file adjustments in the C4D root directory.

For anyone interested in playing with the UI:

The preferences are stored here:

C:\Users\<USERNAME>\AppData\Roaming\MAXON<C4D VERSION>\prefs

But some UI elements are not controlled via the preferences and are controlled in Tiff files such as the background colour of the edit fields or the accent colour of the check boxes to name a few.

These are found here:

C:\Program Files\Maxon Cinema 4D RXX\resource\modules\c4dplugin\schemes\Dark