Setting up a scene, Creating a workflow

[OuterGamut]

Hi,

I am looking for any advice people have on setting up a scene pre-work for a best practices approach. Things like scene scale, linear workflow, gamma, custom layouts, basic but necessary plugins and scene setup changes. This applies to Cinema 4d using Octane. My end goal is to have a template.c4d and new.c4d that ensure cinema 4d loads with a predefined workflow already in order so that scene setup time is reduced to a minimum.

I have been doing this in photoshop for years, constantly evolving my workflow. I am growing now into a daily Cinema 4D octane user and want to be doing things in line with collected standards. I have had some confusing laymen attempts at setting the scene scale in Cinema 4d and I find their tools to be pretty non-intuitive. I currently have my scene scale set to 1- Meter in project settings. I think this is correct for Octane but please fill me in on all the details. Also is there a way to reset scene scale to C4D defaults without resetting all of C4d to defaults?

Thank you for anyone who spends the time to go into details here.

-conor

[OuterGamut]

I made a simple Octane Universal Scene Template for others to try out.

I am using Cinema4D R17 / Octane3.04

It has a simple disc floor and a dummy product box with shader rounded edges.

There are two cameras, an octane daylight setup for LA summer and an empty HDRI in case you want to add one.

The issues I know the scene struggles with are scene scale related to octane. The scene is Cinema 4D's default scale but set to meters in the project settings. This makes F-stop numbers extreme and Depth of Field somewhat limited due to the large scale of everything. For example, a basic box is 100m.

I guess the appropriate thing to do is ignore these initial units and build everything in meters to size. Though cameras and lights and nulls are gigantic when doing that.

Feel free to try it out and report feedback here. If it is no good please tell me why. Thank you for any feedback.