C4D Bevel Tool Broken? Loop Selection Broken?

I wasted an entire day trying to figure this out. If your bevel tool is making holes and garbage polygons instead of working beautifully like in all the tutorials, it's because your polygons aren't "connected". Here's how you connect them (if necessary) and then use the bevel tool.

1. Get any editable mesh. 
2. Select a polygon in the mesh using the Polygon selection tool
3. Choose Select>Select Connected
4. One of two things will happen:
1. All of the polygons in the whole object will become selected. This is great. This means you already have a connected object and all bevel tools will behave as expected. Skip to step 6.
2. Only some polygons will become selected. This is bad for beveling. You will waste an entire day pulling your hair out wondering why the bevel tool just makes holes and garbage. Go to step 5.
5. Use the Edge tool to choose the edge you want to bevel - or the Select>Loop Selection for selection large borders between surfaces. The edges will light up in yellow.
6. Use the Mesh>Create Tools>Bevel tool to drag anywhere in the interface. You should see a bevel appear and get larger and smaller as you drag.
7. If you only see one bevel surface (as oppose to a rounded edge) then increase the Subdivisions in the Bevel Tool Attributes

Camera depth of field demo

http://greyscalegorilla.com/blog/tutorials/how-to-use-the-new-depth-of-field-in-cinema-4d-r13/

Video Textures in C4D

Great demo here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_z5W13Nddko

Connect Polygons Together

I was combining shapes with booles and them making them editable meshes. Problem is, all of the surfaces were disconnected, so the bevel tool was just creating empty holes and garbage whenever I tried to bevel. I realized that all of my polygons weren't "connected" at the edges.

To link everything up, simply go to Mesh>Commands>Optimize. This command takes all of the mesh polygons and connects them up and removes redundant points.

Now all of the mesh tools work the way they are supposed to. Loop Selection actually selects loops now and many other mesh selection works like in all of the tutorials.