Hi @d_keith,

I would kindly ask you to check our Support Procedures, namely the "How To Ask Questions" paragraph:

Singular Question: The initial posting of a support topic must contain a singular question. Do not ask ten things at once, that makes it extremely hard to answer topics. Break up your questions into multiple topics.

Here you effectively have 4 different questions about Asset Browser, and these are candidates for 4 different threads on the forum. In your further postings please try to follow the aforementioned rules.

Regarding your questions:

Should I be able to mount a directory and have it auto-create a DB?

Mounting database is effectively executing the AssetDataBasesInterface.SetDatabases. It has nothing to do with creating database neither semantically, nor is this mentioned in the docu. If you need to create repository, please use maxon.AssetInterface.CreateRepositoryFromUrl(), it will scan the directory for being already a database and create proper dir structure if it's not.

Any idea why I need to re-try creating the Repo for it to work?

If you face any errors in the script, please always attach at least the error message! In this case I assume you receive the following error, when executing the maxon.AssetRepositoryTypes.AssetDatabase() for the first time after Cinema 4D started. Looks like a bug to me, I've created a bug report for that.

The error message:

Traceback (most recent call last): File "console", line 1, in <module> File "C:\Program Files\Maxon Cinema 4D 2025\resource\modules\python\libs\python311\maxon\interface.py", line 5049, in __call__ self._cachedObj.R = _maxon_mapping.GetAssociatedDataType(dt) ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Exception: unable to find datatype ... about multiple DBs ...

You're giving your databases unique IDs with the line repo_id = maxon.AssetInterface.MakeUuid(str(url), True). If you need them to be the same, just pick one instead, e.g. repo_id = maxon.Id('net.maxon.sdk.cool.things.repo')

... revealing assets doesn't work...

I've created a bug report for that, as it looks like a bug with refreshing in the Asset Browser. As a workaround you can reload databases and reopen the AB before reveling your assets, e.g.:

def RepenAssetBrowser(): CID_ASSET_BROWSER = 1054225 # Close the Asset Browser if it's alredy opened if c4d.IsCommandChecked(CID_ASSET_BROWSER): c4d.CallCommand(CID_ASSET_BROWSER) # Open again c4d.CallCommand(CID_ASSET_BROWSER) def main(): # ... # assets = [] # ... # assets.append(asset) # ... maxon.AssetDataBasesInterface.ReloadAssetRepositories(True) RepenAssetBrowser() maxon.AssetManagerInterface.RevealAsset(assets)

Cheers,
Ilia

Thank you @ferdinand for the help!

Write raw memory does help a lot, appreciate!

Thank you very much for all your detailed explanation, @ferdinand!

Hello @uogygiuol,

Thank you for the added details.

Yes, reducing the complexity of questions is the right thing to do, thank you for doing tit. Essays are counterproductive, as we then tend to overlook things (q.e.d., I overlooked the fact that you wanted to mangle the scene file in this thread).

In general, trying to mangle a file beforehand is not a good route, as you always risk invalidating the file. For your very specific scenario - very simple scene graph, just geometry, no materials, animations or other dependencies - it could make sense. I briefly talked with the owner of our GLTF-importer, and we do not do any sanity checking, e.g., comparing nodes with meshes. So, you could just 'clean up' the scene graph ("nodes") of the file, and Cinema's GLTF importer will then just ignore extra data in fields such as "meshes".

How fruitful this will be, you will have to find out yourself. I already had the hunch that your are here surfing on the edge of what is sensbible, and GLTF JSON files which translate to gigabytes of memory are certainly an edge case, due to the fact that text-based file formats are usually a bad choice for such heavy data.

Using Python to Read JSON

My guesstimate would be that when you throw a GLTF JSON file at Python's JSON parser - which takes five minutes to load in Cinema 4D - to mangle it, you end up with a net-loss or tie, because you loose most or more than the won time in that Python JSON stage.

Python's json module is mostly written in C to make it performant, but that is still a lot of JSON to deserialize, modify, and then serialize. One idea could be to use re, i.e., regular expressions, to find the "nodes" section in that file, just deserialize that from JSON, modify it, serialize back to a JSON string, and write it back in place, and by that sidestep having to deserialize that whole file. The problem with all that is that json.load allows you to pass a file object, allowing you to bypass the Python VM entirely and let the data reside in C until the parsing is done, while re does not allow you to regex a file object directly (AFAIK), you always must read the file object into lines or chunks to then pass these strings to the re module. I.e., you would have to load that whole file into a Python string first. What would come here out on top, I have no clue, but my hunch is that re might loose, as Python's string handling is not the fastest. Alternatives might be 3rd party libs such as isjon (a lazy JSON loader) but I do not know how performant it is.

For this section it would make a huge difference if you could predict the position of "nodes" in the file, either exactly as a chunk offset, or in the form of 'I know that it is always very close to the end, so let's regex parse the file in reverse'.

Using a Binary File Format

But the fact remains that text-format file types, e.g., JSON GLTF, become extemely ineffcient once you pass the ~100 MB barrier. Using something like binary GLTF or another binary format such as FBX will likely speed up your Cinema 4D loading times quite a bit, no extra steps required.

And to be clear, text-based file formats are always wildely ineffcient. It is just that below the ~100 MB barrier (adjust for the beefiness of your machine), you can drown that inefficency with pure computing power and have the nice advantage of a human-readble file format.

Cheers,
Ferdinand

Hi @m_adam, following your typescript example it worked now to connect! Thank you very much for your help 🙂

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

I would heavily recommend using the extension, as it will automatically curate the paths for you. I.e., when you use the extension and connect to a Cinema 4D instance, it will make sure that the dummy modules of that Cinema 4D version are on the search paths.

But when you really do not want to use it, you can also just edit your config so that the dummy module paths are discoverable for auto complete and the linter.
2a76cd6c-35aa-451f-82db-02b03694e72d-image.png

What you will need in any case, is the Python and Pylance extension for VS Code, as they are the extensions which make use of these settings. When you install the connector, they will be installed automatically as a dependency.

0b5d77af-5f23-4203-9a0a-276b8eafc62e-image.png

Cheers,
Ferdinand

Thank you, @f8bet00net.
Yeah, I remember I had gone though this with you before. But recently, we found there is a way to customize TreatSpecificWarningsAsErrors settings in projectdefinition.txt for MSVCBase.props for windows VS projects.
So I asked this question again just to double confirm if we could do similar things for MacOS XCode settings.
Thanks for confirming this is not possible on MacOS.

Good to hear. When you want to know more about how to expose libraries, I would recommend reading the Python Libraries Manual, as there are quite a few differences to a vanilla CPython. The guide is a little bit dated, I haven't updated it yet to the pip support Maxime is adding, and I also did not yet cover there mxutils.LocalImportPath.

Cheers,
ferdinand

Hey @spedler,

Thank you for reaching out to us and for pointing out that issue. We are aware that our code signing documentation requires an overhaul. This not only means updating the rather dated MacOS guide, but also providing a guide for Windows since code signing also has become more and more important under Windows. And although not yet as restrictive as MacOS, the Microsoft Secure Future Initative is pointing to a future of execution policies on Windows similar in strictness to the one's found on MacOS.

Cinema 4D itself is evolving in a similar fashion, as recently lined out in About the necessity of code signing plugins. We have currently no immediate plans to make code signing for all plugins technically mandatory, Cinema 4D is currently still loading unsigned binaries, but we strongly encourage users to (properly) sign their plugins, especially under MacOS. What has changed since Cinema 4D 2024, is that Cinema 4D will not load binaries with an expired certificate anymore (note that an expired certificate is not the same as an expired license, see the linked posting for details).

I currently plan to update the guides in 2025 Q1 or Q2. It was actually already planned for 2024 but I never got to it. But just before I left for vacation I at least already requested the necessary licenses to further research and write the new guides 😉 But this is neither my current or next task. However, given the relative closeness of the task of overhauling the code signing documentation, I will probably not 'monkey patch' the current documentation.

When there are any questions regarding code signing plugins for Cinema 4D on either Windows or MacOS, please do not hesitate to ask or discuss them here.

Cheers,
Ferdinand

PS: I am still on vacation, so I will likely not respond to any follow-ups until I am back.

Hi @César-Vonc ,

Cinema 4D uses OS clipboard to some extent, namely as you can see from the CLIPBOARDTYPE enum there's text and image clipboard options. For other Copy&Paste functions the built-in clipboard system is used, hence the OS clipboard stays untouched.

Cheers,
Ilia

Dear development community,

just as a clarification, as I was not very clear about that above. We are working on a solution for the build system for the SDK (as I hinted at before in other postings). But for 2025 we will stay with this a bit cumbersome legacy build system solution for macOS.

Please excuse the inconvenience but there are a few more moving parts in the background than it is obvious from the outside (to fix this, we must move away from the project tool).

Cheers,
Ferdinand

Hey everyone,

I fixed the issue, the legacy SDKs now have again the correct line endings, the downloads have been updated.

Cheers,
Ferdinand

@ferdinand Great thanks!

Thanks for the info!

Dan

Hey @lasselauch,

We are not able to reproduce this crash on an Intel, M1, or M3 MacBook with 2024.4.0. Please provide and submit a crash report when this is still a problem for you. I would also recommend reinstalling Cinema 4D to rule out that your installation was damaged.

Cheers,
Ferdinand

Hi @mikeudin ,

To me it sounds pretty much like this issue here: issue with inserting fieldlayers in r2024, particularly after I couldn't reproduce this issue with the internally available next version of cinema.

Cheers,
Ilia

Hi sorry for not answering this topic earlier, I finally found some time to investigate and sadly there is nothing you can do in your side, this memory leak is coming from the Illustrator Importer and can be big, since all the points and tangents of the file are leaking. A fix will be available in the next update.

Thanks for the report !
Cheers,
Maxime.

Hello @veenamandhan,

Welcome to the Maxon developers forum and its community, it is great to have you with us!

Getting Started

Before creating your next postings, we would recommend making yourself accustomed with our forum and support procedures. You did not do anything wrong, we point all new users to these rules.

Forum Overview: Provides a broad overview of the fundamental structure and rules of this forum, such as the purpose of the different sub-forums or the fact that we will ban users who engage in hate speech or harassment. Support Procedures: Provides a more in detail overview of how we provide technical support for APIs here. This topic will tell you how to ask good questions and limits of our technical support. Forum Features: Provides an overview of the technical features of this forum, such as Markdown markup or file uploads.

It is strongly recommended to read the first two topics carefully, especially the section Support Procedures: Asking Questions.

About your First Question

First of all, you first posting is a violation of our "one subject per topic" rule. When you have questions about multiple subjects, you must open multiple postings. For details on this subject, please see Support Procedures: Asking Questions.

We usually cut newcomers some slack in this regard as they cannot know our rules in advance and one usually also has more questions than there are atoms in the universe when starting out with a new API. But we must ask you to conform to this rule in future postings.

Regarding your questions:

It depends a bit on what you would expect from an "audio input field", but generally, yes. We have the FilenameCusstomGui and the SoundEffectorCustomGui. The former is for letting the user select arbitrary files, the latter is a specialized GUI for sound files (but also hooks into tracks). In the end this also depends a bit on what plugin type you want to use, because not all plugins use the same GUI paradigms.
352630af-9dba-4e39-ac71-5f40da6d26ab-image.png. Yes, that is possible. You are however bound by the threading restrictions here as inserting tracks (your "audio") means modifying the scene graph. Which in turn means that you cannot do this in any of the major payload methods of scene element plugins like ObjectData::GetVirtualObjects, or TagData::Execute as they all run off-main thread. You can do this with all plugin types but for scene elements (everything derived from NodeData) you must usually be a bit more careful, as a lot of methods are there being called in parallel. That is a very ambiguous question. I am not really sure what you mean with "custom boxes like asset boxes", but in general you can implement any kind of custom GUI you want in C++. It again depends a bit on the plugin type you use. For dialogs, custom GUIs are realized by GeUserArea, for descriptions, i.e., stuff in the Attribute Manager, you will have to implement a CustomGuiData (and possibly a custom data type). The GUI paradigms manual is here also entry point for this subject.

In general I would recommend opening a thread for each of these subjects, as this thread will become otherwise very convoluted and hard to read and understand for both you and future readers. Before you do that, I would however recommend that you start a thread asking for help which plugin type to choose, while briefly explaining what you want to do.

Cheers,
Ferdinand

Hey @InterfaceGuy,

you did nothing wrong here, that was an understandable mistake and we do not mind moving topics from time to time. But at the same time we still have to uphold our rules.

Cheers,
Ferdinand

Thank you, @ferdinand