Hello @vhardy,

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 The VS Code bridge currently only works for the script editor, not for the expressions editor. So, you cannot debug scripting elements from there (when debugging means attaching a debugger). You can of course just let them run and print statements or see errors being raised. What you do there, can be technically done, and effectors are somewhat a more sensible case as they can be somewhat be simulated like this. But generally this is not very feasible, you cannot simulate objects or tags like that. For effectors the problem is also that when Cinema 4D calls main() it will keep that MoGraph data you write there (i.e., continuously poll main). When you just invoke a script manager script, your changes will be volatile and erased by the next scene update. When you want more debugging options, you can implement some scripting elements as full plugins, e.g., an object or tag, but that is not possible for the Python effector. The intended way share any form of settings, not only scripts, over document boundaries, are preset assets at the moment. You can just store a preset asset for a finished scripting element. You can then export them in asset database if you want to share them with someone else. As already mentioned, there is no full blown plugin counter part for effectors.

tex.gif

Cheers,
Ferdinand

Hello @patrick_cue,

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

Please do not use other topics for your support requests, especially when they are bug tickets. Asking a follow-up questions such as "when will this be fixed" or "does this also apply to situation B" in a foreign topic is allowed and even encouraged.

But a specific case with your specific code and data always warrants a new thread. Please also familiarize yourself with Support Procedures: Asking Questions, as while it its clear that you put effort into make yourself understood (thanks!), this is also bordering a bit on the too much information.

The bug tracked by the other topic, is that there is currently no way in the Python API to use c4d.documents.RenderDocument in an OCIO document (i.e., every document since 2025.0) and then display that bitmap with the correct colors via c4d.bitmaps.ShowBitmap. It is important to understand that:

The bitmap data generated is just fine, when you save the bitmap to disk, everything is correct. It is just that the Picture Viewer does not display it incorrectly.

The reason for that is that in Python OCIO is not fully exposed in 2025.1.0 and you cannot set the OCIO profiles of the rendered bitmap there. Internally, we have been working on an OCIO port for Python allowing for color conversions and more things, including OCIO managing bitmaps. We also added a function to bake a display and view transform into an sRGB image - another route how this RenderDocument issue can be solved.

The goal is to publish this with an upcoming version of the Python SDK, ideally the next, but as always we cannot make any guarantees. You cannot fix this issue yourself in 2025.1.0 and lower.

Cheers,
Ferdinand

Thank you for @Dunhou answer. It was ultimately completed in JSON format

Ok Understood,

Ok I guess that explains my "nice" comb from the cache and my jagged flip/flop . sometimes zero comb from the "full" matrix normal ...

I also have different tangents from manually "calculating" them then v3, v2. But I will make a "sanity" check this weekend (feed manual matrixes into my code instead of spline "point" matrixes), before I post about this.

Thanks Ferdinand
I'll divide and conquer away.

Understood Thanks.

Hey @kbar,

I hope you are well! Since I just answered a similar question in another topic, I am also answering here. We never make any guarantees regarding when something will be released in SDKs. And more-over, we never name upcoming Cinema 4D versions explicitly or when they will arrive. This also includes seemingly insignificant information such as if the next version will be a minor or a major version increment.

Please note that you as Maxon Registered Developer are bound by an NDA and also cannot disclose such information to the public.

But yes, I am pretty sure Maxime meant the next upcoming release.

Cheers,
Ferdinand

curvature_comb.png

not bad for 5 hours of dabbling --- thanks to you @ferdinand

Gotcha's:
The Curvature was 90dgree rotated - LLM to the rescue ...

# c4d.plugins.RegisterTagPlugin( .... # That one nearly got me ;-) # c4d.TAG_IMPLEMENTS_DRAW_FUNCTION # R22

cheers

Hi @Neekoe,

That's great to hear you've managed to solve the issue!

For your future postings please note that according to our Support Procedures:

We cannot debug your code for you and instead provide answers to specific problems.

This effectively means that you're welcome to ask your questions and attach the code snippet that demonstrates your question or issue you're struggling with. However, we cannot debug your entire codebase, so you have to isolate your specific question and the corresponding part of code yourself before asking the question.

Cheers,
Ilia

@i_mazlov Thanks for the reply. I may have described it wrong. I am talking about the image viewer. It seems that there is currently no API interface to get the number of frames rendered, nor can I get the total number of frames in the rendering settings.

Thanks for helping out @spedler!

Hello @DayDreamer,

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

This is your first posting and you did well, but I would point you to our 'singular question' rule, as lined out above in the 'Asking Questions' link. While we usually cut user some slack regrading that, the rule exists for a reason, as topics otherwise tend to become gigantic. There are way too many questions in this topic, please split your questions into multiple topics in the future.

There is no mechanism to package and ship plugins under Cinema 4D. You can just zip a plugin folder and the user unzips it then in a path where his or her Cinema 4D instance is looking for plugins. xdl64 is the extension Cinema 4D uses for libraries under Windows, i.e., it is more or less an alias for dll (our library linking is kind of special and right between static and dynamic libraries, hence the custom name). So, no, Python plugins cannot be packaged as xdl64 because Python is not compiled into machine code but interpreted at run time. You can mix C++ and Python plugins in the sense that Python plugins can depend/interact with C++ plugins with the means of the Cinema 4D API. E.g., a Python plugin can react to messages sent by a C++ plugin or data placed by a C++ plugin (or vice versa). That is how our Python API works under the hood. But C++ and Python code cannot interact directly of course, as they are vastly different languages. But you can run our Python VM from C++ and eval the results. When you want to protect your intellectual property, you can use our Cinema 4D | Extensions > Tools > Source Code Protector which will encrypt a pyp Python module. But code must of course be decrypted at runtime to be sent to the Python VM, so, this will not really stop anyone who really wants your source code (a cracker for example). C++ is the by far safer option when intellectual property is important (but also C++ can be decompiled).

Cheers,
Ferdinand

Thanks @Neekoe to have shared your solution and thanks @Dunhou for helping.
When you pass LV_TREE the Draw method is not called to have it called you need to pass either LV_USERTREE or LV_USER.

Cheers,
Maxime.

@ferdinand Thank you so much. He perfectly solved all my problems

Hi @ArjenA ,

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

Unfortunately we're not able to provide you with support on designing an architecture of your application, hence my answer here is very limited. Though, you're very welcome to ask more specific questions 😉

Let's call your setup with physical board game, hardware and corresponding software as "backend" and the C4D part as "frontend". Generally speaking, there's nothing preventing you from making these parts communicating with each other and it all highly depends on your project setup: programming languages, physical interfaces, frameworks, etc that you're going to use.

You can start with saving your live data in a file on your disk filesystem and read it using Python API in cinema. Once you have a proof of concept you can start optimizing, for example, by implement a proper communication interface, for example, REST API or Websocket sound like good (but not the only!) candidates for this purpose.

With that's said, I wish you luck with your project. Feel free to make new postings with singular and more specific questions.

Cheers,
Ilia

@ferdinand Thanks for reply. Perhaps not expressed clearly. For changing the axis of an object, it is not a problem. What I want to ask is whether the manual operation step of selecting the axis before the Move tool works can be implemented using a script.

@i_mazlov
Thanks for your help. I using visual studio code as you suggested and am getting to grips with the Drag and Drop to assist with parameter getting and setting.

Hi @kimberlyhtown,

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

I suppose you're asking about the Attribute Manager history, which one can access by using the following arrows:
bf4e829b-8ae1-4eae-a86b-c8dbc57c713d-image.png

Unfortunately, no. the Attribute Manager is a quite complex part of C4D (e.g. with multiple AM having each their own history), hence it is not transparently exposed to our public SDK and one's typically limited by the functionality listed in our C++ SDK the AOM part: Active Object Manager.

Cheers,
Ilia

Hello @Futurium,

thank you for reaching out to us. It pains me a bit to say that, because you made so nicely sure that we have all resources, but your topic is out of scope of support, specifically the points:

We provide code examples but we do not provide full solutions or design applications. We cannot debug your code for you and instead provide answers to specific problems.

Sometimes we cut people some slack here but in your case this is just too much work.

Some High-level Advice

The Take system of Cinema 4D is one of its most liked features. What comes to users sometimes as a surprise, is the technical complexity of the Take System/API; one could also say that it has a bit the reputation of being overly difficult to deal with. While the API is manageable when you get used to it, I would really avoid trying to write a custom serialization and deserialization routine for take data, due to all that complexity. It is certainly possible to do, but at least I would be very hesitant to do that due to all that complexity wich must be met.

In general, you can serialize and deserialize scene elements (nodes) with C4DAtom.Write/Read. Since takes are also of type C4DAtom, you could in theory also serialize/deserialize them like that. I added there the 'in theory' because we generally discourage third parties from using such low-level IO, as you can relatively easily brick your data like this by missing important internal dependencies and/or crash Cinema 4D like that. For takes this could mean that internal data is not copied/serialized properly or that one of the many (Base)links used in takes fails to reattach upon being loaded in another scene.

I personally would try to use the Take Asset Presets to do what you want. Saving a preset is easy, just select it, and then call the command for it. Loading the take preset programmatically might be a bit trickier. Take assets were added after I wrote for S26 the Asset API documentation, and I never used them myself. I am not sure if you can load a take asset just with maxon.AssetManagerInterface.LoadAssets or if you have to get your hands dirty yourself with a more manual approach.

Okay scratch that, I just tried out Take Assets and they probably do not do what you want to do (we might ourself have deemed this a too complex task to fully reattach takes in a new scene). In the end, doing it manually with JSON might indeed be the only option for what you want to do, but we cannot do that for you or debug your code for you.

Cheers,
Ferdinand

Hello everyone,

we have moved this topic to a mail discussion, when there are outcomes relevant for other developers, I will post them here.

Cheers,
Ferdinand