@ferdinand Good to know it's not just myself. I tried restarting just now and the problem still persists. Looking forward for an update, thanks!

@ferdinand Oh I was just making a parallel, how Cinema 4D supports more audio nicely by default (compared to Maya), so I can generally expect Cinema 4D supports a lot more media compared to Maya (which I had experience developing a plugin on before moving to C4D).

@ferdinand Thanks a lot on the feedbacks! Yeah I was thinking of using external library coz I was used to Maya, and the media support in that app was horrendous. I guess even Audio support-wise, Cinema 4D is miles better out-of-the-box. Hopefully c4d fits with our usecase.

Ahhh I see, good point on the Python & GUI limitations. Thinking back, it makes sense that high-performance GUI rarely rendered/looped for each frame. Our use case was more like generating some kind of animation based on a video. The video is there for just for side-by-side preview.

So all in all, we don't really need highly accurate playback. By using the time delta instead of raw timer and skipping frames here and there, overall I presume it'll be fine (say, even 10 FPS out of a 30 FPS video). But those are something I hadn't thought about, thanks a ton once again!

Hi, I was wondering if anyone ever tried embedding a video into the GUI via Python?

One method I was thinking of was to use OpenCV for the video backend, while getting the frames one-by-one and draw it into an UserArea.

@baca Nope, not working. It's worse now coz the error doesn't show up, but it's also not encrypted. So silent error.

@ferdinand I guess still no luck on this, and it's officially a bug? Would be interested too if you managed to find a temporary workaround.

@ferdinand Good to know it's not just myself. I tried restarting just now and the problem still persists. Looking forward for an update, thanks!

Hi, I just found out that you can use the c4dpy -g_encryptPypFile <file.pyp> to encrypt a file without opening up the GUI. But every time I tried it, c4dpy just throws an error, even with the official plugin sample:

> c4dpy -g_encryptPypFile py-commanddata_dialog_r13.pyp

(null)Traceback (most recent call last):
(null)  File "C:\Users\USER\AppData\Roaming\Maxon\Maxon Cinema 4D 2024_0CCAE811\plugins\py-commanddata_dialog_r13\py-commanddata_dialog_r13.pyp", line 101, in <module>
(null)    c4d.plugins.RegisterCommandPlugin(id=PLUGIN_ID,
(null)OSError: cannot find pyp file - plugin registration failed

You can see that the it reads the file just fine, as they printed some lines from the script (for some reason).

Also, I completely confirms that the source protector in GUI works perfectly. And calling just c4dpy works fine, spawning the c4d python interpreter. Tried using Admin, no luck.

@ferdinand Thanks a ton again! Yeah that dynamic UI is indeed something that fits perfectly with my current case, and possibly some other features I want to implement. Tho, I will revisit it later once I get to creating an MVP for my plugin. So I will use FreeChildren() for now.

I want to use dropdown to select an object from a list of children from the targeted object. I managed to populate it just fine, but the issue is, how do you clear it so that I can repopulate the list when a different object is targeted later?

# Initialize dropdown for each parameter
for i, param in enumerate(self.params):
  self.AddComboBox(ID_DROPDOWN + i)

# Once a target is selected
for i in range(len(self.params)):
  for j, child in enumerate(self.children):
    self.AddChild(ID_DROPDOWN + i, j+1, child)

My current idea is to remove the dropdown element entirely, but then I would have a hard time putting the dropdowns back in their respective layout positions like before.

@ferdinand Thanks a lot for the reply (and all of your example codes throughout the years)! Yeah I managed to make one using UserArea, I def think this is a crucial feature to be added in the sample code in GitHub (tbh a ton of your codes are just too useful to be left alone in forums). Especially since it's a multi-step process unlike PySide (used by Maya plugin), for example.