Topics created by Futurium

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

Hi Tomasz,

Thanks for reaching out to us. First I'd like to note that according to our Support Procedures we cannot provide you with complete solutions:

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.

Regarding your question. In short, what you're trying to do here is not easily achievable (if possible at all).

Although, you can manipulate Redshift AOVs as discussed in get the names of redshift multi passes AOV names from the render settings, I'm afraid there's no such functionality exposed for interacting the baking tool itself. This effectively means that you can simulate pressing the "Bake" button in the bakeset attributes using C4D API, but you cannot skip manual interaction in the bake tool. I'd suggest you double checking this on redshift forum as it would be the place with the most concentrated knowledge on this topic.

Regarding your related questions. First, please make sure you're dedicating your threads to a singular question or topic as explained in How to ask questions:

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. Asking follow-up questions is allowed but they must be bound to the initial subject.

Manipulating data of the baked AOV textures. Trying to adapt them to look like on final render image is an ill-posed problem, as each AOV is some sort of "layer" of the information the renderer uses to create final rendering. I'd suggest you first check the documentation on the AOVs: Intro to AOVs and Redshift: Baking. If you still have end-user questions, you're very welcome to ask them on our Support Center. To the best of my knowledge using AOVs from the render settings is supposed to work with the Bake tool as long as you use AOV Manager to set them up. The effect of "green normals" that you observe is likely the unexpected coordinate system for your normal data. Namely, Redshift is always working with objects in worldspace, hence the normal data is also represented the same way. The blueish normal maps are typically those that are expressed in tangent space. Unfortunately there's no built-in AOV that does this for you. To achieve this, you could potentially leverage the "Store Color To AOV" node for that, although this would require adjusting your node material setup, e.g. like below:

8f2f671d-15d9-437f-b6f3-e77f72169666-image.png

Cheers,
Ilia

Thank you @i_mazlov

It works perfectly 🙂

Best regards,
Tomasz

Hello @ferdinand

Thank you for your guidance. I'll follow your suggestion and reach out to the support team for assistance with my query.

Best regards,
Tomasz

Hi @i_mazlov ,
Thank you for confirming my solution.
Best regards,
Tomasz

Dear Ilia,

I greatly appreciate your assistance; it was precisely what I needed. Thank you for your guidance and I wish you a wonderful day.

Best regards,
Tomasz

Hello @Futurium,

without any further questions and other postings, we will consider this topic as solved and flag it as such by Friday, 17/06/2022.

Thank you for your understanding,
Ferdinand

Hi Manual,
This is exactly what I needed. Thank you very much.
Best regards,
Tomasz

That's exactly what I was looking for. Thank you, Ferdinand 🙂

Thank you @zipit
I adopted your solution into our code and it works exactly as expected.
Thank you for your help.
Best regards,
Tomasz