Ah, that novel!
Yeah, sorry. Not one of my personal highlights. Sometimes answering simple questions can be more difficult than one might expect. Such changes can involve quite a few people and seemingly easy processes can become quite lengthy (up to the point, where you (or rather I) forget about the beginning). And certain topics might be regarded so sensitive, that communication on even remotely related topics can get difficult (e.g. due to legal issues). But then again, in the end it was in my responsibility to gather the info you needed or wanted, and I failed to provide it to you. Or at least provide you with a semi-satisfactory answer without touching things I was not allowed to. Sorry!
And see? I'm pretty sure, my follow up will not make the same mistakes (as he or she is most likely human maybe others...). So, if it's not the same anymore without me, then probably better!

Thanks to everybody in this thread for all your kind words.

@C4DS said in Good Bye and Thanks for the Fish:

As mentioned earlier, this place won't be the same without you.

You may overestimate my contribution. Silently watching from the side line, my feeling is, Riccardo, Sebastian, Maxime and Manuel, though being handicapped by a little loss of man power, not only managed to continue to do a great job in here, but even managed to further improve. Just let the dust of change settle a bit and they'll excel even more.

@C4DS said in Good Bye and Thanks for the Fish:

And with the recent unraveling of the plot, this "ending of your novel" has sure taken a new twist.

I'm not quite sure where you are heading and which plot recently unraveled. But please believe me, my departure was not so much related to Maxon and certainly not connected to any announcements on Maxon's strategy of the recent past. I left a group of friends behind, mostly for private and to a certain extent selfish reasons, which I won't discuss in public. Yet, please, try not to read between the lines and do not interpret my silence against Maxon or the SDK Team. I really enjoyed being part of the ride. Having had the chance to meet all of you in here was really great. It's just sometimes you need to stop eating, when it tastes best. I'm pretty sure Forest Gump also said some fitting words, I just can't remember...

Cheers,
Andreas

Dear Plugin Café community,

end of this month I will be leaving MAXON to spice up my life, seeking new endeavors.
Despite me looking forward to my next steps, I can not deny, I'm also leaving with a tear in my eyes.
For me it was an absolute joy to work for MAXON and even more so to work in this community.
Thanks to everybody for your contribution to Cinema 4D.

Rest assured, the SDK Team is in good shape and will continue to be there for you.
Even more so, as I also have some good (or maybe even better) news. Manuel Magalhaes joined the SDK Team last Monday, it won't take long to see him contributing to this community. Everybody say: Welcome, Manuel!

Cheers,
Andreas

Hi,

I'm sorry you are having issues with Cinema 4D.
You have ended up in MAXON's support forum for 3rd party developers.
This is actually not a good place for user support requests. Instead I suggest to use the support form on our website.

Cheers,
Andreas

Hi,

I'm glad you found something working for you. I just want to mention, this way of using the deform cache directly will only work for very specific setups, for arbitrary object configurations you will most likely need to iterate through the cache. So, I think, it's worth to give those manuals another read.
Also Maxime has posted some snippets in Getting a polygonal version of an animated mesh, which might be useful for you.

Cheers,
Andreas

Hi,

of course there is information how to reconstruct a parametric sphere. It is actually the set of parameters needed by the "sphere generator". Check out for example our rounded tube example (here the Python example). For this rounded tube also only the parameters described in the resource files are saved in the scene file. And with these parameters the "generator module" is able to reconstruct everything needed. Everything else we consider baking (basically converting parametric objects into polygonal version) and roughly this is how "Save for Melange" works. Melange SDK itself, it contains no code to evaluate the scene (in the end it would involve having a complete C4D in there), only to access data stored in the scene files.

There are by the way a bunch of applications, which have no issues with this approach. Also our own bridge to After Effects can work quite effectively.

In your situation, I could imagine, maybe a small CommandData plugin customizing and doing the scene export for your needs could simplify the workflow for your users. Or, but that's certainly the more complex approach, you could work around file formats altogether and connect the applications via a "live bridge", where you then have full and direct access to C4D and can then access for example the generated caches as needed.

Cheers,
Andreas

Hi,

in the sense of the word, Cinema 4D has no "deformed space". You have objects with caches (basically the polygon representation of the object) and generator and/or modifier/deformer objects, which then add to the cache hierarchy. So in the end, it is a matter of inspecting the cache hierarchy of an object, looking at the cache you are actually interested in (so in your case the Deform Cache created by the Skin Deformer) and getting the point from there.

GetCache() and GetDeformCache() are the functions to look at. Please node the images and code snippets provided there to get a better understanding.
Also the C++ SDK documentation has a manual on BaseObject and its cache.

Cheers,
Andreas

Hi,

we are sorry, you ran into this issue, especially as our guide seems to have led you on a wrong path. And I apologize, we (although I'd rather blame the bearded guy with red coat) obviously did miss your post. Sorry!
We'll see to get the code style guide updated.

Cheers,
Andreas

Hi,

Riccardo has a day off today. So, I will fill in for him here.

The thing is, the bounding box is not stored in the scene file. If we were to open our file specification, it wouldn't help here. Melange SDK on the other hand enables you to access our scene files and only the information stored therein. Melange has no means to evaluate a parametric object. Instead you need to make sure, the information needed by your target application can either be calculated there (e.g. having the concept of a parametric sphere, too) or got stored in the scene beforehand. For the sphere example you'd need your project to be "Saved for Melange", including all caches into the scene file. Then in Melange you can access the cache of the parametric sphere, thus getting hold of the actual polygon representation.

But how does Cinema4D know the size of a parametric sphere when loading a scene?

It doesn't. The bounding box gets calculated as needed.

Cheers,
Andreas

Hi Robert,

I'm afraid the SDK Team will not be contributing much here. MAXON uses a custom made build tool chain, involving the project tool, to serve our internal needs as good as possible. Unfortunately this is nothing that could be easily replicated outside. Also MAXON's needs are quite a bit different to your needs as a plugin developer.
But with this said I'd like to ask everybody in our community to contribute to these questions. I could imagine many of you run into (and maybe have already solved) similar issues. We'd certainly like to hear about your environments and how you cope with above described issues. And we'd like to learn from this, in order to maybe post some useful ideas to our developers.

Cheers,
Andreas