Thank you very much @ferdinand for your suggestions—I really appreciate your input and support. I will definitely experiment with your leads and see what works best for me. It’s always helpful to get an outside perspective, and your advice has given me some new things to think about. Thanks again!

Hi, I am working with the Cineware SDK in C++. I am trying to import Point Level Animation (PLA) from a .c4d file. My goal is to sample vertex positions for each frame.

I use SetTime() on the document and then read the vertex positions from the PolygonObject with GetPointR(). However, I always get the same (static) vertex positions for every frame, even though the .c4d file definitely contains PLA (I have verified this in Cinema 4D, and the animation works there).

To double-check, I also wrote a Python script, which I ran in the Script Manager inside Cinema 4D. This script correctly reads different vertex positions for each frame, so I am confident that the .c4d file is set up correctly and that the animation is present.

I noticed that in the Cineware SDK, there is no function equivalent to ExecutePasses() (which exists in the full Cinema 4D SDK and Python). According to the documentation, SetTime() should be enough to update all animated data, including PLA, but in my case it does not update the mesh.

Is there any way to force the evaluation of PLA in Cineware C++? Am I missing a crucial step, or is this a known limitation of Cineware?

I am using the officially available public version of the Cineware SDK from your website: RBCinewareSDK22.0_355130.

If there is a newer version of the Cineware SDK available (even if it is not publicly released) that might resolve this issue and could be made available under special terms or a separate license, I would be very interested in learning about such an option.