okay the docs you gave were great for insight working code to change parameter of roughness for x given mat selections import c4d import maxon from maxon import GraphDescription doc = c4d.documents.GetActiveDocument() # Get selected materials directly selected_materials = doc.GetActiveMaterials() # Modify roughness for each selected material for material in selected_materials: graph = GraphDescription.GetGraph(material, nodeSpaceId=maxon.NodeSpaceIdentifiers.RedshiftMaterial) GraphDescription.ApplyDescription(graph, { "$query": { "$type": "Standard Material" }, "Reflection/Roughness": 1 }) c4d.EventAdd()

Hello @Aaron, Thank you for reaching out to us. Please follow our support procedures. You should consolidate your postings until we answer, i.e., update your last posting instead of creating new ones. I have consolidated your postings for you. You should also spend more time on making your problems reproducible for us. I know it can be easy to overlook in the heat of the battle but your question(s) are not as obvious to me as you probably think they are. As lined out in our support procedures, example code and/or scene data is usually required. I cannot answer every possible angle and interpretation this topic of yours could take, but I can state three things which come to mind when reading your two postings. What's the way to get several steps of motion blur transformation matrices for BaseObjects of the BaseDocument. That is simply not possible. A document has no notion of motion blur as it is a render effects implemented by a render engine, not something documents implement. Cinema's time system BaseTime allows for sub-frame accuracy, e.g., you could set a 10fps document to BaseTime(i, 30) and with that step with three sub-frames through the document. Simple things like position animations or other interpolated values will also work doing this. But simulations might yield different results than stepping with the natural frame rate through the document. And the most important thing is that there is absolutely no guarantee that this approach will result in 'matrices', i.e., transforms, that will match with what a render engine produces when you add some kind of sub-frame-based motion blur. Using this BaseTime approach is one way how the render engine could do it, but since render engines always have their own scene format, they could also do the calculation there, yielding different results than what Cinema's animation system would yield. When we want to add Motion Blur and call document->ExecutePasses(...) for some time then this POC is flushed and has no polygons or vertices, so it's not collected and can't be rendered It is too opaque for me what you are doing there to give a real answer, but: There is no guarantee that the caches of an object are built at any point except for when a render engine gets a scene state to render or inside GetVirtualsObjects when you manually build your dependent objcts. Usually, caches are built but depending on where you are, the cache of another object might not have been built or updated yet, resulting in either an empty cache or you looking at the cache output from the previous scene update. ExecutePasses has become a bit too popular tool recently. I guess that is partially my fault, because I have shown its usage in some examples. But executing the passes on a document is a very expensive operation and should only be carried out when absolutely necessary. I would absolutely not be surprised if something like liquids do not support stepping through a document with a frame rate lower than the documents frame rate. But without concrete data and example code I am just guessing. Cheers, Ferdinand

Hey @Ross, Thank you for reaching out to us. You are right, we cannot support third party APIs, but questions about our API do not automatically become moot or out of scope of support, just because they happen in the context of a plugin. We will of course still answer such questions. We will just never write code for a third-party API or test user code that requires a plugin. Your question '[I] need help modifying the "Import Type" button parameters of an ImageTexture node' is however ambiguous. A parameter is Cinema 4D slang for an element in a description, one of the ways of how Cinema 4D defines UIs. This includes things that users would naturally call a parameter such as a textbox holding a string, a number edit holding a float, or a combo box holding a selection, i.e., things that hold a value. But it also includes things that are just part of the UI of a node that cannot hold a value, e.g., a group, a separator, or a button. When someone talks about 'modifying' a parameter I would usually assume that they talk about changing the description of a node, specifically at that parameter. E.g., changing the label of a button, adding or removing elements to/from a drop down, disabling an element, etc. You can only do this for nodes you own, i.e., implement yourself. You cannot change the UI of alien elements, because for you their description is read only. But I assume you are actually talking here about getting or setting the parameter of an element, e.g., set a float slider to the value '4.13'. What gets a bit in the way here in your case, is that Cinema 4D summarizes everything under the label of paramater, even things that do not naturally have a value which could be gotten or set. So, I assume you want to press this button, for that you have two options: Call c4d.CallButton Send the message c4d.MSG_DESCRIPTION_COMMAND Please note that both approaches are restricted to being called from the main thread only when the scene element upon which they are called is part of a loaded scene. E.g., calling one of them on a node in the active document from outside of the main thread: forbidden. Calling them from inside a GetVirtualObjects (or any other off-main thread context) on a scene element in a dummy document which has been constructed just for this purpose and is not loaded by Cinema 4D: absolutely fine. Cheers, Ferdinand

@ferdinand said in BaseBitmap.Init("somefile.exr") crashes with multiple std::thread: omp #parallel Sorry for late reply, I am not advocating for std::threads, I understand your design explanation. The omp #parallel thing is OpenMP directive to launch parallel threads. It's an old but simple method. Actually I have made a solution by exploiting Cinema way of launching threads and it works fine. However, I hope it would be good to make BaseBitmap->Init a thread safe and independent call from other C4D threads and resources. I will collect an example for you with exr images soon. Cheers, Aaron

Thanks @ferdinand for your great solution! Cheers~ DunHou

Hey @ferdinand , thanks for details. Cheers~ DunHou About forum, I can get notification about my own topic, And I clear all the cache, but nothing changed. After I tried to reset my account settings manually, then it worked as expected.

Hey @ferdinand , Thanks for your answer, unfortunately, the answer is the same as I thought, and I am powerless to do anything about it. I can only wait for the exposed parameters. Based on your suggestion, there may be many issues, and it is not worth spending a lot of time debugging them. Fortunately, this is not a very urgent task. Cheers~ DunHou

Hey @ferdinand , Sorry for the late replies. You can only answer these with end user support and the beta community. I will do that. Although I haven't used the beta community yet, I'll post the same question there to better understand what the recommended workflows are right now. you would either have to limit the feature to 2024+ clients That's good enough for us. Our plugin officially supports only the latest versions of 2024 and 2025.

for my use case i will probably have a fallback solution with web-save or system fonts like this: import platform system_name = platform.system() if system_name == "Windows": font_name = "Consolas" elif system_name == "Darwin": font_name = "Menlo" elif system_name == "Linux": font_name = "DejaVu Sans Mono"

Hey @Kantronin, Thank you for reaching out to us. Unfortunately, I do not understand your question. The print out you provided, <c4d.SplineObject object ..., already indicates that the object is a c4d.SplineObject. So, I do not really understand what you mean with 'get a spline-type variable'. To get the underlying editable spline object for a spline generator, e.g., get a spline with editable vertices and tangents for a Flower Spline generator, you should use BaseObject.GetRealSpline. But that is only necessary when you have a BaseObject which under the hood represents a spline. It does not apply when you already have a SplineObject as you do. Cheers, Ferdinand

Hey @Amazing_iKe, Thank you for reaching out to us. That RenderDocument does not support animations is only partially true. Effectively it does not for users, but that is more a regression than the lack of an actual feature. When you look into its documentation, you will see that many symbols and arguments are animation related. And when you send it a document which holds an animation, you are paying the price for rendering the full animation. The regressed state is however that you effectively only have access to the bitmap of the last frame of that animation. There is also the issue that the OCIO workflow with RenderDocument is a bit clunky at the moment. We have these issues in our backlog by I unfortunately cannot make any guarantees as to when we will fix them. You have two options: Render the document frame by frame yourself with RenderDocument and then assemble the animation yourself. Use the BatchRender, i.e., what is shown to the user as the render queue. You can use this in a fully programmatic manner, but you are restricted to rendering documents that have been saved to disk, and the output will also be put to disk. I.e., you do not have the 'memory only'-aspect of RenderDocument. There are many topics about this subject on this forum, for example here where I showed how you abstract some of the disc-only limitations aways. Maxime also recently added some features to the batch render like switching cameras and takes, which makes it less likely that you have to modify the file. I cannot write examples for all possible routes here. You have to decide yourself which route you want to go, and when you are then stuck there, I will help you. What to pick depends on your goals. When you expect the renderings to be quick, doing it manually with RenderDocument could be a solution. For more complex animations, the batch renderer is probably the better route. Cheers, Ferdinand

Hey @kbar, thank you for reaching out to us. Please remember creating new topics instead of posting in older one's, so that our forum remains a searchable database. I have forked your question. I understand the necessity and use case for this, but in the proposed form, this is not possible. At least not without more work than it makes sense to invest here. Because the license validation is one of the first steps in the boot sequence of Cinema 4D, and trying to evaluate a command line argument and use all the components of our API necessary to encrypt a file could easily lead to problems (as these modules might not have been loaded yet). What we could think about is offering this as a standalone tool. The issue is here that we cannot just ship the source for that tool (for third parties to compile it themself) as the source would then also be known to bad actors. And shipping it as a binary would be extra work. An alternative could be a REST service, but that is also extra work (but less than the former route). I currently have no time for either of this. At the end of the year I will probably do some website work, then we could think about the REST route. But it is likely that I then also do not have time for this. As an MRD, you also have the option to ask in our beta forums or make a source code sharing request. In the end, this is very simple code and could probably easily emulated with a couple of lines of Python code. That is probably the most sensible route, but we would have to involve PMs etc. here, if we are willing to do that. I myself am even not sure if I would greenlight such request due to the sensitive nature of the topic. So, unfortunately, there is no clear cut route here, although I definitely can see the use case. Cheers, Ferdinand

Thank you so much

Thank you so much

Ok thanks and sorry

Hey, your second code snippet never sets self._result. Regarding loading vs. cloning documents: That I did it how I did it was no accident, but that does not necessarily mean that cloning things is bad. C4DAtom::GetClone is implemented in the different scene elements independently; i.e., BaseObject::GetClone, BaseDocument::GetClone, BaseTag::GetClone, etc. and C4DAtom::GetClone is just the empty implementation. The different implementations then rely on C4DAtom::CopyTo to copy data from the reference into a new instance of that scene element type. On top of that comes that Cinema 4D is largely Copy-on-Write these days, with data actually only being copied when you try to modify it. This all explains why BaseDocument::GetClone is so inexplicably performant, it just copies the metadata and only copies the real payload of the scene when it has to. On top of that comes that cloning from the same document from multiple threads in parallel could entail read-access violations (although somewhat unlikely). On the other hand, our rendering pipeline does exactly the same, it clones documents for rendering (the cloning is however done on the main thread). I personally would say what you are doing is probably okay, but I would not write such code as example code. I would have to spend more time on this to figure out if this is absolutely safe. Doing the actual cloning off-main-thread seems risky though (but is probably also fine in 99,9% of the cases). Cheers, Ferdinand

Hey @Amazing_iKe, Thank you for reaching out to us. You do the same thing you did incorrectly in your other thread. You create an async dialog and you do not keep it alive. We would prefer it to keep things G-rated here. I.e., no nudity, no violence, and no weapons. I removed the image in your posting. With that being said, and when I try out your script (with the dlg thing fixed). I end up with this: [image: 1752854682502-fc83d223-abc0-4568-98fc-deb82596b059-image.png] I.e., it just works. But you docked your dialog (and so did I imitating what you did). I now cannot reproduce this anymore, but when I did something in my layout, I think I dragged a palette, I got a similar result as yours. That is not too surprising though as you implement here an async dialog in a hacky manner. You have no CommandData.RestoreLayout which would handle layout events for your dialog. Something getting out of whack with scroll areas is not out of question for such irregular cases. Please follow the patterns shown in our GUI examples I would recommend to follow py-cmd_gui_simple_2024, it also contains code for handling layout events. I.e., this: def RestoreLayout(self, secret: any) -> bool: """Restores the dialog on layout changes. Implementing this is absolutely necessary, as otherwise the dialog will not be restored when the user changes the layout of Cinema 4D. """ return self.Dialog.Restore(self.ID_PLUGIN, secret) And to be clear, it is absolutely fine to share plugins with us here. It does not have to be a script manager script. Things should just not get too long. Feel free to anonymize your plugin IDs when you feel skittish about sharing them in public. Cheers, Ferdinand edit: Okay, there it is again. Not exactly the same as yours but close. But I would still have to ask you to provide an example where this happens inside a valid async dialog implementation (with a command or a similar owner). It is not out of question that there is a bug but we still need a non-hacky example. [image: 1752856082257-df89038f-124d-434f-8cde-3442bd9aebba-image.png]

And just to be clear, using a modal dialog, e.g., DLG_TYPE_MODAL, is absolutely fine in a script manager script. Because then the GeDialog.Open call will only return when the dialog is closed (and you therefore do not have to keep the dialog alive). The hack I showed above is only needed when you need one of the async dialog types in a script manager script for testing purposes.

@ferdinand Thank you very much for your response and suggestions. I’ll make sure to follow best practices and provide a minimal, testable code sample when posting questions in the future. I’ll also give embedding a group a try. Thanks again for your support!