@m_adam Thank you for providing an alternative method to set parameters.

Thanks a lot for confirming my doubts, @i_mazlov. I'll find a compromise, but I can't help but express how great it would be if BodyPaint exposed such functionality. The Brush tool and its filters (such as "Smudge") can't be replicated with a simple bitmap texture, and gaining access to it (mind you, in the context where the Paint brush can be programmatically moved/dragged across the UV space) would open the door to so many creative and useful applications. Of course, I'm sure you are already aware of all of this. This is just me casting a single vote for a potential addition of the Brush tool to the SDK in the future. Thanks for everything!

addendum, I briefly spoke with the dev: In SetDParameter, there is code that sets the correct group automatically if force_type or force_type_mode is specified, and the other way around. One thing to keep in mind is that, when you set the parameter force_type_group, the mode is set to default value for that group, i.e., ball and socket for spherical, hinge for angular, slider for linear. This is what you see ig you play in with the dropdown menus in the UI as well. So, if one first sets force_type_mode and then force_type_group, the latter resets the mode to a possibly different value. But in the code snippet attached it looks though like the order is correct (assuming is the actual code used in the plugin). In a way, I understand that if you are setting mode and group manually from you plugin and you know what you are doing, you are setting a combination that makes sense. But in general, to be extra safe, I decided to go with this solution, so if you change the group the mode is automatically set to something that makes sense. And, btw, also when you set the mode there is a check on the group, and if the values don't match it gets overwritten with the correct group. so, valid options are: simply set force_type (as before) set force_type_group and force_type_mode (in this order) only set force_type_mode (group set automatically) If any of these don't give the expected combination it is a bug I think he too struggled a bit with understanding what you did concretely, so I would recommend creating a bug report as lined out above. Cheers, Ferdinand

Thank you so much! That was it. I was thinking I would try to create this standalone, before moving it into creating a GUI, and I didn't know about the Timer in GeDialog. This is now working, and all I needed to do is remove the multithreading and change it to the timer.

Hi @pyxelrigger , Unfortunately your question is out of the scope of support on this forum, namely: We cannot provide support on learning C++, Python, or one of their popular third-party libraries. With that's said, I'm kind of missing the main idea behind your question, in other words what are you trying to achieve? Is it just another (e.g. simply more convenient) data structure for the hierarchy? If so, then you're free to create whatever data structure fits your need the best. For example, check a very fast draft code snippet below. Is it that you want to track changes of the hierarchy? If so, then you might need to come up with some more complex setup, e.g. involving using the c4d.EVMSG_CHANGE message. Please, refer to a great Ferdinand's answer here: Best way to detect an object has been deleted? Please also consider visiting our How to ask Questions section of the support procedures for your future postings. Cheers, Ilia A super draft example of nested lists hierarchy representation: import c4d doc: c4d.documents.BaseDocument class HierarchyObject: def __init__(self, op): self.op = op self.children = [] child = self.op.GetDown() if op else doc.GetFirstObject() # recursion entry point while child: self.addChild(HierarchyObject(child)) # recursion child = child.GetNext() def addChild(self, child): self.children.append(child) def toString(self, indentation: int = 0): indentStr: str = '\t' * indentation name: str = self.op.GetName() if self.op else '___root___' s: str = f'{indentStr}<{name}' if self.children: s += ':' for child in self.children: s += f'\n{child.toString(indentation + 1)}' s += f'\n{indentStr}' s += '>' return s def __str__(self): return self.toString() if __name__=='__main__': root: HierarchyObject = HierarchyObject(None) print(root)

Hi @ferdinand, Thanks for this, inserting the colour shaders uner the Fusion shader and then inserting the Fusion shader under my shader works fine. I must admit this is my fault. Because the shaders are all created in the InitRender() of my plugin, I didn't think they needed to be (or could be) inserted under my shader. I figured it would be different if the shaders were going to be added to a link field and stay in the document, but not if they're just created then destroyed when done with. So that's very useful to know. Thanks again, Steve

Yes, I know about not using multiple events. I was playing with that, I thought that's the reason the button was not being called Thank you @ferdinand

Once again, I am immensely grateful for your generous and incredibly helpful assistance, @ferdinand ! I don’t know why I didn’t mention SetParameter() in my original message, as this was the first thing I attempted before experimenting with the other methods I mentioned. Thank you once again. I was able to throughly familiarize myself with GetParameter() and SetParameter() today.

Thanks for your explanation @m_adam , Yes it's a CommandData plguin but no GeDialog. Because of some limitations, I had to use PySide to create my plugin's special user interface.

Hey everyone, just to add a little disclaimer here, as Maxime gave a very hacking friendly answer with the a bit tame warning 'do it at your own risk'. What you are tyring to do is out of scope of support because it is a violation of the threading restrictions. The whole core message system is about events and UI, both things that are inherently bound to the main thread. Maxime's code just circumvents the main-thread check someone once put into our code for a reason, as that person also made sure to put a warning into the docs. When you are someone like Maxime, i.e., you know all the bits and bytes of Cinema 4D on a first-name basis, you can make a workaround like this work. But for everyone else I would strongly recommend not circumventing such things in production code. Just because a hack runs fine on a development machine, does not mean that a customer might not lose work due to a crash induced by such hack. The underlying issue we talked about this morning, is that in C++ one can easily defer things to the main thread with the aptly named ExecuteOnMaainThread while in Python one cannot. We are aware of this issue but it is quite costly to solve. An outcome of this thread, was that we at least promoted the priority of the already existing ticket for this issue in our task pool. We can however give no ETA when we will fix this, as doing this will cost quite some time. Cheers, Ferdinand

@ferdinand Thanks a lot Ferdinand for your time and effort. It is always admirable how carefully and thoroughly you answer many questions. At first it was often difficult to understand and follow your code examples...now it is a little easier. Thanks for that. I found out that the following method also does the job: c4d.SendCoreMessage(c4d.COREMSG_CINEMA, c4d.BaseContainer(c4d.COREMSG_CINEMA_FORCE_AM_UPDATE), 0) Sorry for the second question about why this buttonDesc[c4d.DESC_FITH] = True buttonDesc[c4d.DESC_SCALEH] = True in the GetDDescription method are not working. I thought this is a follow-up question. I will open another topic for that.

Hi @ferdinand, Thanks for your reply. I just want to make sure if it's possible. And I'll try the BaseDraw.DrawObject later.

Ok thanks. Will do that!

Hello @FlavioDiniz, thank you for reaching out to us. No, that was not fixed in 2024.4. The current plan is to fix it an upcoming minor release, but as always we cannot give any guarantees regarding an ETA. There are currently no workarounds for the other issue. Cheers, Ferdinand

Hi @ThomasB, sorry for the issue. This is going to be fixed in the next version of Cinema 4D. With that's said you can workaround the issue by using directly SetParameter like so: # key[c4d.ID_CKEY_PRESET] = 2 key.SetParameter(c4d.DescID(c4d.ID_CKEY_PRESET), 2, c4d.DESCFLAGS_SET_NONE) Thanks for the report ! Cheers, Maxime.

Hello @Hongzz, Welcome to the Maxon developers forum and its community, it is great to have you with us! Getting Started Before creating your next postings, we would recommend making yourself accustomed with our forum and support procedures. You did not do anything wrong, we point all new users to these rules. Forum Overview: Provides a broad overview of the fundamental structure and rules of this forum, such as the purpose of the different sub-forums or the fact that we will ban users who engage in hate speech or harassment. Support Procedures: Provides a more in detail overview of how we provide technical support for APIs here. This topic will tell you how to ask good questions and limits of our technical support. Forum Features: Provides an overview of the technical features of this forum, such as Markdown markup or file uploads. It is strongly recommended to read the first two topics carefully, especially the section Support Procedures: Asking Questions. About your First Question When removing all the path handling fluff from your code, everything works as expected (the layout is created properly, when runs from both "Execute" button and the menu item). Please check the attached script below. This actually means that there's something fishy going on with the files on your filesystem or the way you're dealing with them. I'd suggest improve handling edge cases, when the path doesn't exist or when there're no files in the specified path. There're a couple more comments on your posting. First of all, storing your dialog in the global scope of the script is a "hack" that is a) highly not recommended in general b) exceptionally not recommended for being shipped to the end user. You should consider developing a plugin instead, if you need your dialog to be persistent over multiple openings of your dialog. You can have a look into our github repository for some references, e.g. the CommandDataDialog example. Secondly, please consolidate your consequent messages in a single posting as it improves the readabily of the forum (please check the "Support Topic Rules" part of our Support Procedures). For your previous message I've already done this for you. Cheers, Ilia The code snippet without unnecessary path handling parts: import os import c4d class ImportDialog(c4d.gui.GeDialog): BUTTON_ID_BASE = 1000 def __init__(self): self.files = ['myFile1.c4d', 'myFile2.c4d', 'myFile3.c4d'] def CreateLayout(self): self.SetTitle("Import C4D Projects") for index, file in enumerate(self.files, start=self.BUTTON_ID_BASE): filename = os.path.splitext(os.path.basename(file))[0] self.AddButton(index, c4d.BFH_CENTER, name=filename) return True global_dialog_instance = None def main(): global global_dialog_instance if global_dialog_instance is None: global_dialog_instance = ImportDialog() global_dialog_instance.Open(c4d.DLG_TYPE_ASYNC, defaultw=400, defaulth=50) if __name__=="__main__": main()

Hey @baca, feel free to send us a mail to sdk_support(at)maxon(dot)net in case you cannot share code publicly. But we have to have a look at your code to see what is going on. When you say this worked before, we either have a soft regression (you did something which you should not but it somehow worked and we now broke that) or a strong one (we broke something that should work) on our hands. And for that we will need code to see what is going on. And I would not say that the performance penalty is dramatic, it more likely will be neligable. But if everyone would do that everywhere, Cinema 4D would come to a crawl. I would say you can ship your plugin with that "fix" when it does not cause any issues for you. But we should work towards solving this properly. Cheers, Ferdinand

Hey @pyxelrigger, sure you can use the string custom GUI. You could also use a base link or a filename field which be the more natural solutions for this. But you asked for AddEditText and that is what I answered. Cheers, Ferdinand

Hello @dgould, Thank you for reaching out to us. Unfortunately, your question has been off topic for the forum you have posted in. Please check the Forum Overview for an overview of the scope of the different forums. As a result, your posting has been moved into General Talk. Regarding your Posting The SDK team cannot make any statements about the roadmap of Cinema 4D. For questions about current and possibly future features of Cinema 4D, please reach out to us via our Support Center. Thank you for your understanding, Ferdinand