Hi @Unit-Image-Dev Thank you for your reply. That's so cool! and i will try it.

Hi Ferdinand, Yeah, I'll need to do dirty checking for sure. Not because I am shipping this to any customers (unless I can find a good licensing framework ), but because the nature of my plugin is to create quite a few objects; We could easily reach 100s or even 1000s of objects, depending on the situation. So I implemented primitive dirty checking from one of the links you provided, and this helps a LOT with the performance - as you're mentioning, just ignoring the cache and recreating everything every time GetVirtualObjects is called would effectively kill Cinema 4D. Especially when fiddling with parameters, as the algorithm to layout all the objects I am creating is quite intensive. So I'm using your code from this topic https://developers.maxon.net/forum/topic/14936/difficulties-to-dedect-the-right-message-data/2 to make sure I do proper dirty checking for my own generator and all linked objects before I decide to return the cache or generate all objects again. I'm not done yet, but early tests seem pretty promosing. Now if only there was a simple way to split the large python file into multiple files, then bundle them all together for one giant python file so I wouldn't have to mess with module paths. 1000 line code files get old real fast. Thanks again!

Hey @ll2pakll, yes, any kind of simulation/solver is usually quite a bit of work; and as with most things, most of it is pushing data around in a 'clever' way and not the actual algorithm. You might get away with just saturating the system (add frames or "redraws"), but be warned, you will run into more problems with this approach. To have a robust solver, you must decouple it from the FPS and scene update events; this is not just a Cinema 4D thing, but universal. Cheers, Ferdinand

@ferdinand Your solution of replacing the doc = c4d.documents.GetActiveDocument() line with doc: c4d.documents.BaseDocument = op.GetDocument() really worked. From my point of view, as an ordinary person, your level of understanding of the code seems to be something beyond the realm of possibility. I wish you a good day and thank you again for your help.

@ferdinand Thank you very much for your reply. I only need to animate one parameter and I have already written something similar to this parameter cache myself, you saw it in a previous question and advised me to change the location of the cache for more reliability. I will take your advice in the future to avoid reinventing the wheel. Thanks again for your help.

Hello Herr May, Thank you for reaching out to us. I am not quite sure why you think it should do that. The angle between two vectors u and v is defined as: theta(u, v) = arccosine(~u * ~v) I.e., the arccosine of the dot product of the two normalized vectors. This is due to the so called circle functions, specifically this identity: [image: 1697012566409-26ea0c5e-9de3-4885-bc15-34b4ee3342da-image.png] Under the hood, GetAngle does exactly what I declared above (just in a bit more efficient manner, as calculating the normalized vector is much more expensive than this little trick): [image: 1697012429446-123bbf8a-568b-49a5-9ff3-2bac41f61339-image.png] As you can see, the correct solution to the arccosine of the dot product of the null vector with itself is 0.5 π, i.e., the value you got : [image: 1697012846516-ebfd4607-e872-42ef-898c-d3a2de4d8dd8-image.png] You could now argue if that is a sensible result for a method that is called 'GetAngle' and if it should throw an error on getting an input vector or being called on a vector with the length zero. But you have also to keep in mind that the C++ backend is used by people who will know the identity pi_half = arccosine(~(0, 0, 0) * ~(0, 0, 0)) and might want to make use of it. Cheers, Ferdinand

Hi @Brakusha, welcome in plugin cafe ! c4d.ID_OPERATOR_COFFEE is working in all versions, please open a new topic with a code that demonstrate the issue and with a short explanation about what you want to achieve. I would also highly recommend you to read our Support Guideline to know how to get the best support from us. Cheers, Maxime.

Thank you for the answers.

Hey @jochemdk, That is the nature of threading restrictions. It is like crossing the street without looking left and right: It works fine until it doesn't Cheers, Ferdinand

@ferdinand said in Adding ports to nodes.: DescID Thank you so much. I am pleasantly surprised at the level of your responsiveness. When I wrote "Global Data" I accidentally used the wrong word, I meant "Global Coordinates". I have read your links and code very carefully. Actually the concept of DescID is not so much complicated as confusing, the easiest thing would be to have something like an interactive online converter that could show the attributes of the desired objects and their corresponding id. I will try to understand the concept of DescID, deeper. And thank you again for your very detailed answer. Have a nice day.

Hi Ilia, Thanks for the reply - you're correct about what I'm trying to do! I've tried your first option and unfortunately the following dialog pops up: "Unable to write file $FILE$ (file may be write protected)" This dialog does not appear if the file is saved manually with the File -> Save Project As... Dialog The save location is a network drive. Let me know if theres a workaround? For your second option - is it possible to specify the exact filename here? EDIT: It looks like you can also specify a filename here, which has worked - thanks !

Hi Bjorn, I have a working version of this now which you can download from my site at https://microbion.co.uk/files/rounditr2024.zip It's PC-only at the moment and requires C4D R2024. Try this and see if it does what you need. There's some basic documentation included which I'll tidy up for the final version. There doesn't seem to be a DM facility here so we'd better take any further discussion to email. You can get hold of through the contact page on my site (link is in the PDF in the zip file). Do let me know what you think. Cheers, Steve

Got it! Thanks.

It works as expected in C4D 2024, but not in the previous versions.

Hi @Gaal-Dornik , Thanks for reaching out to us. Please excuse the delay. This issue is now tracked via internal bug tracking system. Thread is tagged to_fix, so that the thread can be tracked more closely. Cheers, Ilia

MAny thanks Ferdinand. I will look into the BatchRender suggestion. That looks promising.

@ferdinand Indeed, the allure of good looks can be captivating at times. In fact, my primary objective was to explore the development of a pie toolbar, which may seem unconventional but has always held a deep fascination for me. I sincerely appreciate your valuable advice and will certainly give it a try. Cheers, Gheyret

Hello @Gregor-M , Welcome to the Plugin Café forum and the Cinema 4D development 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 Guidelines, as they line out details about the Maxon SDK Group support procedures. Of special importance are: Support Procedures: Scope of Support: Lines out the things we will do and what we will not do. Support Procedures: Confidential Data: Most questions should be accompanied by code but code cannot always be shared publicly. This section explains how to share code confidentially with Maxon. Forum Structure and Features: Lines out how the forum works. Structure of a Question: Lines out how to ask a good technical question. It is not mandatory to follow this exactly, but you should follow the idea of keeping things short and mentioning your primary question in a clear manner. About your First Question What you're trying to achieve is supposed to be happening on the main thread. It's difficult to guess the reasons of the crash you're stumbling across without any further information (e.g. the code showcasing the issue), but could be that MTCharacterBodyPart.GetParameters() function is not a thread-safe one. Cheers, Ilia

Hi @ferdinand, Thank you so much for the comprehensive reply! Given all this I don't think it would make sense to keep trying to unit test this particular part of our code with Python. The last approach you highlighted with testing directly on the C++ side seems like the best option, so I'll give that a try. I'll have to see how to integrate this test with the rest of the unit tests (we have a lot and they're all in Python) but hopefully that won't be too much of a problem. Thanks again for all the help, Daniel

I see, thanks. But honestly i don't get it why the plugins folder isn't in the search path...