I use this to Thank You Ferdinand. This is how I imagine an SDK example should look like .... a simplest version , an altered simple version and a complex touching the boundaries of the subject. I am thankful and praise your work .... ! cheers mogh

Hey @hSchoenberger, as I said, what we provided is mostly a workaround, we'll have to streamline things. I cannot talk much about the details, since I do not yet know myself how we will solve this. Please open new topics for new questions in the future, especially bug reports should remain clean. Our render pipeline, and that includes commissioning third party renders, converges into a singular point. There are currently four entry points into that pipeline: The built-in commands such as "Render to Picture Viewer", "Render View", "Render Region", etc. For them this pipeline has been built initially. Also headless Cinema 4D instances such as the command line or c4dpy use this mechanism when invoked for a rendering. The c4d.document.BatchRender, uses mostly the same route as (1), but the drawback compared to RenderDocument is that you must always operate with files on disk. I.e., you cannot just change a document im memory and then render it, you must first save it to disk, and also your output will provided on disk and not as bitmaps in memory. As stated before, this is the way I recommend. You should not have to apply an OCIO hacks here, we are at least not aware of any issues. The .net Renderer, a.k.a, Team Render, similar to (2) functionally, just more complicated. And other than for (2), not all third party renderers do support Team Render. RenderDocument differs from these three in that it does not take the full length of our render pipeline, but just a subsection of it. RenderDocument is used internally to render icons and preview images and was never intended to be the 'programmatic rendering interface' it unfortunately has been marketed as and is used as by many third parties. The advantage of RenderDocument is that you can easily operate in memory only without any disk activity. Whenever I was asked in the past, I always told people that using RenderDocument as a render pipeline endpoint is not such a good idea because that is not what it is designed for. Mainly because there are also other short-comings due to it not taking the full route in the render pipeline (animations for example or the render data handling). With OCIO this worsened, as we have intertwined the render pipeline, the Picture Viewer, and saving output to disk even more, i.e., things RenderDocument is naturally left out of. I simply do not know yet how we will fix this, as this is largely not my code. But for me it is clear that this must be simplified in Python. This could either happen in the form of fixing RenderDocument regrading its Picture Viewer and BaseBitmap.Save, i.e., BitmapSaver interactions, or by giving the BatchRender more RenderDocument like qualities. The solution to this will not be super simple, and it will likely not arrive within 2025. For now there is a somewhat functional workaround for RenderDocument and you can always use the BatchRender. Cheers, Ferdinand

Hey @vhardy, yes, @m_adam as supporting expressions on his Todo list for the VS Code bridge. But it is not very high in our priority list, you are the first user requesting it. I gave the subject a gentle nudge in our task tracking. FYI: Generally we do not make any guarantees if or when we will implement something. Cheers, Ferdinand

@ferdinand Thanks for your help!

Hello @patrick_cue, 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 Please do not use other topics for your support requests, especially when they are bug tickets. Asking a follow-up questions such as "when will this be fixed" or "does this also apply to situation B" in a foreign topic is allowed and even encouraged. But a specific case with your specific code and data always warrants a new thread. Please also familiarize yourself with Support Procedures: Asking Questions, as while it its clear that you put effort into make yourself understood (thanks!), this is also bordering a bit on the too much information. The bug tracked by the other topic, is that there is currently no way in the Python API to use c4d.documents.RenderDocument in an OCIO document (i.e., every document since 2025.0) and then display that bitmap with the correct colors via c4d.bitmaps.ShowBitmap. It is important to understand that: The bitmap data generated is just fine, when you save the bitmap to disk, everything is correct. It is just that the Picture Viewer does not display it incorrectly. The reason for that is that in Python OCIO is not fully exposed in 2025.1.0 and you cannot set the OCIO profiles of the rendered bitmap there. Internally, we have been working on an OCIO port for Python allowing for color conversions and more things, including OCIO managing bitmaps. We also added a function to bake a display and view transform into an sRGB image - another route how this RenderDocument issue can be solved. The goal is to publish this with an upcoming version of the Python SDK, ideally the next, but as always we cannot make any guarantees. You cannot fix this issue yourself in 2025.1.0 and lower. Cheers, Ferdinand

Thank you for @Dunhou answer. It was ultimately completed in JSON format

Ok Understood, Ok I guess that explains my "nice" comb from the cache and my jagged flip/flop . sometimes zero comb from the "full" matrix normal ... I also have different tangents from manually "calculating" them then v3, v2. But I will make a "sanity" check this weekend (feed manual matrixes into my code instead of spline "point" matrixes), before I post about this. Thanks Ferdinand I'll divide and conquer away.

Understood Thanks.

Hey @kbar, Thank you for reaching out to us and the heads up, much appreciated. Looks like we forgot to update the function documentation, because the change is in the change notes. I updated the docs for the upcoming release. Cheers, Ferdinand

[image: 1739867168603-curvature_comb.png] not bad for 5 hours of dabbling --- thanks to you @ferdinand Gotcha's: The Curvature was 90dgree rotated - LLM to the rescue ... # c4d.plugins.RegisterTagPlugin( .... # That one nearly got me ;-) # c4d.TAG_IMPLEMENTS_DRAW_FUNCTION # R22 cheers

Hi @Neekoe, That's great to hear you've managed to solve the issue! For your future postings please note that according to our Support Procedures: We cannot debug your code for you and instead provide answers to specific problems. This effectively means that you're welcome to ask your questions and attach the code snippet that demonstrates your question or issue you're struggling with. However, we cannot debug your entire codebase, so you have to isolate your specific question and the corresponding part of code yourself before asking the question. Cheers, Ilia

@i_mazlov Thanks for the reply. I may have described it wrong. I am talking about the image viewer. It seems that there is currently no API interface to get the number of frames rendered, nor can I get the total number of frames in the rendering settings.

Thanks for helping out @spedler!

Hello @DayDreamer, 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 This is your first posting and you did well, but I would point you to our 'singular question' rule, as lined out above in the 'Asking Questions' link. While we usually cut user some slack regrading that, the rule exists for a reason, as topics otherwise tend to become gigantic. There are way too many questions in this topic, please split your questions into multiple topics in the future. There is no mechanism to package and ship plugins under Cinema 4D. You can just zip a plugin folder and the user unzips it then in a path where his or her Cinema 4D instance is looking for plugins. xdl64 is the extension Cinema 4D uses for libraries under Windows, i.e., it is more or less an alias for dll (our library linking is kind of special and right between static and dynamic libraries, hence the custom name). So, no, Python plugins cannot be packaged as xdl64 because Python is not compiled into machine code but interpreted at run time. You can mix C++ and Python plugins in the sense that Python plugins can depend/interact with C++ plugins with the means of the Cinema 4D API. E.g., a Python plugin can react to messages sent by a C++ plugin or data placed by a C++ plugin (or vice versa). That is how our Python API works under the hood. But C++ and Python code cannot interact directly of course, as they are vastly different languages. But you can run our Python VM from C++ and eval the results. When you want to protect your intellectual property, you can use our Cinema 4D | Extensions > Tools > Source Code Protector which will encrypt a pyp Python module. But code must of course be decrypted at runtime to be sent to the Python VM, so, this will not really stop anyone who really wants your source code (a cracker for example). C++ is the by far safer option when intellectual property is important (but also C++ can be decompiled). Cheers, Ferdinand

Thanks @Neekoe to have shared your solution and thanks @Dunhou for helping. When you pass LV_TREE the Draw method is not called to have it called you need to pass either LV_USERTREE or LV_USER. Cheers, Maxime.

@ferdinand Thank you so much. He perfectly solved all my problems

Hi @ArjenA , 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 Unfortunately we're not able to provide you with support on designing an architecture of your application, hence my answer here is very limited. Though, you're very welcome to ask more specific questions Let's call your setup with physical board game, hardware and corresponding software as "backend" and the C4D part as "frontend". Generally speaking, there's nothing preventing you from making these parts communicating with each other and it all highly depends on your project setup: programming languages, physical interfaces, frameworks, etc that you're going to use. You can start with saving your live data in a file on your disk filesystem and read it using Python API in cinema. Once you have a proof of concept you can start optimizing, for example, by implement a proper communication interface, for example, REST API or Websocket sound like good (but not the only!) candidates for this purpose. With that's said, I wish you luck with your project. Feel free to make new postings with singular and more specific questions. Cheers, Ilia

@ferdinand Thanks for reply. Perhaps not expressed clearly. For changing the axis of an object, it is not a problem. What I want to ask is whether the manual operation step of selecting the axis before the Move tool works can be implemented using a script.

@i_mazlov Thanks for your help. I using visual studio code as you suggested and am getting to grips with the Drag and Drop to assist with parameter getting and setting.

Hi @kimberlyhtown, 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 I suppose you're asking about the Attribute Manager history, which one can access by using the following arrows: [image: 1738944299742-bf4e829b-8ae1-4eae-a86b-c8dbc57c713d-image.png] Unfortunately, no. the Attribute Manager is a quite complex part of C4D (e.g. with multiple AM having each their own history), hence it is not transparently exposed to our public SDK and one's typically limited by the functionality listed in our C++ SDK the AOM part: Active Object Manager. Cheers, Ilia