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ferdinand

As I hinted at above, markers are eternally persistent. I.e., you can unload, load, and modify a scene S or the non-cache* node N in it, the node N will always have the same marker.

The flag you found has a very special purpose and also very misleading documentation (I just fixed that). Each node in a scene must have a unique marker, as otherwise not only BaseLink but also things like undo and more won't work properly when not each node has exactly one marker and each marker exactly one node (i.e., a bijective or 'one-to-one' relation).

But there can be bad actors such as bugs in our codebase or third party plugins which violate that rule. To combat that, Cinema 4D checks the uniqueness of markers of nodes when a scene is being loaded. When it finds duplicate markers, it will open a question dialog, asking the user if he/she wants to repair that scene. When the user says 'yes', only the nodes which had duplicate markers will get a new marker each (so that they are in a bijective marker relation again).

This flag you found will suppress this whole behavior, i.e., it will let you load corrupted scenes as is. I would not recommend using it. I am currently not 100% sure what happens when your LoadDocument call is not DIALOGSALLOWED, it looks a bit like that this check then always never runs (which sounds a bit dangerous).

Cheers,
Ferdinand

edit: okay now I see it, the question dialog part has been commented out, so this runs always without asking the user (and with that also without DIALOGSALLOWED), unless you pass the flag NONEWMARKERS.

[*] Object and other nodes in caches, i.e., the partial scene graph returned by BaseObject::GetCache and generated by ObjectData::GetVirtualObjects, are allocated each time the cache is being built and therefore also have a new marker each time. But you cannot (or better should not) try to build base links, undos, xrefs, etc. for object and other nodes in caches. TLDR: Markers do not work for caches.

ferdinand

Hey @ECHekman,

I currently use INCLUDE Massign in my .res file. However i would like to do this dynamically so that I can change the order at which it is placed in the Material Editor and Attribute Editor. Is there a way to do this?

There is no INCLUDE which you could call programmatically in GetDDescription, but there is Description::LoadDescription. When Cinema 4D is asking you to update a certain part of your description, you could try to call it on your description instance but not with its id, but Massign. This is however very likely to fail or cause crashes, because your description is already being processed, I never tried this myself though.

Another approach could be to allocate a dummy description, then load your resource (e.g., Massign) into that dummy description, to then copy parameters bit by bit into your active/actual description passed into GetDDescription.

But the whole approach of a 'dynamic include' is a bit backwards without context why it has to be this way. Because when you dynamically include something, this also means you have to remove existing data where it shall not be included anymore. Which is possible but unnecessary extra work. Also copying a whole partial description is not a great idea performance wise, GetDDescription is being called a lot.

The better approach would be to just include your partial description in your res file in the a place where it might appear and then dynamically change the parent of that container. As this workflow would be the common dynamic description workflow.

Additionally Also is there a way to hide settings from the Obaselist group or hide settings in the Material Editor but keep them in the Attribute editor?

No, both managers are more or less just a DescriptionCustomGui, they will always show the same data, unless you have access to the implementation (which you do not). When you would implement your own material dialog, with your own DescriptionCustomGui in it, you could mangle what is shown in this particular description view to your liking, there are multiple methods to highlight, filter, and modify a description on that class. To operate this dialog you would then set this description GUI to the material, shader or whatever BaseList2D you want to display, and then either filter or outright modify the description which is being displayed.

Cheers,
Ferdinand

ferdinand

Hey @mogh,

I forgot this thread a bit, sorry. That sounds all very mysterious. When I summarize your issue, I would describe it as follows. I assume that is the gist of it?

I have a workstation and experience there micro- and macro-stutters in the viewport performance. This happens primarily in low performing scenes with a heavy payload. The odd thing is though, that these performance dips only happen on one machine. On other comparable machines I have an an order of magnitude better performance.

This is very hard to debug, but I would say there are two main cases of what could be going wrong.

Your GPU is damaged or you use corrupted drivers. Outdated drivers alone cannot explain the numbers you report. It could also be the mainboard, although somewhat unlikely.
You have another VRAM intensive app running on this machine. Cinema 4D and this app then play the VRAM memory battle, causing data to be constantly cycled in and out of VRAM, causing the performance dips. But this is somewhat unlikely as you probably would be aware of this.

What I would do:

Update all your drivers.
Go into Preferences/Viewport Hardware and start dialing knobs to see if you can make a difference. Cinema 4D has unfortunately not a software viewport renderer anymore with which you could do a baseline test.
Use a GPU monitoring tool (like MSI Afterburner) to see if your GPU is running at full load, or if there are spikes in VRAM usage. There are also more fancy tools with which you can monitor memory allocations over time.
Run GPU tests such as FurMark or 3DMark to see if your GPU behaves stable there.
Install a different GPU (not fun to do, but the best way to rule out hardware issues).

There could also be a bug in Cinema 4D but with numbers as shown below that strikes me as a very unlikely cause. This sounds more like damaged hardware or a really nasty driver issue.

laptop with ~60 FPS (Quadro 2000)

on my workstation with ~8 FPS (RTX 3090)

Cheers,
Ferdinand

ferdinand

Hey @Simon-Lucas,

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.

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It is strongly recommended to read the first two topics carefully, especially the section Support Procedures: How to Ask Questions.

About your First Question

Do you really mean you are on R25? Or do you mean you are on 2025? Anyway, please share an example scene and the code you have so far. Otherwise we won't be able to help you.

Cheers,
Ferdinand

ferdinand

FYI, I have not overlooked this question here. Will post an answer soon(ish).

ferdinand

Hey @moghurt,

this is on our radar, but I cannot give an ETA when this will be auotmated.

Cheers,
Ferdinand

ferdinand

Hey @ymoon,

Thank you for your question. First of all, your code is more complicated than it has to be. You can just call BaseObject.GetTag to get the first tag of a specific type on an object. Also, your code already does what you are asking for, it selects the tag and therefore causes Cinema 4D to draw the vertex map in the viewport (equivalent to single clicking the tag).

To have the Paint Tool enabled (i.e., what happens when you double click a vertex map), you could either activate the tool yourself, or just send MSG_EDIT to the tag, the message which is sent to scene elements when they are double clicked.

Cheers,
Ferdinand

Code

import c4d

doc: c4d.documents.BaseDocument  # The currently active document.
op: c4d.BaseObject | None  # The primary selected object in `doc`. Can be `None`.

def main() -> None:
    """Called by Cinema 4D when the script is being executed.
    """
    if not op:
        return c4d.gui.MessageDialog("Please select an object.")
    
    tag: c4d.BaseTag | None = op.GetTag(c4d.Tvertexmap)
    if not tag:
        return c4d.gui.MessageDialog("The selected object has no Vertex Map tag.")
    
    doc.SetActiveTag(tag, c4d.SELECTION_NEW)
    tag.Message(c4d.MSG_EDIT)
    
    c4d.EventAdd()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

ferdinand

Hey @WickedP,

Thank you for your question. A BaseLink always requires a document within which it shall be resolved, when you do not provide one, it just takes the active document.

So, your question is a bit ambivalent. Internally, a BaseLink is based on GeMarker which identifies a scene element (C4DAtom) over the mac address of the creating machine, the time of creation, and a random UUID. The value is a constant attached to the scene element expressed as 16 bytes of data.

So, this value is persistent over reload boundaries and does not care for the document it is in - although copying a scene element will usually cause it to get a new marker, unless you tell Cinema 4D explicitly to also copy the marker. You can easily query multiple documents for containing a given C4DAtom via a BaseLink. But unless you deliberately forced markers to be copied, it is not possible that multiple documents contain the same C4DAtom.

Cheers,
Ferdinand

ferdinand

Hey @lionlion44,

yes, that is the correct answer. The subject comes up from time to time, here is an answer of mine which is about the very case of yours - discovering substance channels.

Cheers,
Ferdinand

ferdinand

Yes, it is intentional that the handle draw pass is only being drawn when the object is selected. You can try the box pass, I think it is also drawn when the object is not selected and might not be subject to viewport effects. The highlight pass is also only drawn when an object is selected. The X-Ray pass should be drawn when an object is not selected, but should also be subject to viewport effects. But the box pass is also subject to camera transforms, just as the object pass, which makes it not a very good choice to draw HUD information.

All statements above are from my recollection and could be wrong, you just have to check yourself.

But what you are trying to do is also a bit unusual. Typically, objects should not draw persistent HUDs (what I assume you are trying to do) into the viewport. That would be the job of a SceneHookData plugin. But that hook has never been exposed to Python, mostly out of performance concerns.

Your code is also missing the OCIO handling the C++ example showcases. You will be drawing with incorrect colors (unless the bitmap(s) you draw happen to have the color profile of the render space of the document - which is very unlikely).

M	maxon
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