stream the viewport to python api that sends an image back and use that as a texture

thomas

Hey Forum

Here is what I am trying to do:

capture the current viewport as an image
send it to a Python API
wait for the API to send an image back
use this image as a texture.

I realise my question involves a few steps and is complicated. I think some bits I'll be able to figure out. I think the external API bit sending and receiving will be easier, but I don't know much about the APIs in c4d. I am pretty good at Python and coding, but I have never worked with the API. I looked at the documentation and the GitHub examples but couldn't see any examples for the viewport and capturing it as an image.

Right now, I would like to start at step 01. Can you capture a viewport or, alternatively the render view? Can you capture (save an image) from any c4d window? For example from the RS or Arnold viewport even?

thank you,
T

ferdinand

Hello @thomas,

Welcome to the Plugin Café forum and the Cinema 4D development community, it is great to have you with us!

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About your First Question

I have trouble understanding what you mean with the loaded terms stream, send, and receive. I assume you want to simply get access to the framebuffer of a viewport to use it as a texture.

Viewports are represented by the inheritance chain c4d.BaseView<-c4d.BaseDraw where most of the functionalities is realized in c4d.BaseDraw, a canvas like type with which you can draw into a viewport.
In C++ there is BaseDraw::GetViewportImage which exposes the current color framebuffer state of the viewport as an maxon::ImageRef. This method has not been wrapped for Python.
But you can simply render the document using the hardware preview renderer. The topic has been discussed before for example here.
You could then reference the render result file on disk as a texture.

Cheers,
Ferdinand

thomas

hi Ferdinand.

thanks so much for your help. This will be enough to get me going for now.

thomas

Hi @ferdinand, your links really helped me a lot, and I managed to write a script that starts a render and sends the rendered image to a web service.

Can the SDK grab the live preview image from the redshift IPR? I assume not looking at the documentation: https://developers.maxon.net/docs/py/2023_2/search.html?q=redshift&check_keywords=yes&area=default