2025.0.0 SDK Release

ferdinand

Dear development community,

On September the 10th, 2024, Maxon Computer released Cinema 4D 2025.0.0. For an overview of the new features of Cinema 4D 2025.0, please refer to the release announcement. Alongside this release, a new Cinema 4D SDK and SDK documentation have been released, reflecting the API changes for 2025.0.0. The major changes are:

C++ API

What was formerly has been know as the Classic API has been deprecated in favour of the Cinema API. Alongside this a new cinema namespace has been introduced which contains all the entities which were formerly in the anonymous global namespace known as the Classic API. Plugin authors must adopt their code to this new API, although the changes are not nearly as extensive as for 2024. See the 2025 migration guide for details. Code examples and documentation have been updated to now refer to a Cinema API.
2025 uses OCIO as the default color management mode, brings an improved color picker, and made general improvements to the consistency of the OCIO implementation. This had some effects on the underlying OCIO API which are reflected in two new code examples in the OCIO Manual and a new plugin in the SDK.

Python API

Python also received the update from Classic to Cinema API. But here the change was more of a cosmetic nature confined to the documentation. The c4d package remains the home for all formerly Classic and now Cinema API entities.
The mxutils package received updates around standardized scene traversal, random number generation, and more.
Graph descriptions now support variadic ports of arbitrary complexity and explicit port references.

Head to our download section for the newest SDK downloads, or the C++ and Python API change notes for an in detail overview of the changes.

We discovered late in the cycle bugs in the Asset API code examples and OCIO code in the Python SDK. Which is why the publication of the Python SDK and GitHub code examples has been postponed until these bugs are fixed. They should be ready latest by Friday the 13th of September. But the Python online documentation is accessible and error free (to our knowledge).

We had to make some last minute changes to the C++ SDK regarding OCIO code examples. Only the extended C++ SDK contains these changes. The application provided sdk.zip will catch up with the next release of Cinema 4D.

Happy rendering and coding,
the Maxon SDK Team

Cloudflare unfortunately still does interfere with our server cache. And you might have to refresh your cache manually.

When you are not automatically redirected to the new versions, and also do not see 2024.5 in the version selector, please press CTRL + F5 or press CTRL and click on the reload icon of your browser anywhere on developers.maxon.net/docs/ to refresh your cache. You only have to do this once and it will apply to all documentations at once. Otherwise your cache will automatically update latest by 19/07/2024 00:00.

ferdinand

Dear community,

we have provided a Python SDK for 2025, updated the C++ Docs, and uploaded the new code examples to GitHub.

For C++, we extended the code example for OcioNode2025 a bit, now also covering drawing textures, and made same smaller adjustments to the existing example code. For details see Drawing with OCIO Colors in a Viewport.
For Python, there is now also a py-ocio_node_2025 code example, (mostly) mirroring the 2025 OpenColorIO (OCIO) C++ code example of the same name. It demonstrates how to handle and draw colors in 2025 scenes where OCIO has been reworked and is now the new default.
- Python is still missing OcioConerverterInterface and the OCIO related methods on BaseDocument which currently limits a bit your options in Python. We have porting OCIO to Python high on our priority list.
- I also touched the documentation of NodeData.Init and NodeData.InitAttr, especially their code example, as it was not quite correct (you should not call InitAttr on a node which is being cloned).

Cheers,
Ferdinand

mikeudin

What XCode version is required to compile plugins for v2025?

ferdinand

It is still XCode 13 as lined out here. Release 2025 will hopefully the last release which requires XCode 13 and the legacy build sytem.

Cheers,
Ferdinand

mikeudin

@ferdinand Cinema 4D 2025 requires at least macOS 13.6+ (Ventura), but Xcode 13.4 requires macOS Monterey 12

ferdinand

Hey @mikeudin,

we are aware and working on it. Meanwhile this applies:

Getting Started with the Cinema 4D C++ SDK on macOS: Prerequisites:

Xcode 13 is incompatible with more recent versions of macOS such as Ventura and Sonoma. But you must still use Xcode 13 to build the more recent Cinema 4D C++ SDKs for macOS, as Xcode 13 is the last release that supports the legacy build system. We strongly recommend using macOS Monterey to run Xcode 13 as the circulating hack of reaching into the Xcode 13 package to directly invoke the Xcode app is more and more error prone the further you update macOS. Attempting to build the Cinema 4D SDK with Xcode 14 or later will result in build errors. We are working on supporting the standard build system of Xcode.

See also the forum thread Development requirements for C4D 2025.

Cheers,
Ferdinand

mikeudin

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