Hi @heytraile,

Please have a look at our Support Procedures: How to Ask Question section. Usually it is very helpful if one provides a relevant code snippet, demonstrating the issue. This helps to reduce the room for any misinterpretations of your original question.

Regarding the issue you're describing, the "null" being logged to the console is often a symptom of an implementation issue within a function that overrides the base implementation. Specifically, if a function (such as Message() or RestoreLayout()) is expected to return a particular type (e.g., bool), but instead returns None or a mismatched type, it can result in unexpected behavior and the "null" log.

Cheers,
Ilia

Yes, we will treat it as a bug. Apparently we implemented it, but then someone disabled the implementation (probably because it caused performance issues or something like that), and then we forgot do follow up on that disabled implementation. Generally we cannot give ETA's for fixes but we try to do them in a timely fashion, i.e., within a couple of minor releases such as 2024.1, 2024.2, 2024.3, etc. I am not the dev here, so I can give even less guarantees. We will update this thread when something blocks us from fixing this in the near future.

And yes, it does work in C++. The reason why this is not working in Python is because of the C++ API changes with 2024.0. This link shows how you sample things in C++, the changes revolved around making sampling a field a const operation, i.e., an operation which does not change data on the object. Which was before not the case and now requires that mutable data to be manually passed arround as the extraData as shown in the example. The changes were carried out to speed up the core of Cinema 4D.

Cheers,
Ferdinand

Hello @qq475519905,

Thank you for reaching out to us. Your question is very ambiguous. But given your posting history, I assume this is a development question and not an end user question. I.e., you are a developer who struggles with setting up a plugin which is being loaded, and you are not a user struggling with installing someone else's plugin (the latter would be out of scope of support for the developer forum).

We have plenty of Python plugin examples on Github, for anything more concrete, we will need a more concrete question from you. Most importantly executable example code which highlights your problem. Please have a look at Support Procedures: How to Ask Questions.

Cheers,
Ferdinand

Hey @lednevandrey,

without wanting to be rude, I really struggle with understanding what you want to convey. Material[c4d.TEXTURETAG_PROJECTION] = c4d.TEXTURETAG_PROJECTION_UVW does not work because Python is case sensitive and you gave your BaseMaterial instance the symbol material. So, Python is complaining about that.

But as said before, a material, i.e., BaseMaterial is not the right place to set the projection. It is the counter part to the thing you see in the Material Manager of Cinema 4D and has no projection. The projection is set in the Material Tag, which slightly confusingly is called TextureTag in the API.

Cheers,
Ferdinand

"""Assigns the first material in the document to the selected object and sets its projection to UVW. """ import c4d import mxutils 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: raise ValueError("Please select an object.") # Get the first material in the document. material: c4d.BaseMaterial = doc.GetFirstMaterial() if not material: raise ValueError("No materials found in the document.") # Get the first existing texture tag on #op or create a new one when none exists. tag: c4d.BaseTag = op.GetTag(c4d.Ttexture) or op.MakeTag(c4d.Ttexture) if not tag: raise ValueError("Failed to get or create a texture tag.") # Set the material and projection. tag[c4d.TEXTURETAG_MATERIAL] = material tag[c4d.TEXTURETAG_PROJECTION] = c4d.TEXTURETAG_PROJECTION_UVW # Update the Cinema 4D UI. c4d.EventAdd() if __name__ == '__main__': main()

Great to hear that you found your solution! Do not hesitate to ask more questions when you run into problems while exploring our Python API. But just as a heads up, we prefer users opening new topics for new questions. For details see the Support Procedures linked above.

Cheers,
Ferdinand

Hi sadly it is not possible for the moment, I will talk to the responsible team to see if that's possible.

Cheers,
Maxime.

Hey BigRoy, sadly it's still impossible, I will start the discussion again, thanks for the reminder.

Cheers,
Maxime.

I was just looking for the exact same thing and would second the need for these 3 hooks without the need for a Python Generator object.
It would make the pipeline integration of C4D much more straightforward. @m_adam

Hi @BigRoy,

in python the lifetime of the objects is handled automatically so you're right, there's no need to do anything special to destruct the object.

Good job on your project! Thanks for sharing it with the community!

Cheers,
Ilia

Hi @datamilch,

you can use the EVMSG_CHANGE message as a trigger to check your objects for changes. The timer approach might seem imprecise from the first glance, but can actually be used, I don't think there're any significant reasons against it. Additionally, the recent change was made to make BaseList2D being hashable. This effectively means you can operate with your objects in a dict.

The python tag approach is the least efficient, although would still work, yes.

You're saying your GeDialog plugin uses "mostly the ideantical userdata". If it was "identical", you could potentially use c4d.gui.DescriptionCustomGui with the SetObject function to make it point to your object. This way you can avoid hassling around all the data sync, because it is all handled as a built-in functionality of this class. This is how the attribute manager effectively works, or the Active Object Dialog as well.

For your further postings please follow our guidelines on How to Ask Questions, namely:

Please consolidate your questions into a singular posting by editing your last posting

Cheers,
Ilia

@i_mazlov Thanks much for explanation.

Hello,

Thank you for reaching out to us. @Dunhou is right, the Picture Viewer is sealed, which means that you can put images into it (with c4d.bitmaps.ShowBitmap or c4d.documents.LoadFile) but you cannot get images or information out of it. This generally applies to all UIs, we do not expose UIs, but the data structures behind them. So, there is for example no Object or Material Manager API interface, their functionalities are exposed via the scene graph. For the Picture Viewer there is no data structure exposed.

Cheers,
Ferdinand

@ferdinand

Gotcha. Thanks for the response.
c4d.CallButton(op, c4d.ID_BASEOBJECT_FROZEN_RESET) works as expected.

Hey @moghurt,

Thank you for reaching out to us.

I tried using the pyp plugin to execute Python scripts when starting the software to modify the project file, but when I use the '-render' parameter, the Python code in the pyp plugin is executed after the rendering is complete.

I can only speculate as to what exactly you have been doing here, as you do not provide any details or code. Please have a look at Support Procedures: Asking Questions for how to ask good technical questions.

The general workflow for what you want to do here (given that one really wants to follow the plugin route) would be to implement PluginMessage for your plugin, and then try to run your code from there at a fitting point of time in the startup sequence of Cinema 4D. And while I would not rule out that -render has an impact on the startup sequence of Cinema 4D, the general claim that your Python code only runs after the rendering seems a bit far fetched. Because for events such as C4DPL_INIT_SYS and C4DPL_INIT modules and plugins have not been loaded yet, i.e., rendering is literally impossible at these points.

The plugin approach also assumes that you can inject without problems alien command line arguments into a Cinema 4D app call, e.g., \CINEMA 4D.exe"-nogui -render "render.c4d" -script "myscript.py" with -script being the alien argument. I am not quite sure that this would work, I would have to try myself. What also is problematic, is that you are likely not able to get hold of the render document on this route. The active document will be the empty document, not the render document, i.e., you cannot get hold of the BaseDocument for render.c4d. And you cannot just open and modify the document yourself, as Cinema might have already a lock on that file or is even already loading it.

All this makes using c4dpy instead much more attractive as you won't have these problems there. It is also the intended solution for what you want to do here: Modify one or many documents without a GUI in a fire and forget manner. A while ago we had the topic Extending the Command Line with Python where I showed a workflow for how to treat c4dpy as a Script Manager environment.

ℹ The thread is four years old, written in Python 2 syntax (you will have to convert to Python 3 syntax), and I was then not yet a Maxon employee but a student. So, you might run into some issues. But the principle is definitively reproduceable and I also do not see anything in my old code which seems like a really bad idea.

Your workflow could then look like this for doing the pre and post rendering events (as a bat, ps1, sh, or command file and assuming that you do not want to overwrite files):

c4dpy script_manager_environment.py -script my_script.py -in my_doc.c4d -out my_doc_pre.c4d CommandLine -my_doc_pre.c4d ... c4dpy script_manager_environment.py -script my_script.py -in my_doc_pre.c4d -out my_doc_post.c4d

Cheers,
Ferdinand

@m_adam Thank you for providing an alternative method to set parameters.❤

@ferdinand
Thanks a lot Ferdinand for your time and effort. It is always admirable how carefully and thoroughly you answer many questions.
At first it was often difficult to understand and follow your code examples...now it is a little easier.
Thanks for that.

I found out that the following method also does the job:

c4d.SendCoreMessage(c4d.COREMSG_CINEMA, c4d.BaseContainer(c4d.COREMSG_CINEMA_FORCE_AM_UPDATE), 0)

Sorry for the second question about why this

buttonDesc[c4d.DESC_FITH] = True buttonDesc[c4d.DESC_SCALEH] = True

in the GetDDescription method are not working. I thought this is a follow-up question.
I will open another topic for that.

Hey @BruceC,

you are not expected to. In fact you cannot delete any topic as a user here once it is older than 60 minutes (no replies or not). Postings, a reply in a topic, can be deleted without restrictions. But deleting is not really deleting in NodeBB anyway, true deletion, NodeBB calls its purging, is not available for users at all.

Long story short: We do not want users to delete topics as they tend to delete valuable information for others with that, even when they consider the topic failed or obsolete.

Cheers,
Ferdinand

Hi Andy,

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

Yes, unfortunately it's not possible to catch the "hover" event as there's no such event. So yes, you're right, you can somehow emulate the desired behavior.

The suggestion for that would be to work with Core Messages, namely do your stuff (i.e. change the mode) as a reaction on catching the EVMSG_CHANGE message.

For checking the selections part, you can refer to the DunHou's pointer to the Ferdinand's script.

Cheers,
Ilia

Thanks @ferdinand, you answered my question brilliantly, as you always do.
Cheers

Hey @John_Do,

you can add as many EventAdd as you want, it does not really hurt. All that will happen is that Cinema 4D will see that there is already an event and then do nothing. Technically speaking, it can make sense to have multiple EventAdd calls in a row - when you set the flags in c4d.EventAdd(flags=EVENT_NONE) as your call might then add a flag to the next upcoming event.

It is a bit odd that you need an EventAdd at the end of your CommandData:Execute, but your screen grab clearly shows that it is necessary, so just keep it there. Maybe I also just misremembered something there.

But I am a bit confused to what is now concretely not working.

Cheers,
Ferdinand