Hello @lednevandrey,

Welcome to the Maxon developers forum and its community, it is great to have you with us!

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About your First Question

The issue with your script is that you never insert your bitmap shaders. A shader must be inserted into a scene graph just like any other node before it can be used. Referencing a shader in a shader parameter does not replace inserting a shader. While for shaders this might be a bit surprising for beginners, one can look at it from an generator object angle to gain clarity. You would not expect to be able to link a that cube object into the document first. From this angle it is a bit more obvious that shaders are not any different and must be inserted before being linked anywhere.

In most cases shaders are owned by the material which use them and inserted with c4d.BaseList2D.InsertShader(). But there is some complexity to how shaders are structured when shaders own shaders. See Base Shader Manual: Access and Structure (C++) for details. The manual is for C++ but also applies to Python.

So, for the displacement part it should be for example something like this.

import c4d import mxutils # ... path: str = storage.LoadDialog(type=c4d.FILESELECTTYPE_IMAGES, title="Select a texture for the Displacement channel") if path: # The mxutils.CheckType call is here so that we can be sure that allocation did not fail. Then # we insert the shader into the document by attaching it to the material which itself # is being inserted into the document. shader: c4d.BaseShader = mxutils.CheckType(c4d.BaseShader(c4d.Xbitmap) material.InsertShader(shader) # Now we can link the file in the shader, and shader in the material. A shader can only # be linked/used once by a material in the classic APU of Cinema 4D. So, if we wanted # to use #path twice, we would have insert a second shader for the second usage. shader[c4d.BITMAPSHADER_FILENAME] = path material[c4d.MATERIAL_DISPLACEMENT_SHADER] = shader

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.

@m_adam said in Register event callbacks for "new file", "open file", "save file" (hooks?):

Regarding new document, sadly there is no way to hook into that and the best way would be to have a MessageData, list all doc by calling c4d.documents.GetFirstDocument and then iterating them by calling BaseList2D.GetNext(). Since a document is a BaseList2D you can hash them and therefor know if there is a new document.

So that would just be running on a timer then, with the hope that I 'trigger' on it swiftly enough? Doesn't fit my needs so dedicated SceneHooks I can register application wide would be a mad helper for this!

Aside of that - was there still a way to 'add' the python generator object into the scene without it maybe serializing into the saved file? Like have a flag that says "Do not serialize"? (Also, Scene Hooks would still be better)

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

Hey @ThomasB,

Thank you for reaching out to us. Without your code we cannot really help you, we are not the oracle of Delphi 🙂 There are many things which could go wrong in your plugin. But in general what you are doing is correct; add a dummy point object with your snap points to your cache, when you want to introduce special snapping points for your custom generator object. Snapping onto the points of the returned geometry should work out of the box (but snapping sometimes struggles a bit with deep caches).

There is however only limited support for adding special snapping points, as it is not really intended to add you own snap logic in that manner. The snapping module both in Python and C++ does not allow you to implement your own snapping logic, you can just read some data.

You should also keep in mind that the snapping is an older part of Cinema 4D which has its flaws. You should check if your problem also does occur when you try to snap onto the converted cache of your object (current state to object). If that is the case, you know it is not something your plugin does, but simply the fact that the snapping struggles with that specific geometry/scenario.

Cheers,
Ferdinand

@ferdinand said in GvNodeMaster::Execute() returns error:

Since you do your own stuff, this could for example fail in the DL_TERMINAL node you implemented in addition to some of the init stuff going wrong.

I have confirmed that the error seems to come from my own GvOperatorData()-plugins (shader nodes). When I delete all my own nodes in the graph and only use the build in c4d xpresso nodes, then GvNodeMaster updates correctly. I will look into this, but now I know where to look! We can mark this as solved for now.

"I can of course also just have a look at it, but I will not be able to run your project to see and tell you why it fails exactly"
At this stage, I was just looking for general feedback on how and when the Execute() function was supposed to work correctly, i.e., if it needed to be called in a special context or similar. This is also why I did not post detailed code initially. I don´t fully agree that detailed code is always needed to discuss an issue, even if it of course sometimes helps in clarifying things! Anyway, thanks a lot for the good support, it is really helpful and I appreciate the availability of this forum - it really helps!

Best regards
/Filip

"PS: There are also the copy buffer methods on GvNodeMaster if you want to preserve connections, copy multiple nodes at once etc.:"
-That looks like it might be exactly what I need! Thanks a lot!

Good to hear!