2024.4.0 SDK Release

ferdinand

Dear Cinema 4D Community,

On April the 10th, 2024, Maxon Computer released Cinema 4D 2024.4.0. For an overview of the new features of Cinema 4D 2024.4, 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 2024.4.0. The major changes are:

C++ - An all new form of SDK delivery has been added, the extended C++ SDK.
C++: Documentation landing page now puts a stronger focus on novice users. Added were also two new manuals to help developers on Windows and macOS over the first hurdles.
C++/Python - ParticleGroupObject has been exposed to our APIs, making particle data of the all new particle system of 2024.4.0 accessible to third parties. For Python there is a small code example.
Python - Added MoData.GetArrayValue() method for vastly improved performance in Python Effector nodes in Full Control Mode.

For details about this API release, please refer to the 2024 C++ and Python change notes. The latest offline docs and other resources can be found in our downloads section.

Extended C++ SDK

With Cinema 4D 2024.4.0 we introduce a new form with which we will deliver the Cinema 4D C++ SDK. In addition to the sdk.zip shipped with Cinema 4D, we will now also ship an Extended C++ SDK on developers.maxon.net. This version contains all the necessary tools to build plugins for a particular version of Cinema 4D.

The sdk.zip shipped with a Cinema 4D installer will not be removed, it will still be valid way to get hold of the frameworks for a particular version of Cinema 4D. But the Extended SDK will become the preferred way of using the SDK, as it removes the necessity of installing Cinema 4D to get hold of its frameworks and provides all necessary tools in one package. The Extended SDK is platform agnostic, but currently focuses on Windows and macOS development.

Fig. I: The content of the extended SDK, in this case extracted on Windows.

The extended SDK will contain the offline C++ documentation, the frameworks for that version of the API, the code examples, and tools such as the project tool or the offline version of the SDK asset database. New are also two scripts which can be used to generate or update an SDK solution of us delivering the downloads via the forum.

New Downloads Section

These changes will be accompanied by a new downloads section on developers.maxon.net which will be shipped in the next weeks. With it we will apply the new form of C++ SDK delivery to past versions of the SDK up to release R21.

Fig. II: How the new developers.maxon.net/downloads section will look like for the Cinema 4D SDK (not yet live).

Happy rendering and coding,
the Maxon SDK Team

Dunhou

Hi @ferdinand ,

Great work!

Seems the Github link not work for me , I try it with the python document link, and nothing changed.

Cheers~
DunHou

m_adam

I just updated our Github with latest version, the link should resolve now.

Cheers,
Maxime.

ferdinand

Dear Developers,

There was also an issue with the Extended SDK, as it was not using the correct version of the frameworks. This has been fixed. If you already did download the extended SDK, you must download it again.

C++ SDK 2024.4.0 (unified download)

Please excuse the inconvenience,
Ferdinand

Dunhou

Hi there,

The Online Document seems still broken with side bar in 2024.4.0.

Cheers~
DunHou

ferdinand

Hey @Dunhou,

yeah, I know, I did not touch the Python docs for 2024.4.0 because I was busy with C++ stuff. Maxime built them, will have a look today.

Cheers,
Ferdinand

ferdinand

Hey,

so, I fixed this now, in the sense that the TOC is now back in these classic API type and module pages.

I renamed the old a bit wordily named "Functions Signatures" and "Functions Documentation" to Overview and Functions (or Methods for classes) . Opposed to the old pre 2024.3 TOCs (which were completely broken in many ways), these categories now also show up in the TOC:

The old Types and Inheritance section has been merged into root element as I do not see a good reason why it should appear in the middle of the page. The obvious thing would be to now add links to the individual elements on a page, so that you can quick-jump to a particular function. But that turned out to be not so easy with the mess we made there before and stubborn docutils. As evident by the C4DAtom example and other cases our TOC trees are very broken in this part of the docs and I now already almost spent two days with fixing things to this state.

This will be shipped in the current state with the next release of Cinema 4D. When I have some time to waste, I will try to add the function links.

The manual and maxon API TOCs are unaffected by this, they continue to work as intended. The classic API does its own thing here (as always ) which why this is such a mess.

Cheers,
Ferdinand