My goal is to create software that can display thumbnails of .c4d files, regardless of whether the user has Cinema 4D installed.

Perhaps I can obtain the relevant functions from the Cinema 4D SDK to launch a .c4d scene in the background and capture a screenshot. However, I believe this approach might be too expansive for many files.

Here are the steps I attempted: I copied a .c4d file to a brand new computer and used the win_thumbnail.dll from my original computer to update the registry on this new computer. After that, the .c4d file display the thumbnail correctly.

Does the .c4d file already contain a pre-generated thumbnail, and how can I retrieve it?

thanks for your help.