I guess a Python script would do it fine, but I don't use Python. I can write you a quick plugin if that's any use? A plugin would give a few more options than a script I think.

Steve

Hi @ferdinand

Thanks, I’ll submit a crash report as soon as I can. The power keeps going on and off here, when it’s restored I’ll send one in.

Steve

Hi rui,

Yes, it's a pain in the neck doing macOS development. I almost gave up on it at one point it's such a hassle. But once you figure out all the hoops to jump through, it's not too bad. You might want to take a look at my guide to notarizing a mac plugin on my site at https://microbion.co.uk/html/createplugins_r23_3_notarize.htm. This explains the steps needed; the first step is the Apple developer account, which is what I think the tutorial you read must have been referring to. Unfortunately, unlike an Apple ID, getting a dev account is not free.

Steve

When rebuilding my plugins for R2024, I had to notarize the Mac version again for the new builds. The process worked fine, but I noticed that there was a message from Apple stating that the use of 'altool' to notarize was not going to be supported by the end of 2023.

In fact, they now say "The Apple notary service no longer supports altool from November 1, 2023. You use notarytool instead." See https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/notarizing_macos_software_before_distribution

So I looked into using 'notarytool' and surprisingly (for Apple and XCode) it's significantly simpler and faster than the previous method. I've written some notes on how to use it for anyone interested, which are on my site at https://microbion.co.uk/html/r2024macosnotarize.htm

Steve

Tried to send the crash report on 6/6/25 at 22:08 but I got a message saying there was a problem sending it. The message also says to send it by email so I've sent it to sdk_support(at)maxon(dot)net.

Steve

@m_adam Thanks very much for your comments. You asked which parts of the manual page weren't clear. It's more that it's incomplete, in that it doesn't tell you how to get a bundle ID, app password or provider ID. Also, I don't think the statement that adding a timestamp is optional if you enable the hardended runtime is correct - from what I can see, you must provide a timestamp even though you enable the hardended runtime.

The other thing is that invariably at some point the process is going to fail and there's no mention of what to do when it does. It's extremely frustrating when the notarization fails and you have to figure out why. Apart from that, the page is actually very good - just needs a bit more detail (IMO).

Steve

No problem, give me a couple of days to get an initial test version working. Are you on PC or Mac?

Steve

Take a look at the command line arguments passed to the project tool in your screen shot. The project tool is looking in the wrong place.

Steve

Hi Bjorn,

I have a working version of this now which you can download from my site at https://microbion.co.uk/files/rounditr2024.zip

It's PC-only at the moment and requires C4D R2024. Try this and see if it does what you need. There's some basic documentation included which I'll tidy up for the final version.

There doesn't seem to be a DM facility here so we'd better take any further discussion to email. You can get hold of through the contact page on my site (link is in the PDF in the zip file). Do let me know what you think.

Cheers,
Steve

In C++ - I expect it's the same in Python - I would call GeGetPluginPath() to find the absolute path to the plugin, then append the filename to that path. This should work no matter where the user has installed your plugin.

Steve

Hi Ferdinand,

Sorry to take a while to get back to you. Yes, that's what I did - changed the colour with the colour chip, the dialog appears, change the colour in that, close the dialog then hit Undo, which reverts any previous change before the colour change as well.

I tried with a Cube where the only way to change colour is to use the display colour in the basic tab. At first sight this doesn't cause the problem, but in fact it does. To change the display colour you first have to change the 'Display Color' menu from Material (the default) to Automatic or Custom. If you then change the colour, then hit Undo, what happens is that the colour is reverted and the display colour menu is reverted back to 'Material'. So yes, you can reproduce the same bug with a simple cube (I missed that when I started looking at this, could have saved the time writing a test plugin!).

Cheers,
Steve

Hi Ferdinand,

OK, I'll try that again. Trying upload: Diamond.zip

And the output (hope this is what you wanted!):

I can't even upload an image, this is a link to my site.

Steve

Hi Ferdinand,

Thanks for getting back to me. I'll try uploading the file again in this message and see what it says. Here goes: Diamond.zip
Well that failed. The error message was: "Error. Something went wrong while parsing server response"

I'll try again using a VPN: Diamond.zip

No, same error. Not sure what that means!

Steve

Apologies - the file upload to my original post doesn't seem to have worked. I tried a different link but that was deleted for some reason. Here's another attempt. You can download the file from my site using this link.

Hopefully that has worked!
Steve

I've encountered an odd problem when a plugin has a COLOR field in a description and Undo (Ctrl-Z) is hit after changing the colour.

The attached archive contains a small ObjectData plugin called 'Diamond' to demonstrate this (Windows only, debug build). If you install it then invoke it from the Extensions menu, you see it generates a simple polygon object. There are three parameters - height, width and colour.

To reproduce the problem, change either the height or width parameter to anything. Then, click the 'Color' coloured rectangle and in the colour dialog box change the colour to anything. The object colour changes as expected. Close the dialog, then hit Ctrl-Z to undo the colour change. The colour changes back, but also undoes the previous parameter change to width or height. In fact, if you didn't change anything other than the colour, then hit undo, the object is deleted. It's almost as if the effect is to undo two levels on the undo stack rather than one.

At first I thought this must be the code I used to change the colour (it's just a call to BaseObject::SetColorProperties()) but not so. Because, if instead of clicking the coloured rectangle you expand the COLOR field to show the colour sliders, you can change the colour using the sliders and undo works normally You can also modify the source so the object colour is not changed at all and the problem still occurs.

Unless I'm missing something really obvious this looks like a possible bug in the colour picker dialog implementation. (N.B. the full plugin source code is included in the archive.)

Steve

Diamond.zip

Tried to send the crash report on 6/6/25 at 22:08 but I got a message saying there was a problem sending it. The message also says to send it by email so I've sent it to sdk_support(at)maxon(dot)net.

Steve

Hi @ferdinand

Thanks, I’ll submit a crash report as soon as I can. The power keeps going on and off here, when it’s restored I’ll send one in.

Steve

Hi @ferdinand

Firstly, many thanks for looking at this. The plugin ID is a silly mistake on my part (I didn't realise that VS had auto-completed with the wrong ID). It should be ID_RSC4DSHADER (not IDS...) in the register function. If you look in rsc4dshader.h, you'll see it correctly identified with a valid plugin ID there. I was in a bit of a hurry building this and didn't realise what had happened. I'm surprised it ran at all TBH!

The SDK version was 2024.5.1 (Build 2024_5_ac4bc44383e4_1378804312). Isn't this a newer SDK than 2024.4.0, not an older one?

I can get the crash in 2024 but I've tried now in 2025.2.1 and it doesn't crash, so possibly whatever it is was fixed. I've also tried several other of my shader plugins in 2024 and they all exhibit the same issue, crash in 2024 but not in 2025.

Cheers,
Steve

Hi,
I've written several shaders which I also use in Redshift using the C4D Shader material. I get a consistent crash in the following circumstances:

• the renderer is Redshift and the material is the C4D Shader mat
• the shader contains a gradient
• the texture parameters in the C4D Shader Node are set high (e.g. 512 x 512)
• the user edits the gradient by scrubbing one of the gradient knots quickly to left or right

The crash occurs in customgui_gradient.cpp at line 59, which is:

maxon::Result<maxon::GradientRenderData> Gradient::PrepareRenderData(const InitRenderStruct &irs) const
{
	GradientCallRC(maxon::UnexpectedError(MAXON_SOURCE_LOCATION, "Gradient::PrepareRenderData() not found."_s), PrepareRenderData)(irs);
}

It happens in all the shaders I've written which use a gradient. It looks as if scrubbing the knot forces Redshift to repeatedly bake the shader and doesn't like it for some reason, but that is just a guess.

To demonstrate this, I've written a very basic shader plugin - it just draws a red-blue gradient over the surface. The attached file has the source and a debug version of the shader built with the R2024 SDK. To see it, load the included example file, then scrub one of the knots in the gradient, increasing the texture parameter size until it crashes.

I should also mention that this does not happen in the standard renderer.

Cheers,
Steve
RSC4DShader.zip

I actually quite like the Apple keyboard, even if Apple’s idea of a UK keyboard is different to everyone else. For example, shift-2 should produce a “ character but on this Apple kit, it’s the @ symbol. The odd key bindings just make it worse, but it’s a nice keyboard.

But I detest the Apple Magic Mouse, I can’t get used to those ‘gestures’. Give me my Logitech trackball any time. A bit of extra software does make a Mac so much more useful though. Pathfinder is way better than the horrible Finder, and BetterZip is very user-friendly.