Topics created by spedler

Hey @spedler,

Thank you for reaching out to us and for pointing out that issue. We are aware that our code signing documentation requires an overhaul. This not only means updating the rather dated MacOS guide, but also providing a guide for Windows since code signing also has become more and more important under Windows. And although not yet as restrictive as MacOS, the Microsoft Secure Future Initative is pointing to a future of execution policies on Windows similar in strictness to the one's found on MacOS.

Cinema 4D itself is evolving in a similar fashion, as recently lined out in About the necessity of code signing plugins. We have currently no immediate plans to make code signing for all plugins technically mandatory, Cinema 4D is currently still loading unsigned binaries, but we strongly encourage users to (properly) sign their plugins, especially under MacOS. What has changed since Cinema 4D 2024, is that Cinema 4D will not load binaries with an expired certificate anymore (note that an expired certificate is not the same as an expired license, see the linked posting for details).

I currently plan to update the guides in 2025 Q1 or Q2. It was actually already planned for 2024 but I never got to it. But just before I left for vacation I at least already requested the necessary licenses to further research and write the new guides 😉 But this is neither my current or next task. However, given the relative closeness of the task of overhauling the code signing documentation, I will probably not 'monkey patch' the current documentation.

When there are any questions regarding code signing plugins for Cinema 4D on either Windows or MacOS, please do not hesitate to ask or discuss them here.

Cheers,
Ferdinand

PS: I am still on vacation, so I will likely not respond to any follow-ups until I am back.

Dear development community,

just as a clarification, as I was not very clear about that above. We are working on a solution for the build system for the SDK (as I hinted at before in other postings). But for 2025 we will stay with this a bit cumbersome legacy build system solution for macOS.

Please excuse the inconvenience but there are a few more moving parts in the background than it is obvious from the outside (to fix this, we must move away from the project tool).

Cheers,
Ferdinand

Hi Ferdinand,

That’s great, really very helpful, thank you. I’m glad my code was right in principle even if it didn’t work! I would never have guessed the layer returned a void pointer. That should now work perfectly and do exactly what I need.

Thanks again for taking the time to look into this, very much appreciated.

Cheers,
Steve

Hi @ferdinand,

Thanks for this, inserting the colour shaders uner the Fusion shader and then inserting the Fusion shader under my shader works fine.

I must admit this is my fault. Because the shaders are all created in the InitRender() of my plugin, I didn't think they needed to be (or could be) inserted under my shader. I figured it would be different if the shaders were going to be added to a link field and stay in the document, but not if they're just created then destroyed when done with. So that's very useful to know.

Thanks again,
Steve

One things I forget, is that if you want to extend redshift currently the only way would be via the OSL node they provide, and provide an asset for this OSL node.

Cheers,
Maxie.

Hi @spedler regarding your issue, it's correct all changes done within the resource editor need to be saved, via the menu (file -> Save Database) otherwise change will get lost.

Regarding the needs for the double-click, that's a missing refresh in our cache, I've reported to the responsible dev, thanks a lot !

Cheers,
Maxime.

Hey @spedler,

only the simulation team can speak to the exact details here, but my guess for why it is how it is, is the pesky cpu-gpu upload penalty. If you would upload pre sampled data, or even worse sample on the CPU, this would really slow down any GPU advantage you have. I doubt that this is any different for the GPU part of Xparticles.

One could think about plugin access for CPU-sims but most users are likely never going to use that if they can avoid it. The simulation device is set in the simulation scene and by default GPU.

08c2f454-96fb-4d92-9adc-8247e47fc44f-image.png

The more realistic thing would be that we provide some compute shader like access. I could go here into the details of the new particles and the challenges of providing such compute shader access to them but that would be the famous "counting chickens before they hatch". Let's first see how many users and which user type (scripting technical artist vs. C++ development professional) wants a deeper API access for particles.

Cheers,
Ferdinand

Thanks for the detailed guide, and also a good reminder that the altool is going to be deprecated. We are going to update our documentation accordingly.

Cheers,
Maxime.

Hey @spedler,

I would recommend having a look at the migration guide and the example.migration_2024 in the SDK. When you are then stuck, I would invite you to either open a new thread with concrete code higghlighting your problem or reaching out to us confidentially via our contact form and share there data with us, in case you are not at liberty of sharing your code publicly.

We are here to help you along some more bumpy passages of migrating your plugin.

Cheers,
Ferdinand

Hi @ferdinand,

No problem, I got there in the end and it's actually not too tricky once you know how it's supposed to work. I'll have a go now at a material node, there are more examples of those so hopefully it'll be straightforward. I'll be sure to be back if it isn't!

In the meantime I've uploaded a detailed explanation of all the steps needed to build this kind of node to my site at https://www.microbion.co.uk/html/create_nodes_corenode1.htm so if anyone wants to see how it was done, it's all there. Hopefully it's fairly accurate; all I can say is that this is what I did and it worked for me ☺

Thanks again for your help,

Cheers,
Steve

Hi @ferdinand,

Firstly, thank you very much for this, which is incredibly helpful. I didn't know you had to turn on the ID switch in the editor prefs but more than that, was how to get the resource editor running as you showed in earlier screen shots.

The resource editor manual says that you can right-click in the node editor window and open the resource editor by clicking 'Edit Resource...'. This either does not work at all (if in material mode) or in scene nodes mode opens the resource editor for what looks like the node editor window itself, which isn't very useful. Anyway, there is no menu entry for the resource editor anywhere in the Cinema menu system as far as I can see, or in the node editor menus, so your method of using the commander to open it is the only way to get to it. That is what was confusing me! Now I can open the resource editor and get most of what the screencast shows, although I didn't get the 'Mode' menu so couldn't switch to developer mode. However, adding the 'g_descriptionEditorDeveloperMode=true' flag does work and I can finally see what you show in the screencast - all the menus and switches (Data/UI/String switches) - so that flag is in fact essential ATM with this build of Cinema.

Now I can actually get to the resource editor I can look at the manual for it and see where it goes. I am sorry if I've been so dense in getting this working. It would be nice though if the dev team could look at the issues of how to open the resource editor because it doesn't match the documentation and might well confuse others as well as me.

So for the moment I can now try adding a simple core node of my own based on the example. If I can, I'll try to write some kind of tutorial for this because it's a tricky process as things stand to even get started.

Thanks once again for being so helpful, it is greatly appreciated.

Cheers, Steve

Hi Ferdinand,

That's great, I'll take a look at that file and see what happens with that. Many thanks once more for your help.

(Later) Got, it, works perfectly, thank you very much!

Cheers,
Steve

Ah...so simple in the end! Navigating this maze of interdependent classes used in the node system is not easy, that's my excuse 🙂

Many thanks for this, it solves a very tricky problem I was having.

Cheers,
Steve

Hey @spedler,

I am glad that this solved your problem. Regarding putting this in the docs or SDK: I have created a task for doing this, but there is other stuff in front of the queue, so it might take some time before I find the time to do so.

Cheers,
Ferdinand

Hi and welcome in the community Steve.

Thanks for the report. It 's now solved.