Debugging Cinema 4D Python Plugins with PyDev
29. May 2011 – 12:53When hunting down glitches, the debugger is the coder’s weapon of choice…
In the last post about coding advanced Python plugins, this vital part was skipped as Cinema 4D’s Python interpreter doesn’t support it.
But fear not – you don’t have to write countless ‘prints’ or fiddle with python’s inspect module just to fix a simple fence post error.
Stepping through breakpoints and browsing your plugins scope… – all this is possible with the PyDev remote debugger.
Advanced Python plugin coding for Cinema 4D
9. May 2011 – 00:31It’s been a long time… how have you been?
This is going to be another Python/Cinema 4D related post.
While python is great for quickly scripting workflow optimizing tools, prototype stuff or write generators and tags, is it suited for big, complex plugin development?
A raytracer in Python for Cinema 4D
10. September 2010 – 02:58Maxon has just released the R12 version of Cinema 4D, which includes Python – so let’s dig into Python plugin development!
We are going to build a ray tracer… with Python! Watch a rendered video.
Update: All Python scripts in this blog have been updated to work with the R12.
The Kopernikus Orrery – our solar system in Unity
27. July 2010 – 23:28Humanity has presumably gazed at the stars long before the invention of speech and the concept of numbers…
But it took until the middle of the last millennia till we really understood our own place within the cosmic clockwork.
Checkout the Kopernikus Planetarium!
The Binary Kite – even more cubes with Py4D
25. June 2010 – 14:47There are those popular structures we all know and love because they simply look fascinating from every angle – like the Sierpinski triangle, the Pythagoras tree or the Menger sponge.
Generative geometry is one more proof that math is beautiful no matter how basic.
Recently I stumbled upon a new pattern that is also phenomenally simple but produces rather complex shapes – the “Binary Kite”.
Conway’s Game of Life 3D – huge amount of objects in Unity
10. June 2010 – 15:24Surely you have already heard of Conway‘s cellular automaton – the Game of Life.
For those who haven’t, it’s a simulation of cells interacting with their neighbors by following a simple rule set on an infinite, two dimensional grid.
So let’s add a dimension -> view the game of life in 3D!
Py4D Examples – particle party
10. April 2010 – 17:33I haven´t written about Py4D for quite a while now…
In the meantime, Maxon has first announced a cooperation with – and now the acquisition of Sebastian Rath´s praised python implementation for Cinema4D.
So finally – Cinema4D meets Python!
Let´s celebrate with some cool experiments!
Cruising the cosmos Sagan style – flash in outer space
3. April 2010 – 23:22In his TV series “Cosmos”, Carl Sagan travels the universe in a “ship of the imagination”.
Uninfluenced by the laws of physics, “perfect as a snowflake, organic as a dandelion seed”, this vessel carries him between galaxies, stars, and planets.
And now you can cruise the cosmos too!
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Smart PRS Cinema4D Keyframe Tag
22. March 2010 – 18:01Smart PRS is a Cinema4D tag that allows to record position, rotation and scale of one or multiple objects to key frames.
This is especially useful for all, who want to bake Thinking Particel setups and don’t own the MOCCA module.
The laughing man incident – defacing the web with OpenCV
15. March 2010 – 20:37In the series GITS:SAC, a hacker called “the laughing man” defaces himself and other persons by digitally placing an animated logo over their face.
Now he is back and defaces the entire internet!
Look for yourself and check if your brain has already been hacked!
SmartAA – reconstruct anti aliasing with Pixel Bender
21. February 2010 – 02:59About three decades ago, pixels where as big as toasters – and mostly green.
Today we have millions of them to deal with, and the terms anti-/aliasing are part of our daily live and every time an image is scaled, it gets interpolated to keep those bad “stairs” away from our eyes.
But what if the source image is aliased in the first place?
Checkout the demo of SmartAA!
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The Steve Jobs IPad Adobe Flashplayer HTML5 Video rant
6. February 2010 – 14:30The flame wars are on!
CEOs, CTOs, platform evangelists and users are fighting the war of the worlds out there.
It´s HTML5 vs. Flash, open vs. closed, H264 vs. OGG, desktop vs. mobile, truth vs. lie.
Lets first calm down with this nice audio visualization before we dive in…
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Sing like HAL with the Flash Player 10.1
30. December 2009 – 00:49Of course everybody remembers the scene from 2001 when Dave Bowman removes HAL´s memory banks.
While being shut down HAL sings the song ‘daisy’ and his voice continuously pitches down while his ‘mind fades’.
With this little test app you can sing like HAL!
SmartReLight – relighting with Pixel Bender
27. December 2009 – 17:57Relighting is an interesting method that is often used in video post production pipelines.
Given the vector of its surface normal, it is possible to calculate the brightness of each pixel by a pseudo 3D lightning system.
Checkout the demo of SmartReLight!
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Flash AIML TTS Chatbot – ‘HAL9000′ using PHP and Festival
16. October 2009 – 23:42Ever dreamed of having a chat with you own personal AI?
Well, we are still a bit behind Arthur C. Clarke´s dream of a self-aware AI like the HAL9000 but with AIML, Festival and Flash you can build your own talking chatbot in no time.














