Who is your computer really working for?
You?
How can you be sure? I just hijacked it and you didn’t even notice!
In fact, I just raytraced one frame of a 720p animation on your system and uploaded it to my server…
The combination of Eclipse and PyDev makes an excellent development environment for coding Cinema 4D python plugins.
Sadly, there was this one – major – feature of PyDev I just couldn’t get to work… completions.
And that was a shame, because this is probably the most awesome feature of PyDev and speeds things up a lot.
Now it’s finally usable! (well… mostly)
Smart PolyChart is a simple CommandData plugin which draws a neat bar chart from the polygon counts of all polygon objects in a scene.
You can download it here – the source is documented.
Just drag it into your /Plugins folder and open it from the ‘Plugins’ menu. The ‘Update’ button refreshes the view, a click on a column will select the corresponding object so you can optimize or remove it to lower the scenes polygon count.
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So far we already covered IDE-setup and debugging – new let’s go and actually build something!
This is meant to be a simple template of the most common plugin type in Cinema 4D – the CommandData plugin.
Smart HN-Options is a very simple tool that allows to globally change the parameters of every HyperNURBS object within the scene.
Grab the plugin and source! (Eclipse project files included)
When 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.
It’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?
Maxon 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.
Humanity 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!
There 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”.
Surely 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!
I 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!
In 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 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.
In 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!
About 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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| Jan-C. Frischmuth | 2008 @ smart-page.net | info@smart-page.net - original Design by Bob |
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