Category Archives: cinema 4D

Python Cinema 4D API auto completion (fake package)

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)

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Smart PolyChart Cinema 4D Plugin – fun with the UserArea

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.

The part for users:

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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Smart HN-Options – Cinema 4D Python CommandData Plugin Template

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)

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Debugging Cinema 4D Python Plugins with PyDev

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.

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