creating plugins for c4d

Creating plugins for Cinema 4D can be done with COFFEE, C++, or in R12, Python. COFFEE is a good way to start with plugin development, and I would recommend the excellent COFFEE manual by ruimac, which you can find on his site.

In these pages I will concentrate on developing plugins with C++. I think that this language gives the most speed and widest access the Cinema SDK at the moment, though that may change as the Python SDK is developed further.

Here are the tutorials currently available:

• Compiling the SDK example using Visual Studio
• Addendum - compiling the SDK on a Mac
• Building a plugin from scratch
• Creating a channel shader plugin
  • building the interface
  • coding the basic plugin
  • writing the shader code
• Creating an object (spline) generator plugin
  • the interface
  • code part 1
  • code part 2
• Creating a menu (CommandData) plugin
  • the interface and header file
  • the plugin class
  • the dialog class
• Creating an ObjectData generator plugin
  • the interface
  • set up and resize handles
  • GetVirtualObjects()
  • generating the object

Other information:

• Plugin cookbook #1 - Getting a colour from a gradient element in a description
• Plugin cookbook #2 - Show or hide description elements
• Plugin cookbook #3 - Generating a dynamic spline in an ObjectData plugin
• Undocumented description flags

In addition, a complete open-source plugin, 'ToggleGI' is available for download. This contains the full source code, which is heavily commented so you can see how it works. Download the .zip file here (491K).

More tutorials are planned, so keep checking back for more.