Live linking question

[mattjgerard]

So, I am testing the live link features, trying to move the company over to Cinema 4D for modeling instead of 3DSMax. Outside of that political battle, so far the live linking was working great, until I found out a couple of things that I'm not sure are neccessarily bugs, or the plugin just doesn't support it.

1) KS honors the object  tree organization in C4D, which is fanstastic. But, it won't update object names, or null names if items are renamed. They dont' update in KS.

2) I deleted some parts in C4D, hit update, and the materials on my model in KS freaked out, and reapplied to different objects. I had a piece of idustrial fencing that encloses machining machines, there was a duplicate of one set of these fencing objects. I had a metal material applied to the frame and a mesh material to the plane inside the frame. WHen I deleted the duplicate object in C4D, hit update, in KS the mesh material was applied to the frame as well.

[guest84672]

@1 - I would guess that this is not supported. But i will ask.
@2 - and example would be great so we can take a look at it. We are not C4D exports, so we would need exact instructions on what to do in order to reproduce the failure.

[mattjgerard]

OK, some notes-

1) cinema cameras are not supported. They mess stuff up. Delete them.
2) Can't change the names of the C4D file or the KS file after the live link has been initiated with the "Render" button in the plugin. Changing either breaks the link.
3) Simple moves are fine, rotating, translation, scaling
4) Adding objects works great
5) Deleting Objects doesn't work unless something else in the geometry is changed. Just deleting something doesn't remove it from the KS project, but if you delete something AND move another object or add another object, it updates and removes the deleted object. And sometimes this doesn't even work. And once the sync is lost between the files, can't get it back. Think it is broken if the names of the objects are changed.
6) Applying materials in C4D is only reflected in KS if either ALL objects in C4D are selected in the object tree or NONE are selected. if some objects are selected, but others aren't, only the materials of the objects that are selected are updated.
7)  All geometry has to have unique names, even if buried in the object tree under other null objects. If there are objects with the same name, material reassignment occurrs.
Changing the hierarchy of the object tree in C4D breaks the link. If there are 2 spheres in the scene, render to keyshot. go back to C4D and group under a Null object, hit update, and the spheres are duplicated. Now there are 4 spheres in the KS doc, and 2 in a null in the C4D file. From there on out, there is no way to get them back in sync.

Not a lot of solutions in these notes above, but some realizations that the plugin is a bit more limited than I'd expected. But, now that I'm aware of some of the limitations, I can try to work around that. Like making sure my model is as far as I can get it before I send it to KS, as I know if I make any major changes to the geometry, object tree, naming, etc, it will most likely break the live link.

I hope this all makes sense, I can make some screen captures demonstrating some of this stuff . I'm pretty sure I'm on the latest versions of the KS and the plugin. and using Cinema4D R18. If there is anything I can follow up on to help I'd love to be a part of it. C4D to keyshot will be my workflow from here on out at my new gig, so I'm willing to put any effort into making the process easier!

Cheers!
Matt

[guest84672]

Thanks for the write-up. I will forward to Sean. Timing is good as he is looking into deformable animations from C4D right now.

[mattjgerard]

That would be very neat. I'm very happy that the plugin parses all the mograph, cloner and parametric stuff. I'm happy to help out with whatever I can. I'm not a coder, but I can test and troubleshoot stuff. I've been using C4D for the better part of 7 years, and while I am no where near an expert, I've used it for much CAD importing and rendering. It will be my workflow for the long term future if I can get the boss to agree to it, if not then I need to go learn 3DsMax, which I'm not too excited about.

Cheers!

matt

[mattjgerard]

One more I just found.

Selection tags on objects actually split the object into parts. That's pretty neat. It had some troubles on more complex objects, turning the parts black in KS, but for simple shapes it seems to work. Pretty clever actually.

[guest84672]

Sweet - I forwarded Sean both threads so he will be able to take a look first thing Monday morning!

[mattjgerard]

What actually connects the cinema 4d document to the proper keyshot document? I worked on a project last week, live linking worked OK with its little glitches that I am documenting, but now that I've opened up the 2 files again (Cinema 4D project and corresponding KS project ) the update function in the plugin in Cinema doesn't seem to be doing anything. What's the process of linking the 2 again?

Are they connected purely by filenames? File paths? some hidden file ID number?

Thanks!

[guest84672]

File names. Make sure you download the latest plugin and give it a try.

[mattjgerard]

I will be checking this soon. Have to start a new one so I can keep track of whats' going on. My scenes get very busy quickly.

[guest84672]

Sounds good. The latest one is on our plugins page.