New Cinema 4D Exchange Plug in

[AndyM]

Although it has not been officially announced anywhere that I have seen, the updated R2 of the Cinema 4D exchange is available from Maxon USA. It is supposed to fix the bugs and support VW symbols. I got the disk today but it requires C4D 8.5 and I only have 8.2 so now I have to wait for the upgade CD to come in a couple of days. I'll let you all know how it works ASAP.

[AndyM]

For those of you that use this combination:

I have it working now and I'm a little dissapointed. The only big difference is that VW symbols become C4D instances which is a huge thing for me. Other smaller differences are: exporting is now MUCH faster (probably due to not having to convert symbols to polys, you can rearrange the heirarchy in C4D and it will maintain your order after updating, there is also a new plug in that will globally replace all of your VW materials with C4D materials from a reference file. I think thats it.

Stuff they didn't fix: Scale is still wrong unless you use Centimeters in both VW and C4D. In the export dialog you still can't see any of the files that you have previously exported. After importing, the VW container still takes the name of the VW file, not the name that you chose while exporting and objects in the container are not listed alphabetically. Imported geometry still has its object axis at 0,0,0, regardless of where the geometry is located - that one drives me crazy. Oh well, it is what it is and I'll take it because of support for symbols. Dissapointing that they didn't fix any of these other things.

[dave96]

Hello Andy

I am thinking of replacing Artlantis. Can you get high quality radiosity results?

Dave

PS: you say:

> Imported geometry still has its object axis at 0,0,0, >regardless of where the geometry is located.

Can you start by exporting just a single cube that's centred on the origin - in order to force a synchronisation of the cinema origin with the VW origin? Then replace that with your proper export?

[AndyM]

Just to be clear... The plug in is not developed by Maxon but by a third party, so they probably can't legally give it away and were just talking about $50 here. Although I wish the plug went much farther than it does and am dissappointed that more of the issues were not addressed, I still firmly believe that this is the best rendering option for me and think that Maxon is no more or less loyal to it's customers than NNA (remember VW 9.0.0!!!!)

[dGrub]

When I export models to C4D, often extruded polygons and added/subtracted solids do not translate, appearing as empty shapes. The polygons are closed, and often quite simple (rotated rectangle). And, sometimes objects that I successfully exported the last 20 times suddenly have the same problem.

1. Can I fix this?

2. Does the latest version of the plug-in fix it?