Should you encounter any trouble with the following steps, please refer to the PyDev installation manual. PyDev will help you coding by adding syntax highlighting, code completion and much more. If you don’t have the Java Runtime Environment installed jet, you need to do this first.Īs said before, Eclipse has excellent python support – but not out of the box, so we are going to install PyDev. So let’s start by downloading and installing Eclipse Classic from If you never used one, think of an IDE as your workshop, it’s a collection of tools as well as the place where you do and organize your coding work.Įclipse is one of the most popular – its Java based, open source, free to use and most importantly has excellent support for python. In order to get auto completion to work within PyDev, we are going to need a separate python interpreter – 2.6.4 to be exact. We will add some useful things on Cinema 4D-side later – for now let’s continue with the Eclipse setup… This will slow Cinema 4D down a bit, but enables you to monitor memory leaks. Place an empty text file named “c4d_debug.txt” into the root folder of your Cinema 4D copy.Get rid of all Cinema 4D plugins you don’t need for your development.Make a copy of your Cinema 4D installation – name it “Cinema 4D R12 Dev” for example.You may skip this part, but I highly recommend it: We are going to set up an IDE (Integrated Development Environment), talk a bit about modules/packages and finally I will try to give some general hints and tips.Ĭoding Environment/IDE: Prepare Cinema 4D: This is the point where you might want to look out for a little help. If you are still working with the script editor by now, things will most likely start to get out of hand as you introduce more modules and classes, deal with more code and more functionality. Imagine you wrote a nifty script, decided to make it a simple plugin, and now want to take it a step further – add more features, a complex GUI with some dialogs etc… So it’s not only possible to code full-fledged python plugins but it even has its advantages over classical C++ development. You get ‘nearly’ full access to the C++ API of Cinema 4D, don’t have to compile or worry much about platform dependencies, can easily find a ton of neat recipes and libraries out there… 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? This is going to be another Python/Cinema 4D related post. It’s been a long time… how have you been?

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