spedler

ArrowMaker is still available from my site right up to Cinema R2023. See https://microbion.co.uk/html/arrowmaker.htm Steve

Hey Nick, Thanks for the suggestions. I'll send you a DM so we can discuss these. Steve

Hehe. Very funny Dave! I'd have admitted to the second but I've just got a new keyboard so it can't be that...😉

Thanks for the comments. I just did it because I'd thought about it a couple of years ago and finally found some time to see if I could get it to work! So I guess I did it out of interest more than anything else. There are quite a lot of molecular visualisation apps around but very little to create objects directly in C4D. I also wanted it to be procedural so an ObjectData plugin rather than a script looked the best bet. It only does the classic ball-and-stick appearance ATM but I might extend it if I revisit it at some point. Here's another render, this time using different materials per element and some lighting:

ChemLoader is a free plugin intended to parse a chemical molecule definition file then create all necessary objects to display and render the molecule. Out of the box it creates objects like the bacitracin molecule shown below. The model is fully procedural and can be modified with numerous settings at any time. A full and detailed manual is included. For more details and to download a copy please see the plugin's page on my site. Steve

I had to do this myself recently. The SDK docs are pretty good but miss out one or two crucial steps. I wrote the procedure down as I knew I'd need to do it again (and would never remember it) and you can find it on my website at https://microbion.co.uk/html/createplugins_r23_3_notarize.htm. For sure, this can be automated but it helps to understand the process and the only way to do that is to do it (at least once) from scratch.

The FlowField object is XP’s equivalent of the field force. In fact it was in XP before Cinema had it. You can alter the field vectors in a number of ways and export the result. It doesn’t export the forces from Cinema’s own object. Try the XP demo if you want to test it.

X-Particles can export .fga files from its FlowField object if you have that. Steve

As the author of ArrowMaker, I can confirm that it does indeed work in R20 using the Insydium Bridge.

No offence taken at all, I was just surprised is all. In fact I see you’ve been on the community forum recently and that Mario has been helping. He’s a great guy, if anyone can help, it’s him. You may get some help from users on discord, too.

Sorry, small community? Have you joined our Discord channel and our new community forum? There are plenty of other XP users there, especially on Discord. They are the best places to ask questions like this. You can find details of both of them on our main website.

You've got two choices when using a 4K monitor and Cinema. You can just let windows scale everything up and it will look the same as it does on a lower-res monitor. To me that isn't so useful because the amount of screen real estate remains the same. The alternative is to tell windows not to scale this app, in which case you get a large amount of screen space but of course all the text and icons look very small. What I did was not scale it up but increase the font sizes in Cinema's own prefs and along with using the largest icon size it's pretty good - certainly very usable. And vast acres of screen space :-) Fortunately Cinema scales up very well but you will find that not all software does so, so experience can be a bit variable with other apps. Photoshop in particular is a touch erratic. Steve

Probably best if you visit our forum and we'll help you there. We usually ask for a scene file (simple as possible) to see what the problem is. Steve

Can I just say, I'm not in the slightest bit angry with you for hosting ads on your site. It's the nature of some of the ads which gets me a little - either completely irrelevant and therefore just a waste of space (which is important on a tablet/phone) or just plain annoying like the online dating sites. But if that's what Google feeds you then that's what you get. If the ads were relevant, even if not of interest to me personally, I could have no reason to complain. And in any case I'm not complaining, just pointing out that the ads can make the site look bad in various degrees and in more than one way. And that's the last comment I'll be making on this. Rest assured that I have nothng but admiration for anyone who can keep a huge site like this up and running efficiently and with continual new content. I know it's a very hard thing to do. Steve

Wow, interesting response. I've no intention of getting into an argument with you but here are some points you might want to consider. Are you angry about people using ad blockers? Grin and bear it. Lots of people use them. If you don't like it, restrict access to the site by using anti-ad-blockers, but then you risk people not coming here. Or are you annoyed that not everyone loves the type of ads you show? What do you care? Either the ads are making you so much money you can ignore your users, or they aren't, in which case get some better ads. But TBH while ads for render farms, software, computer components or whatever are perfectly reasonable on a site like this, some of the ads you've been hosting are not, in my opinion. They make your site look a touch sleazy and while I personally couldn't care less, it's up to you to decide if the money is worth the potential loss of reputation.

I'd be more interested in knowing what those ads are doing on a site like this anyway. Do the site owners really think ads like that are a good idea? They might bring in some money but they aren't the sort of thing I'd expect to see here and TBH I would have thought that this is hardly the target audience the advertisers are looking for, either. Anyway, just install an ad blocker on your tablet - I use Crystal on my iPad - and say goodbye to them. Steve

Contact MAXON support. They can sometimes recover corrupted files if that's what the problem is (which it sounds like). Steve

Hm, I don't know what's gone wrong there, the process is automatic so shouldn't have been missed. Sorry about that. Please contact our sales team via the contact form on our site and they'll sort it out for you. If after that you still don't hear anything get back to me and I'll look into it. Steve

Please let me clarify this, as it seems to be a common misunderstanding. We are not charging for the render engine itself, we cannot do that even if we wanted to. What we are charging for is the time and effort required to build the bridge from Cinema to the render engine. Believe me, that has taken a massive investment in time and resources, which we have to recoup. It really isn't a matter of a couple of afternoons running up a quick plugin to pass the scene file to Cycles. Steve