Importing into Cinema 4d

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Permalink Reply by Gerard Jonker on May 12, 2010 at 1:17pm

Hi Paul,

Please use the Exchange plug-in Maxon provides for Cinema 4D, it will cost you about 100,- $ US . The free Plugin that comes on the installer DVD of Vectorworks has a few draw backs.
1. Maxon's Plugins give much better and faster results.
2. The VW version uses the first instance of a symbol as the original object in Cinema 4D which means the coordinates inside the "symbol" get different.
3. Maxon's Plugins don't render the scene (never understood why VW's plug-in does that).

I have some really big (several Km in size) and heavy (30MB 3D model in VW) still the accuracy in C4D is high enough to do some detailed renderings.

No crashing of VW nor C4D. (although in persp view in C4D, I often can't zoom out the see the whole model again, I have to switch views Back and forth and use "H" the see everything again. I don't think that is related to the exchange plugin or the model coming from VW as I heard others about it too.)

I play a lot with the conversion resolutions (2D and 3D). and I often use Regular polygons with a known vertex count instead of circles, just be aware of the number of Polygons produced. I wrote my own nurb to 3D poly converter as I'm not always pleased with the way VW converts it's nurb surfaces. Although sometimes VW's conversion is better, so often I try them both. Cinema has a very good smoothing setting that is easy to adjust per object.

I wrote two little menu items "Set 2D Conversion Resolution" and "Set 3D Conversion Resolution" they used to work perfectly, a setting of for instance 4 would produce 4 faces in each curve. However, this has changed around VW 2009. Now it does something in the neighbourhood of ... very annoying. Still use them though. If you like you can download them from the Download page of our website.

Applying materials to symbols is fantastic.
I have a set of cars, that I made instances of in C4D. The standard materials (glas chrome rubber lights) are done inside the "definition", the body has no colour in the original object. It get's its colour from the instance. So to get a blue and green VW (VolksWagen) I simply duplicate the instance and give one instance the colour blue and the other instance the colour green. Of course you can do this funny thing only with the objects that get same colour.

Regards,
Gerard Jonker

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Permalink Reply by Paul Craig on May 12, 2010 at 1:30pm

Thank you Gerard for your in depth reply.

I still have quite a bit to learn about Cinema 4D and will experiment with your suggestions.

I will let you know how I do. I maybe asking you a few questions in the near future if thats OK.

Thanks again,

Paul Craig.

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Permalink Reply by Paul Craig on May 20, 2010 at 3:00pm

Hello Gerard,

How do you update a Cinema 4d file if you change the symbols/model in vectorworks?

Do you re-export the Vectorworks file to Cinema 4d and then merge the existing Cinema 4D file with the new exported file?

Thanks,

Paul.

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Permalink Reply by Gerard Jonker on May 20, 2010 at 4:46pm

Hi Paul,

1 Just export from Vectorworks as normal.
2 Make sure you have the model file in C4D open and active
3 Drag the new .vw4d file on C4D to open
4 Choose to Update a folder and select the folder that has the name of the export file.

Despite my initial suspicion that works great, textures are used the right way . When you do a lot of corrections and even some modeling in C4D, like me, you can't always use this method, or you risk to loose your C4D edits to the model. I often simply open the file with a new, clean, C4D file active, and then copy and paste what I need.

Regards,
Gerard

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