colortwist

More Plugins and Spline Insanity

Added 2020-05-14 15:27:08 +0000 UTC

Alternatively entitled: "How to teach a hippo how to dance"...

Sooooo, this is what I've more or less been working on for the past two weeks (it's the bit that says "Spline Tool" in the lower right hand corner of the CINEMA 4D window). It's pretty much exactly as advertised- it's a custom spline tool plugin written in C++ designed to help wrangle spline objects inside C4D and extend their usefulness down into the character rigging tools.

I really didn't want to be writing Yet Another Plugin for C4D (TM) at this particular stage in my transition away from C4D (since I direly want to shift my focus towards other more advanced programs), but in this particular case I didn't have much of a choice. Vanessa's new hair rig calls for some rather complicated spline interpolation mechanics, which means I needed fairly low level control over the actual curves being manipulated within the scene. C4D can do this OOTB; but not very well- the existing tools used to dynamically manipulate spline points all tend to have performance/priority/stability issues when combined with various other objects. After a few days of cursing and swearing, I realized that the only way forward was to write my own tool so I could guarantee things were firing off in the right order and doing exactly what I expected them to do.

I'm not really sure how many revisions this thing went through- probably 6 or 7 by now, mostly due to things not working out or various strange interactions occurring inside the scene when I went to actually try and use the thing. This particular iteration seems to be pretty stable though, and it's got some nice UI options to save me some time in the future as well.

In any case, hopefully I'll finally be able to get back to work on Vanessa's new hair rig now that I've got all the spline insanity stuff finally solved. Sorry for the lack of content and what not, I really didn't expect this to erode away into the gigantic rabbit hole that it did.