SI - Animation Reader

Owned by thomas (Unlicensed)
Last updated: 03 Nov, 2014
3 min read

Once the SD file has been loaded its contained objects will appear in Cinema 4D's “Objects Manager”. There you will find an “animation.sd Reader” node – if the file's name was “animation.sd”. Otherwise you will see a different name, e.g. “Realwave01.sd Reader” etc. This node can be seen as a global controller. To change its settings, select it, and take a look at “Attributes Manager”. Under “Setup” you will find several parameters and options for customizing the imported objects' properties. The settings made here will affect all parented objects.

 

 

SD File Path

If the path to the SD file has changed it can be updated here. As mentioned before, the plugin only establishes a connection between the SD file and the imported objects for reading position, rotation, and scale data.

StartFrame/End Frame

Here you will see the simulation range. If you want to change the number of loaded frames just define values.

Offset

With this parameter you can shift the starting point of an SD's objects. It works together with the “Start Frame” and “End Frame” parameters.

Let's say you want to render the objects between frame 10 and 20. In this case, “Start Frame” and “End Frame” are simply 10 and 20, but that is nothing special. With “Offset” you can specify when you want to render the frames. Let's further assume that you want to render these 10 frames starting at frame 50. Here, the values have to be set as follows:

  • Start frame = 10
  • End frame = 20
  • Offset = 40
Scale

By default, the plugin performs an automatic scale conversion. This way, everything matches RealFlow's standard scale of 1 metre. But, it is also possible to change scale in RealFlow directly, and this change can be compensated in Cinema 4D again with the “Scale” parameter. If you set a scale of 2.0 in RealFlow and you want to restore the original scale in Cinema 4D a value of 0.5 has to be used in the plugin.

Lock Current Frame

The current frame will be displayed all the time – even if you change the active frame in the timeline.

Lock Last Frame

Here, the last frame will be kept and displayed in the viewport.

Invert Sequence

This option allows you to invert the SD files' sequence: the last frame will be defined as the first frame, and so on.

Create Motion Keys

By default, all position, rotation, and scale data are assigned to an object via a certain node – you can find it attached to the object itself. This small tool reads the information from the SD file directly. Once the connection between object and its SD file is broken the object will not move anymore. Therefore, it is often a good idea to bake the transition information into animation keys. This can be done for each object individually with the attached sub-node, globally with this function, or during import in the plugin's UI.

With high object counts it takes some time to translate the SD's data into keys. Additionally, the Cinema 4D's scene file's size will increase. Once the keys have been written, the plugin's own nodes can be deleted.

Delete Motion Keys

When you click on this button, all motion keys will be deleted.

Share all Frames (Team Render)

With Cinema 4D R15, a dynamic download of assets is not supported, and in this case it is mandatory for the clients to download all RealFlow elements. To do this, please open the plugin, and activate this option. With R16 this limitation has been removed, and it is not necessary to use the download method.