14 September 2023

C4DtoA 4.6.5 uses Arnold 7.2.3.3 and is a minor feature release bringing support for Cinema 4D 2024, improvements to the IPR window and to the text overlay settings, and a number of bug fixes. Support for Cinema 4D R24 is dropped.

Installation

• Download the Arnold for Cinema4D plugin
• Follow these installation instructions.

Cinema 4D Compatibility

• R25.010 and above
• S26.013 and above
• 2023.0.0 and above
• 2024.0.0 and above

Note: Known issues in the legacy Arnold Shader Network Editor since Cinema 4D S24:

• Drag & drop nodes to the node editor does not work as expected:
  • Drag & drop an Arnold Material to create a reference. A Cinema 4D Object Operator node is created instead of an Arnold Material reference node.
  • Drag & drop an object to create an object reference. A Cinema 4D Object Operator node is created instead of an Arnold object node.
  • Drag & drop a Vertex Map to create a Vertex Map shader. A Cinema 4D Object Operator node is created instead of an Arnold Vertex Map shader.
• Ctrl + drag a shader in the node editor in S24 creates two copies instead of one. shift + drag and Shift + Alt + drag does not work.

Note: Adding shaders to a Node Material from python crashes Cinema 4D 2024.

Enhancements

• Cinema 4D 2024: Builds for Cinema 4D 2024.0.0 are now available. Since now Cinema 4D 2024 properly applies the view transform to the output, the Bake View Transform option is removed from the Arnold render settings when selecting the native OCIO color management. (C4DTOA-3003, C4DTOA-2959)

• Node Material as the default in Cinema 4D 2024: Creating a new Arnold material from the material menu or via commands now creates a Node Material by default in Cinema 4D 2024. If you still prefer the legacy material, you can change the default material system in the Preferences, but note, that the legacy material is deprecated and planned to be removed in the future. (C4DTOA-3069)

• Free image alignment in the IPR window: The image displayed in the IPR window is not locked to the center anymore, but can be freely moved around with the left mouse button. When the image is moved outside the window, a small indicator appears at the bottom right corner showing the image position compared to the window. (C4DTOA-2857, C4DTOA-3064)

• Composition overlays in the IPR window: You can display composition helpers in the IPR window on top of the rendered image. Open the display settings from the side bar and choose from the available overlays. (C4DTOA-1982)

• Start/stop the IPR with Space key: You can now start and stop the render from the IPR window by pressing the Space key. (C4DTOA-3056)

• Alpha channel in IPR pixel info: The pixel information in the status bar and side bar of the IPR window now also displays the alpha channel of the selected pixel. (C4DTOA-3046)

• Active camera in text overlay: You can use the new <active_camera:attribute> token in text overlay settings to print the given attribute value of the active camera. The attribute can be a user data or any built-in attribute. Attributes within groups are defined by the / separator. (C4DTOA-3047)

  Examples:

  • <active_camera:Film Offset X>: Film Offset X attribute of the active camera.
  • <active_camera:Details/Far Clipping>: Far Clipping attribute from the Details tab of the active camera.

• Vector and color components in text overlay: You can print x, y, z or r, g, b components of vector and color type attributes in text overlays. (C4DTOA-3048)

  Examples:

  • <object:Arnold quad_light.Color.r>: R component of an Arnold quad light color.
  • <object:Camera.Global Position.z>: Z coordinate of the Camera object.

• Bucket corners in CPU progressive renders: Bucket corners are now displayed again in CPU progressive mode. They were disabled previously in C4DtoA 4.6.4. (C4DTOA-3060)

• Path mapping: The plugin now respects the path mapping json file defined by the ARNOLD_PATHMAP environment variable. (C4DTOA-2198)

• c4d_no_color_transform meta data: A new meta data is introduced to prevent color space transform on the given color type parameter when exporting the scene to Arnold. (C4DTOA-3050)

Bug Fixes

• C4DTOA-3058 - IPR window loses sidebar settings

• C4DTOA-3061 - IPR pixel info color picker does not work

• C4DTOA-3062 - IPR does not update after changing Arnold Procedural light linking override

• C4DTOA-3063 - Linkable parameters in Arnold tag do not trigger IPR updates

• C4DTOA-3065 - Slow GPU render to Picture Viewer when multiple AOVs are in the scene

• C4DTOA-3070 - Missing texture error if using a path map file and tx generation is set to manual

• C4DTOA-3072 - IPR image is not resized in fit resolution mode when opening the side panel

• ARNOLD-9480 - clip_geo not working from procedural

• ARNOLD-13949 - clip_geo not working in an instancer

• ARNOLD-14003 - crash at startup when Arnold is run under certain applications

• ARNOLD-14037 - ai_file_utils.h is missing from ai.h API header

System Requirements

• Windows 10 or later, with the Visual Studio 2019 redistributable.
• Linux with at least glibc 2.17 and libstdc++ 4.8.5 (gcc 4.8.5). This is equivalent to RHEL/CentOS 7.
• macOS 10.13 or later.
• x86_64 CPUs need to support the SSE4.1 instruction set. Apple Mac models with M series chip are natively supported.
• GPU rendering works on Windows and Linux only and requires an NVIDIA GPU of the Ada, Ampere, Turing, Volta, Pascal, or Maxwell architecture. We recommend using the 525.89 or higher drivers on Linux and 528.49, or higher on Windows. See Arnold GPU for more information.
• The cache also needs to be re-populated after installing a new Arnold version, updating to a new NVIDIA driver, or changing the hardware configuration of GPUs on the system. More information can be found here.
• OptiX™ denoiser requires an NVIDIA GPU with CUDA™ Compute Capability 5.0 and above.