01.0 Introduction
Hello and welcome to an introductory tutorial on the Cinema 4D R17 C++ Software Development Kit. The goal of this document is to get you writing C++ plugins for Cinema 4D as quickly as possible.
This Wiki is being written by a relatively inexperienced 3rd party developer and does not necessarily represent official best practice. At the moment this is an incomplete document - but you can help make it more complete. Please mark issues and make suggestions.
Unfortunately, this guide cannot be all things, to all people. To that end, certain assumptions have been made.
- You have prior programming experience.
- You have at least a basic understanding of C++.
- You have a working knowledge of your IDE (Integrated Development Environment)
- You are familiar with Cinema 4D
If you're relatively new to programming, I would recommend starting with the Cinema 4D Python SDK as it's a bit easier to hit the ground running when you don't have to deal with compilation, memory management, and list indexes - all things that make C++ faster to run, and a bit more painful to work with.
You can code on a Mac or PC - but for the purposes of this guide, I will only be covering this exact setup:
- Cinema 4D
- OS X
- Xcode
- GitHub
If your setup differs, there's a good chance that even if you follow along exactly with my instructions you will run into problems. Software development is way more complex than it reasonably should be - and there are a lot of dependencies between each of the parts. With the wrong mix you can get some very unexpected results.