Cinema 4D Project Settings: Cineware

Function available in CINEMA 4D Prime, Visualize, Broadcast, Studio & BodyPaint 3D

Cineware

The Cineware exchange makes it possible to read and write the Cinema 4D file format in external applications. Several settings are available when exporting from Cinema 4D.

Tip:
In previous versions of Cinema 4D (prior to S22), the first two options (formerly Save Polygons/Animation for Cineware) were located in the Preferences menu and were therefore global settings. Now, Cineware settings are Project settings, which can be activated and saved per project file.

Note also the Save Project for Cineware... command that exports as if the first three options are enabled (the other settings described below will also be taken into consideration).

Save Polygon Cache

This option defines if a polygonal copy of the corresponding data should also be saved for Generators (parametric primitives, spline generators (such as the Extrude object), Cloner objects, etc.). The files will be much larger but it will allow an external application to import the file.

Save Animation Cache

If, for example, you animate the number of clones for Cloner objects (or any other objects that change the number of clones; also, the Array object or many other MoGraph objects), this option will ensure that in fact all clones can be imported by the external application. Note that - depending on the Project - the file can end up being very large.

Save Material Cache

If this option is enabled, Cinema 4D can save a default Node Material surface with the file (internally, this consists of more than 40 material properties). This can include linked textures (see also Width/Height) and bitmaps of baked Node Materials that will be saved to the tex/cineware directory.

The material cache can be used by the Cineware SDK to, for example, transfer materials to third-party applications such as Unity or Unreal Engine.

Note that there is no guarantee that the materials will be identical. These are all approximations since parameters are interpreted differently by different applications.

Width [0..128000]
Height [0..128000]

Here you can define the width of the texture to be exported in pixels.

Format

Here you can define the bitmap format in which the texture to be exported should be saved. The selection made here depends on the format required by the target application.

Depth

Here you can define the color depth of the texture to be exported. Note that more than 8 bits per channel is not possible for all formats. *.tif, for example, can handle all three options: 8, 16 and 32-bit channels.