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 (c)2001 Naam |
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When one starts to use expressions in Cinema4D, there's literally no limit to what you can do. Since the c.o.f.f.e.e.-language, in which expressions are written, allows you to go into every nook and cranny of the Cinema4D program, you can literally link everything to everything. You might even be able to change the color of the interface with the distance between two objects, or build a little machine in your scene that actually eats and deletes objects from the object manager! On the other hand, c.o.f.f.e.e. expressions have a steep learning curve, since c.o.f.f.e.e. is a lot like C++, it can be quite daunting for users with less of a coding background. That's where Puppeteer comes in. A lot of uses for expressions are rather straight and simple. Often, you simply want to limit an object's rotation, have it always point in the same direction as another object, have a slider-object that controls four bones at the same time, or spread a twist of the hand between two bones in the lower arm. Puppeteer is an attempt to make these kinds of applications of expressions easier to do. Instead of typing in a few lines of code, you simply click around on the interface, link data together in the way that suits your needs, set limits, and the Puppeteer tag does the rest for you. I tried to get as much of the flexibility of coding your own expressions into a one-window interface, which means there are a lot of options and hidden uses, if you just know how to find them. This also means that the Puppeteer interface may seem a little tek-minded, even daunting, at first, but as soon as you start to grasp the concepts behind it, I'm sure you'll see that using this approach does mean there is a LOT you can do with just this single tag! I'll try to explain it all without getting too technical, though there's no escaping the fact that this IS quite a technical plugin, especially since it comes so close to coding your own expressions. |
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