Instantce! Cinema4D Plugin

Instantce! instantly recognizes and replaces identical objects in your Cinema4D scene.

Working with scenes which happen to have thousands of objects can slow down Cinema4D significantly - we already know that. But what if these thousands of different objects are actually the same objects duplicated numerous times, which often happen with game or CAD files?

Using hashes of randomly sampled points of each object (and their tags), Instantce! can quickly identify duplicated meshes and replace them with instances: there won't be a visible difference in the scene, except for the sluggishness being gone, and not having to modify thousands of meshes if you want to edit the original object.

Installation

• Unzip Instantce! into your plugins folder of Cinema 4D. (below are examples)
  • - Windows: C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\MAXON\CINEMA 4D VERSION\plugins\
  • - Mac: /Users/USERNAME/Library/Preferences/MAXON/CINEMA 4D VERSION/plugins/
• Make sure there is no Instantce folder inside of the plugins/Instantce folder
• You can then open Instantce! by going to Extensions -> Instantce!
• You can add a shortcut to open Instantce! in your layout for easier access!

Features

After adding the objects to be processed to the Object list, either by drag & drop or selecting the objects (CTRL-A for all objects in the scene) before opening Instantce!, you can start the instance recognition by:

1. Pressing Extract Instances to get a tree-like structure of which objects will be replaced by instances of which original object
2. Then pressing Instantce! to realize the changes in the scene!

• Sample settings
  • Precision : Defines up to which decimal the point position should be rounded
  • Samples : How many points of each object should be sampled at most
  • Sampling Seed: Change this to select different random points of the objects

• Consider
  • Materials : Whether material (tags) should be considered when comparing objects: Toggling this off will move the material tags to a parent Null as well as onto the instances so you can easily change them per-instance
  • Normals: Whether surface normals should be considered when comparing objects
  • UVs: Whether UVs should be considered when comparing objects

• Blind mode: Experimental toggle to not update the progressbar when processing. Can speed up the process when processing many millions of objects (but not needed often)

Have fun and keep on creating!

• Jérôme & Darby

LICENSE: This Product is free to use for personal use. If you wish to use it in commercial projects, it is necessary to buy it for 10€.