cinema4d-c4dtoa-2025

Conda build recipe for Arnold C4DtoA

About

This package build recipe creates a conda package for the C4DtoA plugin you provide in an input folder.

Usage based licensing is available on Deadline Cloud SMF automatically.

Building the package for Windows

To build the c4dtoA package, follow these instructions:

1. Install the Cinema 4D to Arnold plugin by following instructions here. i. We have used "C4DtoA-4.8.3.2-windows-2025.exe" with "Cinema 4D 2025.3.3" in this example, but theoretically it should work with other versions as well. Ensure that the C4DtoA and Cinema 4D versions are compatible with each other.
2. [Optional] Verify that "Arnold" works with Cinema 4D locally. You can test this using any of the sample scenes available here.
3. Copy the "C4DtoA" folder from your installation directory to conda_recipes/archive_files/cinema4d-c4dtoa-2025/win-64. (The default installation location on Windows is C:\Program Files\Maxon Cinema 4D 2025\plugins\C4DtoA)

Build the package on Deadline Cloud

If you create a package build queue as described in the Deadline Cloud developer guide page Create a conda channel using S3, you can submit the package to build on your farm.

Note that this approach automatically determines a new build number each time you run the package build job, you do not have to handle that yourself like when building locally.

C:\Dev\deadline-cloud-samples\conda_recipes>submit-package-job cinema4d-c4dtoa-2025
No channel URL was provided, using a default prefix on the queue's job attachments bucket
Building packages into channel s3://<MY_S3_CHANNEL_BUCKET>/Conda/Default
...

Build the package locally

From the conda_recipes directory, run:

C:\Dev\deadline-cloud-samples\conda_recipes>conda build cinema4d-c4dtoa-2025/recipe --no-test
Adding in variants from internal_defaults
...
####################################################################################
Source and build intermediates have been left in C:\...\conda-bld.
There are currently 1 accumulated.
To remove them, you can run the ```conda build purge``` command

C:\Dev\deadline-cloud-samples\conda_recipes>dir C:\...\conda-bld\win-64
...
04/10/2025  02:21 PM           232,806 cinema4d-c4dtoa-2025-0.conda
...

Note: The --no-test skips a build error locating cinema4d package only required at runtime and already provided by the SMF default Conda environment.

Publish the locally built package to an S3 conda channel

To publish your package to an S3 conda channel, two things need to happen:

1. Copy the Windows package into the win-64 subdirectory of the channel.
2. Update the channel index (repodata.json and some other files) so that they include metadata about the new package.

You can accomplish this with the AWS CLI to synchronize S3 data and the conda index command that is available when you install conda-build.

Here's an example of doing this for the package that was built by rattler-build:

1. Synchronize the win-64 subdirectory of the channel locally.

   C:\Dev\deadline-cloud-samples\conda_recipes>set CHANNEL_BUCKET=<MY_S3_CHANNEL_BUCKET>
   
   C:\Dev\deadline-cloud-samples\conda_recipes>aws s3 sync s3://%CHANNEL_BUCKET%/Conda/Default/win-64 ./temp-local-channel/win-64
   ...
   

2. Copy the package you built into the win-64 subdirectory.

   C:\Dev\deadline-cloud-samples\conda_recipes>copy output\win-64\cinema4d-c4dtoa-2025-h9490d1a_0.conda temp-local-channel\win-64
           1 file(s) copied.
   ...
   

3. Update the channel index with the new package.

   C:\Dev\deadline-cloud-samples\conda_recipes>conda index --subdir win-64 --zst ./temp-local-channel
   Indexing ['win-64'] does not include 'noarch'
   ...
   

4. Synchronize the local copy of the win-64 subdirectory back to S3.

   C:\Dev\deadline-cloud-samples\conda_recipes>aws s3 sync ./temp-local-channel/win-64 s3://%CHANNEL_BUCKET%/Conda/Default/win-64
   upload: temp-local-channel\win-64\repodata.json to s3://<MY_S3_CHANNEL_BUCKET>/Conda/Default/win-64/repodata.json
   ...
   

Building the package for Linux

To build the c4dtoA package, follow these instructions:

1. Install the Cinema 4D to Arnold plugin by following instructions here.
2. [Optional] Verify that "Arnold" works with Cinema 4D locally. You can test this using any of the sample scenes available here.
3. Copy the "C4DtoA" folder from your installation directory to conda_recipes/archive_files/cinema4d-c4dtoa-2025/linux-64. (The default installation location on Linux is /opt/maxon/cinema4dr2025.303/bin/plugins/)

Build the package on Deadline Cloud

If you create a package build queue as described in the Deadline Cloud developer guide page Create a conda channel using S3, you can submit the package to build on your farm.

Note that this approach automatically determines a new build number each time you run the package build job, you do not have to handle that yourself like when building locally.

/dev/deadline-cloud-samples/conda_recipes>submit-package-job cinema4d-c4dtoa-2025
No channel URL was provided, using a default prefix on the queue's job attachments bucket
Building packages into channel s3://<MY_S3_CHANNEL_BUCKET>/Conda/Default
...

Build the package locally

To build locally on Linux, you can follow the linked installation instructions for either rattler-build or conda-build.

From the conda_recipes directory, run:

[/dev/deadline-cloud-samples/conda_recipes]$ rattler-build build -r cinema4d-c4dtoa-2025/recipe

 ╭─ Finding outputs from recipe
 │ Found 1 variants
 │
 │ Build variant: cinema4d-c4dtoa-2025-hb0f4dca_0
 │
 │ ╭─────────────────┬────────────╮
 │ │ Variant         ┆ Version    │
 │ ╞═════════════════╪════════════╡
 │ │ target_platform ┆ "linux-64" │
 │ ╰─────────────────┴────────────╯
 │
 ╰─────────────────── (took 0 seconds)

or:

[/dev/deadline-cloud-samples/conda_recipes]$ conda build cinema4d-c4dtoa-2025/recipe --no-test
Adding in variants from internal_defaults
...
####################################################################################
Source and build intermediates have been left in .../conda-bld.
There are currently 1 accumulated.
To remove them, you can run the ```conda build purge``` command

[/dev/deadline-cloud-samples/conda_recipes]$ dir .../conda-bld/linux-64
...
04/10/2025  02:21 PM           232,806 cinema4d-c4dtoa-2025-0.conda
...

Note: The --no-test skips a build error locating cinema4d package only required at runtime and already provided by the SMF default Conda environment.

Publish the locally built package to an S3 conda channel

To publish your package to an S3 conda channel, two things need to happen:

1. Copy the Linux package into the linux-64 subdirectory of the channel.
2. Update the channel index (repodata.json and some other files) so that they include metadata about the new package.

You can accomplish this with the AWS CLI to synchronize S3 data and the conda index command that is available when you install conda-build.

Here's an example of doing this for the package that was built by rattler-build:

1. Synchronize the linux-64 subdirectory of the channel locally.

   [/dev/deadline-cloud-samples/conda_recipes] set CHANNEL_BUCKET=<MY_S3_CHANNEL_BUCKET>
   
   [/dev/deadline-cloud-samples/conda_recipes] aws s3 sync s3://%CHANNEL_BUCKET%/Conda/Default/linux-64 ./temp-local-channel/linux-64
   ...
   

2. Copy the package you built into the linux-64 subdirectory.

   [/dev/deadline-cloud-samples/conda_recipes] copy output/linux-64/cinema4d-c4dtoa-2025-h9490d1a_0.conda temp-local-channel/linux-64
           1 file(s) copied.
   ...
   

3. Update the channel index with the new package.

   [/dev/deadline-cloud-samples/conda_recipes] conda index --subdir linux-64 --zst ./temp-local-channel
   Indexing ['linux-64'] does not include 'noarch'
   ...
   

4. Synchronize the local copy of the linux-64 subdirectory back to S3.

   [/dev/deadline-cloud-samples/conda_recipes] aws s3 sync ./temp-local-channel/linux-64 s3://%CHANNEL_BUCKET%/Conda/Default/linux-64
   upload: temp-local-channel/linux-64/repodata.json to s3://<MY_S3_CHANNEL_BUCKET>/Conda/Default/linux-64/repodata.json
   ...