Plugins and Scripts

Drop It! Pro extends the original COFFEE plugin, Drop It! into a Cinema 4d plugin ready for heavy lifting. Well, heavy dropping maybe. A more apt name, at least for this implementation of 'drop to target', may have been 'First Contact' but this is a true extension of the original, including dropping objects to value (and with due speed!) and radial drops.

Discovery and application of a fast and accurate method of bringing complex objects into contact was more of an undertaking than expected. Almost no papers discuss something like this directly, mainly focusing on collision detection and very complicated, costly ways to determine 'first contact' between non-convex polygonal meshes involving top-down bounding volume testing, BSP or Octrees, and a variety of hybrid and novel approaches. Luckily, Cinema 4D has a collision detection engine accessible from the C++ SDK which I was determined to put to use in the effort. The difficult part was preparing whatever objects (primitives, polygonal, deformed, generated, hierarchical) for use with the engine, as it requires triangulated polygonal meshes. The other difficulty was in employing the collision detection in the process of bringing into contact complex polygonal meshes both accurately and quickly. That'll remain my secret.

Although the main reason for writing this plugin was to satisfy the feature requests of several Drop It! users, it is clear that there are other possible uses. As usual (and welcomed), users always push the envelope and find inventive ways to make their tools more useful. I expect nothing less!