Export animations from cinema4d to blender

Question

I've been trying to get some animated models from c4d into Blender all day. The models transfer fine, but the animations don't. I've used COLLADA, 3ds and obj file types but none are successful. I need to get the files into Blender as I'm trying to get them into three.js. I have had a look at http://disturbmedia.com/blog/tag/threejs/ for c4d>threejs but the python console is throwing up errors.

Does anyone have any thoughts? I'm using v12 of c4d and v2.59 of blender if that's any help.

Answer 1

I was facing a similar issue a couple of years ago, as you can see in this answer and I ended up writing a Python script.

The post from the blog at work on three.js was also written by me and is also old. It was written for C4D R11.5 and the API changed a bit. Vincent was kind enough to branch from my GitHub repository and update that script, which you can get from his repository. Still the three.js script only exports geometry/meshes, but doesn't handle animation at all (morphing was not supported in three.js at the time I wrote the script (release 32))

If you want to export geometry+animation tracks(position,rotation,scale,and morphs(PLA)), you might something like an updated version of the script I had. Since it's almost two years old, it works for C4D R11.5 and Blender 2.49.

You can see a recording of how it worked here.

Still, as I mentioned above, the C4D R12 Python API changed a bit and the Blender Python API changed completely as they went for Python 3.0 from Blender 2.50 upwards.

Unfortunately, I can't commit to updating that soon due to time constraints, but I can explain/comment/share the old code if it helps. Another thing that comes to mind is to use the older versions(C4D R11.5 and Blender 2.49), but it seems like a long way around it and maybe not all the features you use in R12 are supported in R11.5 (not sure).